Conservatives this week were quick to mock the Obama campaign's "The Life of Julia," an online slideshow highlighting how government investments in education, health care, small business and retirement security help enable the children of working families to climb the ladder of social mobility. Republican critics dismissed that common path to the middle class as the "condescension" of "cradle-to-grave, government-supported existence" supposedly championed by Democrats.

It is only fitting, then, that the Romney campaign offers its alternative vision. So here is "The Life of Mitt," a tale of a winner-take-all America in which government exists to ensure a privileged few stay that way.

Age Minus 9 Months: The son of American Motors magnate and Michigan Governor George Romney, Mitt fondly recalls being with his father for Detroit's Golden Jubilee. That celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the American automobile occurred on June 1, 1946, "fully nine months before Romney was born." Years later, Mitt would similarly "remember" seeing his dad march with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Age 8: Young Mitt Romney is living his American Dream; that is, being born to a father who achieved his own. "Only in America could a man like my dad become governor of the state in which he once sold paint from the trunk of his car." In Michigan, Mitt learned to love cars and trees which were the right height. He also begins to soak up valuable life lessons from his dad, like "Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage." As for the millions of Americans unable to pay theirs, Mitt later concluded:

"Don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."

Despite his filial devotion, Mitt forgets his father's warning that "rugged individualism" is "nothing but a political banner to cover up greed."

Age 12: After attending a public elementary school, young Mitt is sent to the prestigious Cranbrook School in elegant Bloomfield Hills. This experience leads him to declare he's just "a guy from Detroit," one who happens to support school vouchers and tax breaks for home schooling, while slashing funds for public schools.

While Mitt Romney would certainly never had to worry about "getting a pink slip," he stills gets a chuckle thinking about those who did when his father moved AMC jobs from Michigan to Wisconsin. It's no wonder he chides his former home town in 2008, declaring, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

Age 16: In 1963, Mitt confronts personal tragedy, as "dear, close family relative" Ann Keenan dies as a result of an illegal abortion. As he later explained during a 1994 Senate debate with Ted Kennedy, it was that searing experience which made him a pro-choice Mormon:

"It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that."

Age 19: In 1966, Stanford student Mitt Romney takes part in his only college protest, one in favor of the Vietnam War. But thanks to the generous 4-D exemption from military service, Mitt like many Mormon young men of his age was able to secure multiple deferments in order to perform his church mission. During that two and half year period when other American men were fighting in the rice fields of Vietnam, Romney faced hardships in the vineyards of France. These apparently included pooping in a bucket during his of roughing it in a palatial church mansion in Paris. As he revealed in a 1994 interview with the Boston Herald, Romney was not exactly racked by guilt as the war raged in Southeast Asia:

"Romney, however, acknowledged he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days, especially after he married and became a father," the newspaper wrote. "'I was not planning on signing up for the military,' he said. It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft. If drafted, I would have been happy to serve, and if I didn't get drafted I was happy to be with my wife and new child.'"

Thirteen years later, candidate Mitt Romney explained he passed on that tradition to his five boys:

"My sons are all adults and they've made decisions about their careers and they've chosen not to serve in the military and active duty and I respect their decision in that regard. One of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president."

Age 24: In 1971, Ann and Mitt Romney head to Cambridge, Massachusetts. There, Mitt starts a "terrific" four year program to get his JD and MBA at Harvard Business School, completing both degrees 37 years before accusing Barack Obama of spending too much time in the Harvard faculty lounge. Even with small children and Mitt in school, Ann avoided the "dignity of work" because "Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. The stock came from Mitt's father."

That history might explain why Romney offered this advice in March to college students struggling to pay for his education:

"If you can't afford it, scholarships are available, shop around for loans, make sure you go to a place that's reasonably priced, and if you can, think about serving the country 'cause that's a way to get all that education for free."

Pell grants, schmell grants.

In 2012, Mitt tells college students to borrow money from their parents to start a business, advice his son Tagg took to the tune of $10 million.

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This is an interesting trend, one kicked off by M.I.T. a few years back. I have to think that at some point, employers will consider these certificates in hiring, since formal education is almost out of reach for most people. (One reason why Occupy groups around the country are offering free classes.) Good for these schools for taking that leap forward!

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but will carry no credit.

But Harvard and M.I.T. are not the only elite universities planning to offer a wide array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who made headlines last fall when 160,000 students signed up for his Artificial Intelligence course, has attracted more than 200,000 students to the six courses offered at his new company, Udacity.

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In 1990, Barack Obama gave a speech at Harvard in support of the first tenured African-American Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell. Video of the speech has been available for years. But Sean Hannity, Mediaite's Frances Martel and Breitbart acolytes have decided it's time to make a new bogeyman of Professor Derrick Bell, and by extension, President Obama. The video here is the full video of his speech as recorded by a local NBC affiliate at the time.

Before Andrew Breitbart's death, he was promising earthshattering video that would destroy President Obama. This is, apparently, that video. They needed a new Jeremiah Wright and figured Bell, being dead and all, might be just the person to fill the bill.

Of course, they did not publish the video in its entirety. Buzzfeed published a 77-second excerpt Tuesday morning, which Breitbart.com claims is heavily edited. PBS notes that the editing was likely done by the station itself at the time it was aired in 1991, and Buzzfeed licensed the clip for publication, as is.

Breitbart TV, on the other hand, aired a tiny little clip shown during a lecture by Professor Charles Ogletree which purports to have Ogletree claiming they hid the clip in 2008. Except the clip was not hidden at all, as PBS explains. In fact, part of the video was used in their documentary The Choice, which has been available on the Frontline site and on YouTube since it was aired.

Breitbart's heirs can't resist characterizing a man whose entire career was devoted to fighting for equality and civil rights for black people as a "racialist" as a way of once again emphasizing Obama's "otherness" to viewers and faithful conservatives everywhere. Racialism has several definitions, but is most often associated with racist, supremacist, or separatist views.

That is not who Derrick Bell was. In essence, Derrick Bell argued that it wasn't enough to say blacks were equal, but that equality was more than saying. It was doing. Here's an excerpt from his bio on the Visionary Project:

Bell's scholarly writings have placed him in the forefront of Critical Race Theory (CRT), a new jurisprudence that explores the influences of society's racism and sexism in the law's policies and precedents. CRT is the theory that race lies at the center of American life. It challenges people to consider in all things the relationship that exists between race, the justice system, and society.

Turning to Hannity's Foxification of then-Harvard Law Review President Barack Obama's speech in defense of Professor Bell, we begin with two wet-behind-the-ears kids who clearly need to study some history and maybe the definition of humility before swaggering onto Hannity's set -- Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart.com and Joel Pollak, failed Skokie Congressional candidate and Breitbart.com Editor-in-Chief.

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News like this is what students are protesting in California. State schools are supposed to be affordable, and that's why they're demanding a dedicated millionaire's tax. Will they get it?

Going to school at Harvard University is cheaper than attending a public university in California.

According to the Bay Area News Group, a "family of four -- married parents, a high-school senior and a 14-year-old child -- making $130,000 a year," with typical financial aid, would pay around $17,000 for tuition, room and board and other expenses, if their child went to Harvard. However, if their child attended a Cal State, they would pay $24,000. Going to the University of California, Santa Cruz would cost around $33,000; at UC Berkeley would be about $19,500.

Other Ivy League schools including Yale University and Princeton University offer similar financial scenarios.

"It does sort of put you in an awkward spot," Dean Kulju, financial-aid director of the 400,000-student Cal State system, said. Cal State has doubled their tuition since 2007, the Bay Area News Group reported.California's public universities lost more than a $1 billion in support from the state in a round of 2011-12 cuts. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) announced in December, another $300 million would unexpectedly be cut from higher education because revenues were coming in below projections.

Since 2009, public universities in the state have lost $2 billion and community colleges have had $695 million cut from their budgets.

According to the Government Accountability Office, both public universities have increasingly relied on tuition for funding as states have dropped support.Over the past three years, students have been holding protests in California against tuition hikes that have been as high as 32 percent in some cases.

I've seem people complain that the typical grants used for comparison are questionable (a full ride at Harvard now runs $52,650), but here's what the Harvard Crimson reports:

Under the financial aid initiative, families that earn less than $60,000 per year pay no tuition to send students to Harvard. Students whose families earn up to $180,000 are typically asked to pay no more than 10 percent of the family’s income.

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Yesterday's media heroine has to be Patricia Murphy of Politics Daily, who yesterday on Fox managed to make Sean Hannity look like buffoon and a tool. Of course, Hannity does this to himself every day, but Murphy gave it a little extra edge.

First, she flatly knocked down Hannity's little right-wing talking point about Elena Kagan purportedly "kicked the military off campus" at Harvard (she of course did did no such thing).

But the most delicious moment was this one:

Murphy: Let's be really, really honest here. There are members of the Tea Party -- it's a tiny, tiny minority -- members of the Tea Party, and I've seen them, who compare President Obama to Hitler. I've been there and seen it, I've been on this show --

Hannity: I've not seen it.

Murphy: He's been compared to the Khmer Rouge, and to Nazism, while I've been here, this is just common cultural --

Hannity: Whom compared him to that?

Murphy: Tucker Carlson! When I was sitting right here, on this show!

Hannity: [red-faced] Did you disagree with him?

Murphy: I did disagree with him.

Of course, if you go back and look at that clip now, it's worth noting that Hannity did not.

I have a confession to make...

I am insane. I have to be. Yes, I did turn on the live stream of the Texas Board of Education curriculum standards meeting at 9AM Thursday morning and yes, I stayed with it until 6pm, live-tweeting the whole thing until I could stand it no more. Still not content with the assault on my sensibilities, I came back for more at around 8pm, until it finally adjourned at 10pm my time, 1am Texas time.

I did it for you, all for you...

Bless their hearts....

Here's my biggest takeaway, and I mean this with all sincerity and respect: These people should not be doing this. They just shouldn't be. Not because they're evil. They're not. Well, maybe some of them are just a little bit, but more fundamentally they don't have the first clue as to how absolutely screwed up these curriculum standards are getting. Forget the textbooks, no teacher -- not even one with a masters from Harvard or University of Texas or ANYWHERE -- could possibly teach what they've put together.

It's incoherent. It makes no sense. They've created something that I should be able to define without resorting to NSFW terms, especially a compound word that begins with the word "cluster" and ends with an additional four letters, but really, that's what they've made. A colossal one, even.

Some highs (or lows, or you'll wish you were high)

Don't acknowledge truth without a tinge of pettiness

While it was certainly big of them to include a standard acknowledging the 2008 election of the first black President of the United States, it was not without moments. One of the conservative members thought that would be fine as long as he was included as "Barack HUSSEIN Obama". There was a bit of a verbal tussle over this as the more reasonable members suggested that might be just a little bit petty. Ultimately, the Henry Cabot Lodge false equivalency failed, and they agreed to Barack H. Obama. Grudgingly.

What's a little eugenics between friends?

After tonight, there is an extra word nestled in the following standard:

analyze causes and effects of events and social issues such as immigration, Social Darwinism, race relations, nativism, the Red Scare, Prohibition, and the changing role of women; and...

It reads this way now:

analyze causes and effects of events and social issues such as immigration, eugenics, Social Darwinism, race relations, nativism, the Red Scare, Prohibition, and the changing role of women; and

That's right. Our kids in Texas will possibly learn about eugenics. Why do I say possibly? Because there are two ways to word a standard. One is to use the term including, which means everything may be on a standardized test and therefore must be covered. The other is to use the term "such as", which means the teacher must teach the concept but has the option to use some or all of the terms.

It sounds like a benign enough compromise until you begin to consider the insidious ways it was used to denigrate in some cases and slide references into the material in others. Like eugenics, for example. Or to downgrade the elevation of our first Hispanic Supreme Court justice, Sonia Sotomayor, to a "such as" when the original list without her was an "include". But, they did manage to remove Phyllis Schlafly from that same list, so there's that, anyway.

Speaking of Phyllis Schlafly...

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Juan Williams, filling in for Bill O'Reilly last Friday on The O'Reilly Factor, had on my friend Kyle de Beausset (who blogs as Kyledeb at Citizen Orange) to discuss Kyle's role in Harvard University's decision to rescind a speaking invitation to Minuteman leader Jim Gilchrist. As you can see, Williams was perplexed by what should be an obvious matter: While Harvard is well served by hearing all sides of a debate, it serves neither the university nor the public to legitimize the rantings of a hatemonger whose rhetoric inspires violence.

At least the Harvard Crimson got it straight:

The movement to ban Gilchrist from the conference was largely initiated by Kyle A. de Beausset ’11, who in early October began using different university mailing lists to build support for uninviting Gilchrist due to his involvement in the Minuteman Project, which organizes civilians to patrol the border for illegal immigrants and to report crossings to the Border Patrol.

“It might be an interesting intellectual exercise for Harvard students to hear extremist views,” de Beausset wrote in one of these e-mails, but he added that the “broader implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name” were more important.

“Jim Gilchrist’s willingness to spout falsehoods shows that he shouldn’t be given the legitimacy of open and free academic debate...His irresponsible rhetoric has led to violence,” de Beausset told The Crimson in an interview.

In a statement released on the conference Web site, the Undergraduate Legal Committee said that Gilchrist’s presence would detract from the conference because his attitude and views were inconsistent with the conference’s mission of promoting law and public service to foster social justice.

“Unfortunately, Mr. Gilchrist’s participation in the conference on the behalf of the Minuteman Project was not compatible with providing an environment for civil, educational, and productive discourse on immigration, and we cannot host him at this time,” it said.

What may have been the deciding factor, it turns out, may have been Jim Gilchrist's history of bad judgment catching up to him -- namely, his long association with Shawna Forde, the leader of a gang of "tacital" Minutemen who, in a failed effort to finance their activities through robbery, shot and killed a 9-year-old girl and her father late at night in their home in cold blood.

The Boston Globe explained:

Kyle de Beausset, an undergraduate student and migrant advocate, who was one of the original Harvard protesters, said yesterday that Gilchrist’s removal will allow discussions to move toward policy, rather than animosity.

“It’s a victory for people who are trying to get hate out of the immigration debate,’’ he said. “There’s a difference between having views, and hate speech.’’

Beausset said more students have been alerted to the group’s stance since the arrest in June of a woman with ties to the Minuteman Project.

Shawna Ford and two others allegedly shot and killed a father and son, and wounded the mother in a robbery that Beausset said was to “finance her nativist activism.’’

He said the episode showed the extremes to which some members of the movement will go.

“I’m concerned about the broader national implications of legitimizing these extremist views with the Harvard name,’’ he said in a letter to fellow students.

[Note: The Globe story has its facts slightly mangled; the Minuteman gang's young victim was a girl.]

Arizona Star reporter Tim Steller noted the role played by Gilchrist's ties to Forde as well.

Jim Gilchrist posted the following response:

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(audio courtesy of Media Matters)

Rush Limbaugh has never hidden his bigoted beliefs, and on Tuesday he went on a racist rant about a highly disturbing incident on a school bus where a black student attacked a white student while other children cheered on. As Ben Frumin at TPM puts it, Limbaugh acts as though this is all the fault of President Obama:

Rush Limbaugh weighed in today on this video of a 17-year-old white Illinois student beaten up by two black classmates. Shockingly, his analysis doesn't reveal an even-handed understanding of our country's complicated racial history. In fact, not only does Limbaugh imply that this high school scuffle is racially-motivated -- but that somehow, it's the fault of President Obama.

"In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, 'Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on," Limbaugh said. I wonder if Obama's going to come to come to the defense of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard." Read on...

At some point, the hatred coming from the right and their mouthpieces on the radio will hit critical mass in this country. I'm all for free speech, but entertainers like Rush and Glenn Beck are walking perilously close to "yelling fire in a movie theater."

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There's no shortage of wingnuts out there, so why would George Stephanopoulos invite on someone too crazy for even Bill O'Reilly? Only people with a Malkin brain would believe and push across the notion that Americans would rather collect three hundred dollars a week on unemployment insurance rather than get a job that supplies benefits and pays a salary.

Yea, because there are so many jobs available, people will just wait until the insurance ends and then immediately get hired. I'm sorry, where are all these jobs again? On ABC's THIS WEEK Malkin made this bogus claim. A quick Google search uncovers that when Michelle claims Larry Katz once said that the benefits could discourage people from seeking employment, Katz actually said just the opposite during our current financial mess:

Traditionally, many economists have been leery of prolonged unemployment benefits because they can reduce the incentive to seek work. But that should not be a concern now because jobs remain so scarce, said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard.

For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said. With the economy still listing, he added, a temporary extension can provide a quick fiscal stimulus. And, Dr. Katz said, when people exhaust unemployment and health insurance, many end up applying for disability benefits, which become a large, unending drain on the Treasury.

It does help to fact check what conservatives say.

Malkin: If you put enough government cheese in front of people they are just going to keep eating it and you're just kicking the can down the road and just to hammer this point about the unemployment benefits extension again it was Larry Katz, who's a chief labor economist under the Clinton labor department who came out with a study and there are a lot of these economists who say this that if you keep extending these "temporary" unemployment benefits you're just going to extend joblessness even more.

Stephanopoulos: I don't know if I follow that though

Malkin: That was a Clinton economist who said it George...

Stephanopoulos: Choosing to take the unemployment benefits when a job is available?

Malkin: Seventy nine weeks already and then they're going to extend it by another thirteen weeks and what happens is according to these economist who have seen it including this Clinton economist is that people will just delay getting a job until the three weeks before the benefits run out.

Tucker: Well, that might be true when there are jobs out there that are available, but there are very few jobs available at the moment so I don't think people are using that unemployment benefit to be lazy instead of going out and searching for jobs...

Malkin: I'm not making a moral judgment, it's an incentive problem.

Tucker: But when businesses advertise the few job openings they have, they'll advertise twenty openings, they have six thousand applicants so I don't think that's the problem...

Hunt: If Starbucks were hiring, suddenly you'll see lines around the block. Anecdotally George, I have a kid who has some friends from college and many of them don't have jobs and boy, they are looking.

Stephanopoulos: And there are other states especially that are hard hit.

I know she probably worked on her government cheese talking point for a while, but it makes no sense except if we've all turned into little mouses now. With unemployment so high, where are the jobs that people are not bothering to take that bears any of this out? There's good money to be made in wingnutland, so she can attack Americans just trying to stay afloat by receiving unemployment compensation. I never realized how wonderful not having a job is.

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Jumpin' Jehoshaphat, this man redefines the term "being confused." He just nicely obliterated the right wing's chances to smear Michelle Obama with that whole "she's proud for the first time" stupidity. Wasn't that nice of him?

The Politico: (h/t Jed Report)

So a man finally got a question into McCain and he had a very different sort of question.

The questioner noted that he had been educated at Princeton and Harvard and made more than $300,000 a year.

"How can I be proud of my country?" he asked.

Get it — he was mocking Michelle Obama and her statement earlier this year that her husband had for the first time in her life made her proud of her country.

Well, McCain either missed the joke or decided to ignore it and answer the question literally. I think it was the former because the individual asking the question had a thick accent that sounded to be either Indian or Pakistani, perhaps suggesting to McCain a recent immigrant grappling with America's image abroad.

"I'll admit to you that it's tough, it's tough in some respects," McCain said, seeming to lend credence to Michelle Obama's observation.

McCain said America needed to be "more humble, more inclusive."

He observed that one of the ways to be proud of the country was to look at our history — and the sacrifices U.S. troops have made abroad.

McCain let his questioner follow up and the individual repeated, but didn't clarify, his line.

In closing, McCain said he was proud of America in part "because of you and what you've been able to achieve and accomplish."