Student loan lobbyists have been distributing a memo around Capitol Hill, with the misleading claim that if the FFEL program is eliminated in favor of direct lending, all of these jobs in the industry will be lost.

The bottom line: job losses in a tough economy are nothing to treat lightly, but the claims made by lobbyists don’t hold to close scrutiny, and the jobs impact must be weighed against the number of students currently enrolled in each state if money that could be going to schools is instead propping up a costly and unnecessary industry that is surviving only because of government subsidy.

Find out more about the Students, Not Banks campaign and sign the petition.

Sallie Mae gets cheap money to make guaranteed student loans, and there is a buyer who will pay face value. Surprise: it’s your government. It’s up to Congress to stop this practice and quit acting like saps.

It’s pretty clear Marco Rubio is going to be the Republican candidate for US Senate in Florida. He’s crushing Charlie Crist, who was a popular Republican governor until he had the gall to support a black muslim’s generational theft the stimulus bill, which Rubio has admitted he would’ve accepted for Florida. Anyway, Byron York’s sickening beat sweetener contains this little nugget about what Rubio thinks are the “central” issues of the times.

Blanche Lincoln, directly contradicting previous statements about using reconciliation to finish off the health care bill, pronounced herself open to the process yesterday.

I saw Ken Starr, of all people, making the case on ‘Countdown’ that we want to “encourage young lawyers” to follow in the tradition of defending controversial clients like the Guantanamo detainees. Marc Thiessen, upholding his deeply-felt commitment to embarrassing himself and the Washington Post, responds that there was no such backlash among lawyers to the cruel slights visited upon John Yoo and David Addington and Jay Bybee for creating legal pretexts for torture. Well, yes: Lawyers tend to like it when their colleagues uphold the law rather than figure out how to evade it.

Today, FDL launches its Students Not Banks campaign, with a petition calling on Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and members of Congress to pass student loan reform quickly through reconciliation.

Find out more about the Students, Not Banks campaign and sign the petition.

If you add up the numbers, you get 194 confirmed yes, 191 confirmed no, with the rest in the middle. Obviously, this is fluid right now, especially in advance of actual bill language. But you can see why the leadership is still talking to Stupak. The votes are very hard to find without his bloc.

Big cities like Kabul and Herat don’t speak for the entirety of all Afghans, so focusing all of our attention on the major urban centers doesn’t do anything to extend the legitimacy and credibility of the government, much less provide security from the Taliban. Therefore we concentrate on rural areas like Marjah — but this effort still won’t matter as long as we continue using military force and prop up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Until we have a strategy that doesn’t involve violently imposing our pet gangsters’ will on the Afghan people, we’ll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.

Doesn’t he realize that Rahm needs a “win”?

Marc Theissen is outraged and it’s a day ending in “Y” — how quaint, and ‘How dare the Justice Department hire people that give a damn about the Constitution’.