The deal could be used as a template for other privatizations—your local Board of Education, for instance.

Most Americans don’t realize that the right wing’s main ideas have been pushed for 50 years by the John Birch Society (JBS), a group Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. once thought too extreme, but which has since become the intellectual seed bank of the right.

Whimsical ephemera, profound insights, and complete balderdash.

“It’s just been the general statements she’s been making,” says Ms. Myers, adding that she found large numbers of inaccuracies in Rep. Bachmann’s statements about history, and “I know all the answers to the majority of the statements, and I’m sixteen.”