Our guest columnist is Roscoe Bartlett, Republican Congresscritter from Maryland.

Not that it’s not a good idea to give students loans, it certainly is a good idea to give them loans. But if you can ignore the Constitution to do something good today, tomorrow you will be ignoring the Constitution to do something bad. You could. There are more people in our, in America today of German ancestry than any other [inaudible]. The Holocaust that occurred in Germany — how in the heck could that happen? And when you start down the wrong road, it can be a very slippery slope.

Bartlett suggests federal student loans are unconstitutional, invokes Holocaust [WaPo, via Political Wire]

“The First Lady’s speech Tuesday was written at a 12th grade level — the highest in history among the wives of presidential nominees and far above Ann Romney’s lowest mark of a 5th grade level.” [Smart Politics, via Political Wire]

Our guest columnist is an Oxy-Addled Fat Fuck.

So we got a hurricane coming. The National Hurricane Center, which is a government agency, is very hopeful that the hurricane gets near Tampa. The National Hurricane Center is Obama. It’s the National Weather Service, part of the commerce department. It’s Obama.

The media, it’s all about the hurricane hitting next week, and they’re not talking about Biden, they’re talking about this Hurricane Isaac thing.

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“Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay rights organization, posted an alert on its blog Tuesday: ‘Paul Ryan Speaking at Hate Group’s Annual Conference.’ The ‘hate group’ that the Republicans’ vice presidential candidate would be addressing? The Family Research Council, a mainstream conservative think tank…” [WaPo]

If you’re not watching it, you should be. If you don’t have HBO,  you can get the pilot here, and you can find episode 2 and episode 3 in chunks on youtube.com.

This series calls out the Tea Party. This series names the Kochs, and accuses them of shitting on our country. It features Jane Fonda playing a network executive who caves in to corporate pressure. It’s well written, and it’s pitch perfect. If only it were on CBS.

When you boil it down, we remember Ray Bradbury for one moment, and it’s not from Fahrenheit 451. In The Martian Chronicles — a collection of stories around a common theme — two travelers, a human and a Martian, meet one night on a mountain pass. As they look to the valley below, they see a vast Martian city.

Only they see it differently. The Martian sees a thriving metropolis, full of lights and noise and life. The human sees ancient ruins.

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[Daily Beast, via Sully]