I saw this on the news last night, too, and the pundits cried their fears that our language would be ruined.
Well, it's not going to be ruined, but here is my question for the American Literacy Council. So elementary school students will be able to learn to read and write more easily with phonetic spelling. They'll still have to learn traditional english spellings or they won't be able to easily read the texts produced for the last few hundred years. What do you do about that literacy issue?
Seriously, folks, instead of focusing on changing the spelling of 100's of words, let's move people past the QWERTY keyboard onto a faster typing interface :)
Simplified Spelling, Nothing New
I hadn't heard of the Simplified Spelling Movement until I was in grad school and was doing archival research on writing instruction in normal schools. At Illinois State, the president moved all official business to Simplified Spelling for a about four years ... those were THE MOST ANNOYING artifacts to have to go through, but also, strangely cool, too ... You might find this article on SSM by Mark Twain of interest ...