Kind of feel sorry for this guy, who seems nice and energetic and whatever, and is good at math, but still: the president of the Detroit school board may be functionally illiterate. No, really: it took him 10+ years to get his college degree because he kept failing an English proficiency exam, the requirement for which he eventually got dropped, like last year. He had a .98 GPA in high school. He loves typing e-mails, though! Mass e-mails, to colleagues: “If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.” Eh, still better than the average Politico commenter. [Detroit News via Byron Crawford]

OBAMA ANNOUNCES EDUCATION FOR AMERICANS! Barry’s on the teevee, live, talking about schools or whatever. Tune in, if you’re naive enough to think the United States will ever again have a “highly educated work force.” We’ll be lucky if we ever get back to having a work force at all. [White House]

Uh oh, our beloved friend Chuck Grassley snuck into the Twitter machine again, and would you look at this! And don’t give us that “Oh you can only use 140 characters on dumb fucking Twitter” rigmarole. The man simply does not know how to spell “school” and simply does not care for the learning of said spelling. [Chuck Grassley's Twitter via operative "Tim H."]

Fine then: What is your name? Do you know what your name is? CAN YOU ANSWER THIS QUESTION? [Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs]

For this post we shall refer to that old axiom by the famous scholar, Jesus X. Christ: Before the socialist speech there came the socialist discussion, during which socialism was Made. This was the case today, when Barack Obama held a secret session with the children of Wakeview High School in Arlington, Virginia, to talk about how dumb they all are, before addressing the nation on the same topic. It was there that he gave the students the most important career advice available in this day and age: don’t write racist shit or whatever on your Facebook page. MORE »

Here is insane Florida death-monster Jim Greer, the famous state Republican party chair who last week shouted these important words, at America: “The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.” But then he read the speech and… and… and it was okay BUT NOT WHAT OBAMA ORIGINALLY WANTED TO TELL THE YOUNGS, which was probably “Free cocksucking for all.” MORE »

• IMPORTANT DECISIONS: Your editors will NOT be liveblogging this education speech at noon, because it will simply be the president telling kids that education is important, and while that is wrong, there is no sort of controversy or news or anything of any interest to be found here. We would rather liveblog the cloud formations changing. The wingnuts have a problem with THAT, too. [White House]

In the early 1800s, a nice nerdy Democrat gal named Laura “Matt” Welch was attending a “common backyard barbecue” in Texas when this drunk slob, George W. Bush, started grabbing her boobs and vomiting all over her. Bush made Ms. Welch become a Republican, if she wanted in on the family money, and this arrangement worked out alright until just now, when Laura Bush said a nice thing or two about Barack Obama and his commie speech to the schoolchildren. MORE »

Do you know where your child is? No, not right now. No don’t worry, you don’t have to know that. But know this: On September 8th, President Barack Obama will be INDOCTRINATING your children with well wishes and vague pleasantries about doing their best and working hard. He will speak to them, via video, which our nation’s teachers will turn on after an estimated three to five minutes fiddling with the TV. But America’s school children want—nay, need—to know just this one thing: Will this be the sort of activity that cuts into their class time, or do they just have to make it up at the end of the day? The support of an entire generation depends on this crucial question. MORE »

Hey did you know that if you are a failure at third grade, the government just assumes that you’ll be a criminal forever? No? Well good, because that isn’t true anyhow. For many moons, Democratic candidates have repeated this old saw about states using third-grade reading scores as a predictor for how many prison beds they’ll need in 15 years. This sounds like exactly the sort of sad, spooky metric that governments would use to determine how doomed its citizens are, but apparently nobody actually uses it. MORE »

Steve Schmidt and David Plouffe are both shiftless, do-nothing losers who will never make a dime because they did not spend the requisite four-plus years drinking cheap beers and having awkward sex with people they did not particularly like at “college.” Both of them in fact dropped out of the University of Delaware, in the process sealing their fate as unemployable hobos. And this is why you must stay in school, children! Because otherwise you might end up pursuing a tawdry life in “politics,” which is basically just “prostitution for ugly people.” MORE »

Eliot Spitzer has a great idea for making college more affordable! Ha, not really. But he has an idea about how we can make it possible for people to pay back their $160,000 loans from undergrad without ending up in debtor’s prison. MORE »

The best part of this speech (parts one, two, and three) was definitely when Obama started making jokes about Joe Biden, which is how he “deals” with Joe Biden. (”I have no idea who this insane Delaware hustler is, always following me around, ha ha!” etc.) Otherwise we’ve heard a lot about working on green technology, health care, and education, but very little about new Weaponry. How are we to go about the business of Warring? MORE ERIC CANTOR. MORE »