We spent some quality time last night debating with ourself the best way to frame an Important Discussion about student rights in cyberspace, using three recent examples:

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Breaking news from Wingnuttia:

I arrived in Washington DC today to cover CPAC and since I was in town, and since CPAC doesn’t really get rolling until tomorrow, I tagged along with some Scott Hennen Show listeners on an extensive tour of the White House as part of the Common Sense Travel Club. One of the stops on the tour (which was wonderful by the way) was the White House library.

Now, according out the person who guided our tour, the library is stock with books picked out by the First Lady, Michelle Obama. Being a bit of a bibliophile, I started to peruse some of the books on the shelves… and lookie, lookie what I found

Well, let’s lookie-lookie:

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News is breaking too fast for us to summarize, so we’ll encourage crowdsourcing in the comments.

Latest updates: Plane crashes into building in Austin, Texas [CNN]

Official: Plane crash into office building ‘a criminal act’ [Austin American-Statesman]

Internet note posted by man linked to plane crash [Austin American-Statesman]

It’s the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and we already have a winner:

“The president couldn’t find anywhere to set up a teleprompter to announce new taxes,” Rubio said of the snow accumulation.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Gosh darn, that Obama Teleprompter Meme is really funny. It’s even funnier when you make a crack about it while standing in front of teleprompters.

Rubio makes fun of Obama teleprompter [The Hill]

Down the street from our ancestral home in Eugene, Oregon, once stood a small private institution devoted to the education of what are now called “special needs” children. It was formally known as the Pearl Buck School, named in honor of the Nobel-winning author.

But to us kids, it was simply where the retards went.

We were very, very cruel about that, as only kids and Republicans can be. We didn’t have “shortbus” as shorthand in those days. If you wanted to snap at someone on the playground, you’d accuse them of going to Pearl Buck.

Language works that way. Today’s well-meaning euphemism is tomorrow’s slur. In the defining example of our era, “colored people” was proudly codified by the NAACP, devolved into a vicious taunt for decades, then re-emerged as “people of color”. Even “mental retardation” began as a polite substitute for “idiot” before we kids got hold of it, giving rise to “special needs” as a subsequent replacement.

You really can’t escape it. At best you can acknowledge it — and turn it on its head.

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Oh please oh please oh please:

“I promise you, I will stop at nothing when it comes to defending our freedom and our values,” Santorum wrote [in an email to supporters]. “That’s the real reason why — after talking it over with my wife Karen and our kids — I am considering putting my name in for the 2012 presidential race.”

As long as Spreading Santorum shows up as the first Santorum link at Google, he has our endorsement.

The Re-Emergence Of Rick Santorum — From Ex-Senator To Potential Presidential Candidate [TPM]

It has come to our attention that our thesis about the relationship of feral pigs to South Carolina douchebags was incomplete in its implication. Let’s study a fresh example and expostulate:

South Carolina will no longer recognize U.S. currency as legal tender, if State Rep. Mike Pitts has his way.

Pitts, a fourth-term Republican from Laurens, introduced legislation earlier this month that would ban what he calls “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.

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