Via skippy, Barbara Miner has an opinion piece at Common Dreams, The False Promises of “School Choice”, that covers the school voucher program in Madison, Wisconsin. That program is the prototype that Republicans have been trying to put in place in Florida for over a decade, with their latest attempt being Amendment 8, on the Florida ballot.

The Republicans have been beating the drum loudly about the need for “accountability” in education, and have put in place the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test [FCAT] that is supposed to address that issue for public schools, but private schools don’t have to participate. Private schools don’t have much in the way of oversight or standards, so it is difficult to know if they are teaching anything.

If it is important to know what is going on in public schools, why isn’t it just as important to know the same things about private schools if they are going to receive tax money? Don’t taxpayers have a right to know what their taxes are buying?

But the luck is not necessarily good.

I have a friend who should just avoid the water altogether, because every time in the last ten years he has been on a boat for more than a day, there is a problem.

It started to go really bad when he went with a group of guys to bring a wooden vessel back from the Atlantic Coast. One of the group had bought the boat on the ‘Net and it was too big for a trailer.

They kind of checked things out and then entered the InterCoastal Waterway that allows passage to the Gulf from the Atlantic using Lake Okeechobee. There were minor problems that were patched up until they got to the lake. The level of the lake was low and the engine cooling system sucked up mud which blocked it and caused the engine to overheat, and, well, die. Fortunately the water was shallow enough to wade to shore to arrange a tow to a marina, but people ran out of time for this adventure and ended up taking the bus home.

My friend just left New Orleans today on a cruise to the Yucatan. He checked the weather between here and the Yucatan and it was ‘great’.

He should have scanned a bit further South into the Caribbean where he would have seen Invest 99. It might not affect his cruise ship, but with his luck …