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"The details of the Bush administration's proposal are vague," report the Post's Justin Blum and Michael A. Fletcher. "Paige could not say how much the vouchers would be worth, the number of students who could take part in the program or the total amount of money that would be set aside for the District."

Bush dropped school vouchers from his 2001 education plan, but became more supportive of them than ever after last year's Supreme Court ruling that they do not violate the First Amendment.

In related news, Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster has called for a voucher pilot program in his state. "In his proposal for vouchers, Foster called for a small pilot program that would give parents of students in a limited number of failing schools the right to transfer to a private school," reports the New Orleans Times-Picayune. "Foster didn't say how much money the state would pay for private school tuition, but he said the program would include only a few failed schools and affect only a few hundred students."

Pundits: What did religious talk after the Columbia disaster mean?
A lot of people took note of religious language and feelings after the Columbia explosion. As Weblog noted yesterday, The Washington Post even ran an entire article on how Isaiah 40:26 made its way into Bush's announcement that "The Columbia is lost." Now pundits are giving it closer scrutiny.

"In moments of tragedy, it's natural to speak of God watching over us," writes William Saletan in Slate.

There are two senses in which God can watch over us. Only one of them is compatible with the courage praised by Bush and Reagan. The other is the one invoked by the terrorists of Sept. 11 and by Iraqis who are rejoicing today in our misfortune. … It's reassuring to think that God will protect us from tragedy or defeat. But that belief has two dangerous implications. One is that courage is unnecessary and unreal. The crews of Challenger and Columbia weren't actually taking risks or showing bravery, as Reagan and Bush supposed, because their fate was in God's hands. The other implication is that tragedies are God's will. That's what Bush rebuked Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell for suggesting when they speculated that Sept. 11 had happened because God had removed his protection from the United States.

Saletan, Slate's chief political correspondent, concludes by noting the implications this has with war against Iraq. "In the skies over Baghdad, as in the skies over Texas, God's non-neutrality is a guide, not a promise. If Iraq insists on building weapons of mass destruction, we must fight not because God will protect us, but because he won't."

The idea God allows evil but does not cause it or will it does not appear in Saletan's piece.

In The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, Naomi Schaefer writes that religious language about the Columbia explosion—indeed, even about space itself—is wholly understandable. "The impulse to see if there is a world beyond the human world, whether there is life other than human life, and view our own planet from another perspective, is deeply entangled with our curiosity about the fundamental questions of existence," she writes.

Indeed, [Columbia astronauts Rick D. Husband, Michael P. Anderson, and Ilan Ramon] didn't seem to see a conflict between maintaining their religious beliefs and exploring the outermost reaches of space, even though such missions have helped provide mankind with some of the most important information regarding the way in which the world was created. … Perhaps belief in a higher power may bring something even more important than this comfort—a drive to go back "into the darkness beyond our world."

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47