Wonks Anonymous is a true child of the sixties and therefore allergic to forms, rule, regulations and deadlines, which does not help now that it is time to enroll his dippy daughter - the youngest offspring - in kindergarten.

So this morning he packed her off to preschool and sat down for a fine few hours of filling out forms, during the course of which he called the school for information and to schedule an appointment to enroll the child. To his mild amazement the secretary said: "Bring what you have in here and we can start the process now."

Which we did, with Wonks Anonymous leaving the school with a little check list of stuff that was still pending.

All of this happened at a public school, run by the Alameda Unified School District.

That would be Washington School, Elyse Belanger principle. Way to go, you have a good team there.

Now Wonks Anonymous has seen a lot of "service" in his life. Far too much of it is given by bored, uncaring people who are forced to follow scripts written by grasping, penny pinching, uncaring weasels.

That would be service in the sacred private sector. Service given by banks, health insurers and internet service providers.

So here he was sitting in the office of an underfunded school which is contemplating yet another round of layoffs, getting help from someone who is also fielding calls from parents and helping kids with boo boos that they just got on the play yard thinking that sometime today he will read some vile screed written by some right wing nut job or other about failing public schools and lousy teachers and soulless bureaucrats.

And there will be a good chance that the nut job will actually have a full time, paid media position writing such vile screeds.

And then Wonks Anonymous thinks of his own experience with expensive private education - that would be at the ever so chi chi School of the Madeline in North Berkeley yet. Which school his elder children attended for some years before asking their mother to be sent to public schools. Which school turned out to be a hotbed of bullying where the first grade teacher was not even capable of teaching high intelligent and verbal children how to read.

But we really do need to reduce taxes for rich people - all of those bankers are suffering, not to mention poor Paris Hilton - and the only way we can do that is to destroy trust in the government. So folks like Debra J Saunders need to keep up their output of anti-government drivel and of course their unthinking disciples like James McPhail need to repeat it all over the web.

The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Goebbels, quoted in Wikipedia.