I’ll be helping to liveblog the State of the Union tonight for ABC News. We’ll be starting coverage at 6:00 ET and going until we run out of coffee diet Pepsi.

I really think that if you put a wig and some lipstick on Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), he could reprise Kathryn Joosten’s role of Mrs. Landingham on The West Wing. Uncanny.

There aren’t many subjects that get me as riled up as school choice. From what I’ve been reading lately, Governor Doyle has continued to veto attempts by the legislature to raise the cap above the current 15% of Milwaukee’s public school enrollment. To many people, such as Charlie Sykes and writers at the Wall Street Journal, the answer is simple: let more kids in the system use vouchers to attend private schools outside the crippled MPS system. Better education for more kids. How can you argue with that? Like this:

Money used for vouchers to send Milwaukee students to private schools is money that could have been put towards the public school system.

The argument for school choice is that taking students (and money) away from public schools will force them to compete with private schools, and raise the quality of public schools.

The goal: Improve public schools.
The means: Take money away from public schools.

Great plan!

According to the WSJ article, a study has shown that “students using vouchers to attend Milwaukee’s private schools had a graduation rate of 64%, versus 36% for their public school counterparts.” What the WSJ failed to note is that parents who desire their child to participate in the voucher program are more likely to provide an environment conducive to learning and success. What the study should have done was compare kids who participated in the choice program to kids whose parents wanted them to participate in the program, but were not accepted.

Those in favor want to raise the cap on school choice participation above the current ceiling of 15%. My question is, raise it to where? To 20%, leaving 80% of Milwaukee’s students in the public schools that choice advocates say need to improve so much. To 50%? The major problem with school choice is that, while a small fraction of the students may get a better education, THERE ARE ALWAYS STUDENTS LEFT BEHIND. Why not devise a plan to fund and improve public schools for all of these students? Why must we save the few lucky enough to make the 15% cut and defund public schools for the other 85%? Raising the cap won’t help, but proper funding and some effort put into fixing MPS will. Don’t just abandon these kids, help them.

Mr. Sykes writes, “Today, black students in choice schools face the possibility that they will also be excluded from the schools of their choice. While the current governor will not literally stand in the schoolhouse door, the effect will be the same: the kids will be kept out.”

My question to Sykes is: what is your plan to provide EVERY child with a quality education. Sykes says that kids will be left out if the Governor doesn’t up the cap. What he doesn’t state, is that, no matter what the cap is, kids will be left out. What I believe Sykes is saying here is that all children who have parents who desire them to get a quality education should be allowed access to it. What I’m saying is that all children should have access to a quality education, whether their parents are supporting enough to care about where they go to school or not.

According to the WSJ, the only way Doyle will raise the cap is if, “it’s tied to a change in the school-aid formula that he knows would never pass the Republican legislature — particularly in an election year.” No shit. Doyle realizes that just sending more kids into the voucher program won’t help the bigger problem: improving our public schools. You know what will help? Proper funding; which is exactly what Doyle demands be part of the package and is what he’s been fighting for over the past three years.

This isn’t to say that simply throwing money at poorer districts will improve the problem. Funding has to be accompanied by effort, reform, and accountability. But defunding public schools doesn’t come across as a responsible action to me. The bottom line: use public money to improve public schools, not to send a small fraction somewhere else.

That’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Folkbum: Shameless Race-Baiting on the Right: Conservatives’ True Colors (this one’s a must-read)

Wall Street Journal: The Education Borg (Poor form with the analogy, WSJ. I expect better.)

Charlie Sykes: WHY ARE DOYLE AND XOFF SO UPSET?

Xoff: Sykes choosing words more carefully? His ’spot’ becomes paid commercial

My report on the annual March for Life anti-abortion demonstration (and acknowledgement for my reporting, thanks Teddy) was included the ABC News AfterNote podcast today (fast-forward to 2:00). You can listen to the AfterNote like any .mp3 file.

The event was huge; thousands of people were crowding the Mall. At points, it was almost impossible to move. People came from around the country, some driving through the night to attend the event. Several U.S. Representatives were present and President Bush addressed those in attendance via a phone call from Manhattan, KS where he was giving a speech today.

Speakers at the event made an effort to connect the march and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade to Bush’s new appointments to the Supreme Court: John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Some of the most prominent cheers of the event were for the resignation of Sandra Day O’Conner and the appointments of Roberts and Alito.

Pictures from the March for Life

ABC News Political Unit: The AfterNote

ABC News: Demonstrators mark Roe v. Wade Anniversary

It’s appears that new voting systems can be hacked into and the results changed.

The Washington Post reports that optical-scanning voting machines produced by Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems.

Four times over the past year (Ion) Sancho (an election supervisor in Leon County, FL) told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques.

Sancho’s most recent demonstration was last month. Harri Hursti, a computer security expert from Finland, manipulated the “memory card” that records the votes of ballots run through an optical scanning machine.

Diebold took a dim view of the experiments. On June 8, a senior company lawyer faxed Sancho: “You have willfully and intentionally allowed the manipulation of memory cards related to your elections. . . . We believe this to have been a very foolish and irresponsible act.”

That’s an interesting reaction by Diebold. It seems to me that anyone who would be looking to to manipulate an election would be foolish and irresponsible. That’s exactly the reason that voting systems be resisting to tampering.

More than 800 jurisdictions use Diebold’s technology.

hat tip to Mark Kleiman

As part of my internship at the ABC News Political Unit, I work on “The Note”, a daily summary of political news and analysis that has a readership in the “tens of thousands”.

From Friday’s “The Note”:

The Note goes Hollywood:
You won’t want to miss this Sunday’s episode of The West Wing (8 pm ET on NBC), penned by Al Gore’s former chief scribe Eli Attie. In the episode, entitled “Duck and Cover” and dealing with the familiar primetime TV topic of nuclear energy policy, Ron Silver’s Bruno Gianelli character (who is oddly Dick Morrisian) name-checks The Note, and then proclaims himself to be a liberal Democrat in real life! (Okay, maybe not. But he does name-check the Note, per our sources.)

Let’s just say I don’t think this is something that the legislature in Wisconsin will be working on any time soon. They’re too busy allowing people walking down the street to carry a concealed weapon.

From the AP:
ABC News: Wash. House Passes Gay Civil Rights Bill

note: I’m not saying that I support this exact piece of legislation, but I’m of the opinion that it’s more beneficial to work for policy that protects civil rights instead of limiting them.

• The people have spoken and Google has answered. Last week, Google added a “delete” button to Gmail. Gmail has prided itself on the fact that, with over 2GB of space, you’ll never have to delete an e-mail, but instead archive them all to search through later. But, I really don’t want to keep an infinite library of NY Times headlines in my e-mail. Now I don’t have to.
• In other Google-related news, the search giant refused a subpeona from the U.S. Gov’t for millions of search records for use in reviving “the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 federal law that seeks to ban Internet sites from displaying content that the government deems ‘harmful to minors.’”

  “The Supreme Court has ruled that the law can’t be enforced unless the government shows less intrusive measures such as Internet filtering are inadequate. The government hopes to use search results from Google and other companies to show that Internet pornography is so pervasive that only a federal law can protect children from it.”

  Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft complied with the subpoena.

  Boston Globe: Google subpoena roils the Web

• The new Intel iMac crushes the G5 iMac in boot-time. Video

I’ve taken the last couple weeks off from posting, using my time to prepare for the semester… and sleep. On Thursday, I left Milwaukee for Washington DC, where I will be interning for the ABC News Political Unit until May.

I’m not exactly sure what that means for The New Vernacular. I may be writing about politics more, with an emphasis on the national arena, or I may take a step back from political writing altogether and focus on technology and media. Or, I may not feel like writing much here after writing at work all day. One thing is for certain, because I’m working for a news organization, I’ll be refraining from promoting any specific candidates or agendas and stick to a more objective analysis.

I start work tomorrow, hopefully I’ll get a chance to update later in the week.

I’m not sure who made this juxtaposed editorial decision, but they highlighted an interesting contrast in Southeastern Wisconsin. The Journal Sentinel gave approximately equal space to these two stories on the bottom of its January 2nd frontpage: “Lakeside castles bring a backlash” and “Family center can’t cure all of area’s ills“.

The first story is about a proposed rule restricting the size of waterfront mansions in the Village of Chenequa, in Waukesha County. The caption accompanying the map of Waukesha County reads: “MANSIONS: TOO BIG?”. The second story is about the opening of a new community center in a Milwaukee neighborhood where 86% of the residents live below the poverty line. Both stories continue on page 5B.

These two communities are only 25 miles away.

Just something to think about as we start the new year.

Thank you, Barry.