LA Times Mysteriously Over-Estimates Prospects for President's S&M Initiative

There's a surprisingly upbeat assessment of the President's math and science initiative's prospects in the LA Times this morning (Prospects Bright for Bush's Competitiveness Plan) -- reporting that it "could be one of the few administration initiatives to be enacted in this congressional election year."

Would that it were so -- my old Senate boss Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) has been helping lead the effort in the Senate, along with Lamar Alexander (R-TN). But the LAT piece (by Joel Havemann and Richard Simon) is the most wildly over-optimistic piece I've seen on this since the proposals came out --and there've been a lot of them.What are those guys on?