Sen. Hillary Clinton on misspellings and high-tech plans

As political gaffes go it wasn't quite up to the level of ex-VP Dan Quayle's Potatoe" screw up, but it was still pretty darned funny. On Thursday Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Silicon Valley touting her high tech innovation agenda and behind her in Big Bold Letters was:

Now tomorrow is one of those words that some writers might have to think about - it is one of the words many are sure to misspell, but this one well, falls into the truly bad timing category. I mean as Clinton was trying to woo the high-techies of Silicon Valley this glaring error is screaming behind her. Not to mention that last night Evan O'Dorney won the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion by acing the word "serrefine."

Oh and in her speech she said she's trying to increase the number of H-1B visas - a highly controversial topic.

"If you think you have a skills shortage now, project it out a decade and we're going to be in real trouble," Clinton told some 200 executives attending a half-day CEO Summit by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. "We need to guide immigration reform to attract and retain foreign-born students who want to work in the United States."

According to an Associated Press story Clinton's high-tech plan would:

* Increase federal research and development budgets 50% over the next 10 years at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Defense Department. She would triple the number of NSF fellowships and create an award structure to encourage working engineers and scientists to teach classes and mentor students in public schools.

* Establish a $50 billion "Strategic Energy Fund" that would create a research agency focused on reducing the threat of global warming. The R&D windfall and energy agency would be funded in part from closing tax loopholes and ending subsidies to oil companies, she said.

* Provide tax incentives to increase the number of U.S. homes with broadband Internet connections.