The Economist has a cool graphic display of public debt. Just put your cursor on a country and you can see how much public debt the country has, the per capita debt, the % of GDP that is debt, etc. FYI, the US public debt per capita is $21,973.60. That's bad, but Canada's is $28,347.10, France's is $31,971.90 and Italy's is $41,035.80. On the other hand Zimbabwe is in some sort of parallel universe with $0 per capita debt while their debt as % of GDP is 285.1%.

The House voted to stop subsidizing bank-based student lending and shifting the money to the federal direct-loan program and grants to community colleges.

Fec provided this outtake from Rolling Stone: "The campaign to mobilize the town-hall mobs began with a script written by the right’s foremost fearmongerer, Frank Lutz…

Lutz writes: 'Takeovers are like coups – they both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom…

'It is essential that ‘deny’ and ‘denial’ enter the conservative lexicon immediately,' he writes, 'because it is at the core of what scares Americans most about a government takeover of health care.'”

Don't be distracted by the compensation kerfluffle for the bankers; the real juice is in their equity holdings which were preserved by the big bailout. h/t to Lex for the link.