Parents of students at Beaver Ridge Elementary school in Norcross, Ga., are up in arms after seeing a math assignment that teachers sent home for their elementary school children to complete. The problem? Some of the questions were insanely insensitive for a math test being handed out in the year 2012.

Although not as flashy as the newsletter controversy, here’s a fascinating curio from Dr. Paul’s political closet: in a Christmastime appearance on Meet The Press in 2007, Paul said that Abraham Lincoln should never have started the Civil War, instead ending slavery by having the federal government purchase all of the slaves and set them free. Like many libertarian ideas, it’s appealing unless you think about it for five seconds.

On Saturday, Republican presidential candidates gathered for the latest Republican presidential debate , the “Thanksgiving Family Forum,” sponsored by The Family Leader. In July, the debate’s sponsors authored a pledge that asserted, among other things, that “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.”

Whoopi Goldberg went after Ann Coulter and her provocative statement that “our blacks are better than their blacks” on The View Thursday. “I didn’t know we were anybody’s blacks!” Goldberg exclaimed. “My God, I thought I was free but damn it! I found out again, somebody’s got my behind!”

Tuesday evening, Fox News’ Sean Hannity spoke with presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann about the “mainstream media’s” attacks on her, particularly in light of the controversial marriage pledge the congresswoman recently signed. Bachmann, for her part, says she’s choosing not to focus on negativity but, rather, on the economy and job creation. Hannity then offered Bachmann the opportunity to address recent comments she’d made that had some in the media enraged. Bachmann instead spoke about unemployment

We reported Friday that the marriage pledge that GOP hopeful Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was first to sign contained a bit of not-so-fine print that made a stomach-churning comparison between the era of slavery and the presidency of Barack Obama. The group behind the pledge has since removed the reference (along with a “sorry you were offended” apology that doesn’t acknowledge the fact that their “research” was a lie), and Bachmann’s campaign delivered a statement with all the sensitivity of a burlap condom.

Missed in all of the pornography-banning outrage over the marriage pledge that GOP hopeful Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was first to sign is a bit of not-so-fine print that makes a stomach-churning comparison between the era of slavery and the presidency of Barack Obama. To be fair, there’s a lot to hate in The Marriage Vow, but right at the top of page one is the paragraph that insists that black children born into slavery had a better shot at two-parent glory than those born under President Obama’s watch.

Radio host Mark Levin took to Facebook to air out the issues he has regarding George Stephanopoulos‘ recent interview with GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann for ABC News. During the interview, Stephanopoulos confronted Bachmann on her description of John Quincy Adams as one of the nation’s founding fathers as well as on an earlier statement she’d made claiming that America’s founders had “worked tirelessly” to end slavery.

Republican Senator Rand Paul is proving himself to be a loud and persistent critic of President Obama and all of his policies. Speaking at a Senate hearing yesterday, Paul expressed his strong disapproval of universal healthcare, even repeatedly comparing the right to healthcare as being similar to slavery.

Just as there are infinite different types of young people out there, there are infinite different methods of teaching. You can be very stern and strict or extremely supportive and kind or you can even have tense stare-downs with Coolio. One of the most effective ways, however, is to have the students see and experience something firsthand. For some topics though, this can get a teacher in trouble. Like the Northwestern professor who showed his class a live sex demonstration or this most recent story about a fourth grade teacher who called up her non-white students, had them stand on a stage, and held a “mock slave auction.”

It could be worse, of course. She was trying to get them to experience the Civil War. She could have given them all gangrene.

Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann has a history of confusing some aspects of history and has been the subject of much criticism and insults as a result. Therefore, it is certainly peculiar that Bachmann, unprovoked, frequently insists on talking about American history and leaving herself open to future challenges.

With more and more people discussing Chris Matthews and his verbal attacks on Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, today Matthews continued with a slightly more respectful assault on Bachmann, this time trying to just focus on discrediting her statements rather than personally attacking her. Matthews listed all the American presidents who owned slaves in an attempt to finally disprove Bachmann’s claim that the founders worked tirelessly to end slavery in their lifetime.

The bad news is that Michele Bachmann seems to have a slightly skewed vision of how America was founded. The good news? Her version is much nicer. Sure, it’s not 100% true that America’s founders “had different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions” and that they all fought until slavery was abolished. But, hey, it sure sounds nice so why don’t we go with it?

Most people would agree that it takes a lot of balls to celebrate the South’s secession from the Union, while pretending it had nothing to do with slavery, but in fact, it only takes one. South Carolina’s 150th Anniversary Secession Ball heads up the latest movement to sanitize Southern secession of its connection to slavery, and prompted a too-infrequent visit from The Daily Show‘s Senior Black Correspondent, Larry Wilmore. He takes on the notion that acknowledging slavery’s role in secession is driven by “political correctness,” noting that it’s actually “correct correct.”

Everybody wants to be something else. In Countdown host Keith Olbermann‘s case, there seems to be a frustrated vaudevillian trying to get out. On Tuesday’s show, Olbermann made an admirable attempt at a spit-take, but later in the show, chose an inopportune moment to stretch his funny bone. In the middle of an important segment about a movement to sanitize Southern secession of its connection to slavery, he interrupted guest Clarence Page to indulge in some prop humor that would even make Carrot Top cringe.

Last Friday, while the cable news world watched Rick Sanchez’s career end in a spectacular crash via an undisciplined and unhinged radio interview, Glenn Beck was blaming the evils of slavery on government regulation, then asked if, via increased insurance rates, “are we creating slaves?” Only in the tortured and hyperbolic world of opinion media can someone get away with this sort of analysis

Ann Coulter, seemingly unscathed from her battle earlier today with far-right internet journal WorldNetDaily, visited Bill O’Reilly tonight to talk about the children of illegal immigrants (“anchor babies”) and a nearly twenty-year assertion by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that those children should not be US citizens. Unsurprisingly, Coulter seems to have had enough of “deadbeats… sneak[ing] into the country and [having] babies to get on welfare.”

Pack up your Earth Day granola bars and put away the Gaypril leis: April is now officially Confederate History Month in the State of Virginia, as per a proclamation from the office of Governor Bob McDonnell. Understandably, many in the media are now up in arms over the glorification of slavery, racism, and treason, but it’s ok, McDonnell says the move has nothing to do with slavery– it’s only a tourist trap.

In the course of writing about a new anti-Obama ad that features opponents of healthcare reform (sarcastically) declaring “I’m a racist,” I noticed an elegant parallel to the current brouhaha over Harry Reid’s slavery comparison. The Republican legislator who appears in the “I’m a racist” ad has, himself, previously used the slavery comparison with regard to health care. Do slavery and racism have a place in the healthcare debate?

ESPN’s Michael Wilbon was on CNN this morning to discuss an incident earlier this week where he, like many others in the media, falsely attributed quotes to Rush Limbaugh while reasoning that Limbaugh shouldn’t allowed to purchase a minority stake in the St. Louis Rams. Meanwhile, Limbaugh makes lemonade on the WSJ‘s Opinion page.