Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s controversial schools chieftain who put the Ten Commandments in classrooms, has issued another edict to public schools: Kids have to watch a video infused with politics and religion. In the video, Walters (photo, left) attacks teachers unions, claims religion is under [...]
Search Results
Is Oklahoma the worst state?
It’s sure trying to be. Peruse the list below of my previous posts about Oklahoma. But first, the reason for this post is the state schools superintendent’s thinly-disguised efforts to impose mandatory Bible instruction on Oklahoma public schools. This isn’t especially shocking, gi[...]
June 26th, 2024 - 1:12 pm § in Law and Courts
Something’s rotten in Oklahoma
McCurtain County is a rural county (pop. 31,000) in the southeast corner of Oklahoma. It became a focus of national news coverage when a hidden microphone picked up the sheriff, jail administrator, a sheriff’s investigator, and a county commissioner discussing lynching black people and murderi[...]
May 22nd, 2024 - 5:09 pm § in Misc.
Oklahoma makes being an “illegal” a crime
Oklahoma has enacted a law threatening to “fine and jail migrants who are in the state without legal documentation,” NBC News reported on May 22, 2024 (read story here; see the law here). That it’s a bad law goes almost without saying. (What good comes from Republican legislatures?[...]
Oklahoma board votes to use public funds for Catholic education
An Oklahoma state school board has approved “the first publicly funded religious school in the nation, despite a warning from the state’s attorney general that the decision was unconstitutional,” ABC News reported on Monday, June 5, 2023 (read story here). “The Statewide Virt[...]
January 20th, 2023 - 7:33 pm § in Business
Oklahoma pork plant fired worker, then called cops who killed him
Guymon, Oklahoma, is a town in the dusty Oklahoma panhandle. It was a dying town until the pork plant came in the 1990s. In 2014, an Oklahoma newspaper gushed (here), “On the northeast corner of town, cradled by a cluster of dilapidated trailer homes, sits a business that many credit for start[...]
Oklahoma house calls
Excerpted from E.R. Nurses: True Stories from America’s Greatest Unsung Heroes, by James Patterson and Matt Everson (get it here), at p. 246: “We get a lot of calls to deal with emergency situations in the rural parts of Oklahoma, where a lot of people live off the grid, without TV or ru[...]
February 25th, 2022 - 12:15 am § in Environment, Politics
Oklahoma GOP Sen. Imhofe to retire
Sen. Jim Imhofe (R-OK), 87, who was re-elected to a 5th term in 2020, is expected to announce this weekend he will resign at the end of this year so his successor can be elected this coming November (see story here). Imhofe previously had said he wouldn’t run for reelection in 2026. He plans t[...]
October 28th, 2021 - 11:05 pm § in Law and Courts
Oklahoma botches 3rd consecutive execution
States using lethal injection to execute killers struggle to get execution drugs because pharmaceutical companies won’t provide them. So prison officials get creative. They go to compounding pharmacies that create the drugs for them. It doesn’t always work as it should. In fact it often [...]
October 16th, 2021 - 11:39 am § in Misc.
Oklahoma’s robber cops
They rob people in Canadian County, Oklahoma. The police do. They prey on itinerant motorists passing through on Interstate 40. For example, they robbed Nang Thai and Weichuan Liu, of New Mexico, of $141,500 in April 2021. The pair were en route to closing a cash deal to buy 10 acres of farmland. Th[...]