Word: wiring
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...these days, not everyone is on the Vice President's bandwidth. His biggest high-tech achievement to date is a program to wire every classroom and library in the country. He has heralded it as "a turning point that [will] transform the shape of America." But right now, the program is under assault from Congress as an out-of-control entitlement engineered by an out-of-control bureaucracy. Which does not do much for Gore's reputation as the architect of reinventing government. Even more ominous is another threat: starting this summer, phone companies that were ordered...
That's the easy part. Appeasing the phone companies will be harder. "While we support the goal of wiring classrooms," says MCI spokesman Brad Burns, "we don't think we should be put in the position of playing fee collector for the Federal Government." The long-distance companies have already begun collecting the surcharge from their business customers, adding as much as 5% to their bills. In July, they warn, they'll place a line-item charge on residential users as well. Phone companies, which are trying to outdo one another by offering service for pennies a minute, claim...
...Department called on the FCC to do what it could to assure that any charge the residential consumer sees would not be more than $1 a month per telephone line. "I am totally happy to have a debate over whether or not it's worth $1 a month to wire the schools," said Ron Klain, the Vice President's chief of staff...
...animating anger, an Italian street-kid swagger that made such good cover for his black-and-blue soulfulness that it was easy, especially when he was living high or mouthing off, to take it at face value. But as much as anything else, that attitude was a dodge, barbed wire for the unwary, protecting his private preserve of deepest feeling and experience, saving it for where it was needed most: the songs...
Quack medicine comes in two varieties: "irrelevant but harmless" and "toxic." The Administration's plan to wire American classrooms for Internet service is toxic quackery. Four-fifths of U.S. schools have Internet access already; instead of wiring the rest, we ought to lay down a startling new educational directive: First learn reading and writing, history and arithmetic. Then play Frisbee, go fishing or surf the Internet. Lessons first, fun second...