Last week, Mitt Romney blasted Barack Obama's record on education in a high-profile speech and white paper. The critique ranged from kindergarten to grad school, but let's pick out one issue that we've been following at Salon for some time. On the specific topic of for-profit schools of higher education -- notorious both for saddling students with high levels of debt and for their abysmal graduation rates -- Romney promises to repeal Obama's "ill-advised" regulations targeting the sector.

The for-profit school industry gives Mitt Romney a lot of money. One of Romney's top education advisors is William D. Hansen, who has lobbied extensively for for-profit schools. As deputy secretary of education under George W. Bush, Hansen is well known in the higher education community for issuing a directive promising that the Bush administration would relax the enforcement of rules meant to crack down on student enrollment recruiting abuses at for-profit schools.

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With our first-ever private equity honcho running for president in an era of high unemployment and slow economic growth, it was always a foregone conclusion that this year's election campaign would include an appraisal of whether Mitt Romney's version of capitalism is good for America. It's a debate the culture has been passionately engaged in at least as far back as Oliver Stone's "Wall Street," and the battle lines are well-drawn. Is Bain Capital a parasitic corporate raider or an engine for lean-and-mean capitalist renewal? You get to make the call, and then you can go vote.

Facebook's botched IPO adds a new wrinkle. In contrast to Bain-style private equity wheeling-and-dealing, the Silicon Valley venture capital model for new firm creation has always enjoyed a much more positive public relations profile. Maybe it's a West Coast vs. East Coast thing, but conjuring up the likes of Intel or Apple or Google from thin air is a lot more sexy than swooping down on a troubled firm, brutally slashing costs and stripping assets, and then reselling for a huge profit a few years down the line.

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Here's what we know: Sometime in the run-up to the IPO, Facebook realized that it needed to downgrade its revenue projections for the second quarter because of difficulties selling ads on mobile phones -- which are increasingly the access point of choice for Facebook browsing. This news was buried deep in an SEC regulatory filing, but it also may have been communicated directly to Facebook's underwriters who, in turn, may have told their big clients -- the institutional investors who usually make out like bandits on IPO day by buying stock at the offering price and then selling on the pop. The big investors accordingly decided that the price was a little too high and dumped their stock as quickly as they could. Thus: no pop. The closing price was essentially the same as the opening price, and that wasn't supposed to happen.

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The most recent evidence that the current incarnation of the Republican Party just can't handle the truth arrived this month when House Republicans voted to get rid of the American Community Survey. The ACS is an annual information-gathering effort that's part of the U.S. Census. Every year, a randomized sample of 3 million Americans is surveyed for data on "demographic, housing, social and economic characteristics." In one form or another, the U.S. government has been carrying out similar surveys since 1850 -- the current version is the fourth major iteration.

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If you're impatient, you can skip ahead to the last, chilling line: "The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections." And from there, you can make your own decision about whom to vote for this November, based on the direction that the Supreme Court is currently headed.

But a full reading of Toobin's article is essential for understanding the larger context. The fight over whether and how to limit corporate spending on elections in the United States goes back more than a century. The battle lines are well-drawn, the sides well-established: "progressives (or liberals) vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans, regulators vs. libertarians." The libertarian/Republican/moneyed interest side is currently in ascendence, but this is a long, long struggle, and the pendulum must one day swing back.

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As a consolation prize for getting clobbered by Jerry Brown in the gubernatorial election, Whitman landed a plum job of her own -- CEO of Hewlett-Packard, a company that, like California, has been going through some tough times. But this week Whitman made clear that as a business leader, her approach to job creation doesn't quite mesh with her political promises. Multiple media outlets are reporting that HP is planning to cut its workforce by around 30,000 jobs -- a number that accounts for 7-8 percent of HP's total workforce.

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"If you have already got 96 percent of what you want," Ferguson told Salon, "why not take the remaining 4? That's where the culture of American finance is right now, and I think it's really dangerous for the country."

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A few highlights:

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In the best of times, small business owners complain about taxes and regulations, and that is starting to happen again.

As we scour the economic landscape for any data point, no matter how tiny, that will help us glean some sense of what the future holds, the fact that business owners might be seeing an uptick in consumer demand could be significant. This is especially true after the disappointing April jobs numbers released 10 days ago provoked a new round of mild panic about U.S. economic prospects.

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If you're looking for the most easy-to-understand breakdown of how JPMorgan managed to lose $2 billion, read Marketplace reporter Heidi Moore's fabulous explainer. Readers who fancy themselves financially sophisticated can ponder DealBreaker's Matt Levine's analysis. If all you want is a guide to the critics "flaying" Dimon's hide, check out the New York Times' DealBook.

But for our purposes right now, all you need to concern yourselves with is Dimon's monumentally disingenuous self-castigation. Because Dimon is not stupid. Under his tenure, JPMorgan has been the best-run of the big banks. So Dimon's self-criticism gets it all backward. The fact that JPMorgan was so very stupid is so very scary because we can rest assured that just about everybody else is doing things even more idiotic.

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The officials may have been indulging in some good old-fashioned political grandstanding, hoping to whip up support for a November vote on a tax hike endorsed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But in a state where tuition fees have already doubled in just five years, another 6 percent hike is hardly unthinkable. And as a symbol of rising costs in higher education nationwide, California's example is more than apt. Since 2001, tuition fees at four-year public colleges in the United States have risen at an annual average of 5.6 percent.

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At 4:30 p.m. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon convened an impromptu conference call in which he admitted that a spectacularly bad bet by a London-based trader had resulted in at least $2 billion of trading losses over the last six weeks. And the numbers could get even worse, Dimon warned, depending on how the market behaved in upcoming days. Another $1 billion in losses could happen.

A big bet gone wrong is hardly unusual on Wall Street. It's the nature of the beast, the kind of thing one expects from over-testosteroned speculators surfing the waves of their own monster egos. It happens all the time.

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In every case but one, the senior Republicans (with the help of Democrats) proved victorious. The lone exception? An amendment proposed by Maryland's Andy Harris, cutting $542,000 in funding for a climate website at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

After all, who needs more information about the climate? It's not like there's been anything weird going on with the weather lately.

Oh wait. On the same day that the House voted to reduce funding for NOAA, the agency announced that the United States had just recorded its warmest 12-month period of temperatures since records started being kept in 1895.

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Which doesn't make me particularly special. The 1960s, as "Mad Men" takes pains to remind us with each new episode, was a decade-long wild rumpus. If you didn't seize every chance to ride piggy-back on half-menacing, half-jubilant dancing monsters you were ignoring the lesson of the age, something manifestly perceivable even to those of us who wouldn't hit puberty until the '70s. If it seems silly now that librarians used to draw diapers across the baby Max who starred in "In the Night Kitchen" -- well, we can blame some combination of Sendak and the '60s for our more refined modern sensibilities. As my mother, a neuroscientist, read "Where the Wild Things Are" to me, new synaptic connections spread like a grass fire in my brain. From Sendak to "Helter Skelter," in one easy swoop.

It was a lesson we never let go of. As Margalit Fox's superb New York Times obituary for Maurice Sendak notes, his "books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children."

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That's pretty rich, coming from the man who said in October 2010 that "the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

For the GOP, the 2012 election campaign began the day Obama defeated John McCain. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the fundamental dynamic that has destroyed the capacity of the federal government to effectively function: More so than ever before, partisan politics determines every aspect of government -- from Supreme Court decisions right on down to the interest rate on your student loan.

Let's recap: In 2007, the new Democratically-controlled Congress passed a law that, among other things, lowered the interest rate charged on federally-backed student loans -- but only temporarily. On July 1st, interest rates will jump back up, adding about $1000 in cost annually to the average student loan debt load.

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Generally speaking, we like to see evidence that the "animal spirits" of Americans are reviving. As Keynes has taught us, demand stokes the fires of a capitalist economy. In that regard, any sign that Americans are ready and willing to buy cars or plunk down their dollars for an education or pull out their credit cards is encouraging.

But only if we can actually afford it. Which brings us to a sobering quote in the middle of the Bloomberg story.

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Unfortunately, it's still a tiny number, and it is dwarfed by a much larger figure: 607,000. That's the number of public sector jobs -- federal, state and local -- that have been lost since Obama took office. It's a story that probably isn't getting told enough about the Obama administration: Big government keeps getting smaller.

But the real eye-opener comes when we compare Obama's numbers to George W. Bush's. In Bush's first term, the economy shed 913,000 private sector jobs! 913,000! The only thing that saved Bush's first term from being a complete economic disaster, in terms of employment, was robust public sector growth: The economy added 900,000 government jobs. One wonders: Without the massive growth in the public sector during Bush's first term, would he have been reelected?

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The only good news in the report: The numbers for February and March were both revised upward, from 240,000 to 259,000 in February, and from 120,000 to 154,000 in March. The economy is still growing.  Indeed, over the past 12 months, the U.S has added 1.8 million private sector jobs.

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