I mentioned my recent visit to the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. Just this week, Goldwater has published two new studies on school choice. The first study takes a look at a decade of choice in the state of Arizona. A conclusion of the second study is that parents of children who receive tax credit scholarships are measurably more satisfied with the education.

Of course, the namesake of the organization, Barry Goldwater, was an avid aviator who not only flew in World War II but also became the driving force in the Arizona Air Guard. Barry Goldwater?s eponymous organization promotes liberty and the policies that lead to it. With all of this on my mind, I sat down this afternoon to listen to Attorney General Ashcroft address the ALEC legislators gathered from around the nation. General Ashcroft often invoked terms like liberty and freedom and even quoted John Locke on the role of law: ?not to abolish or restrain, but to enhance and enlarge? the scope of individual liberty. So it was to my great disappointment that when he talked about the 1st Amendment, he only spoke in terms of the USA Patriot Act and made no mention of the recent evisceration of political speech to come down from the Supreme Court.

In order not to close on too dark a note, I?ll share one more short passage from Wolfe?s The Right Stuff. Coupled with the post from yesterday it shows how the spirit of adventure, exploration, and individual accomplishment as a means to achieve the greater good are part of American life. These things ? and evidence abounds of them from the growing successes of charter and home schools to educate children in North Carolina to strong and healthy liberty-oriented think tanks like the John Locke Foundation and the Goldwater Institute ? spur us on toward truly enhancing and enlarging the scope of individual liberty.

They swirled about his capsule like tiny weightless diamonds, little bijoux?no, they were more like fireflies. They had that lazy but erratic motion, and when he focused on one it would seem to be lit up, but the light would go out and he would lose track of it, and then it would light up again. That was like fireflies, too. There used to be thousands of fireflies in the summers, when he was growing up. These things were like fireflies, but they obviously couldn?t be any sort of organism?unless all the astronomers and all the satellite recording mechanisms had been fundamentally wrong?They were undoubtedly particles of some sort, particles that caught the sunlight at a certain angle. They were beautiful, but were they coming from the capsule? That could mean trouble. They must have been coming from the capsule, because they traveled along with him, in the same trajectory, at the same speed. But wait a minute. Some of them were far off, far below?there might be an entire field of them?a minute cosmos?something never seen before!