I am suffering from severe Sarah Palin fatigue. Hopefully that soon pass, because, you know, she’s good for traffic and stuff. Anyway, for those of you who cannot get enough of the former Alaska governor, here’s something about the release of a ton of e-mails showing that Todd Palin got all up in the state business when she was in charge. It is not particularly shocking, but there you are. And the part about how “the governor coached her staff on how to disguise the amount of electrical work needed at the mansion to hook up her new tanning bed” is at least amusing.

Things you should watch and listen to: Awl pal Ana Marie Cox live-podcasts (if that is a thing now, which I am going to say, yes, yes it is) the Carly Fiorina demon sheep ad, and Awl pal Chris Cechin hangs out with the extremely marijuana-friendly dudes behind the Frankies Spuntino/Prime Meats empire. Support your Awl pals!

“Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby has placed a unilateral hold on all of President Barack Obama’s executive branch nominees in an apparent protest over home state concerns.” For “home state concerns” read “millions of dollars in pork.”

Caesar Storlazzi has been the chief financial aid officer at Yale since 2005. Back in November, he made the decision to work with the government’s direct student lending program, in anticipation of the disembowelment of Sallie Mae and the other mega-lenders. And now, he tells the Times, he’s regretting it. “’It really felt like the administration was just shoving this down our throats,’ he said. ‘It feels a bit like a federal takeover.’ With competition among lenders, he said, ‘We get better prices and services.’” What a strange and amazing thing for a senior official at Yale to say!

For starters, maybe “we” get better prices and services. But students don’t.

Storlazzi grew up in New Haven, and attended Yale, and describes his family as working class (he has said that the cost of Yale was about equal to half his family’s income). He never left Yale, actually, having started working in the financial aid office as a work study job. Now, Storlazzi’s office-actually, the initiative of his predecessor-has been at the forefront of need-blind aid; students from families that make less than $60,000 a year pay zero dollars, and families that make more also saw payments reduced.

Even with Yale’s endowment in the toilet, with construction projects frozen, the number of doctoral students cut back, with Yale-owned New Haven commercial real estate unrentable, the financial aid office has made sure that they’ve kept student aid available.

Let’s look back to October, 2008:

As the credit market tightens, nearly 30 percent of colleges that use commercial government-backed student loans are considering switching to direct government loans in the next academic year, according to a survey of 416 financial aid administrators released Tuesday by Student Lending Analytics. An additional 6.3 percent of colleges have already switched this year, the survey found. But Yale has no immediate plans to join them, Director of Student Financial Services Caesar Storlazzi said. As it does every year, Yale is examining the possibility of offering direct loans, he said, but he does not expect the University to switch in the near future. Yale continues to use private lenders because they offer better customer service and a range of loan options, unlike the federal government, Storlazzi said.

Storlazzi has always been a cheerleader for the corporate lenders, and only long after other schools began shifting to direct government loans did Yale follow suit. That the “range of loan options” and the “better customer service” are his only two reasons-also, the exact reasons cited by lobbyists for loan companies like Sallie Mae for their existence!-is an incredibly weak argument, given the difference that these different kinds of loans make in students’ lives.

The most important thing about the already-passed House bill on loan reform is that it has the effect of keeping “interest rates low on need-based student loans.”

And here’s Gail Collins explaining the reform:

Let us stop here and recall how the current loan system works:

1) Federal government provides private banks with capital.

2) Federal government pays private banks a subsidy to lend that capital to students.

3) Federal government guarantees said loans so the banks don’t have any risk.

And now, the proposed reform:

1) The federal government makes the loans.

For a much deeper background, there is this to read. The government takeover that people are freaking out about? It’s actually calling for the end of government-backed corporate socialism.

What possibly makes people like Storlazzi, who clearly understands the urgent role of financial aid and needs-blind policies, take these lobbyist talking points and run with them? How can an expert, who clearly gets so much, totally not get how an entire swollen industry makes billions of dollars off servicing government loans, thereby taking money out of government coffers and out of student’s future earnings? Something here just doesn’t add up.

Now you know: “Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to ‘biggest dick.’” [Via]

Blogger Jim Treacher, struck down by a State Dept. Security Services-driven SUV on the mean streets of D.C., speaks! (He is about to undergo surgery and is presumably on some awesome painkillers.) Tucker Carlson will continue to bring you updates on this breaking story (until the snow becomes the news of the hour).

Alan D. Mutter thinks journalists should fight against market forces: “I readily stipulate that the traditional media businesses are hurting and that web start-ups provide a welcome outlet for latent journalistic expression. But I don’t accept the argument that journalists are powerless against the market forces arrayed against them. The way to address the supply-demand imbalance is not to submit to ever-lower prices for your work, but, rather, not to work at all. If the supply of willing hands contracts, then publishers will have to pay up to fill their pages.”

Counterpoint?

Sad news, Saints fans: Maya Angelou predicts that the Colts will win the Super Bowl 28–16. Remember how she totally called the Tyree catch two years ago? This does not bode well.

Are you opposed to the noise of strangers? Did you know there was a custom CSS page (don’t worry about what that means if you don’t know! You can still use it!) that disables most comments up in your browser? It is true-it simply strips out any part of a web page that has the name “comments.” (So, obviously, this works sometimes and not others.) But worth a try if you crave silence and the like, you heartless hater.

Pluto is turning red. Apparently the funny little 1,467-mile-wide ball of rock and ice that snobby earthlings named after a cartoon dog before stripping of official “planet” status four years ago is entering a new phase in its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. “These changes are most likely consequences of surface ice melting on the sunlit pole and then re-freezing on the other pole,” said NASA, in a statement issued by its Space Telescope Science Institute. Other astronomers, though, aren’t so sanguine. Marc Buie, of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas says, “It’s a little bit of a surprise to see these changes happening so big and so fast. This is unprecedented.” We’ll see what people say when the supposedly negligible “dwarf” starts to quiver and shake and lines itself itself up on a direct angle with New York.