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