DON SURBER: “We have now seen the president handle 4 crises. He failed each time.”

Related item here. Don Surber and Maureen Dowd on the same page? Cats and dogs, living together!

FATHER’S DAY MARKDOWNS on video games.

PODCAST: Ed Driscoll talks to Zev Chafets about his new book, Rush Limbaugh: An Army Of One.

THE TRADITIONAL REMEDY FOR SUCH THINGS INVOLVES TAR AND FEATHERS: Michigan Considers Law to License Journalists.

A Michigan lawmaker wants to license reporters to ensure they’re credible and vet them for “good moral character.”

Senator Bruce Patterson is introducing legislation that will regulate reporters much like the state does with hairdressers, auto mechanics and plumbers. Patterson, who also practices constitutional law, says that the general public is being overwhelmed by an increasing number of media outlets–traditional, online and citizen generated–and an even greater amount misinformation.

“Legitimate media sources are critically important to our government,” he said.

He told FoxNews.com that some reporters covering state politics don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re working for publications he’s never heard of, so he wants to install a process that’ll help him and the general public figure out which reporters to trust.

How about requiring that all sitting legislators pass a test on the constitution? And maybe an IQ test, too . . . .

Okay, if you read the fine print, the bill doesn’t really do anything other than label. But it wouldn’t be irrational to fear the camel’s nose. And how do you deal with the camel’s nose? You cut it off.

NEW YORK TIMES: White House Struggles as Criticism on Leak Mounts.

MICHAEL BARONE: Oil spill tars Dems’ reputation for competence. “Obama’s press conference — his first in the White House in 309 days — did not make him look any more in command of things than the photos of Bush’s flyover visit to New Orleans. The candidate who told us his electoral victory would be seen as ‘the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal’ is now the president who seems helpless to prevent the oil slick from spreading. . . . Before the oil spill, the Obama Democrats, noting their policies’ unpopularity, might have asked voters to decide on ‘competence, not ideology,’ as Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis did in 1988. Now, suddenly, that doesn’t seem like a viable theme for 2010 or 2012.”

GOOD QUESTION: “Why write something he knew wasn’t true?”

FOR MEN WHO ARE ENGAGED, the “Mangagement” ring.

STOP YER WHINING, you non-contributing zero!

HOT NEW TREND: Divorce Rings?

DID EARLY HUNTERS cause climate change? “When hunters arrived in North America and drove mammoths and other large mammals to extinction, the methane balance of the atmosphere could have changed as a result, triggering the global cool spell that followed. The large grazing animals would have produced copious amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, from their digestive systems. They vanished about 13,000 years ago.”

AT AMAZON, a big Memorial Day clothing sale.

DA TECH GUY ON GA-4: Looking for a cup of peach tea.

A HIGHER ED BUBBLE? This sounds familiar:

So in an eerie echo of the mortgage crisis, tens of thousands of people like Ms. Munna are facing a reckoning. They and their families made borrowing decisions based more on emotion than reason, much as subprime borrowers assumed the value of their houses would always go up.

Meanwhile, universities like N.Y.U. enrolled students without asking many questions about whether they could afford a $50,000 annual tuition bill. Then the colleges introduced the students to lenders who underwrote big loans without any idea of what the students might earn someday — just like the mortgage lenders who didn’t ask borrowers to verify their incomes.

Ms. Munna does not want to walk away from her loans in the same way many mortgage holders are. It would be difficult in any event because federal bankruptcy law makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loan debts. But unless she manages to improve her income quickly, she doesn’t have a lot of good options for digging out.

With only a few exceptions (like being admitted to Yale Law School or CalTech) I strongly recommend avoiding student loans. And I wonder — when you’ve got an industry whose prices have skyrocketed on a combination of consumer ignorance and cheap credit, what happens when consumers wise up, and credit gets harder to come by?

UPDATE: A reader emails:

One rather interesting thing about that article comes right at the end. The woman they profile makes $2,300/month after taxes, pays $750/m in rent and would have $700/m in loan payments if she was paying in full (which she isn’t because she’s in night school). They then claim that paying both the rent and the loans would leave her little in the way of money to live off of. By my math, she’d have $850/m to live off of, which is plenty for a single person who’s at all sane with their spending.

I suspect the real issue here is that she’s never learned how to manage money. That would explain her debt, her degree (in Religious and Women’s Studies, which is a good choice if you want to work in Fast Food) and her current situation. Note she’s blaming Citibank for giving her the money (which they shouldn’t) but she signed the papers.

Unfortunately this is far too common a story today, but the issue is as much the fault of the students and their parents as it is of the Banks and Colleges.

-Adam Maas

Who’s an adult, back in school after over a decade in the workforce and living on much less than $2,300/m USD after taxes.

The Higher Ed establishment has been selling college as a matter of emotion, self-fulfillment, and entitlement rather than economics. Nothing new about that — sports cars are sold the same way — but one doesn’t depend on the sports car to generate the income needed to pay off the sports car loan . . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Brian Abbott writes:

I really think your exceptions for when student loans are appropriate are a bit excessive. I put myself through engineering school at Virginia Tech. Between the relatively low tuition and the low cost of living there, I was only $12,000 in debt once I was done. Within 3 years of graduation, I had that all paid off.

Student loans aren’t a bad thing as long as you keep them in a reasonable range (i.e. less than the cost of a car) and you’re majoring in something that’s actually in demand and pays well (i.e., not law, education, or basically anything else that starts with “Bachelors of Arts”).

Well, maybe. But the point is that it needs to be a case where you can clearly make enough money to pay the loans off. And because student loan debt is non-bankruptable (and at lousy interest rates, these days), you need to be much more certain about your ability to pay it off than with other debt.

MORE: Reader Brock Cusick writes:

The cost of education should prepare to fall much further than housing post-crash. Prices in competitive markets fall when costs fall, and the cost of building a house hasn’t changed all that much. The same cannot be said of education.

StraighterLine – $99/mo. + $39/course for college credit.
KhanAcademy.org – Free. (I know someone getting their MBA at Columbia who does the Khan exercises rather than attend class, because they explain the subjects better).

The cost of storing and disseminating information (even educational information) has dropped to zero. The web makes it interactive. Colleges should prepare to be disintermediated just like the newspapers.

Gulp.

ANDREW ROBERTS: Nick Kristof’s Unhinged Attack on Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE MIKE STOPA compares the Deepwater Horizon oil spill with the 1979 Ixtoc 1 spill. “I cannot say with any confidence that the consequences of the current, Deepwater Horizon spill will be as slight as the fortunately slight effects of Ixtoc 1 of 1979. I present the facts just to keep my readers up to date in an issue which is of concern to many if not all of us.”

THE HILL: Gulf Coast Dem still backs oil drilling, says spill is not Katrina.

BP’S FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: “Here’s something you probably don’t know about the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the top media consultants for British Petroleum gave free rent to a politician who became White House Chief of Staff.”

STEWART BAKER: If you like the BP spill, you’ll love cyberwar.

DAVID ZARING: Would You Even Want To Be The Treasury Secretary?

PJTV: Dana Loesch: This Week In Tea. “Dana Loesch recaps the week in Tea Party headlines and speaks with KrisAnne Hall, a Florida prosecutor who was fired for speaking to a Tea Party group.”

If you like what you’re seeing, consider subscribing to PJTV. Alt-media will only work if you support it.

IN THE MAIL: From Tom Bower, Oil: Money, Politics, and Power in the 21st Century.

AN ARMY OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: If you missed it on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, the latest PJM Political is now online. “From Rush Limbaugh biographer Zef Chafets and Ricochet.com majordomo Peter Robinson, to James Lileks and the gang at PJTV’s Trifecta, this week’s edition of the VodkaPundit-hosted PJM Political is all about the new, new media.”

TRYING TO INSPIRE A Tea Party movement in Ireland.

THE MEDIA WOLF PACK holds itself at bay.