Americans Back Gay Marriage:

The Washington Post reports today that the majority of Americans now accept the legalization of gay marriage. It should be noted that a growing number of young people are showing little interest in the institution of marriage overall.

NOTE: Spring arrives on Sunday, exactly one week after Friday the13th fell on a Sunday this month. Life is sure strange.

Student Debt Surpasses Nation's Credit-card Debt:

Thanks to the Bush administration, greedy college presidents and even greedier banks the nation's youth is being saddled with massive debt, and nobody is addressing the problem.

The cost of higher education has been skyrocketing well beyond inflation for sometime, as colleges and universities spend like they've found the proverbial pot of gold in order to turn their physical facilities into "club meds."

College administrators claim they have to spend whopping sums to build fancy pleasure palaces to attract continuing growth. The real truth is that an administrator's power is directly related to the size of his budget, just as it is for any bureaucrat.

Of course, they'll tell you the cost is growing because health costs for faculty is driving the budget up, and to some extent, that's true. But it's no truer for colleges than it is for any other business.

And then there's the tie between the Bush administration and the banks. You'll recall that the Bush administration dramatically reduced government assistance for students, forcing the latter to rely on high interest school loans from banks, backed by government guarantees. It was a win/win situation for the banks.

(See the story in yesterday's New York Times.)

He Ain't There, so Why Are We?

Today's Washington Post reports that two-thirds of Americans no longer support the Aghanistan war. We've been searching for Osama in that country for nearly ten years now, and for almost as many, we've known that he scampered out of the country and into Pakistan where our troupes can't follow.

Now, no matter how many of their own women Afghanis may mutilate, we don't want to go on spending our money and soldiers' lives on a war that seems futile at best. If the country is capable of doing something more productive than soliciting bribes and heron, we haven't figured out what that is, and the people, at least in significant numbers, seem unwilling or incapable of finding out what that might be. Besides, they don't have any oil to pay for the war. Wait, that was Iraq! Wonder when that's going to start paying off?