WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Maureen Dowd

The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong. Charles Sherrod, Shirley’s husband, was a Freedom Rider who, along with the civil rights hero John Lewis, was a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s. (NYT)

Mayoral control

The only thing that every researcher agrees about is, as David Hursh of the Warner School of Education says, mayoral control represents “a decline in public input, a decline in accountability, a lack of debate over what schools should be doing.” (Shea Howell, Michigan Citizen)

Van Jones

The former White House green jobs czar who, like Shirley Sherrod, was thrown under the bus by the Obama administration amid another phony scandal stoked by Fox: 

Sherrod is "like Rosa Parks and she got slimed." (At Netroots)