Politics and other nightmares

Well, of course: "The factors that improve student performance often seem a fuzzy list of hard-to-define assets like good teachers, effective principals, smaller classes, and the right curricula, only some of which are directly related to dollars." We've been arguing about this for about 100 years, and the answer is no: Money does not buy good education.

If you're near a computer terminal with an Internet connection at 1 p.m., watch a little history being made. It will be the first time an Indiana Senate committee will have a live Webcast of a hearing. Legislators will try to assert their authority over the Daniels administration's efforts to close license branches.

President Bush really didn't call for the teaching of Intelligent Design in science classrooms as a viable alternative to evolution, although a lot of friends and enemies of the adminsitration are saying he did, each group for its own peculiar reasons. Here's a pretty interesting discussion of the issue.

Big liars: First, Alec Baldwin went back on his word to move to Paris if George W. Bush won his first term. Now, we learn that these wimps are going to hang around and keep pestering us until at least 2008.

If Evan Bayh doesn't run for president, he sure will have wasted a lot of time and effort. After schmoozing with Democrats in New Hampshire, he's now trying to gauge his appeal in Iowa. At least one writer picks him as the dark-horse candidate to take the Democratic nomination.

OK, I've told you about turf, those interest-group mass-produced letters to the editor disguised as the individual efforts of real readers, and how newspapers look for them to prevent them from getting published. What do you think about this?

How you can have input when President Bush nominates a nut like --------- for the important position of ----------. If you have read my earlier post on turf, this parody will seem too realistic to be funny.

Indiana U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh is the outgoing chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the group made famous by Bill Clinton for trying to move the party back to the center from the extreme left. That group has been meeting (site also includes video), and there's lots of talk about "finding a message" that the nation desperately wants to hear from Democrats. But they also talk about "appealing to the middle," so I'm not sure they get it yet.

Knowing they're fighting a lost cause, Democrats who oppose putting John Roberts on the Supreme are grasping at straws by seeking something they know they can't get  -- the work product of attorney-client privilege. Note in this story that the first one to ask for "full disclosure" was John Kerry.

I've been staying away from the Valerie Plame/Karl Rove story in part because it's just politics as usual and in part because it's so convoluted it's hard to fathom. People who have followed it far more than I have admit to not understanding it. So I have just been content to watch the investigation go where it goes and let the chips fall where they may.