Kimberly Pauley has announced the winners of the Swan Kingdom Giveaway Contest. Competing for one of five free copies of Zoe Marriott's The Swan Kingdom, contestants answered the question, "If you could be any character from any fairy tale (traditional, new, or re-imagined), which character would you be and why?"

This one's my favorite:

Judith Rycar: If I could be any character from a fairy tale, I would be the stepmother in Snow White. I would realize that the king was a creep who only wanted a young, beautiful woman and that was why I was afraid of not being the loveliest in the land anymore and i would get Snow White out of their before he noticed how lovely she was becoming! We could both go live with the 7 Dwarfs and make apple pies for everyone.

Smart kid.

The Arizona legislature is considering legislation that would pull state funding from education programs that "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization," reports the East Valley Tribune. And I quote:

SB1108 also would bar teaching practices that "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Schools would have to surrender teaching materials to the state superintendent of public instruction, who could withhold state aid from districts that broke the law.

Another section of the bill would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is "based in whole or in part on race-based criteria," a provision Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said is aimed at MEChA, the Moviemiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a student group.

Em-phas-is mine. Firstly, "capitalism" is a value? But second of all, this fails the First Amendment on so many levels I lose count. Hey, how about academic freedom? Debate? Inquiry? The socratic method? Are those not, er, "Western values"?

Hmm. Maybe this is just a nativist ploy to punish Chicana/os, Mexican-Americans and Mexican immigrants for creating more culturally relevant educational programming. Hey, whaddaya know!
( It gets worse behind the cut )