Kudos to you and David for uncovering this.

Interesting post, David. I agree with your points, but I think what really counts is how good our average teachers are. And, on that front, it's just math. If we pay teachers better, we make teaching more attractive as a profession compared to other alternatives. When I was campaigning, I knocked on the door of a young couple, both former teachers. They loved teaching and I could tell from speaking to them that they were both good at it. But they left the profession within a year of the birth of their first child, because they, you know, wanted to provide for that child and his future siblings. Bottom line: If we didn't pay our teachers so poorly, those two young teachers likely would have spent a 40 year career teaching, and likely been an inspiration to thousands of kids. For whatever reasons, we've made a choice in our society that teachers are low value. Lawyers are high value. Doctors are very high value. Baseball players have huge value. And CEOs have astronomical value. But teachers have been deemed low value. Implicilty, that means we don't value education. We can say we do, but until we start paying teachers appropriately those are hollow words.

I'd advocate an entirely different solution. Instead of treating the symptom -- the performance gap between rich and poor, treat the disease -- the ever increasing inequality of income and wealth in America. If we returned to the distribution of wealth and income we had in the '60s, the gap in educational performance would shrink automatically.

Spot on, BlueMeanie. I wonder if MoDo and the Times blew it even more fundamentally. At some point, it became counter-productive for Obama to move heaven and earth to pull 60 votes for weakened legislation that would have been further weakened, or trashed entirely, in the House. Passing some toothless bill and having a bunch of craven Senators and Reps brag how they stood up to the NRA would do very little to address the issue here. In the long run, it seems, Obama accomplishes more by marginalizing the Republicans (and 4 Democrats) who voted against the legislation and re-igniting the passion of those on his side. So it wasn't so much that Obama doesn't like twisting arms. In this case, doing so would have been poor chess playing.

Life is so easy as a Libertarian. In this case, there's private property and public property, nothing in between. No need to worry about nuance. Nuance is inconvenient. It gets in the way of formulaic rules. But life is nuanced. If I own a restaurant, it may be my property, but it's likely on a major street that requires more public services -- more sanitation services, more police services, more fire services. And what if there only are enough people in town to support one restaurant? Am I then allowed to discriminate, thereby depriving some citizens of a restaurant facility? If there are a limited number of liquor licenses available, is it fair that I own one? is it fair that the citizens against whom I'm discriminating pay taxes to have police and fire on the ready for my restaurant? What if I'm an innkeeper and there only is room for one place of public lodging in town? What If I own a taxi in New York City, where there are a limited number of medallions? Can I systematically not stop for Blacks, even though the medallion was intended to ensure taxi service to all citizens? Sorry, but if we allow people with businesses that serve the general public to discriminate simply because we've decided to exalt private property rights, it's unworkable.

Nice post. My thought when I read about Senator McLastInHisClass' idea was how easily the logic could be extended to other crime suspects. What's troubling is that there will be blowback in the liberal blogosphere, but neither the MSM nor progressive politicians will aggressively go after Graham and McCain for their idiocy, which implicitly validates their view as not necessarily correct, but reasonable and acceptable. After twelve years of horrendous policy mistakes since 9/11, the knee jerk response in our culture still is to label anyone who stands up for civil liberties in this context as "soft on terror." Thus, morons like McCain and Graham can advocate the destruction of civil liberties without fear of political repercussion.