Both Sean-Paul at The Agonist and the Pensacola Beach Blog write about the proposed changes to the Federal student loan program.

The current system has the program administered by private banks, but almost totally guaranteed by the Federal government. This is another example of socializing the risk and privatizing the profits. To make it worse, even with these minimal risk conditions for the banks, they aren’t loaning money, so the Federal government is having to step in to provide that.

This is wasteful. Most of the work is done by colleges and universities in their financial aid offices, so there is no value added by having banks involved in any way. If banks want to make student loans, there is nothing stopping them, but there is no need for the government to provide the money and take the risks.

The government should return to the direct loan program where the risk and profit are both assigned to the government. The banks provide nothing to the program and increase its cost.

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It is being reported that Comissioner Don Amunds resigns from Sheriff’s Office. This is known as covering your butt, because being associated with Charlie Morris’s Sheriff’s Office is not going to be a good thing for any local politician and it takes a while for the anger to die down.

It should be illegal to hold down more than one government job at a time, but that’s not how things work around here.

On the national front, Atta Turk has a picture of President Obama at the White House Easter Egg Roll wearing a plain black windbreaker and reading a book.

If it had been the Shrubbery, it would have featured the Presidential seal, his name and title [Bunny in Chief?], and probably have been festooned with red, white & blue Easter Eggs. He would have been standing behind a podium with the Presidential seal on the front.

The NWF Daily News reports: one struck by lightning, one tornado [probably came ashore on Hurlburt Field], all of the recent road repairs undone, and the rivers are raising again.

They have video of a street two blocks from where I am sitting with the water up above cars’ axles and the idiots driving through it. Even if you were in good shape when you entered, the wake from the 4WD coming the other way will probably flood you out, and the waves were obviously washing into the Gas Company office. They don’t actually show that happening, but the office is at that location and it is on a ground level slab as it was formerly a service station. [Storm drains? We don’t need no stinkin’ storm drains! You just want to raise taxes!]

For something completely different, if you can deal with video, go see these amazing birds found by Mary at Pacific Views.