It's that last four sentences that make Kansas especially attractive to me!

Dave "Original Idaho Conservative" Darnell

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wirt Atmar [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
> Sent: Monday, January 22, 2001 12:17 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
>