>>Can you honestly say we [the US] need a Dept of Education at the Federal level?
>
>Yes. There should be no reason why the federal government cannot get together, create 13 curriculums (K-12), decide what people need to know, put together all the textbooks, assignments, and quizzes, throw them all onto the Internet for free, put them on CD and DVD-ROMs, distribute them to households and neighborhoods and take care of ineffective and overly expensive education in this country once and for all!

Yeah but you do not need a continuing multi-billion dollar a year federal department to do this. If we do not have the curricula nailed down by now, there is no hope of ever improving education.

>>We need to approach funding our Federal [and all] gov'ts from a totally different angle.
>
>So do you think that attacking Iraq is a good use of $200,000,000,000?

As opposed to them using nuclear bombs against us and our allies? You're damn right it is. These people have already demonstrated the will kill themselves in order to kill hundreds or thousands of innocent people. What makes you think they would not do the same with a dirty bomb?