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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.

File this in your notebook under "in case you didn't believe prejudice and bigotry lives on" here in the United States. I won't even try to summarize this. I'll just give it to you straight:

Kymberly Wimberly, 18, got only a single B in her 4 years at McGehee Secondary School, and loaded up on Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She had the highest G.P.A. and says the school's refusal to let her be sole valedictorian was part of a pattern of discrimination against black students.

Wimberly says that despite earning the highest G.P.A. of the Class of 2011, and being informed of it by a school counselor, "school administrators and personnel treated two other white students as heir[s] apparent to the valedictorian and salutatorian spots."

Wimberly's mother is the school's "certified media specialist." She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard "in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly's status as valedictorian might cause a 'big mess.'"

McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the "big mess" comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her "that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian," although the white student had a lower G.P.A.

I guess the school authorities found it uppity that someone who had the highest GPA in the school would actually expect to have the valedictorian honor bestowed on her.

I think I'll set a Google Alert for this one...and hope for an appropriately punitive outcome.

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(h/t CSPANjunkie)

It's hitting the fan in California as students protest the grotesque 32% hikes in their college tuition.

Angry students at the Davis, California, branch of the University of California refused to vacate the school's administration building Thursday evening in a show of defiance and protest over a 32-percent undergraduate tuition hike instituted by the California Board of Regents earlier in the day.

About 50 students remained in the building, which was supposed to close by 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET), UC Davis spokeswoman Claudia Morain told CNN. At one point, as many as 150 students were at the building protesting the tuition increase, she said. She said she hopes campus police can resolve the issue without the need to make arrests.

CNN affiliate KCRA captured footage of students outside the building shouting, "Who's university? Our university!"

Nearly 400 miles south and hours earlier, hundreds of students marched and chanted against the increase while outside the UCLA building in Los Angeles where regents met to vote on the hike.

Protesting students and others say the increased tuition will hurt working and middle-class students who benefit from state-funded education. But officials argue that a fee increase and deep cuts in school spending are necessary because of a persistent budget crisis that has forced reductions across California's state government.

California is in bad shape and it's only to get worse.

Hullabloo:

And there's no end in sight:

In what's become a depressingly familiar story over the last 2 years, California faces another big budget deficit:

Less than four months after California leaders stitched together a patchwork budget, a projected deficit of nearly $21 billion already looms, according to a report to be released Wednesday by the state's chief budget analyst.

The new figure -- the nonpartisan analyst's first projection for the coming budget year -- threatens to send Sacramento back into budgetary gridlock and force more across-the-board cuts in state programs.

As the article points out, the deficit for 2009-10 (current fiscal year) is $6.3 billion, and the projected deficit for 2010-11 is $14.4 billion. Arnold is already talking about closing it with cuts...

Congressional Democrats decided they didn't have the months it would take to renegotiate the aid formulas, which resulted in some real disparities between districts:

RANDOLPH, Utah — Dale Lamborn, the superintendent of a somewhat threadbare rural school district, feels the pain of Utah’s economic crisis every day as he tinkers with his shrinking budget, struggling to avoid laying off teachers or cutting classes like welding or calculus.

Just across the border in Wyoming, a state awash in oil and gas money, James Bailey runs a wealthier district. It has a new elementary school and gives every child an Apple laptop.

But under the Obama administration’s education stimulus package, Mr. Lamborn, who needs every penny he can get, will receive hundreds of dollars less per student than will Dr. Bailey, who says he does not need the extra money.

“For us, this is just a windfall,” Dr. Bailey said.

In pouring rivers of cash into states and school districts, Washington is using a tangle of well-worn federal formulas, some of which benefit states that spend more per pupil, while others help states with large concentrations of poor students or simply channel money based on population. Combined, the formulas seem to take little account of who needs the money most.

As a result, some districts that are well off will find themselves swimming in cash, while some that are struggling may get too little to avoid cutbacks.

Schoolhouse Rock defines a generation: this morning my third grade son had a school program, during which the students recited the Preamble to the US Constitution. Practically the entire audience of forty-something suburban parents suppressed both giggles and the urge to sing the version above, some more successfully than others.

Open thread below...

The Left Coaster: The Bush administration's systematic destruction of the US military continues.

Consortiumblog: VA debated PR plan on Vets' suicides

Orcinus: Issues about the FLDS we're not discussing

Just because BUSHCO strips financial aid from college students with drug convictions, doesn't mean those same students are unfit to die in Iraq.

collateral news: A look at the origin of the modern state secrets priviliege, its illegitimate uses, and the threat it poses to an open society

Welshman: A disenchanted ex-Conservapedian speaks

From a "Blogs and Politics" political survey by graduate students at Stony Brook (NY) University.

Open Thread below...

It's hard to play the taken out of context card when the words come from your own website.

"There is not a better Congressman in Washington than Chris Shays," said Ford, to a crowd of about 600 Fairfield University students and community members.

That's truly pathetic.

Chris Shays is my friend, and I was proud to serve with him in Congress. It's unfortunate he's not a Democrat...My comments were clearly taken out of context.

A couple of days ago, I linked to this Burnt Orange post about the Prairie View A&M students walking 7 miles from campus to the one voting location alloted for their district. Well, we now have video of the march:

and this update:

The day closed yesterday with:

Rep: 82 voters
Dem: 472 voters

In a county that votes for Republicans in large numbers, this number is HUGE!!!!

Also, I can report that in Austin County, the race was almost equal yesterday. That is HUGE information because Republicans normally out vote Democrats (at least in primaries) at the rate of 10-to-1.

More pictures available here

Burnt Orange Report:

Early voting starts today in Texas. In Waller County, a primarily rural county about 60 miles outside Houston, the county made the decision to offer only one early voting location: at the County Courthouse in Hempstead, TX, the county seat.

Prairie View A&M students organized to protest the decision, because they felt it hindered their ability to vote. For background, Prairie View A&M is one of Texas' historically Black universities. It has a very different demographic feel than the rest of the county. There has been a long history of dispute over what the students feel is disenfranchisement. There was a lot of outrage in 2006, when students felt they were unfairly denied the right to vote when their registrations somehow did not get processed.

According to an article in today's Houston Chronicle:

Waller County has faced numerous lawsuits involving voting rights in the past 30 years and remains under investigation by the Texas Attorney General's Office based on complaints by local black leaders. Those allegations, concerning the November 2006 general election, related to voting machine failures, inadequate staffing and long delays for voting results.

The article adds,

"I was angry after registering to vote in the 2006 election only to be turned away at the voting booth," said sophomore Dee Dee Williams.

So what are the students doing?

1000 students, along with an additional 1000 friends and supporters, are this morning walking the 7.3 miles between Prairie View and Hempstead in order to vote today. According to the piece I saw on the news (there's no video up, so I can't link to it), the students plan to all vote today. There are only 2 machines available at the courthouse for early voting, so they hope to tie them up all day and into the night.

I love stories like this. In the face of an obvious ploy to suppress the vote, these young people stood up for their rights and showed that they will not be cowed. Republicans should be worried, because this is a committed electorate.