And I respectfully but totally disagree with my very good friend Wirt.

He says: If you look at where all of the Silicon Valleys are, they're smack in
the middle of the most liberal, most highly educated populations in the United
States.

RTP in North Carolina is definitely not an area that I would call the "most
liberal", though it has a very highly educated population.  It also ranks as
one of the top "Silicon Valleys".

Austin, TX also has a very important "Silicon Valley", and it is definitely not
in a liberal area.  Atlanta is also another such area, and that is definitely
not a "very liberal" area of the country.

The remainder of the post might have originated from the "Liberal's Handbook."
 In response, suffice it to say that the main problem with public education in
this country has to do with the extreme-left liberal NEA, the teachers union,
which refuses to teach, they just want money and power with no accountability.

Finally, we supposedly have had 8 years of economic growth with a supposed
"education president and vice-president."  Nothing at all has been done in this
respect.

It was definitely time for a change and the change is taking place.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Wirt Atmar [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Monday, January 22, 2001 1:17 PM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        Re: OT: rotating blackouts ordered for Northern California

Glenn asks:

> Hey - how about the other side of Denver?  Kansas would more than welcome
>  any expansion.

[snip]

>  We take our politics, like most of our religious life, on a conservative
>  scale.  The state has been overwhelmingly Republican since being founded in
>  the mid-1830's.  Remember Carry Nation?  Well, she was a native-Kansas...

Unfortunately, it's these last four sentences that pretty much guarantee that
Kansas won't be a future center of high-tech innovation, at least not in the
near-term.

If you look at where all of the Silicon Valleys are, they're smack in the
middle of the most liberal, most highly educated populations in the United
States.

Today's NY Times ran an article today concerning the comments of a great number
of the CEO's of these technology-based corporations regarding Bush's new
education push. They're all for it, but not in the way that people in Kansas
are.

In Kansas and Tennessee and Mississippi, Bush's education agenda is being
primarily interpreted as the idea of school vouchers, which is political code
for the notion that the US government (meaning all of us) should pay for their
children to attend religious academies so that they will not be exposed to the
corrupting ideas of modern science.

But in California, the idea's radically different. These CEO's very much want
the US government to massively invest in public education, raise standards, and
raise accountability, in a manner that recapitulates the national defense push
for educational reform that followed directly after the launch of Sputnik in
1957. Without these impositions of strict new guidelines, they see the US
falling ever further behind, unable to find a sufficient labor pool of well
educated, innovative thinkers without greatly increasing our dependence on
foreign workers.

Bush lays out his education agenda today. He's going to have a problem on his
hands, trying to satisfy both groups: the people who voted for him and the
people who paid for his election.

Wirt Atmar