Lots of people were angered by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s announcement that he would use money gained from the foreclosure fraud settlement to plug his budget hole. I suspected that a lot of states with a budget gap would go this route. And that apparently includes Missouri, a state with a Democratic Governor and a Democratic Attorney General.

In the UC-Davis pepper spraying case, two unidentified police officers have been placed on administrative leave, and chancellor Linda Katehi announced some vague investigation into the incident. The President of the University of California, Mark Yudof, has now released a statement expressing shock and dismay at the events in Davis.

The balance sheet recession – collapsing wealth, underwater homes, student loans – is creating a major part of the crappy economy. Everyone’s waiting for things to get better, and by extension ensuring that nothing will. In this instance, only repairing balance sheets – such as through debt forgiveness – can get the economy on a better path. And then the kids move out of their parent’s house and housing construction starts jumping and we get some relief.

There are two programs here. The first is income-based repayment. Under current law, graduates with student loans can opt to pay 15% of their income for 25 years instead of a monthly student loan repayment based on the cost of the loan. In the reconciliation sidecar to the Affordable Care Act, actually, this was reduced to 10% of income, starting in 2014. The plan announced under executive authority moves that date up to 2012, and changes the debt forgiveness end date to 20 years from 25. This would only benefit those who graduate college between 2012 and 2014; people who have already graduated or who are in repayment won’t benefit from this change. The Administration claims that 1.6 million graduates would be eligible for the new program.

For the record, Florida State is a publicly-funded university. This isn’t the first time that the Kochs have pushed their way into academia: the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is a fully-funded Koch creation, pumping out right-wing economic memes for the masses. But at least that’s a private institution. This is a college funded by taxpayers, though critically, it’s underfunded. So when they had an opportunity to get $1.5 million, they signed away the right to vet their own instructors.

Texas, the extreme right’s political mushroom factory, is at it again. Americans had better look out, especially if they still care about knowledge, truth, curiosity, the exploration of new frontiers, the power of literature, art, and, especially, real science.

If the federal government is finally catching up to some of the ways in which the credit card companies prey on customers and muscle out competition, they’ll have to look at what the industry is doing on college campuses, which is one step ahead of them.

As you may know, FDL has launched the Students Not Banks campaign to get the student loan bill passed through reconciliation this year, enabling hundreds of thousands of students to afford college and ending the needless subsidies to the big banks for the privatization of the student loan market.

FDL campaigns get results! Already today, senior Democratic aides have proposed combining the student loan and the health care bills through reconciliation, the only way to pass SAFRA this year:

Senate Democratic leaders have decided to pair an overhaul of federal student lending with healthcare reform, according to a Democratic official familiar with negotiations.