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This is the world we live in now, folks. One where conservatives think students borrowing money from the government is an "entitlement." Back in the days when people were sane, we used to believe paying for our young people to be educated was an obligation of a healthy democracy. Now, it's all up to kids who are expected not only to pay for their college educations, but to bury themselves deep in debt to do it. Listen to George Will's arrogant pronouncement:

TAPPER: And, George, you and I were talking about this earlier. You think that we're witnessing the birth of a new entitlement, with the president's push on -- on student loans.

WILL: Well, look what happened. It's a slow-motion, almost absentminded creation of a new entitlement, exactly at the moment when the entitlement state is buckling under the weight of its already existing commitments. Five years ago, Congress says, well, let's cut in half the interest rate on certain student loans, from 6.8 to 3.4.

Wow, no brownie points to Jake Tapper for just repeating that nonsense without so much as a raised eyebrow. Entitlement? Really?

From the time our kids are in kindergarten, parents, teachers and society alike hammer home the value of their education. By the time they're freshmen in high school, they're expected to know what they want their career to be and forge a pathway to college. If they want to get into something other than a community college, they're told to stress out for the next four years, take all the AP or IB classes they can, volunteer in their communities, participate in extracurricular activities, work a part-time job, and make sure they maintain their straight As in the process.

Those who actually manage to do these things are then rewarded with acceptances to the colleges of their choice and immediately presented with a bill for anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 per year. If they're really lucky, they might win one of the few scholarships available to shave some of the pain off that bottom line, but there are no guarantees.

If they're not, they're told they can borrow around $5,000 per year from the government, and if their parents qualify, mom and dad can borrow about $25,000 from the government to send them to that school. Here's what happens: Those kids who we pushed to achieve and qualify for those public and sometimes private university educations land in community college for a couple of years while they try to save enough money to go to a 4-year university and not go broke in the process.

If they choose the 4-year university/tuition loan route, they leave school with debt, hazy job prospects, and the sense that everything they just worked toward was a farce. Which it will be, if Will has his way.

TAPPER: 6.8 to 3.4, yeah.

WILL: We'll do it, they said, temporarily. Well, now we're coming up against the expiration of that, and they're saying, well, let's temporarily move it on yet again.

TAPPER: But Romney supports that, as well.

WILL: I understand that. And that's why this is a bipartisan example of how entitlements -- because once you do this, once you extend it again, you'll never go back to 3.4 percent.

SMILEY: But when -- but when -- but when student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt, and we want to label that an entitlement, we don't call corporate welfare an entitlement. I just -- I don't see...

WILL: Of the two-thirds of the people who graduate from college with debt, the average debt is something under $30,000 total. That is just about the one-year difference in earnings between a college graduate and a high school graduate. We're talking about a pittance a month (ph).

(CROSSTALK)

SMILEY: But, George -- but if we give interest-free loans to bankers, why not interest-free loans to students, George?

WILL: Let's not give interest-free loans to anyone.

At last! Something I agree with George Will about. Truly, let's not give interest-free loans to the banks, and let's not make students and their struggling middle class parents break under the weight of student loans. Instead, let's recognize that this country has always believed that educating our children is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and start paying for it again the way we have in the past.

The reason Will and his ilk argue against student loan interest rate breaks is simple: They want to control which students have access to a college education. Their preferred flavor of student is a conservative one. They truly believe educating those librul ingrates who show up at Occupy protests or dare to question the status quo are unworthy of an education. If conservatives could choose which students got a college education, they'd be the very compliant sons and daughters of fine, upstanding, churchgoing types. The ones who qualify for Koch scholarships.

The ones like people in my family who protested the Vietnam war, went to college in the days when the University of California was tuition-free, and then dedicated themselves to public service for their entire career? They need not apply if their voter registration says "Democrat."

I'm completely serious about the need to return to the values that made this country great, and those values include assuming the costs for educating our young people and making sure they have the finest education possible in order to innovate, create, and shape a new, better, more equal world. Enough of the philosophy of educating only caretakers for the oligarchs.

Not only should there be no interest charged on student loans, there should be no student loans. It's as simple as that.

There are many things wrong with the presumptive Republican candidacy of Mitt Romney. Mitt is wishy-washy, a mediocre politician at best, willing to say or be for anything that will get him ahead. But that's just me as a liberal. If I was a Republican Party elder, I'd be fearful of a Romney campaign for an entire other reason. It's a terribly hard sell to convince the evangelical right (a huge percentage of Republican voters) to consider a Mormon elder like Romney a true Christian.

Rick Warren, head of Saddleback Church, which claims 20,000 weekly church goers, and co-author of the ridiculously popular book "The Purpose Driven Life" (with sales of more than 30 million units), is very influential among the evangelical community. What he told Jake Tapper has to make every Republican operative working for a 2012 victory very, very nervous.

“I have a congregation that’s very large. It talks to me all the time. Most people would not think they’re better off economically than they were four years ago,” Pastor Warren said. “I hold everybody responsible for that. I hold the people who got themselves into debt. I hold the government that got themselves into debt. I hold multiple administrations. It’s not the fault of any one person.”

With Republican Mitt Romney moving closer to becoming the first Mormon presidential nominee, I asked Warren whether he believes Mormons are Christians — a contested issue among evangelicals.

“The key sticking point for evangelicals and actually for many is the issue of the Trinity… that’s the historic doctrine of the church that God is three-in-one,” Warren said. “Not three Gods; one God in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Mormonism denies that.”

Ouch.

I don't see how Romney gets over that hurdle. The only hope I guess he has is to revive the whole Obama-is-a-Muslim trope to point to the only religious faction more horrifying to the evangelical voter.

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It must really tick Sen. John McCain off to see his signature legislation (the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform) made irrelevant. He seems to be relatively sincere in his appearance on This Week with Jake Tapper, at least the segment when he's talking about finance cash. The rest? He's just doing his job as a campaign surrogate for the floundering Mitt Romney, like when he gets in that dig about the K Street Project and call out Rick Santorum on his not-so-distant past:

TAPPER: Good morning, everyone. George Stephanopoulos has a well-deserved morning off. We're now just over one week away from the crucial Michigan primary. Michigan is Mitt Romney's home state, where his dad was governor. And both the Romney and Santorum camps consider the contest there to be a potential game-changer in this bitterly fought Republican nomination battle.

To discuss that fight and more, key Romney-backer and the Republican nominee from four years John McCain joined us just a few moments ago from Afghanistan.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: Senator, I'm going to get to international relations and foreign policy in a second, but the news this week has been dominated by politics. And, in fact, you've become part of the conversation. I want to play Rick Santorum in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday, talking about Mitt Romney's leadership of the Salt Lake City Olympics.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SANTORUM: He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bail out the Salt Lake -- John McCain called it potentially the worst boondoggle in earmark history. Does the word "hypocrisy" comes to mind?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

TAPPER: Does the word "hypocrisy" come to mind, asks Senator Santorum. Well, does that word come to mind? Because Senator Santorum is right. He did request that money as head of the Olympics. You did criticize it. And now Mitt Romney is criticizing Rick Santorum for earmark spending. What's your reaction?

MCCAIN: Well, my reaction is that I, of course, oppose earmarks, and I've opposed them of all kinds. All I wanted them to do was go to Congress and go through the normal process of authorizing and then appropriating. I certainly wanted to save the Salt Lake Olympics, as most other Americans did.

Ooo, take that, Rick Santorum!

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Now, I'm going to assume that you didn't come in during the third act of Newt's career, and therefore you can appreciate just how funny it is when, on This Week, he's whining to Jake Tapper about how hard it is to pin someone down who will just lie about anything!

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I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to give props to Christie, who did a great job convincing people to take this storm seriously. There was serious damage and substantial flooding in New Jersey, and thanks to his blunt statements, he managed to persuade most of the people in harm's way to evacuate. Reports of damage are still coming in from all over the state, which is why I was surprised by phone calls this morning from friends saying, "No big deal." Really? One of my friends, who lives at the beach, had a tornado touch down near her house. It took out a couple of houses, the roof of an apartment building, and threw high-velocity debris all over the area. None of that has appeared on the news. (Oh, and her local beach was completely washed away.)

Here's Gov. Christie, interviewed by Jake Tapper for This Week With Christiane Amanour:

TAPPER: As we've been telling you, New Jersey is getting hit hard by the storm right now. New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie, is monitoring the situation from the Regional Operations Intelligence Center in Ewing, New Jersey. He joins us right now. Governor Christie, thanks for coming onto the show.

CHRISTIE: Thanks for having me, Jake.

TAPPER: So, Governor, the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey shortly before 6:00 this morning. Your state's just beginning to weather the storm. What are the early reports telling you?

CHRISTIE: Early reports are very difficult, Jake. We have over half-a-million people that are now without power. We have 15,000 people in 45 shelters across the state; 250 roads are closed; and we are going to look at a record flooding situation here, both at the shore and inland. And so my message to the people of New Jersey is, the eye of the storm is still over the state. We are far from out of the woods on the storm itself. And I urge people to stay inside their homes. The one report we have this morning of a woman who's missing is someone who went out into their car, drove, got into the water, got out of her car, and was swept away in the water and is still missing. So, please, stay in your homes until the storm has completely left New Jersey. Then we'll be able to get through this together in the aftermath, but I need people to stay at home.

TAPPER: What is your biggest concern right now? What kept you last night?

CHRISTIE: Flooding, Jake, because we had the wettest August on record in parts of New Jersey before this storm. Already, we've had six to eight inches of rain dumped on south Jersey, and the rain is continuing throughout the state. And so what I'm really worried about is flooding at this point and having to evacuate even more people than the 15,000 we've already had to evacuate and shelter. So in the short term, in the next couple of days, my big concern is the inland flooding and the shore flooding and how we're going to deal with folks who maybe have to be evacuated from their homes and need to be sheltered.

TAPPER: Is there anything that the state of New Jersey needs from the federal government that you're not getting?

CHRISTIE: Not at this point, Jake. We have FEMA representatives here at the -- at the Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, been working with us. I'm going to be calling Secretary Napolitano in an hour or two to make a further request of additional needs. But so far, FEMA has been very responsive. I spoke to Secretary Napolitano in the last 24 hours. She's offered to do whatever she needs to do to help us out here in New Jersey. She knows how hard we're going to be hit. So right now, the cooperation between New Jersey and FEMA has been great, and I'm going to be calling Secretary Napolitano shortly to ask for some more help.

TAPPER: I know you were very concerned about the -- at the time, it was 600 seniors in these Atlantic City high rises who were not leaving. What can you tell us about efforts to protect them?

CHRISTIE: Well, our last-ditch efforts that I referenced yesterday afternoon got another 100 or so to leave and to evacuate. So now we're dealing with about 500 seniors who refuse to evacuate. And as soon as it's safe to travel there, I know county OEM, Office of Emergency Management, Atlantic County is already checking on these folks to make sure they're OK. They lost power in a number of the buildings as early as 10 o'clock last night. So the county officials in Atlantic County are going to check on those folks. And as soon as we have some reports, we'll be able to share them with the public.

TAPPER: Why do people not leave their homes at times like this?

CHRISTIE: You know, I think it's a combination of things. You know, Jake, New Jerseyans are especially tough, kind of cynical, hard-edged folks, and they think the "cry wolf" syndrome, you know, it's all over TV, but it's never as bad as they're telling you it will be, that's one of the reasons. Another reason is that people are very scared, they want to protect their property. And thirdly, especially with the elderly, you know, we had one 92-year-old woman say to us yesterday, "I'm 92 years old. If I die, this is where I want to die." And so I think it's a combination of all those things that make people not heed the warnings. But the good news is that we evaluated over a million people from the Jersey shore in 24 hours without incident. And if those people had stayed at the Jersey shore, I think we'd be talking about significant loss of life. And now, hopefully, we're not going to be talking about that.

TAPPER: All right. Governor Chris Christie, thanks for joining us. Stay safe.

CHRISTIE: Jake, thank you very much for having me.

It's absolutely crazy that the one Republican presidential candidate who acknowledges that global warming is a man-made problem is the one least likely to make it through the GOP primary, simply because he told the truth. On This Week with Christiane Amanpour, Jake Tapper interviews Gov. Jon Huntsman:

TAPPER: This was a big week for Texas Governor Rick Perry. He went out on the campaign trail and he raised a lot of eyebrows. He made some comments about evolution and he said this about climate change.

PERRY: "I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven, and from my perspective, is more and more being put into question."

TAPPER: These comments from Governor Perry prompted you to Tweet, quote: "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." Were you just being cheeky or do you think there's a serious problem with what Governor Perry said?

HUNTSMAN: I think there's a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science - Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

The Republican Party has to remember that we're drawing from traditions that go back as far as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. And we've got a lot of traditions to draw upon. But I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a - a party that - that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula.

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Whew! I was a little worried after T-Paw said that a government shutdown for a month or so would be just the lesson we uppity Americans needed to take seriously the austerity measures they want to force on us that we would see a growing chorus of Republicans calling for the shutdown. But Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is deviating slightly from the Republican script to assure Jake Tapper that she doesn't want a government shutdown. After all, the government is a "necessary evil", isn't it?

Facing an oncoming federal government budget crisis, Republican governors Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Jan Brewer of Arizona both agreed that a government shutdown would not be productive for the country.

"I think government is a necessary evil," Brewer said. "But it's necessary to provide services, and they should be able to come to some solution. We need to trim the budget and move on."

"We appreciate our public employees but our job as governor is to look after our taxpayers," Haley added.

I wonder, who exactly do the governors think are the taxpayers? Corporations? Not hardly. The wealthy? No, not so much. No, you nimrods, the taxpayers ARE the teachers, the firefighters, the cops, and the other public employees whose jobs you want the right to cut without union protections.

Nevertheless, it's quite a change for Brewer to go from claiming her position was divinely mandated to saying that government is a necessary evil. Is she saying God put her in charge of evil? I'd guess there's an argument to be made for that.

Like all states, Arizona is facing hard financial times, but this is a question of priorities. While Courtney’s life is on the line, Brewer eagerly signed tax cuts for businesses into law last week — cuts that will cost Arizona $538 million by 2018. Yet the governor has dragged her feet in offering the mere $1.36 million needed to save Courtney and her cohort’s lives, and she has consistently ignored 26 possible funding solutions from a member of her own party.

For Brewer, the fact that Courtney’s plight is forced to take a backseat to business tax cuts is “sad but necessary.”

Brewer as a death panel? Evil, yes, but necessary, I don't think so.

Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves - Eurythmics featuring Aretha Franklin

I woke up this morning to the sweet, sweet sounds of a shattered glass ceiling. This Week is now being hosted by a woman, Christiane Amanpour. With no disrespect intended to interim host Jake Tapper (who did a fairly decent job, certainly better and more consistently than Stephanopoulos), I am thrilled to get a new voice and new point of view to the Sunday shows. Both as a female and as a person who has lived in other countries, I'm hoping that Amanpour will bring something different to the American macho exceptionalism that spews forth mindlessly on these shows. And who better to inaugurate Amanpour's first show than that other glass ceiling breaker, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi? Of course, on the other end of the spectrum, we have Sarah Palin on yet another "exclusive" interview with Fox News Sunday. Elsewhere on the dial, Ayn Rand's boy toy Alan Greenspan will be on Meet the Press and would-be Fourteenth Amendment Warrior Lindsey Graham is on State of the Union and Tweety's trying to figure out if tying the Republicans to the Tea Party is a good electoral strategy. Like I said, we could sure use a fresh perspective on Sundays.

ABC's "This Week" - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.; Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

CBS' "Face the Nation" - Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.; Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations; Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

NBC's "Meet the Press" - Mullen; former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan; Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa.; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

NBC's "The Chris Matthews Show" - Panel: Kimberly Dozier, Dan Rather, Rick Stengel and Helene Cooper. Topics: The War in Afghanistan: How Long Will the President's Popular Support Last? Can Democrats Limit the Damage By Tying Republicans to the Tea Party?

CNN's "State of the Union" - Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.

CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" - On Sunday, Fareed has an exclusive interview with Senator John Kerry -- the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- to talk about the Wikileaks and, more broadly, the war in Afghanistan; about Iran and whether we should be engaging that nation; and about U.S. politics. Then Pakistan's Ambassador to the U.S. responds directly to the accusations in the war logs that his intelligence service has been colluding with the Taliban.

"Fox News Sunday" - Former Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky; House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.

So what's catching your eye this morning?

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TAPPER: So, the administration has had a number of successes after big battles, stimulus, health care legislation, new rules for Wall Street, but you have a big battle coming when it comes to the Bush tax cuts. If they remain in place, as Republicans want, it will cost three trillion dollars every ten years. The administration has said it wants to keep the ones for people who make under $200,000 a year, individuals and $250,000 for couples. That will cost $2.5 trillion over 10 years. Ben Bernanke the chairman of the Federal Reserve said that with the economic outlook unusually uncertain, extending the Bush tax cuts would have a stimulative effect on the economy. Is he right?

GEITHNER: I don't think it should be a battle, Jake. You know, what the President's proposing to do is to leave in place, to extend tax cuts that go to more than 95 percent of working Americans and to leave in place tax cuts that are very important to incent businesses to hire new pe -- new employees and to invest in expanding output. We think that's a -- the -- it's a very strong package. We think it's the right package. We think it's fair. We think it's responsible. Now, we also think it's responsible to let the tax cuts expire that just go to 2 percent to 3 percent of Americans, the highest earning Americans. We think that's the responsible thing to do because we need to make sure we can show the world that they're willing as a country now to start to make some progress bringing down our long -- our long-term deficits.

TAPPER: Don't you think it will slow economic growth?

GEITHNER: No. Just letting those tax cuts that only go to 2 percent to 3 percent of Americans, the highest earning Americans in the country expire. I do not believe it will have a negative effect on growth.

TAPPER: This package that you're talking about pushing in Congress to -- to save the Bush tax cuts for people under $200,000 individuals and 250 for couples --

GEITHNER: And in fact, we go beyond that. Because you know, we're proposing to extend the [...] tax cut which also goes to 95 percent of working Americans. And a set of very important business tax cuts targeted for small businesses themselves, expensing, zero capital gains rate for investment in small businesses. These things, we think, are very helpful, very powerful.

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Maybe Jack Tapper and Ruth Marcus will come to their rescue again because I imagine Tapper will just say that FOX News was getting their info from one uncorroborated source inside the prison walls and it's a very dangerous place to do reporting in. As for Ruth Marcus? I'll remain silent on her.

FOX News: Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting to Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says

Tamara Haley, 38, is doing time for heroin possession and prostitution. She said Monday: "Everyone will want a piece of her. It will make them famous if they hurt Lindsay Lohan. "Or if you get her to cry, the whole ward will laugh and people will love it -- even the guards."

Haley also warned bisexual Lindsay of the jail's lesbian gangs -- and offered advice on how to avoid their clutches. She said: "The gay inmates wear their shirts inside out to let others know they are available.

"So if Lindsay doesn't want someone to grab her ass she'd better keep her shirt on straight.

"Women grab each other like animals when the guards aren't looking. It's disgusting."

And if the lesbians don't get her, Tamara says she might get it from all the murderers even though she'll be segregated from them.

Haley added: "She'll be segregated from the general population, but where she's going it is even worse. It's the wing where the murderers are. "I don't think they will actually be able to get to her, but you never know. At the very least some of those hard cases will try to scare her. They'll scream stuff to her from their cells.

Yea, prison is tough like that. Now that's real reporting.
Don't miss the FOX411 host saying that Lohan will be subjected to a "full cavity search" too.

We have crazed, angry blacks stealing the election for Obama and wild hordes of lesbian prisoners having their way with you too. We're losing the culture wars. It's all going to hell with your liberal agenda!