Mitt Romney showed his hair briefly at a West Philadelphia charter school this morning to tout his plan for education, which he calls "the civil rights issue of our time." You could make that argument, but Romney has a bizarre way of addressing that. Like, do you remember that time when Martin Luther King marched on Washington so that bankers could get a bigger cut of fair housing programs for America's poor? Me, neither.

Even by the ultra-cynical standards of the Romney campaign so far, the presumptious nominee's education plan is pure snake oil, his latest "Romney Hood" scam that takes even more from the poor and the middle class and gives to his rich NASCAR-team-owning friends:

Of course, tuition increases and growing debt are a phenomenon several decades in the making. And Romney’s plan would make the problem decidedly worse in two important ways, giving federal money away to Wall Street banks and predatory for-profit colleges, two industries to which Romney has extensive ties.

How? The most egregious case is Romney saying he'll undo "Obama's nationalization" of student loans. That might sound nice on the Rush Limbaugh show but all Romney really wants to do is take money that's now going -- thanks to the Obama initiative -- to needy students as Pell Grants and hand that money back to private bankers. The public benefit? There is none.

The other plan would reverse what little progress has been made in regulating the scammiest of the for-profit colleges -- the ones that use boiler-room tactics to woo students, loads them up with loans that they can't repay and send them into the world ill-prepared for getting a job. The tepid, watered-down rules put in place by the Obama adminsitration offer a small measure of protection to students and to you, the taxpayer. But Mitt Romney doesn't really want to protect either your children or you, the taxpayer, who foots the bill for student-loan defaults. He wants to protect his rich friends who own for-profit universities.

I happen to think that almost everything in Romney's education plan is wrong-headed but at least some aspects -- like the role of charter schools -- are worthy of a vigorous public debate in the fall. But Romney's proposals on student loans and for-profit colleges are not. They are brazen daylight robberies of the ever-shrinking middle class.

Actually, I wasn't referring to baseball, but to this:

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.”

Of couirse, the idea is totally unconstitutional and what not, but some days it's nice to dream.

By the way, I think the legislation does ban Mr. Met, since he's anonymous.

UPDATE: Days in.

Michael Days, the popular editor who ran the Daily News from 2005 until early last year, is back at the helm.

Daily News staffers burst into spontaneous applause when publisher Bob Hall announced that Days -- who in the interim had been managing editor of the Inquirer -- would be returning to the tabloid. Days assured the newsroom that his goal was the re-energize the spunky urban paper that has won three Pulitizer Prizes, including one for investigative reporting when Days ran the paper in 2010.

Everything old is new again at the Daily News and Inquirer Building on North Broad Street. In a matter of a few short weeks, the new local owners of Philadelphia's newspapers have brought back former Inquirer editor Bill Marimow, restored former publisher Bob Hall, and even returned columnists like Harry Gross of the Daily News and Clark DeLeon of the Inquirer before today's announcement about the return of Days.

EARLIER: The Larry Platt era at the Daily News is over just over 16 months after it started.

The editor who redubbed Philadelphia's tabloid as "The People's Paper" and urged a new brand of sharp and sometimes opinionated journalism told staffers this afternoon in an email that he's stepping down, in part to finish work on a book about ageless pitching wonder Jamie Moyer. He says he'll also continue to write a column -- not for the Daily News or Sports Week but for the Inquirer.

The headline of this blog post is a fond tribute to one of Platt's all-time favorite front-page headlines, as noted in his going-away email, which is reprinted below:

I let Bob Hall know this week that I wouldn't be renewing my contract as editor of the Daily News. As you know, I have what has evolved into a big book due in a few months that I'm woefully behind on and I desperately need to focus on that. We started talking about other ways that I can remain part of the PMN family, and Bill Marimow graciously offered to have me pen a regular column in the Inquirer going forward.

As some of you know, I never looked at this gig as a long-term play for me. I have long loved the Daily News, and I was jazzed by the challenge of being a change-agent, of remaking the publication that I grew up poring over. And, boy, did we embark on some change: a redesign, a new focus for both news and features, an entirely new product, SportsWeek, a new content management system. It often feels like the last year and a half has been nothing but change, some of them wrenching.

Even with all that upheaval, you guys produced the sort of journalism that any editor would brag about. From Ackerman and Masch to the elected DROP whores, we held the powerful accountable in a way only the Daily News can. We challenged the tired tenets of he said/she said reporting by telling stories with more of a point of a view than ever before. We introduced a host of new voices to our readers, including Charles Barkley, Marc Lamont Hill, Jason Wilson and Big Rube. From "WTF?" and "Worst. Weekend. Ever" to “We Are Nitt-Wits” and “Sucking On The Public Tweet”, we set the agenda for how Philly would talk about what it talks about. And we created SportsWeek, which, in three market research surveys, has tallied the highest reader satisfaction results of any publication I've ever been associated with. You've produced this groundbreaking weekly product with virtually no additional resources and without complaint, which speaks volumes about your collective character.

We have had some good, if mixed, results. Newsstand circulation of the Daily News dropped in the fourth quarter last year, but our overall print readership is at its highest in four years. Factor in our disproportionate performance on philly.com, where DN stories generate some 45% of the traffic despite our comparative dearth of resources, and the conclusion for those of us on the creative side is inescapable: that the Daily News isn’t just an increasingly popular voice among readers, it’s also a necessary one — for this city and for this company.

There's a lot of angst about the future here, but take some comfort in the fact that storytelling is as old as our history, and it's not going away. Right now, readers and users are sorting out how they're going to access those stories. Your job is to embrace that change, not fear it. Instead of being "platform-agnostic" we should become "platform-specific" -- tailoring our voice and subject matter to the particular ways our readers opt to engage us. The key is that they stay engaged, and a feisty city tabloid does that by being provocative while remaining fair, and sensationalistic while remaining journalistically responsible. That’s not always an easy balancing act, but one I know you guys can pull off.

On a final note, I've never worked with a better group of people. In true Philly fashion, this staff know how to take a punch (and, when warranted, throw a few) and keep on going. The way you all have weathered our various storms has been inspirational.

So my last day will be Friday, June 8. Bob Hall will come down to the newsroom at 4:30 pm today to talk about the next steps for this place.

Keep up the good work.

Best,
LP

I think I've mentioned this before, but watching Fox News a lot actually makes you dumber. Now, researchers have confirmed it:

The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly -- a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly; viewers of Sunday morning talk shows fare similarly well. And people watching only The Daily Show with Jon Stewart could answer about 1.42 questions correctly.

This study comes out of New Jersey, so it must be true. And you know, it would be funny if ill-informed news consumers had no impact on the broader American society. But unfortunately they have a huge impact. The most egregious example -- in something I've mentioned many times here on Attytood because I think it's both so outrageous and so important -- is when Fox News viewers were more likely to falsely believe that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had something to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11, thus fueling popular support for a lie-based and immoral invasion. And of course Fox News' repeated lies about climate changes could have severe consequences for your children or grandchildren.

Indeed, you could make the case that Fox News and its dunderheaded, sensational brand of conservatism is destroying the Republican Party. How so? Check out the official party platform of the Iowa Republican Party, ripped from the headlines of Fox News (with an assist from talk radio). In addition to a detour into tin-foil-hat birtherism about President Obama, it calls for this:

We support the elimination of the departments of Agriculture, Education, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Energy, Interior, Labor, and Commerce as well as TSA, FDA, ATF, EPA, National Endowment for the Arts, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac.

The platform also calls for a federal investigation of ACORN -- which has ceased to exist since 2010 but continues to be a major American problem in the world of Fox News. This bizarre document is an inevitable consequence of what happens when the political conversation is hijacked by an organization whose top priority is higher ratings.

And so now viewers of a certain late-night comedian are better informed than Fox News watchers. Unfortunately, that's no joke.

Interesting take on the neverending Bainapalooza:

On the other hand, I don’t think Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO [leveraged buy-out] business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits.

The ironic twist is who said this: Ronald Reagan's budget director.

Is this what they mean by "Do A.C."? Also, has anyone ever read a provocative newspaper headline or article and said, "Start up my subscription!!!"? That's not totally a rhetorical question, although I think I know the answer.

"The amount of money the president gets from Wall Street is just huge, and disturbingly so He'll give a speech in Washington and attack greed, then he'll ride Air Force One up to New York to raise $5 million from bankers."

Answer -- and possibly some interesting and related news -- to come later tonight.

UPDATE: Wow, no one got this -- it's Democratic presidential hopeful John Wolfe, who's racking up 33 percent of the overall vote tonight in the Arkansas primary and obviously doing better than that in some rural counties. Unlike the inmate who nearly beat Obama in West Virginia, this interview with Wolfe by Slate's Dave Weigel shows a candidate with smart liberal views on Wall Street and expanding health coverage -- a candidate "from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." If I lived in Arkansas, I probably would have voted for him. But then I would live in Arkansas.

The New York Times lifted up a large rock over Pennsylvania this morning, and the slime they found underneath was remarkable even by the low muck standards of the Keystone State. Under the headline "Public Money Finds Backdoor to Private Schools," a remarkable expose by reporter Stephanie Saul (whom I worked with at Newsday many years ago) reveals a tangled web involving the Corbett administration, fracking money, and the ongoing crusade to favor private schools at the expense of public education.

The focus of the article is private-school scholarship programs now operated in Pennsylvania and seven other states (around these parts it is better known by the bureaucratically benign name of EITC, for Educational Imporvement Tax Credit, launched here in 2001). Instead of the government providing direct help for parents to send kids to private or religious schools through vouchers, EITC provides tax credits to private donors for scholarship money that does essentially the same thing.

The Times article quotes experts calling this "a shell game" and it's not hard to understand why: The tax credits that finance the scholarships mean there's less revenue coming into to Pennsylvania's coffers -- at a time when the Corbett administration has been slashing spending for public schools.

But it gets better. Frankly, this looks like the Iran-Contra of the Corbett administration -- one unifying theory that ties together our governor's ridiculously close ties to the fracking industry with his jihad against public schools while benefiting people with close ties to his administration.

The Times article chronicles how Pennsylvania's EITC has evolved into a web that brings together companies seeking to curry favor in Harrisburg with lawmakers eager to woo voters by helping steer where this scholarship money actually goes. In the middle are lobbyists posing as philanthropists.

As the article notes:

Some of the programs have also become enmeshed in politics, including in Pennsylvania, where more than 200 organizations distribute more than $40 million a year donated by corporations. Two of the state’s largest scholarship organizations are controlled by lobbyists, and they frequently ask lawmakers to help decide which schools get the money, according to interviews. The arrangement provides a potential opportunity for corporate donors seeking to influence legislators and also gives the lobbying firms access to both lawmakers and potential new clients.

Check out the curious case of Bridge Educational Foundation

When the gas drilling company XTO Energy made generous donations for private school scholarships in Pennsylvania, the corporate largess was hailed in ceremonies across the state. As the cameras flashed at one event in Punxsutawney, Sam Smith, the speaker of the Pennsylvania House and a local native, stood with an oversize cardboard check for area private schools.

The media events began in 2010 and have generated a burst of good will for XTO at a time when the controversy over the hydraulic fracturing drilling method has been growing in Pennsylvania. One state official remarked that the company, which donated $650,000 over the past three years, had gone “above and beyond” its duty. In reality, as much as 90 percent of XTO’s donation was underwritten by taxpayers.

Also in attendance in Punxsutawney was Peter Gleason, chairman of the Bridge Educational Foundation, the middleman organization that arranged XTO’s donations. Mr. Gleason congratulated the voters of Punxsutawney for having the wisdom to send Mr. Smith to Harrisburg. In addition to serving as chairman of Bridge, Mr. Gleason is a lobbyist in Harrisburg. Two other lobbyists, who have represented XTO, serve on Bridge’s advisory board, as does the chief of staff to Mr. Smith. XTO was acquired in 2010 by Exxon Mobil.

Gleason, who represents several large natural-gas drilling companies in Pennsylvania including the largest, Chesapeake Energy, was a member of Corbett's transition team. The current executive director of the Bridge Educational Foundation is also the wife of Corbett's 2010 campaign manager, Brian Nutt. Its board of directorsis a mish-mosh of current and former lobbyists as well as the chief of staff to House Speaker Smith, Philadelphia Democratic state Rep. Bill Keller and union leader John Dougherty. The Times article also notes the travails of 2005 Bridge founder and lobbyist John O'Connell, who just the following year was convicted on embezzlement charges.

Is this a great state, or what?

And the Exxon-Mobil subsidiary XTO, according to Brodge's website, isn't the only firm ties to the Marcellus Shale industry -- which has been aided in ways large and small by the Corbett administration -- that is now supporting the Bridge scholarship fund. So is Williams Transco, which is seeking to build pipelines to transport natural gas across the state. And one assumes that the Times' findings about Pennsylvania (the long article also describes potential abuses in other states) are the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Of course, this comes right when the Republican "shock doctrine" of destroying public education in Pennsylvania, and especially here in Philadelphia, is detonating. Corbett's heartless budgeting combined with Philly's massively self-inflicted wounds of fiscal mismanagement and the end-of-the-empire decadent reign of Arlene Ackerman has led to a plan that -- with no public input -- would all but end public schooling here as we've known it. And the no-really-we're-not-political Catholic Church was seeking to pile on with its "Voucher Sunday" the other day.

And so instead of working together to re-build the system that created the American middle class of the booming 20th Century, and gave a fair shot to every kid, Pennsylvania's pols have developed a Ponzi scheme to tap into the wealth they create with their short-sighted policies and steer those dollars to favored schools and favored kids. In a warped way, you have to admire the ingenuity of their scam.

Just imagine if Pennsylvania's leaders ever used their brainpower for good.

This picture is definitely worth 1,000 words.