I first came across Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne in connection to last year's multistate battle over the so called 65 percent solution. 65  was a terrible idea, and, what's worse, it was a cynical one as well, whose real purpose, according to its own documents, was giving political cover to anti-public education politicians. 

Byrne has a reputation for shooting from the hip, using aliases to comment on Internet sites connected to his stock, and advancing the theory that much of the stock people buy is, in fact, worthless or non-existent. He convinced the Utah legislature to pass and the governor to sign legislation to protect his company from this supposed phenomenon only to have the securities industry threaten suit and convince the legislature to undo the action within the same legislative session. At the end, the sponsor of his bill, Senator Curtis Bramble, said “There are those who believe Overstock has been using the legislature as a distraction against its own problems.” Byrne then called Bramble “a squish” and “a yellow belly."  I have never seen anything quite like that.  

I don't know if Byrne himself has actually used aliases to comment on his stock. But he has touted a blog whose chief purpose seemed to be to attack critics of Patrick Byrne. When the blogger was identified as an Overstock exec, Byrne defended his employee's right to do what he wants on his own time.  The Motley Fool called Overstock "the worst stock of 2007" Dow Jones Marketwatch Blog called Byrne the 2nd worst CEO in America in 2006 noting "he has spent shareholder time and money using innuendo and lies to create a conspiracy theory."

Naturally, he's just the guy you want to have be out front advocating on your behalf if you want to privatize education services in Utah…right? Even taking him at his word as to his intentions in this sorry debate, the track record for private schools generally and voucher programs in particular indicates they won’t be able to solve the problems Byrne says he was trying to identify.