OJ: common, reality check time; the Medicare bill was an attempt to purchase votes, obscenely expensive, utterly corrupt, with HSA's tossed-in in an attempt to help corporate America remain competitive, but these matters are essentially separate and should be evaluated separately. The Medicare bill was a big kick in the teeth to our kids.

The vouchers are taking a hell of a long time to show up and have requirements so toothlessly malleable at the union-local level that they essentially never need take effect even in the worst districts.

Look, I think Bush is great for a lot of reasons; but in these two cases, he gave up far too much for, essentially, a mirage of value-based outcomes. Bush is no Billy Beane.

Thus illustrating "barely comprehend"

Well OJ, as I recall, you were also the only one to "comprehend" that Bush would receive 535 electoral votes. The proof is in the pudding; while there's hope for HSA's, the vouchers, as now-constituted, offer no escape anytime in the future for kids trapped in crappy government schools and are simply a pretty naked attempt to shore-up the evangelical coalition.

That's quite wrong, of course, but they are generally only helping black kids and he'd never have gotten such a program past the Republican party had they recognized what it would do:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/webpage/book.htm#rayola

OJ:
Bush came to power when my oldest son was in fifth grade. The boy is now a freshman in high school and attending an underperforming school. I have no doubt that he will graduate from this school in the last year of Bush's two-term presidency without us ever being given the chance to use vouchers for better school options.

Jim:

And? The program is just three years old and not designed to benefit upper-middle class folk. If it's a failing school under NCLB you can get a voucher though.

I think vouchers' political stillbirth status is quite apparent in the fact that they are "not designed to benefit upper-middle class folk." Why the hell not? Don't middle class kids deserve school choice? Is school choice a valid response to government school monopoly or not? 70,000 kids with vouchers is a zero impact all hot-air program.

Jim:

They don't support them. Whites are more afraid of black kids in their classes than interested in vouchers for their own kids.

Not true, at least in Metro Detroit. There's a Catholic school in Detroit proper, with lots of black kids, that's very good; interestingly, it charges less than Detroit's unbelievably bad public high schools receive in per-pupil funding. Many parents in my town west of Detroit would much rather send their kids to this school than the subpar local public school, BUT THEY CANNOT AFFORD TO DO THIS, and, OJ, they will never get vouchers to help them, because the unions don't want them to have the choice and Bush doesn't give a tinker's damn whether they get school choice or not. Vouchers are just red meat for conservative wonks and evangelicals, they are absolutely ineffectual where the rubber meets the road. Color me disappointed.

Jim :

The Republican Party doesn't support vouchers because it means black kids going to sub urban public schools--it's that simple. Getting vouchers in the back door was the only way to do it--W did. In a few years they'll just jigger the program and make them universal.

OJ: this "jigger the program" line is simply face-saving gibberish. Going into the fifth year of his administration, three years after NCLB, vouchers are serving 70,000 kids, statistically insignificant even if limited to inner-city kids, a limitation, by the way, that makes absolutely zero sense.

It's time to own up, OJ: Ted Kennedy won this one big. Educational spending has gone through the roof and there's virtually no school choice anywhere. Bush was beaten on this issue, thoroughly, despite majorities in both houses of Congress. Damn.

Money doesn't matter--we have plenty. The essernce of being a conservative is being patient. Social Security looked a lot different three years in too.

OJ: maybe, then, the essence of "being a conservative" is not having a kid trapped in a crappy public school so you can be patient in a politically sophisticated way.

Jim:

Yes. Conservatives are getting them out of such schools, thus homeschooling.

OJ:

Homeschooling is great; but are conservatives telling single moms and couples who need a second income to homeschool? Especially when these folks are already paying for public schools? Isn't the just, efficient, freedom-loving, anti-propaganda, anti-monopoly political answer "vouchers", with home-schoolers being eligible for voucher money based on test performance? Do conservatives already need to be re-introduced to the virtue of vouchers? Is this why vouchers have NEVER GOTTEN OFF THE GROUND BEYOND SERVING AS CAMPAIGN FODDER?

No, they're telling them to get married, to move, to get second jobs, to lobby Congress.

Well, that's progress, getting you to see that it's still l999-1989-1979-1969 as far a vouchers are concerned. Yours is good advice for starting from scratch. Q.E.D.

Federal law provided vouchers for kids in failing schools before NCLB?

Equally well as after NCLB; a school only fails if the local union rule makers want it to. Three years after NCLB, 70,000 kids. NCLB is the educational equivalent of border security.

And every kid in the District of Columbia. Bureaucracy moves slowly, but it moves.

OJ: Norm Mineta couldn't have said it better!

Which has made him a great cabinet secretary for three terms now.

Yes, offending nobody.

And putting a complete halt to terrorism--something thought impossible in the wake of 9-11.

Yes, all the while being a top-notch host to Syrian rock bands and making sure air marshals are disguised as actors from "Dragnet." At least he shakes down the grannies, you just can't pass up a good grope.