It's funny because I've been watching Glenn Beck for more than a year now and never once has he mentioned that Soros is Jewish. Not once. Until this article I honestly had no idea what faith the man followed, nor did I care and nor did it matter.

I say let this bubble burst. I currently work for my alma mater-- an ivy league institution that has been living on public largess for as long as recorded history. Private universities don't pay real estate tax on their property, don't pay any taxes at all, as far as I know. Their tuition has more than doubled in the fifteen years since I graduated. When I found out from a current undergrad that he is now paying more than $1400 per credit hour, I almost fainted.

In addition to the tax-exempt status of these institutions, many like my own are quick to use eminent domain to snatch up still more property to expand their campuses, increase their enrollment and, thus, rake in more tuition payments. The endowments of the largest private universities run into the billions, yet they still hike tuition annually even when the economy stagnates and falters. Cripes, Harvard has a whole office and team of investment managers dedicated to investing their endowment. When the derivatives markets took a nose dive a couple years back, major universities were among the biggest losers and, in my opinion, deservedly so.

As many of the respondents have commented before me, there are scarce few degrees in the undergrad curriculum that translate into jobs that pay enough to justify the staggering loans the average middle-class family needs to take out to afford it. For parents with more than one child planning to enroll in college, this can be downright crippling. While most universities offer grants to make up the difference between the tuition cost and what a student can afford to pay, they usually do so after squeezing every last available penny from the parents and, of course, making the student take out the maximum allowable amount in loans. In my case my tuition for four years totaled more than $100K, of which loans covered about 40%, my parents covered another 20%, with the difference taken up by grants and work study employment.

A few respondents above have noted meeting undergrads without even basic critical thinking skills and I can attest to this fact. That's what happens when a school is so focused on matriculation rates and getting its graduates into good graduate schools than in training its students to think. The mean GPA at these schools is often higher than a 3.0. At my esteemed alma mater it was 3.3 or a B-plus. The effect of all this grade inflation is a devaluation of the undergraduate diploma to about the cost of the paper on which it's printed.

Guess what? I watched the full video. I know the story about how Mrs. Sherrod helped the Spooners save their farm. And I know all about the Spooner's testimonial-- they talk about it in detail in the CNN clip I provided in the link, so I don't need you explaining it all to me.

None of this changes the fact that the audience laughed out loud at her 'stick-it-to-this-superior-acting-whitey' moment. Mr. Jealous never retracted his admonition regarding the audience behavior. Nor does this change the fact that Mr. Jealous and his organization were the only ones who had the full video, yet he still decided to toss Mrs. Sherrod to the wolves based on his perception from not even watching the entire 2-minute 36-second clip that Mr. Breitbart posted.

And honestly, what does your claim to blatant racism in the '60s have to do with anything here? The event she describes happened in 1986, not 1968. You might as well have said blatant racism existed in the 1860s for all the relevance it provides.

First, Mr. Breitbart didn't remove a thing from the clip he posted. The clip came to him without the introduction to set up the time frame. Hence the error in the text intro, and thus the correction that reads: 'Correction: While Ms. Sherrod made the remarks captured in the first video featured in this post while she held a federally appointed position, the story she tells refers to actions she took before she held that federal position.' This correction has been on both the video clip intro text and the text of the original post at least since July 20-- a day after it was first posted and the first day I visited to view it.

Secondly, trying to equate taking 'a long time talking' with an attitude of implied superiority is a pretty weak argument. Some people talk more slowly. Some people talk in a roundabout way. Does that mean they think they're better than the person to whom they're speaking? This claim does nothing to prove that Mr. Spooner came to her for help from a position of anything but desperation. In the interview with Roger Spooner and his wife[ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQgJsVw-3Vo ], they only ask him about his perception of Mrs. Sherrod. Nobody ever asks him if he had any racist attitude toward Mrs. Sherrod when he first met her. Nobody ever asks him, 'So, when you first met Mrs. Sherrod, did you come to her with an air of superiority?'

Lastly, if you watch the clip, when she first explains that this white farmer needed help and was coming off all 'superior' the only thing you hear from the audience is someone saying 'that's right' when Mrs. Sherrod claims that she 'knew what he was doing.' No laughter here. The audience doesn't laugh until she says, 'what he didn't know was that while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.' Your interpretation of the clip doesn't even jibe with that of NAACP president Ben Jealous who, in his repudiation of Mrs. Sherrod, wrote: 'The reaction from many in the audience is disturbing. We will be looking into the behavior of NAACP representatives at this local event and take any appropriate action.'

From the hubby's 'white man and uncle toms' comment to their Pigford boondoggle to this, these Sherrods are just the gift that keeps on giving. Please sue Mr. Breitbart, Shirley. Please! Lord only knows what else would come out during the discovery phase of that trial but it sure will provide plenty of entertainment.

Add the name Howard Kurtz to the long list of perpetrators in this attempted smear of Andrew Breitbart. What a clown.

Matthews got it right in the first segment and even backed up his claim with the video evidence, meanwhile Howard Dean makes himself look like a complete ass by trying to argue with him. Walsh offers a qualified admission that the redemption is there, but somehow not long enough.

Matthews even gets it right in the second segment, but instead of defending AB, he leads Walsh and Vogel (some diversity of guests he chose for these segments, eh?) into claiming that AB and the Big staff were amateurish for not removing the redemptive moment. These three stooges go so far as to suggest that they maybe Breitbart and company didn't even watch the clip they posted and if they did, they didn't understand it.

For those of you who like to read, I absolutely skewered Joan Walsh in response to her Salon article about these Hardball sessions. I had to break it into two parts because Salon only allows 1000 words per comment.

part 1: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2...

part 2: http://letters.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2...

Absolutely. That these adjectives keep getting repeated over and over in just about every MSM article written about the topic is disgustingly misleading. The clip is a snippet. An excerpt. Aside from the words from her speech added over the top of the screen, nothing else was done to it.

Furthermore, this article implies that Sherrod's much-touted 'redemptive moment' was omitted on the clip Andrew posted. Just because the USDA and Obama administration didn't take the time to watch it until the end before canning her doesn't mean it wasn't there.