If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list.

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 5 or 6 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12). If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, let me encourage you to do so: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father but through Me.” “Believe in Me and you will have eternal life. Believe not, and the wrath of God will abide on you.” (John 14:6 3:16).

Journalist Andrew Breitbart, who had several websites devoted to the dissemination of news, opinion and information (many of which I utilize when putting together this paper), died this week. He was 43 years old. He gave a wonderful speech at CPAC this year, which I recommended a few weeks ago. He has video of Obama during his college years.

Georgetown Law Center student Sandra Fluke spoke in front of Congress in support of the Obama administration's new birth-control mandate. Her argument was, she and many young women that she knew could not afford to pay for the contraception that they needed while going to college.

The Virginia Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would make the state the eighth in the nation to require women to undergo ultrasound imaging before having an abortion - a high-profile conservative priority for which Gov. Bob McDonnell helped broker a compromise. I think that there is a good possibility that we will see laws like this all over the United States (like the voter ID laws which recently have popped up).

New orders for U.S. manufactured goods fell in January by the most in three years as demand fell across the board from machinery to aircraft, suggesting the economy started the year on weaker footing than expected.

President Obama issued an order which nullified much of the impact of a measure Congress passed late last year making military custody the default for some foreign-citizen terrorism suspects.

Did you know that there are two gun-walking programs and that another agent was killed by one of the guns allowed to walk in the second program. I only read about it today. And, with regards to Operation Fast&Furious, there seems to be but one mainstream reporter covering it still.

A low emission model of the 2012 Chevrolet Volt electric car are on their way to California, where customers will qualify for a $1,500 state rebate and be allowed to drive solo in the state's carpool lanes.

General Motors has told 1,300 employees at its Detroit Hamtramck that they will be temporarily laid off for five weeks as the company halts production of the Chevrolet Volt

A123 systems, an electric car battery company, had been touted as a stimulus "success story" by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm. They had a net loss of $172 million through the first three quarters of 2011 and it is reported that they have laid off 125 employees since receiving $390 million in government subsidies, yet they have enough money to hand out big pay raises to company executives.

Colorado-based Abound Solar announced this week it has been forced to lay off 180 of its 400 workers as it tries to retool to produce a more efficient type of solar panel in order to keep a technological edge on Chinese manufacturers who are flooding the market with less expensive models. Abound received approval in 2010 for a $400 million government loan.

Through February, 2012 globally averaged temperatures have dropped 0.56°°F (0.31°C) since the movie An Inconvenient Truth was released at the Sundance Film Festival on January 24, 2006.

Speaking of global warming, in Washington, D.C., speaker and activist Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a "common sense" part of a climate-change reduction strategy.

The firm, Debevoise & Plimpton LLC, received $1,842,180 in Recovery Act funds to provide legal advice, conduct due diligence, and review documents for two loans from DOE's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program. It should not be surprising that this firm was a significant donor to the Obama campaign.

In a demonstration, occupiers foreclose on Wells Fargo's CEO John Stumpf and “auction” off his home.

Stockton, Calif. could become biggest city to go bankrupt The drop in housing values (which reduces tax revenues) combined with soaring public retirement benefits are destroying this and many other Californian cities. Just like the U.S. is about to go broke with so many baby boomers entering into retirement, California is facing the exact same problem.

Obama's National Labor Relations Board announced its new Excelsior List—all employees who are targeted for unionization will be forced to turn over the home telephone number and e-mail addresses of non-unionized employees.

The Obama administration has proposed defense budget calls for military families and retirees to pay sharply more for their healthcare, while leaving unionized civilian defense workers' benefits untouched. Several congressional aides have suggested that this move is designed to increase the enrollment in Obamacare's state-run insurance exchanges.

A leaked White House memo suggests that President Obama is considering raising taxes on the middle class in his second term.

The Texas Legislature and Governor Rick Perry have authorized the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) to continue the Medicaid Women's Health Program (WHP). The program, which the HHSC points out provides preventative health services to more than 100,000 low-income women annually, is set to expire in March 2012. Those services include contraceptives, STD testing, and screening for hypertension, diabetes, and breast and cervical cancers. The HHSC has applied to the Obama Administration for an extension of the program through 2013, with the condition that no funding go to organizations that perform or promote elective abortions or are affiliated with such organizations. Of the more than 1,000 certified WHP providers across the state, this rule excludes fewer than 100 Planned Parenthood providers. The Obama Administration has threatened to deny renewal of the WHP if Texas does not fund Planned Parenthood as a provider.

A group of business leaders-including Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's ice cream and former Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg-are planning to pour substantial funds into the Occupy Wall Street movement in hopes of sustaining the protests and fostering political change. Protestors will be paid to protest.

Under the new ICE guidelines, hormone treatments for transgendered detainees, abortion services and extensive outlets for complaints will be available detained illegal immigrants.

The Empire State Building, which has honored everything from athletes to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and even honored the 60^th anniversary of China's communist takeover of China, finally found something too horrendous and controversial to honor: Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

Two ethicists working with Australian universities argue in the latest online edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics that if abortion of a fetus is allowable, so to should be the termination of a newborn. President Obama has approved of and voted for such infanticide.

An analysis of twenty debates by Think Progress shows that GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul did not attack rival Mitt Romney once during those televised face-offs.

Romney won the primaries in Michigan and in Arizona. About 1 in 10 voters in Michigan was a Democrat.

A Ron Paul flyer written In Arabic was found outside of a Michigan mosque, indicating his desire to cut aid to Israel. The other side is written in English and Israel is not mentioned.

Researchers claim that Britain faces years of freezing winters because global warming is causing Arctic Sea ice to melt.

To celebrate an upcoming Occupy Portland march, businesses in northeast and southeast Portland were damaged overnight by vandals.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called on the Revolutionary Guards to ensure that his supporters emerge triumphant in this week's parliamentary elections, and that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would lose the election.

Islamist parties won more than 80% of seats in Egypt's upper house of parliament.

A senior Egyptian legislator called on the Arab countries to voice their protest at the desecration of the Holy Quran at a US base in Afghanistan by cutting relations with Washington.

Seven American rights workers were allowed to leave Egypt after the U.S. paid nearly $5 million in bail costs to secure their freedom.

A suicide car bomber struck early Monday at the gates of Jalalabad airport in eastern Afghanistan, killing nine people in a large blast. The Taliban said the attack on the airport, which serves both civilian and international military aircraft, was revenge for the burning of Muslim holy books at an American military base.

A Nigerian spokesman for the Islamic militant group Boko Haram told Bikyamasr.com on Sunday that they are planning a "war" on Christians in the next few weeks.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations are separately calling for investigations into White House funding of a domestic spying program launched by the New York Police Department against Muslim-Americans.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today called on the New York Post to apologize for publishing a political cartoon that the Muslim civil rights group says "evokes anti-Semitic themes" through its depiction of hook-nosed terrorists objecting to the New York City Police Department's (NYPD) widespread campaign of spying on Muslims without warrants or evidence of wrongdoing.

Gitmo Jihadist detainees will get a new $750,000 soccer field courtesy of the American taxpayer.

President Obama to the United Auto Workers in Washington D.C.: "Because I've got to admit, it's been funny to watch some of these folks completely try to rewrite history now that you're back on your feet. The same folks who said if we went forward with our plan to rescue Detroit, ‘you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.’ Now they're saying they were right all along. Or worse, you've got folks saying that the problem is . . . the workers, made out like bandits in all of this; that saving the American auto industry was just about paying back unions. Really? Even by the standards of this town, that's a load of you-know-what."

President Obama: "[My apology about the Koran burnings] calmed things down. We're not out of the woods yet."

President Obama to the UAW in Detroit: “And five years from now when I'm not president anymore, I'll buy [a Chevy Volt] and drive it myself." GM has suspended the building of Volts this week.

President Barack Obama: "America's not just looking out for yourself, it's not just about greed, it's not just about trying to climb to the very top and keep everybody else down. When our assembly lines grind to a halt, we work together, and we get them going again. When somebody else falters, we try to give them a hand up, because we know [that] we're all in it together."

President Obama: “But we can't just drill our way out of this problem. While we consume 20 percent of the world's oil, we only have 2 percent of the world's oil reserves.” Apparently the term “oil reserves” is technical. We think of it as the amount of oil under our soil (or water). However, this is actually a term for proven oil reserves, and I am not even sure it applies to getting oil via oil sands or frakking. However, in reality, when it comes to recoverable oil, we have a huge supply of it in the United States, far more than 2%.

Obama: “Every year, $4 billion of your tax dollars go to subsidizing the oil industry. These are the same companies making record profits - tens of billions of dollars a year. I don't think oil companies need more corporate welfare. Congress should end this taxpayer giveaway.” Do you think this will increase or decrease the price of gas at the pump?

Obama: “Around the world, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela - what they did was hard. It takes time. It takes more than a single term. It takes more than a single president. It takes more than a single individual.”

Obama: "I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don't bluff."

WH spokesman Jay Carney: "The reason why the Keystone XL required the review that it did is because it crossed, that pipeline crossed an international boundary. The State Department, by tradition and rule, reviews those requests for permits and was in the process of doing just that when the Republicans forced us to deny it because tried to compel the administration to grant a permit to a pipeline for which the route didn't even exist."

Jay Carney: "The Speaker of the House apparently spoke to reporters this morning in which he suggested that the president wasn't in support of

expanding domestic oil and gas production, which is demonstratively, categorically false. And suggested that somehow simply by drilling or approving the Keystone XL pipeline that that would lower gas prices. That would lower prices at the pump. And that's the kind of empty promise that politicians make when we face hikes in the global price of oil. That is really is dishonest with the kind of promises that are really dishonest with the American people."

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:: "The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception."

First Lady, Michelle Obama: “[the President constantly stays up late thinking about] folks who desperately want to attend college but can't afford it...We gotta fix that."

Michelle Obama: "We got rid of `Don't Ask Don't Tell' so that Americans will never have to lie about who they are to serve the country they love."

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, about upcoming meetings between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "We're trying to make the decision to attack [Iran] as hard as possible for Israel."

John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser to President Barack Obama, in his book: "Advertising now functions in large part to keep the economy growing by creating demand for a wide variety of often useless, dangerous or environmentally destructive products. Its most dangerous abuses might be halted immediately by legislative action. For instance, it could be made illegal for any utility to advertise in such a way as to promote greater demand for power. Also references to size, power or sexual potency (direct or implied) could be banned from automobile advertising."

Attorney General Eric Holder on Operation Fast & Furious in his Congressional testimony: "That was a fundamentally flawed program, fundamentally flawed; and, I think that I can agree with some of my harshest critics that there are legitimate issues that need to be explored with regard in which the way Fast and Furious was carried out. But, I think one thing that also has to be understood is that once this was brought to my attention" - Holder said before slamming his hand on the committee room table he was sitting at - "I stopped it. I stopped it."

California Gov. Jerry Brown, of the Republican party: “Well, the extreme move to the right, they want to take away contraceptives from American women.”

White House spokesman Jay Carney: "Calls to approve Keystone XL right away are insulting to the American people . there is no pipeline application to review . the decision that the president made in January . was made without prejudice on the merits of the project. That's how we view Keystone. Anybody out there who is telling his or her constituents that approval of Keystone [will lower gas prices] is blowing a lot of smoke."

Majority Leader Harry Reid, regarding an anti-Fox News book by Media Matters founder David Brock: "I will do anything I can to make sure it's a success."

ThinkProgress: “Relentless attacks on the Chevy Volt from Rush Limbaugh and Republican politicians have taken their toll, as General Motors has announced a five-week suspension in production of the range-extended electric car. Conservative enemies of clean energy and the Obama administration seized on isolated reports Volts with battery fires, calling the cars ‘Obama-mandated death traps.’”

Gov. Martin O'Malley: "For the election I suppose it's best for the president if they take their hard-right turn - sort of war on unions, war on women, and all these cultural issues."

NOW President Terry O'Neill of the Virginia bill requiring an ultrasound be shown to women considering an abortion: “The purpose of this bill is simply to stop women from exercising their constitutional right to have an abortion.”

From Obama donation letter: “...according to our records, you haven't yet made an online donation to this campaign at this email address. (If our records are wrong, I apologize and thank you!). I'm not writing to ask you for money again. I'm actually writing to ask your opinion about why you haven't given, and what you think would inspire you or other Obama supporters like you to decide to take the leap and donate.”

The Reverent Jesse Jackson about Obama: “Say, it's an honor to be a food stamp president. Food stamps feed the hungry. Food stamps save the children. Food stamps help the farmer. Food stamps help the truck driver. Food stamps help the warehouse. Food stamps help the store. Food stamps hire people and feed people. Food stamps save people from starvation and malnutrition. Whenever you attack feeding the hungry, you undermine the moral authority of our faith. Give President Barack Obama a big hand. Show your love. Show your appreciation.”

Oklahoma Dem Senator Judy McIntyre carrying a sign that someone else made: "If I Wanted The Government In My Womb, I'd F__k a Senator."

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson of a dance company that got a $25,000 grant: "It's with a very well-respected group. . . that uses dance to educate. . . . Apparently they have a long history of doing this and are quite well-respected."

Obama Energy Secretary Stephen Chu: “...the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil to - to build and strengthen our economy and to decrease our dependency on oil.”

Rep. Raúl Grijalva: “Why do we have this paralysis in Washington D.C. where we can’t get things done? Why do we have that? I’ve come to the real conclusion that the reason we have this paralysis is greed. A pervasive and corruptin influence in our political system that tells the American people, you wait your turn while some of us do well. You wait your turn while the rest of us do better.” It is almost as if he is talking about all of these “green” company executives who are getting huge handouts from the government, but he was talking about House Republicans and TEA party voters.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva: “This is a government as good as you elect...and you do it by understanding that this nation is about shared responsibility and not greed.”

Socialist favourite in France's presidential election, Francois Hollande: "Above 1m euros [£847,000; $1.3m], the tax rate should be 75% because it's not possible to have that level of income...It is patriotic to agree to pay a supplementary tax to get the country back on its feet."

President Obama was apparently Linsane before any of us were: “And I knew about Jeremy before you did, or everybody else did, because Arne Duncan, my Secretary of Education, was captain of the Harvard team. And so way back when, Arne and I were playing and he said, I'm telling you, we've got this terrific guard named Jeremy Lin at Harvard. And then one of my best friends, his son is a freshman at Harvard, and so when he went for a recruiting trip he saw Lin in action. So I've been on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon for a while.”

Washington Post religion columnist Lisa Miller: "There's nothing wrong with big families, of course. But the smug fecundity of the Republican field this primary season has me worried. Their family photos, with members of their respective broods spilling out to the margins, seem to convey a subliminal message that goes far beyond a father's pride in being able to field his own basketball team. What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs. As conservative religious believers, we take seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply."

Salon’s Joan Walsh: “And they're [the Republican party] not going after the Latino vote. They really are, I mean, it is their last stand. It's like they're writing off women, they're writing off Latinos, they're writing off Asians, they're writing off young people. It's really the party of old white men basically.”

John Heilemann, New York Magazine: “Yeah, and look, I mean, I think it's an amazing thing in the sense that, you know, James and I were talking about this before. The Republican Party is becoming just truly is becoming a whiter, more blue collar, more populist, less well-educated party, and more and more a religious party. And they cater to that base and just in a systematic way are making it impossible for them to win national elections. They are, you know, driving first Hispanics out of the party. They're driving women increasingly out of the party. And they find these places where they think they can get narrow advantage and then they go too far. And this is one of the instances that I think is, there's a logic to it, but it's a faulty logic.” Pretty much everything that Heilemann said here is a lie.

Former NY Times editor Bill Keller: “Remember earlier in the campaign when Newt Gingrich was worrying everybody about Sharia law-the Muslims were going to impose Sharia law in America? Sometimes Santorum sounds like he's creeping up on a kind of Christian version of Sharia law.”

Richard Cohen from a column in the NY Daily News: “Mullah Rick has spoken. He wants religion returned to "the public square," is opposed to contraception, premarital sex and abortion under any circumstances...This is a perilous and divisive approach. We have all of world history to warn us about what happens when religion takes too prominent a role. The public square gets used for beheadings and the like.” Good point. Elect Rick Santorum as president, and, next thing you know, there will be beheadings in the public square for the use of contraceptives.

MSNBC’s Karen Finney: “I never would have thought that we would be in a position to actually call someone ‘governor vaginal pro—governor trans-vaginal probe.’”

Politico columnist Roger Simon on PBS: “The question for some, especially women, is: Why do the Republicans want to get government out of our lives, but into our wombs? I mean, it's more than contraception and reproductive rights, as the Supreme Court ruled decades ago. It is a matter of privacy whether the government can intrude upon your privacy to force you into doing or not doing certain medical acts.”

MSNBC’s Karen Finney: “I mean, and I think they're also not paying attention to the fact that women have very much been awakened over the last several months. Again, look at these Republican legislatures and these sort of anti-women bills, you know, having to prove that you were raped in order to, you know, use Medicare, Medicaid, to have an abortion. I mean, some of the, you know, redefining rape, letting women die. I mean, the level of conversation we've been having. And then, contraception!”

Eugene Robinson on Rick Santorum: "Yes. I think he is a theocrat. I think that's what he believes deep down inside of him. And I think that's obviously dangerous for this country."

Liberal billionaire and CNN founder Ted Turner: "the tea party people [are] mean-spirited."

Ted Turner: "It's so heartbreaking to have [them] say that global warming is a hoax."

Ted Turner: "I like Obama. I don't know who could do a better job. He's got an incredibly tough situation, and a good heart and mind."

Ted Turner sees a psychiatrist friend once a month: "I'm not in therapy; it's just somebody to talk to."

Bill Maher: “You are allowed to have your opinion. You're allowed to have your opinion that a Palestinian 2000 years ago walked on water and did magic tricks and he was really still his own father and all that stuff. That's fine. You can have whatever opinion you want, and the fact that a billion other people believe it gives you a lot of strength and credence. But I also have the opinion that that's ridiculous, that it's anachronistic, this is the 21^st century.”

Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann explains why Bush took us to war in Iraq: “I would submit to you that the reason we're at war is because big oil companies bought Ronald Reagan, they bought his election, they brought him into office, the big oil companies...he was going to go to war in Iraq 'cause it would give him the power to privatize Social Security for his bankster buddies!” And liberal hosts wonder why they cannot garner an audience.

Star of TV's Parenthood [NBC], Dax Shepard tweet: "Saw `Triumph of the Will' tonight, oh wait, I mean `Act of Valor' great action." Triumph of the Will is a Hitler propaganda film. Apparently, Dax has since tried to walk this remark back.

Filmmaker Michael Moore: "I have to tell you a lot of my Democratic friends will vote for Santorum in something they are calling Operation Hilarity."

WH spokesman Jay Carney 2011: “The economy has vastly improved from what it was when Barack Obama was sworn into office.”

Occupy Oakland chant, as Cops are being taken to the Hospital: "From Oakland to Greece, f__k the police."

Denver Occupier: “Hey, remember! We're American citizens. We don't have to put up with terrorists. These people are terrorists. These people are f___g terrorists. These people are [something...put in jail?]. These people should be put down like the [mother-f___g?] dogs they are. And when you do no one's going to cry for it. You've got all the weapons now. America's the f___g land of [doxing?] and you have addresses, families, don't you? And we have the internet. That's scary. Hey, that's cool you can have the pepper spray now. You've got addresses, you've got families, you've got everything. Go away. We'll go away. Remember, it can happen here or at your houses.”

Troubadour at the Daily Kos, describing Republicans: “...mendacious, death-loving, frothing, lamprey-mouthed, inhuman, abominable, atrocious, verminous, rapacious, sadistic, bullying, invasive, grasping, psychopathic, twisted, warped, animalistic, belly-crawling, mouth-breathing, illiterate, innumerate, know-nothing, imbecilic, sheep-raping, horror movie extras masturbating into wads of money while fantasizing about war collateral damage. . . (inhale). . . puppy-torturing, vacuous, mindless, nihilistic, evil, diseased, soulless, morally bankrupt, greedy, insecure, envious, kleptomaniac charnel-house mascots stewing in universal hatred for all life. . . (inhale). . . toxic, ugly, bestial, humorless, loveless, compassionless, demonic human-shaped ruins forever slouching toward Bethlehem in search of some fresh nightmare to wreak on the defenseless via other people's money and heroism. . . (inhale). . . Satanic monkey-s__t-throwing, cowardly, chickenhawkish, parasitic, baby's-candy-stealing, wife-beating, minority-purging, syphilitic Confederate poltergeists with erectile dysfunction...perverse, prurient, crocodile-eyed, necrophiliac mass-producers of human misery and gleeful destroyers of truth, justice, and the American way. . . sepulchre-hearted human deserts walking the Earth only to look for more victims. . . silly, stupid, ignorant bastards proud of every good thing they've never done, every person they've never been considerate toward, every fact they've never learned and will never acknowledge, and every virtue they will never possess or even attempt to comprehend. . . preternaturally drunken, bleary-eyed, zombie-like, empty vessels who wander aimlessly until given instruction by their masters. . . unthinking, unquestioning, unfeeling diabolus ex machina mockeries of the human condition, perpetually acting out a burlesque of the basest and least interesting psychological dysfunctions...face-chewing, self-devouring, medieval barbarian museum dioramas and depraved Nazi homunculi preserved in formaldehyde to frighten children. . . sick, ominous, loathsome, Nosferatu-impersonating Gollum-acolytes feasting on the flesh of our society while complaining about its taste. . . tax-evading, sommelier-abusing, election-buying, yacht-aficionado hemmorhoids flying flags of convenience and berating their six-year-old Chinese employees for requesting bathroom breaks. . .Republicans, you vile, repulsive, scum. You're not leading this country. You're not contributing to this country. You're not even part of this country. You are the maggot-ridden rot that arises in this country's damaged flesh; you are the vultures constantly picking at us to see if we're weak enough yet to become your next meal; you create problems where none would otherwise exist, just to further weaken America and quicken your own insatiable appetites; you are garbage, and you are traitors. And you are not welcome in this country anymore.” That link a page back will take you to the comments, because Troubadour did not quite get all of the adjectives in.

Nancy Pelosi in a fund-raising email: “It's time to put an end to the Republicans' unrelenting war on women. With your help, we can send a deafening message to anti-woman Republicans - but we're still $4,800 short of our $1 million goal.”

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone Magazine, headline: “Andrew Breitbart: Death of a Douche”

Taibbi text: “So Andrew Breitbart is dead. Here's what I have to say to that, and I'm sure Breitbart himself would have respected this reaction: Good! F__k him. I couldn't be happier that he's dead.”

Mister Opus1 of the Daily Kos on Andrew Breitbart, recently deceased conservative journalist: “He was a piece of s__t...He was a complete piece of s__t, ripe full of vitriolic hate for anyone who disagreed with his views - you know, us...smug bastard...He deserves no respect, not while he's living and certainly not in his afterlife. ”

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman El-Zawahiri: "The Afghan Mujahideen inflicted the disasters on the US which forced it to shrink its military budget."

Qazi Nazir Ahmad Hanafi, head of an Afghan group comprising clerics and parliamentarians investigating the burned Koran incident: "The military leaders who ordered the burning and the offenders should both be tried and punished . This evil crime has been done inside Afghanistan so the punishment must be according to the country's law."

Senior Afghan clerics released a statement: "The council strongly condemns this crime and inhumane, savage act by American troops by desecrating holy Korans...The council emphasized that the apology for this evil act can never be accepted. Those who committed this crime must be publicly tried and punished."

FoxNews’ Kirsten Powers: “This is not to suggest that liberals-or feminists-never complain about misogyny. Many feminist blogs now document attacks on women on the left and the right, including Jezebel, Shakesville, and the Women's Media Center (which was cofounded by Steinem). But when it comes to high-profile campaigns to hold these men accountable-such as that waged against Limbaugh-the real fury seems reserved only for conservatives, while the men on the left get a wink and a nod as long as they are carrying water for the liberal cause. After all, if Limbaugh's outburst is part of the ‘war on women,’ then what is the routine misogyny of liberal media men? It's time for some equal-opportunity accountability. Without it, the fight against media misogyny will continue to be perceived as a proxy war for the Democratic Party, not a fight for fair treatment of women in the public square.”

In the New York Times corrections: "A previous version of this article misstated how many of the president's proposals to reduce the country's reliance on imported oil were new in his speech on Wednesday. None of them were, not one of them.”

SNL character portraying Shepherd Smith on Romney’s sons: “My thanks to Stephen King for creating those boys.” Perhaps, you had to be there. :)

Nancy Pelosi on Obama: “One week and one day after the president's inaugural address, the House of Representatives passed his recovery stimulus package. And that, not by us, don't take it by me, by the economists who studied this, three and a half million jobs saved or created. And that was the beginning of taking down this 800,000 jobs being lost on a regular basis. He had inherited a terrible thing. Professional and statesman that he is, he was about getting the job done rather than pointing fingers.”

From Obama’s first presidential press conference: “What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place."

And more recently: "My job over these first two years has frankly been to clean up a big mess."

Senator Chuck Schumer on the Blunt Amendment: "This is one of the most extreme amendments that's come up."

Senate leader Harry Reid on Democrats voting for the Blunt Amendment: "I have the greatest respect for what Senator Ben Nelson did, what Bob Casey did, and what Joe Manchin did. That's their privilege. We don't demand everyone vote the same way."

NBC’s David Gregory: "Do you think it was harmful that Limbaugh, as certainly an influential voice in a conservative grassroots and you well know that, was it appropriate for him to apologize? Do you think that he's done damage to the debate that you're now getting into?"

Newt Gingrich first said it was appropriate for Limbaugh to apologize, and then said: "Do you think the President owes an apology to all the men and women in uniform who he frankly abandoned when he apologized to religious fanatics in Afghanistan? What's your opinion, David?"

Question: "Was the president's speech to the UAW this morning a campaign speech?"

Jay Carney, White House: "Not at all. The president was speaking to American workers, which he certainly enjoys doing. He was speaking to them about several things, principally the resurrection of the American automobile industry which is a subject that has been a focus of his attention since he took office."

President Obama to the UAW: "We are going to keep on fighting to make our economy stronger. To put our friends and neighbors back to work faster. To give our children even more opportunity. To make sure that the United States of America remains the greatest nation on earth. Thank you, UAW. I love you! God bless you! God bless the work you do! God bless the United States of America!"

Townhall question: "Under what portion of the Constitution is the government allowed to require a private or religious organization to pay for anything for free?"

Dem Rep. Kathy Hochul: "Well, basically, we're not looking to the Constitution on that aspect of it. What I'm trying to say is basically the decision has been made by this congress that American citizens are entitled to health care."

Rep. Peter Roskam: “How about when the president said you can keep your health care coverage if you like it? And yet, the reality is, according to Bloomberg at least, 9 percent fewer businesses are offering medical coverage than in 2010. There, the rhetoric didn't meet the reality, did it?”

Sec. Kathleen Sebelius: “Well again, Congressman, what you're seeing - it wouldn't have mattered if we had passed the Affordable Care Act or not. The private market is in a death spiral.”

Secretary of energy steven chu: "Well I would give myself a pretty good grade because if you look at what we've done, and what we've supported, and the breakthroughs that have occurred during this tenure, I think it speaks very well. As I said before, that battery research has been going extremely well, way ahead of what we thought was the schedule. We're very focused on a lot of the good technologies on solar technologies, and as another example, the bioenergy, the bioenergy centers that which were started under the previous administration have done extremely well and we're continuing funding those. A lot of the inventions and technologies are now being licensed by companies and they're entering into pilot production. So there are many successes in the technologies that the Department of Energy has supported and the private sector, American industry, are picking up these technologies."

Newt Gingrich to NBC’s David Gregory: "You know, David, I am astonished at the desperation of the elite media to avoid rising gas prices, to avoid the President's apology to religious fanatics in Afghanistan, to avoid a trillion dollar deficit, to avoid the longest period of unemployment since the Great Depression, and to suddenly decide that Rush Limbaugh is the great national crisis of this week"

Gingrich continued: "There is no debate about access to contraception. There is a debate, which Cardinal George of Chicago has pointed out, is a war against the Catholic Church. You do have this weird situation where President Obama apologizes to Islamic extremists while waging war against the Catholic Church."

Gingrich: "Barack Obama as President in the most radical anti-religious move made by any president, is trying to coerce the Catholic Church at a time when he's been told by the bishops they would have to give up every single hospital...they would have to give up every single university and college associated with the church, because he is asking them to violate their religious beliefs."

Newt Gingrich: "Nobody's blocking anyone from having access to contraception. No one. The young lady who testified can get access to contraception. Nobody said she couldn't. The question is should a Catholic institution, or for that matter, the Ohio Christian University which is a Protestant institution, which is a very pro-Life institution, which is now being told it will have to pay for abortion pills. Should a Protestant fundamentalist institution be dictated to by Washington politicians over whether or not it can have its own religious beliefs, or have we become a country where it's okay to go to church on Sunday morning for one hour, but let's not actually express those beliefs the rest of the week?"

Politi-chick Jan Morgan: “Criminals, thugs and the federal government will always own guns.”

Jan Morgan: “There are millions of Americans out there who own guns who understand the real reason behind the second amendment, and that is, that, in the 20^th century alone, over 170 million people were annihilated by their government after being disarmed.”

Jan Morgan: “Since the election of Barack Obama, he has done more for increasing gun sales. There has been more sale of guns in this country than ever in the history of America and there’s a reason for that.”

Jonah Goldberg, on the idea of Rand Paul becoming Mitt Romney’s running mate: “It would also be awesome to see Superman fight the Hulk.” I’ve predicted that is the plan for Romney’s VP choice.

Rep. Allen West: "You're looking at a second Holocaust . . . [if Israel doesn't] know they can trust and depend upon the stars and stripes . . . to provide them support. There will be no homeland for the Jewish people in the United States of America for their birthright. This is a dangerous situation and we have to take the Iranians for their word."

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) office press release headline "Top Democrat Senator Demands Increased Energy Production, Jobs In Saudi Arabia Rather Than Increasing American Energy And American Jobs." The Democrat is Chuck Schumer.

Sen. John Corny: "Rather than approve the Keystone pipeline, the Democrats' energy plan now calls for the most powerful nation in the free world to politely ask other countries for more oil and cross our fingers."

Previous presidential candidate, John McCain: "This is like watching a Greek tragedy. It's the negative campaigning and the increasingly personal attacks . it should have stopped long ago. Any utility from the debates has been exhausted, and now it's just exchanging cheap shots and personal shots followed by super PAC attacks."

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich: "President Obama is very quick to apologize for Islam while he attacks the Catholic Church. You'll notice he's very sensitive about problems involving Islam, but he has a willingness. This is the most anti-religious administration in American history."

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum on the John Kennedy separation of church and state speech: "To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up. What kind of country do we live that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case? That makes me throw up and it should make every American who is seen from the president, someone who is now trying to tell people of faith that you will do what the government says, we are going to impose our values on you, not that you can't come to the public square and argue against it, but now we're going to turn around and say we're going to impose our values from the government on people of faith, which of course is the next logical step when people of faith, at least according to John Kennedy, have no role in the public square." Some phrases in here are the very definition of “inartful.” Santorum has been trying to walk back the “throw up” portion of this quotation.

Rick Santorum: "I don't believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country."

Rush Limbaugh on the young woman who went before Congress and said, in essence, that she and many of the women that she knew were having so much sex in college that they needed to have their contraception needs subsidized: "What does it say about the college co-ed Susan [sic] Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."

Rush Limbaugh: "Obama is going to be campaigning exclusively to the people who are being pulled in the cart: The people that aren't paying income tax, the people that are on the federal dole. He has made the calculation that that's where he wins."

Rush Limbaugh: "It's clear to me that the Democrat Party has now made the determination that of the people that vote in this country, a clear majority of them don't work. A clear majority of them don't want to work. A clear majority of them live and breathe on this class envy stuff, and are gonna vote for somebody who's gonna make sure their contraception pills keep coming; their welfare checks keep coming, their disability checks keep coming, their unemployment checks keep coming. Food stamps, you name it. That's his group."

Rush Limbaugh: "If you think birth control is expensive now, wait 'til it's free. When Obamacare fully kicks in. We are all being asked to pay for everyone's birth control pills."

Rush Limbaugh: "So what I'm doing and what I'm saying and how I'm reacting is 'reprehensible.' But it's not reprehensible for Obama to violate the Constitution. It's not reprehensible for Obama to impose his own morality on the Catholic Church and all of its schools and all of its hospitals. No, that's not reprehensible? To me it is. To me it's insulting and reprehensible."

Rush Limbaugh: "You know what the solution is here, why doesn't Georgetown lower their tuition? Tuition and room and board is 60 grand a year, and this woman's up at Congress asking for thousands of dollars in birth control pills. This law school, they need to establish a new scholarship, the Wilt Chamberlain Scholarship, exclusively for women."

Rush Limbaugh: "The poor babes have to buy their own pills. What has gone wrong with our country? What has happened to our country where law students have to buy their own contraceptives? What have we done with our hearts? How did we become so cruel? Require each other to pay for the contraceptions of the women law students at Georgetown?"

Rush Limbaugh: "The one real threat to your freedom -- to your birth control pills, to your abortion, to whatever -- comes from the White House, from the Democrat Party, not from a guy on the radio who can't do anything about it."

Rush Limbaugh: "Where is it written that all of a sudden, if you want something and don't have the money for it, somebody else has to pay for it."

Rush Limbaugh: "What can I do to the women of America? Do I have the power to raise their taxes? I do not. Do I have the power to regulate their behavior? I do not. Do I have the power to make health care decisions for them? I do not. Do I have the power to withhold birth control pills from them? I do not. Do I have the power to audit their tax returns? I do not. Do I have the power to take their little four-year-old kindergarten student's lunch and throw it away and make 'em eat something else? I do not. Do I have the power to look into their personal life and leak the information to the media? I do not. Is there one bit of freedom that I can deny them?" -

Rush Limbaugh: "Why did she have to go to Georgetown? Why didn't she go someplace else instead of trying to get them to change their religion? If you ask me, this is part of the coordinated assault on the Catholic Church, and this little bomb is like a hand grenade with a timer that has just been waiting for the right political moment to be exploded."

Rush Limbaugh: "If this is where the left wants to fight the battle of government-run health care, then this is where it should be fought, and that's what they're doing. This whole episode is to advance the premise of government-run health care, and notice the left is choosing contraception, not cancer, not heart disease, not diabetes. They're choosing one-dollar condoms."

Rush Limbaugh: "I'm offering a compromise today. I will buy all of the women at Georgetown University as much aspirin to put between their knees as they want."

Rush Limbaugh: "Wouldn't you think that real life journalists would applaud Breitbart's efforts to expose government corruption and media bias? I mean, what does the media claim to exist to do? To hold the powerful accountable! 'Speak truth to power,' is that the phrase? Well, the mainstream media has become part of the power. When that power is held by the Democrat Party, the mainstream media covers up the corruption. He was exposing it."

Rush Limbaugh: "I know the Democrats work closely with the media to get these propaganda stories out, there's no denying this. At some point, though, they want to live in this world of total perception, not reality. And they've pulled it off in the area of social issues."

Rush Limbaugh: "I believe that an informed voting electorate is the absolute best way to affect long-term, positive, deep-rooted change in the country."

Rush Limbaugh: "We're supposed to believe stock prices are rising on growing expectations Obama will be elected this November. What an absolute crock. No, it can't have anything to do with the turmoil in the financial markets in Europe. It can't have anything to do with the fact that that's a black hole to invest in. Investors are losing half of their holdings thanks to the various bailout deals. No. Can't have anything to do with that."

Rush Limbaugh: "You notice that as far as Obama's concerned the religious right care only about abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, intelligent design. Isn't that what they call projection? Isn't that all the church of liberalism is concerned about? They're haunted by these things. All of those things that Obama mentioned, the left hates."

President Richard Nixon in 1970: "We are all Keynesians now." He did? He said this??

Often attributed to Alexis de Toqueville: "In a democracy, people get the government they deserve."

Newt was on fire this morning on David Gregory’s show. The video and much of the text.

One minute ad for Barry Hinckley’s 5 year-old kid doing a political ad. It’s pretty funny, including the clever lines, “Are you other 5-year-olds better off today than you were 5 years ago?”

Reasonably funny SNL cold open on FoxNews’ Shepherd Smith and Mitt Romney. Commercial first.

Apparently, there are a number of people who believe that Operation Fast&Furious was all an attack on the Second Amendment. Also, hot gun babe in this video.

The third Huckabee forum was good; much better than any of the debates. There were no timed answers, real people and not political operatives asked the questions, and these were substantive questions. It has not yet been posted anywhere.

One-per center, Susan Sarandon, blames the Mainstream media for demonizing the Occupy movement.

Obama’s weekly address—notice that he does not use the words Solyndra, Volt or algae.

Jodi Miller: “A white supremacist in Missouri was arrested after joining a black gang to sell meth. Hey, who says the Obama economy hasn’t brought the races together?”

1) Did you notice, when Obamacare was being sold to us, it was all about people who went bankrupt from medical expenses or people who could not afford to pay for medical care or people who went to the emergency room for free medical care. But now, Obamacare is all about increasing premiums and the president being able to mandate pretty much whatever. Even when negotiating a compromise, it is negotiated without the other party being there. The “negotiation” is simply trying to locate a point at which the most political leverage can be gained.

2) The Blunt Amendment should make us ask ourselves, who gets to decide what is in our healthcare coverage? Is it the employers, the government (and at what level), the healthcare insurers themselves as guided by supply and demand? Government has forced healthcare into the workplace, which then gives us the false choice of, either government controls what a healthcare plan must include, or the employer must do that (and many employers hate this responsibility). If the government simply mandates more and more things be covered, that will simply increase the cost of healthcare insurance.

3) Over and over again, when Sarah Palin comes out and says something, I tend to agree with her more than I do with any of our presidential candidates. She recently said, Allen West ought to be the VP choice for whomever gets the nomination.

4) I must admit to racking my brain when it comes to gas prices today. We have an ample supply of gas and we are exporting it all over the place. So, why is gas so high? The problem is not that gas prices are just out of control; the problem is, we measure oil, and gas prices in terms of dollars. So, if our dollars are inflated, so it our gas price at the pump. Nobody says that we are suffering from inflation because housing prices have been so deflated. We have such a huge supply of vacant houses that it distorts the market and inflation figures. So, even though our salaries are flat, the dollar continues to lose value, which increases the price at the pump. Usually, an ounce of gold will buy around 15–18 barrels of oil, give or take. That is where we are today. I did not catch this; Dick Morris pointed it out. As an aside, this would also help to explain the stock market’s relative health.

5) I really do not want to hear from a Republican (Romney) who has a plan to balance the budget over the next 10 years. As far as I am concerned, he is kicking the can down the road past his won term in office. The Mack-Penny plan balances the budget in around 5 or 6 years....and it is simple for anyone to understand.

Our 4^th quarter GDP has been revised to 3%. This is actual growth. Most of the Obama recovery has been 1–2.5% growth, which is not growth; it is treading water or falling behind (2-2,5% is treading water when it comes to providing jobs for new people entering the work force).

President Obama is asking for an additional $111 billion for Obamacare this year. This program has not even begun to be implemented and already, it is costing way more than expected. It wasn’t too long ago when Democrats were having a heart attack over Bush running entire deficits this large.

75% said the right level for top earners was 30% or below. Participants were asked to choose the best rates for highest wage taxpayers.

The current rate for top earners is 35%. 4% thought it was appropriate to take 40%, which is approximately the level that President Obama is seeking from January 2013 onward.

65% said they favored President Obama's "Buffett Rule" that millionaires should pay at least 30% of their income.

66% of adults favored raising taxes on those making more than $250,000 as a way to tackle the deficit.

One possible explanation for the disparity in these 3 polls is, voters may not know how much the nation's top earners are already being taxed. The Hill poll did not ask voters to identify current tax rates before saying what rate they favored. "It might be that people are underestimating how much the rich pay now," said Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan adviser and Treasury official under President George H.W. Bush.

36% of Americans think the government should have provided help to the car companies;

55% think "these companies should have been allowed to succeed or fail on their own"

50% of Americans take the opposite view and say government intervention does more harm than good.

10% of Likely U.S. Voters now rate Congress' performance as good or excellent, which is up from 5% last month.

63% think Congress is doing a poor job, which is an improvement from last month’s 70%

Operation Fast & Furious and the second gun-walking program are being almost entirely ignored by the Mainstream media, and for two reasons: (1) It makes Obama and his administration look bad and (2) I think that mainstream media suspects what many in the alternate media suspect, that this was a program designed to eventually pass and enforce stricter gun control laws. Big media is in favor of lots of gun control laws and they like Obama. Therefore, any in-depth reporting on Operation Fast & Furious just isn’t going to happen.

When Nancy Pelosi says that President Obama was all about being pragmatic from the very beginning, and without finger pointing, the press never challenges such absurd statements. I cannot recall any president ever in my lifetime who blamed the previous administration as often as Obama has.

MSNBC (which is not the alternative to FoxNews, but the alternative to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity) does a segment on the Republican “war against women.” While talking about the Blunt Amendment, at no time do they see it appropriate to point out or to discuss that 4 Republican women voted for the Blunt Amendment.

How long ago did this occur? 1 or 2 years? Yet, the media is still getting it wrong about Andrew Breitbart and Shirley Sherrod. The left-wing media does not care if they get a story right; they do not care if they mis-report it, again and again and again. They simply figure that, you will hear the report, dislike those on the right even more, and they have achieved what they wanted to achieve—disseminating propaganda rather than true information.

Phoney story on CNN, the Huffington Post and Yahoo—an evil banker, one of the 1 percent-ers, leaves a 1% tip. They run stories like these simply because they fit into their narrative of the greedy, evil top 1%.

Saturday Night Live cannot seem to find anything funny about Barack Obama, his algae solution, or the green companies which take government money and then go broke.

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, a leading Democratic lawyer, has declared a personal war on the liberal group Media Matters: "Not only will [the Media Matters controversy] be an election matter, I will personally make it an election matter. I don't know whether President Obama has any idea that Media Matters has turned the corner against Israel in this way," he said. "I can tell you this, he will know very shortly because I am beginning a serious campaign on this issue and I will not let it drop until and unless [writer and activist MJ] Rosenberg is fired from Media Matters, or Media Matters changes its policy or the White House disassociates itself from Media Matters."

Democrats will come out in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. Former President Clinton first sent up a trial balloon this week.

Do not be shocked or surprised if this war against Christians in Nigeria does not expand to include several other countries by the end of this month.

Are You Freaking Kidding Me? From Weasel Zippers. This was about Gitmo detainee, the 9/11 Mastermind KSM, refusing to sign off On a courtroom sketch because he didn’t like the nose; and the military bowed to his demands and re-Drew it to his liking.

There are Two Operations Fast and Furious (most news services have all but ignored the first one)

Here is what Democrats want us to think: Republican candidates are going to take away your contraceptive pills; they are going to go on some jihad against you in the bedroom, and the only salvation is reelecting Barack Obama.

First of all, Obama cannot run on his record. The last thing that he wants you to think about is what he has done while in office. He does not want you to think about Obamacare, because it has continued to remain unpopular, even to today. Now, they will continue to try to sell Obamacare is becoming more popular, but Democrats do not want to carry this flag into the main election.

Whereas Newt Gingrich is going to tell you over and over again that he is the only person on the ticket to ever balance the budget in our lifetimes, Democrats are not going to tout the passage of Obamacare as a great reason to vote for them.

What else have they done? They passed the Stimulus package, which was supposed to reverse the recession. More people believe that Elvis is alive than believe that the Stimulus package worked. Democrat Evan Bayh, when retiring said that if he created one job when he entered into the private sector that would be more than Congress has created in the previous six months.

Are Democrats going to run on the various omnibus bills that they have passed? Yes, at $1.1 trillion for one 2010 bill alone that was 2000 pages long, Dems do not want you to think about that.

Can Obama run on ending the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq? These wars have degenerated into chaos under his watch.

It doesn’t matter if Obama is at fault here or not; under his watch, things have gotten worse, not better, and he has spent huge sums of money from many generations to come in order to “fix” the U.S. economy.

So, what remains are wedge issues and personal attacks. The media managed to drive Herman Cain out of the Republican race and Sarah Palin out of elective office and apparently, out of elective office aspirations.

What the democratic party knows is, there are a lot of voters out there who barely pay attention. Huge numbers of people voted for Obama, and yet had no clue about him or the other candidates. Some young people simply voted for Obama because he was cool and McCain was this doddering old man.

So Obama needs to capture these votes and to do it with manufactured controversies.

Although Republicans are continually blamed for raising this issue, it actually first occurred in a Republican debate, brought up by George Stephanopoulos on January 7^th, a former Clinton aide.

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, President Obama made to sovereign decision that some Catholic institutions must pay for forms of birth control including the morning after pill. When this became plainly unpopular, the President proposed a compromise, which did not come from any sort of discussion with the Catholic entities about a compromise.

The compromise is, insurance companies will now give out free contraception, which is essentially free to the insurance companies, even though it costs a huge amount of money to individuals (which stories generally ignore that contraceptive pills from WalMart can cost as little as $5–$15/month). And, to liberals, this makes complete sense. If the government requires it to be paid, then it’s free; if a person pays for it individually, the costs are beyond that person’s ability to pay.

Then there is the liberal operative at the Georgetown School of Law, Sandra Fluke [pronounced flook]. There are all kinds of law schools out there and there are a number of different medical plans, yet this woman chose to go to Georgetown, where there are some limits on contraceptive coverage. She said she is attending Jesuit Law School in her testimony. She is concerned that she and others who have spoken to her must come up with $3000 for contraception (which appears to be over the period of time that she is enrolled in school). She claims that contraception is not easily available elsewhere, that they are under crushing demand.

Fluke is a reasonable speaker, but her examples were weird. One woman, after being raped, did not go to her medical provider because she figured they would not help her. Another example was a women who used birth control for other reasons, and received the birth control, even though maybe it might be denied.

Her primary point was, she should be able to get the coverage that she wants—including free birth control—at a Catholic University, no matter what.

I am certainly not an expert in the female reproductive system. However, it would make sense that, if a woman needed birth control pills for a reason other than birth control, that would be easily verifiable. It appears as though that was not really an issue, even though many people are arguing that is the main issue, where one person actually argued that more people took birth control to prevent ovarian cancer than took it for birth control.

What we have here is a typical Democratic issue. “I am a victim; my friends are victims. This is what we want; we should get it without any hassle or any extra cost.” And Democrats come to her aid, thankful to talk about anything other than the debt, the deficit and unemployment.

As a side note, Rush Limbaugh made light of this, which he often does, illustrating absurdity by being absurd. However, in between the absurdity, Rush also throws in some actual information. However, Rush has formally apologized for his word choice.

Now, it is doubtful that the Democrats can run with this for the next 10 months. However, expect there to be victim after victim, wedge issue after wedge issue, with a little class warfare thrown in. But do not expect Democrats to tout what Obama has accomplished (and he has accomplished a lot) and do not expect them to talk about Obama’s actual record.

As Rush Limbaugh said 2 weeks ago: "The Democrats don't have one thing they can run on. There's not one aspect of Obama's first term that they can say, 'If you want four more years of this, vote for us.' They have to create fear, hatred, loathing, impugn the character, all that, of Republicans -- and that's what they do."

America's budget process is broken. Our economy and American families are struggling, and the country needs bold reforms and major restructuring, not tinkering at the margins. Obamanomics has left one in six Americans in poverty, and one in four children on food stamps. Millions seek jobs and others have given up.

Meanwhile, my opponent in the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney, had a last-minute conversion. Attempting to distract from his record of tax and fee increases as governor of Massachusetts, poor job creation, and aggressive pursuit of earmarks, he now says he wants to follow my lead and lower individual as well as corporate marginal tax rates.

It's a good start. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. He says his proposed tax cuts would be revenue neutral and, borrowing the language of Occupy Wall Street, promises the top 1% will pay for the cuts. No pro-growth tax policy there, just more Obama-style class warfare.

By contrast, in my first 100 days as president, I'll submit to Congress and work to pass a comprehensive pro-growth and pro-family Economic Freedom Agenda. Here are 10 of its main initiatives:

• Unleash America's energy. I'll approve the Keystone Pipeline for jobs and energy security, and sign an order on day one unleashing America's domestic energy production, allowing states to choose where they want to explore for oil and natural gas and to set their own regulations for hydrofracking.

• Stop job-killing regulation. All Obama administration regulations that have an economic burden over $100 million will be repealed, including the Environmental Protection Agency rule on CO2 emissions that's already shut down six power plants. I'll review all regulations, making sure they use sound science and cost benefit analysis.

• A pro-growth, pro-family tax policy. I'll submit to Congress comprehensive tax policies to strengthen opportunity in our country, with only two income tax rates of 10% and 28%. To help families, I'll triple the personal deduction for children and eliminate the marriage tax penalty.

• Restore America's competitiveness. The corporate tax rate should be halved, to a flat rate of 17.5%. Corporations should be allowed to expense all business equipment and investment. Taxes on corporate earnings repatriated from overseas should be eliminated to bring home manufacturing. I'll take the lead on tort reform to lower costs to consumers.

• Rein in spending. I'll propose spending cuts of $5 trillion over five years, including cuts for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. I'll propose budgets that spend less money each year than prior years, and I'll reduce the nondefense-related federal work force by at least 10%, without replacing them with private contractors.

• Repeal and replace ObamaCare. I'll submit legislation to repeal ObamaCare, and on day one issue an executive order ending related regulatory obligations on the states. I'll work with Congress to replace ObamaCare with competitive insurance choices to improve quality and limit the costs of health care, while protecting those with uninsurable health conditions. In contrast, Gov. Romney signed into law RomneyCare, which provided the model for ObamaCare. Its best-known feature is its overreaching individual health-care mandate. But it shares over a dozen other similarities with ObamaCare and has given Massachusetts the highest health-care premiums in the nation, and longer waits for health care.

• Balance the budget. I'll submit to Congress a budget that will balance within four years and call on Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution which limits federal spending to 18% of GDP.

• Negotiate and submit free trade agreements. Because many Americans work for companies which export, I'll initiate negotiations in the first 100 days and submit to Congress five free trade agreements during my first year in office to increase exports.

• Reform entitlements. I'll cut means-tested entitlement programs by 10% across the board, freeze them for four years, and block grant them to states-as I did as the author of welfare reform in 1996. I'll reform Medicare and Social Security so they are fiscally sustainable for seniors and young people.

• Revive housing. I'll submit plans to Congress to phase out within several years Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's federal housing role, reform and make transparent the Federal Reserve, and allow families whose mortgages are "underwater" to deduct losses from the sale of their home in order to get a fresh start in difficult economic times.

I'll work with Congress and the American people to once again create an economic environment where hard work is rewarded, equal opportunity exists for all, and families providing for their children can once again be optimistic about their future.

John Barrasso, NTU and FreedomWorks sign off on plan to reduce spending and balance the budget

Florida Congressman Connie Mack's plan to reduce the size and scope of the federal government and balance the budget by 2019 continued to build momentum Friday, as both a U.S. senator and prominent conservative groups backed his One Percent Spending Reduction Act of 2011.

The proposal, which is being sponsored in the U.S. Senate by Republican Mike Enzi of Wyoming, also has the backing of tea party favorite U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and three of Mack's Sunshine State Republican colleagues in the House: Jeff Miller, Dennis Ross and Allen West. It would mandate a 1 percent reduction in federal spending from 2012 until 2017, before imposing a spending cap in 2018. That cap would mandate the total cost of the federal government not to exceed 18 percent of the total Gross Domestic Product. Enzi maintains that the proposal, which backers have labeled the Penny Plan, would cut $7.5 trillion from the federal government over the next decade.

On Friday, Enzi's Republican colleague from Wyoming -- U.S. Sen. John Barrasso -- said he was backing the proposal.

"As more and more senators voice their support of the Penny Plan, it is becoming clear that a core of fiscally conscious conservatives are willing to do what it takes to stop the out-of-control, reckless spending in Washington," insisted Mack on Friday. "Senator Barrasso knows that we must get serious about our debt crisis, which every day threatens to destabilize our economy even further. When it comes to Washington's budget woes, voters have repeatedly said `enough is enough.' I am proud that Senator Barrasso has joined us in this fight for a return to fiscal sanity.

"At a time when so many in our nation are hurting financially, the federal government needs to do its part to cut spending," added Mack. "The Penny Plan is a straightforward answer to our nation's overspending problem that asks government to eliminate only one penny from every dollar it spends -- a simple solution that all Americans can rally behind."

The proposal also won the backing of the conservative National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and FreedomWorks, a Washington-based tea party movement organization led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey.

"The One Percent Spending Act is a valuable component of a comprehensive `cut, cap and balance' approach that addresses our immediate needs for spending restraint as well as our enduring structural weaknesses," said Brandon Greife of NTU. "NTU is pleased to endorse this legislation and any roll call votes will be significantly weighted in our annual Rating of Congress."

"Washington is on an unprecedented spending binge. Our national debt has skyrocketed to nearly $14.4 trillion. The Republican Study Committee has listed the One Percent Spending Reduction Act as a bold solution in their `cut, cap and balance' proposal letter to House leadership," noted Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks. "The letter states that it would be fiscally irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without immediate spending cuts, enforceable total-spending caps and a balanced budget amendment. Rep. Mack's `Penny Plan' should be considered as the second part of the RSC's `cut, cap, and balance' approach for the debt ceiling in order to put federal spending on the path to a balanced budget."

"The support for the Penny Plan is continuing to grow across the country, today gaining support from the National Taxpayers Union, as we draw closer to President Obama's Aug. 2 debt-ceiling deadline. Every time Washington spends more money, our freedom and security are in jeopardy. Voters have continually said `enough is enough' when it comes to Washington's appetite for spending, and it is time Congress listens," said Mack. " I am proud to have the support of FreedomWorks and the great work of their chairman, leader Dick Armey. Our deficits and debt hang around us like an albatross, and last November American voters sent a clear message to their elected officials that `enough is enough' when it comes to Washington's appetite for spending."

The major issue of the presidential campaign in 2012 is not jobs. It's not Iran. It's not the jihad.

The most important issue facing Americans is the chaos. and I mean that word "chaos". in government spending.

Listen to this. Fannie Mae, the government sponsored agency that provides housing loans to lower income Americans, now asking for $4.6 billion dollars more in federal aid to cover their deficit. At this point, Fannie Mae is costing the American taxpayer $100 billion dollars, yet the agency wants more.

So let's go back to July 14th, 2008, when Congressman Barney Frank was oversight authority on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said this:

REP. BARNEY FRANK (D), MASSACHUSETTS: I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under, they are not the best investments these days from the long- term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.

They're in the housing market. I do think their prospects going forward are very solid. And, in fact, we are going to do some things that are going to improve them.

Obviously, Frank was wrong. Then he lied about it on this program and then I scolded him. We don't need to replay that again. I'm sure you remember what happened.

Combined, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have received more than $150 billion dollars from the Treasury Department. But, again, it's not enough. Fannie wants more.

And then there is another looming green disaster. You already know about Solyndra, which cost the American taxpayer about $500 million dollars. But you have heard about Abound Solar based in Colorado?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Today, I'm announcing that the Department of Energy is awarding nearly $2 billion dollars in conditional commitments to two solar companies. The second company is Abound Solar Manufacturing, which will manufacture advanced solar panels at two new plants, creating more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.

O'REILLY: Well, those permanent jobs weren't so permanent. This week, Abound Solar announced it's laying off half its workforce, nearly 200 employees. Another fiscal disaster.

American voters have to wise up and fast. This country is wasting an enormous amount of money. We owe $16 trillion dollars. That figure could rise to $20 trillion over the next few years. But little is being done to stop the madness.

"Talking Points" has said this before. the way to stabilize federal spending is for Congress to pass the same spending level we had in 2008. Obviously, you have to exempt Medicare because of the expenses. But, otherwise, it's doable.

But, no, Congress and the President are actually increasing government spending this year.

Hear me well. Deficit spending is the major issue facing the nation now. And President Obama is not confronting it. The Democratic Party is not doing anything about it. And the Republican Party is not selling the urgency of the situation.

The Quick List: After this list is more detail description of each name and their personal situation. There are a lot of actors on this list, and the only reason I kept them on here, is that often they speak on behalf of political movements, and therefore, their background must be understood.

▪ S. Daniel Abraham, billionaire founder of Slim-Fast. Joined the Army at the age of 18 and fought in Europe during World War II. Did not attend college.

▪ Roman Abramovich, richest man in Russia, billionaire. Dropped out of college. He studied at the Moscow State Auto Transport Institute before taking a leave of absence from academics to go into business. He later earned a correspondence degree from the Moscow State Law Academy

▪ Calpernia Adams, showgirl, transsexual. Never attended college. As she noted, "My parents thought that college leads you away from God, so they hadn't saved any money."

▪ Sheldon Adelson, billionaire casino owner. Dropped out of City College of New York to become a court reporter. He made his first fortune doing trade shows.

▪ Mortimer Adler, author, educator, editor. Left high school at the age of 15 to work. Later received his high school equivalency degree and attended Columbia University.

▪ Ferran Adria, chef. Has been called the world's greatest chef. Did not finish high school.

▪ Ben Affleck, actor, screenwriter. Left the University of Vermont after one semester; then dropped out of Occidental College to pursue acting.

▪ Andre Agassi, tennis player, winner of 8 Grand Slam titles. Quit school in the ninth grade and turned tennis pro at the age of 16. His father would drive the kids to school but, instead, actually took them to local tennis courts to practice.

▪ Dianna Agron, actress. "I didn't take the typical path and go to college after high school. Instead, I saved up money from teaching dance classes and moved to L.A."

▪ Danny Aiello, actor. Dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to join the army. Later received a high school equivalency degree.

▪ Troy Aikman, Superbowl-winning football quarterback, TV sports commentator. In 2009, he finally graduated from UCLA, 20 years after leaving college to play in the National Football League. Aikman had promised his mother, when he left school just two courses shy of a degree, that he would return and finish. In 2009, at the age of 42, he finally fulfilled that commitment, earning A's in his last two courses, thus earning a bachelor's degree in sociology.

▪ Malin Akerman, model, actress. Enrolled in York University (Toronto) but left after about a year to see what else was out there. She moved to Los Angeles to become an actress.

▪ Dennis Albaugh, billionaire founder of pesticide company Albaugh Inc. Earned a 2-year agriculture business degree from Des Moines Community College. Did not continue on to a 4-year degree.

▪ Edward Albee, playwright. Dropped out of Trinity College after three semesters.

▪ Paul Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, founder of Xiant software, owner of Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trailblazers. Dropped out of Washington State to start up Microsoft with Bill Gates.

▪ Woody Allen, screenwriter, actor, director, and producer. Was thrown out of New York University after one semester for poor grades. Also dropped out of City College of New York. As he admitted, "I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics final. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

▪ Steven-Elliot Altman, author. Left school at the beginning of the 10th grade and ran away from home. Entered college at the age of 16 and earned a degree at 19.

▪ Wally "Famous" Amos, multimillionaire cookie entrepreneur, author, talent agent. Dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to join the U.S. Air Force.

▪ Hans Christian Andersen, short story author, fairy tales. Left home at the age of 14 to find work. Later attended Copenhagen Univesity.

▪ Paul Thomas Anderson, director of such movies as "Boogie Nights" and "Magnolia." He attended film school at New York University but quit after two days because one professor dissed "Terminator 2" and another gave him a C for a writing assignment.

▪ Walter Anderson, publisher, editor. High school dropout who later earned an equivalency degree.

▪ Mario Andretti, race-car driver, author. High school dropout who later earned an equivalency degree.

▪ Julie Andrews, Oscar-winning actress, singer, author. Dropped out of high school.

▪ "Jennifer Aniston says getting a nose job was the best thing she ever did. But keep in mind, she didn't go to college, her marriage failed, her mom hates her, and she was in that Kevin Costner movie." - Danielle Fishel, The Dish

▪ Billie Joe Armstrong, front man for Green Day punk rock band. High school dropout. As he noted, "I finally realized that high school didn't make any sense for me then. So I quit."

▪ Peter Arnell, advertising executive. Never attended college. Talked his way into the advertising business after graduating from high school.

▪ Eddy Arnold, country music singer and member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was 11 when his father died, so he turned to singing at church picnics and other venues to support his family. By the age of 17, he was singing in nearby honky-tonks and made his first radio appearance. He debuted at the Grand Ole Opry in 1943. Between 1945 and 1983, 145 of his songs made the country charts, with 28 of them at #1. He sold more than 85 million records.

▪ Cliff Arquette, aka Charlie Weaver. Comedian, entertainer. High school dropout.

▪ Danni Ahse, multimillionaire businesswoman, adult entertainment website operator, model, producer, dancer. High school dropout who later earned an equivalency degree.

▪ Brooke Astor, wealthy socialite, author, philanthropist. Dropped out of high school.

▪ John Jacob Astor, multimillionaire businessman. America's first multimillionaire. High school dropout.

▪ Jane Austen, novelist. She and her sister attended schools in Oxford, Southampton, and Reading until the age of 11. After that time, their father taught them at home. Did not attend college.

▪ "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, wrestler, actor. Dropped out of the University of North Texas a few credits shy of a physical education degree.

▪ Gene Autry, singing cowboy, actor, songwriter, producer, businessman, author, baseball team owner. High school dropout.

▪ Dan Aykroyd, actor, comedian. Dropped out of Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.

▪ Jimmy Santiago Baca, poet, activist, and filmmaker. At a young age, he ran away from the orphanage and lived on the streets, spending some time in juvenile detention centers. Before he was imprisoned for seven years for a narcotics conviction (a charge he's denied), he was functionally illiterate. During his time in prison, he taught himself to read and write, eventually earning a GED. Baca has written ten books of poetry, a memoir, a book of essays, a book of short stories, a play, and a screenplay for the 1993 film Bound by Honor.

▪ Lucille Ball, actress, comedienne, producer. Co-founder of Desilu Studios. Late bought out her husband's share to become the first woman to own and run a production studio. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Steve Ballmer, billionaire chief of Microsoft. Graduated from college, but dropped out of the Stanford MBA program to join Microsoft.

▪ Tyra Banks, supermodel, TV host, and TV producer. Applied to college and was accepted by many colleges but deferred college when she received an offer to be a model in Paris.

▪ Brigitte Bardot, actress, model, author, animal rights activist. High school dropout.

▪ Etta Moten Barnett, singer, actress. Dropped out of high school to get married, but six years later attended and graduated from the University of Kansas.

▪ Ronald Baron, billionaire money manager, founder of Baron Capital. Dropped out of George Washington University law school to pursue a career on Wall Street.

▪ Roseanne Barr, actress, comedienne, producer, director. High school dropout.

▪ Fantasia Barrino, singer, actress, American Idol winner. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Drew Barrymore, actress, producer, and director. High school dropout. Never attended college.

▪ John Bartlett, author and publisher, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Did not attend college, but ended up owning the University Bookstore at Harvard University.

▪ Donald Barthelme, bestselling short story author, college professor, museum director, newspaper reporter. "After experimenting with college, journalism, and marriage in Houston, he got sick of the provinces and lit out for New York City at 31." (Time magazine). Although he continued to take classes at the University of Houston after serving in the army, he never received a degree.

▪ Eike Batista, billionaire mining executive. Studied matallurgy at the University of Aachen, Germany. Dropped out of college. Now one of the top 10 richest men in the world.

▪ Billy Beane, baseball player, general manager, and statistician. Turned down a scholarship to Stanford to play as a professional baseball player.

▪ Warren Beatty, Oscar-winning director, actor, producer, and screenwriter. Dropped out of Northwestern University after his freshman year to attend Stella Adler's Conservatory of Acting. Beatty is one of the few people ever to receive Oscar nominations in the Best Picture, Actor, Directing and Writing categories from a single film (he did it twice for Heaven Can Wait and Reds).

▪ T. Bubba Bechtol, comedian and radio show host. Transferred to the University of Southern Mississippi his junior year but left soon thereafter. As he notes, "There was one course I was looking for that wasn't in the curriculum catalog: How to Make Money. So I left." Nonetheless, he was inducted into the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College Hall of Fame in 2005.

▪ Boris Becker, tennis player. Did not complete high school or attend college.

▪ Kate Beckinsale, actress. Dropped out of Oxford University to pursue her acting career. Starred in Nothing But the Truth, Much Ado About Nothing, Snow Angels, Winged Creatures, Van Helsing, Whiteout, and the Underworld series.

▪ Natasha Bedingfield, singer. Dropped out of college after her freshman year to pursue a music career. Her Unwritten album debuted at #1 in England.

▪ Anne Beiler, multimillionaire co-founder of Auntie Anne's Pretzels restaurants. High school dropout.

▪ Art Bell, radio talk-show host, author. Dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to join the U.S. Air Force.

▪ André Benjamin, aka André 3000, rapper, singer, songwriter, actor, member of OutKast. Dropped out of high school but later earned a high school equivalency degree.

▪ Robert Bergman, portrait photographer. Dropped out of the University of Minnesota.

▪ Irving Berlin, Oscar-winning songwriter, composer. When his father died when he was 8 years old, he had to work to survive. Wrote such long-lasting hits as God Bless America, White Christmas, There's No Business Like Show Business, etc.

▪ Carl Bernstein, Watergate reporter, Washington Post. Never finished college. Started as a copy boy at the Washington Star at the age of 16.

▪ Yogi Berra, baseball player, coach, and manager. Quit school in the eighth grade.

▪ Claude Berri, Oscar-winning French director, actor, screenwriter, and producer. High school dropout.

▪ Chuck Berry, rock singer. High school dropout, left in the 11th grade. Received high school equivalency degree at the age of 37. Attended cosmetology school for awhile when yournger.

▪ Halle Berry, Oscar-winning actress. After high school, she moved to Chicago to pursue a career in modeling. Did not attend college.

▪ Luc Besson, French director, screenwriter, and producer. Dropped out of high school. Never attended college.

▪ Jessica Biel, actress. Did not graduate from college. In an interview in Glamour magazine, she said that leaving college was one the toughest choices she ever made: "I do still have a desire, a pang in my heart, when I think about it and the fact that I didn't spend my four years with my friends."

▪ William Bishop, actor. Enrolled at West Virginia University but got involved in summer theater and left college to tour with a Tobacco Road theater production. Later went to Hollywood and signed an MGM contract.

▪ Robert Bisson, founder, EarthWater Global. Had about four years of college spread over seven universities, but he never earned an undergraduate degree.

▪ Clint Black, Grammy-winning country singer, songwriter, record producer, actor. Dropped out of Stratford High School in Houston, Texas to play in his brother's band.

▪ Karen Black, actress, screenwriter, producer, singer, songwriter. Left high school to get married. Soon divorced and entered Northwestern University at the age of 16. Left college at 17 to pursue an acting career in New York City.

▪ Norman Blake, guitarist, singer, and songwriter. Did not finish high school.

▪ William Blake, poet, artist. Never attended school, educated at home by his mother.

▪ Mary J. Blige, Grammy-winning singer, songwriter, record producer, actress. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Timonthy Blixseth, billionaire founder of Yellowstone Club. Skipped college, failed as a professional songwriter. Made his first fortune as a timberland investor. At the age of 15, he bought 3 donkeys for $75 and resold them a week later as pack mules.

▪ Orlando Bloom, actor, Left high school at the age of 16 to study acting. Later won a scholarship to the British American Dramatic Academy.

▪ Peter Bogdanovich, director, screenwriter, actor, author. High school dropout. Began studying acting with Stella Adler when he was only 16.

▪ William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, aka Henry McCarty, outlaw legend. Orphaned as a teenager, he never finished high school.

▪ Sonny Bono, singer, actor, songwriter, U.S. congressman. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Bjorn Borg, tennis player. Joined the professional tennis circuit when he was 14. Never finished high school or attended college.

▪ David Bowie, singer, songwriter, actor, record producer. Sold 136 million records. May not have graduated from high school. Did not attend college.

▪ Ray Bradbury, science fiction author. Never went to college. "I never went to college. I went to the library."

▪ Stan Brakhage, experimental filmmaker. Dropped out of Dartmouth College after a few months to make films.

▪ Russell Brand, comedian and actor. After high school, he attended two drama schools in London but got kicked out of both of them.

▪ Marlon Brando Jr., Oscar-winning actor. Expelled from Libertyville High School for riding his motorcycle through the school. Later attended Shattuck Military Academy but was also expelled from there. Was invited to come back, but he decided not to finish school.

▪ Richard Branson, billionaire founder of Virgin Music, Virgin Atlantic Airways, and other Virgin enterprises, balloonist. Left high school when he was 16.

▪ Ralph Braun, founder of BraunAbility, inventor of battery-powered scooters and wheelchair lifts. Attended college at Indiana State for a year, but dropped out.

▪ Jacques Brel, Belgium singer, songwriter, actor, and director. Did not finish high school. Never attended college.

▪ Sergey Brin, billionaire co-founder of Google. Dropped out of Stanford Ph.D. program in computer science to start Google in 1998 working out of a friend's garage. He did earn a masters degree.

▪ Christie Brinkley, aka Christie Lee Hudson, model, actress, political activist. After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, she moved to the Left Bank of Paris, France.

▪ Joseph Brodsky, Nobel prize-winning Russian poet and essayist, Poet Laureate of the U.S. from 1991 to 1992. Left school at the age of 15 and tried to enter the School of Submariners, but was not accepted.

▪ Edgar Bronfman Jr., billionaire heir to the Seagram liquor fortune. Skipped college to pursue a career as a songwriter and movie producer, but soon began running the Seagram corporation.

▪ Charles Bronson, actor. He was 10 when his father died, and he went to work in the coal mines to help support the family.

▪ Gary Brooker, singer, songwriter, founder of Procol Harum rock band. Did not finish high school.

▪ Louise Brooks, actress, dancer, model, showgirl. Began dancing at the age of 16. Never finished high school.

▪ Pierce Brosnan, actor. He left school in England at the age of 15 to draw and paint. He also did odd jobs like washing dishes, cleaning houses, and driving a cab. But, as he noted, "Once I found the world of theater, I was off to the races!"

▪ Herbert Brown, Nobel Prize-winning chemist. Dropped out of high school to support his family. Later return to school and graduated from high school and college.

▪ James Joseph Brown, mining engineer, husband of Unsinkable Molly Brown. Self-educated.

▪ Margaret "Molly" Brown, socialite, philanthropist, social activist, survivor of the Titanic. High school dropout.

▪ V. V. Brown, singer. After attending a top-line prep school, she left England at the age of 18 to got to Los Angeles to make an album. Later returned to England but never went to college.

▪ Carla Bruni, folk singer, songwriter, model, and first lady of France. After graduating from high school, she went to Paris to study art and architecture, but left school at the age of 19 to pursue modeling.

▪ Joy Bryant, model, singer, surfer, snowboarder. Dropped out of Yale University to become a Victoria's Secret model and, later, the face of CoverGirl.

▪ Peter Buffett, musician, author, son of Warren Buffett. Dropped out of Stanford University to make music. "When I turned 19, I received my inheritance. . My inheritance came to me around the time I was finally committing to the pursuit of a career in music. . I decided to leave Stanford and use my inheritance to buy the time it would take to figure out if I could make a go of it in music."

▪ Warren Buffett, billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. Dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania after two years. But later he did get his bachelor's degree and MBA.

▪ Gisele Caroline Bündchen, Brazilian multimillionaire supermodel. High school dropout. Left home at the age of 14 to begin her modeling career. Moved to New York City at the age of 16 to continue her career as a model. "Reading things is so important to me-things that can open up your mind. You need to feed your mind."

▪ Ronald Burkle, billionaire supermarket owner and investor, Yucaipa. Dropped out of California State Polytechnic University and returned home to work in a Stater Brothers grocery store. Had started early stocking shelves; joined union local as a box boy at age 13.

▪ Abner Burnett, singer, guitarist. High school dropout who later earned an equivalency diploma.

▪ Pete Burns, singer, songwriter, member of Dead or Alive rock band, reality TV star. Elementary school dropout.

▪ Robert Byrd, U.S. senator. Graduated from high school but could not afford to attend college.

▪ David Byrne, singer and songwriter, member of Talking Heads rock band. Dropped out of the Rhode Island School of Design after one year to form the Talking Heads. He also attend the Maryland Institute College of Art for one year only.

▪ James Francis Byrnes, U.S. representative, U.S. senator, Supreme Court justice, U.S. secretary of state, South Carolina governor. At the age of 14, he left St. Patrick's Catholic school to apprentice in a law office. Never attended college or law school.

▪ James Cagney, actor, song-and-dance man. Worked from the age of 14 as an office boy, janitor, package wrapper, and finally vaudeville dancer.

▪ James Cameron, Oscar-winning director, producer, and screenwriter. Dropped out of California State University, Fullerton. Then took up street racing while working as a truck driver and a high school janitor, eventually getting a job building models for Roger Corman's New World Pictures.

▪ Ben Nighthorse Campbell, U.S. representative and senator. Dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to join the U.S. Air Force, where he earned his GED. Later attended and graduated from San Jose State College.

▪ Jack Cardiff, cinematographer. His formal education was spotty because his family moved every week or so. He started in the movie business as a gofer and later graduated to camera work.

▪ George Carlin, comedian, author 4-time Grammy winner. Never finished high school. As he noted, "The fact that I didn't finish school left me with a lifelong need to prove that I'm smart." He also noted, "When you're a dropout and the culture accepts you and begins to quote you and teach your stuff in class and textbooks, this is my honorary baccalaureate."

▪ Kitty Carlisle, actress, panelist on To Tell the Truth. "I went to boarding schools in Lausanne. And then I went to school in Neuilly. I stopped school when I was about 16. I went to Rome to come out. I never got any degrees or anything, but I am better educated than people who went to college."

▪ John Carmack, founder of Armadillo Aerospace, cofounder of Id Software (sold 10 million copies of Dome and Quake games). At the age of 14, he was sent to a juvenile home after breaking into a school to steal an Apple II computer. Quit college early to become a game programmer.

▪ Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist. Elementary school dropout. Started work at the age of 13 as a bobbin boy in a textile mill. One of the first mega-billionaires in the U.S.

▪ Scott Carpenter, astronaut. He twice flunked out of the University of Colorado.

▪ Adam Carolla, comedian, radio/TV personality, podcast superstar. "He was a wrong-side-of-the-tracks North Hollywood high-school graduate who could barely read and who worked a series of menial jobs before breaking into radio and then TV" (Fast Company). Did not attend college.

▪ Julia Carson, U.S. congress representative, did not graduate from college. She was the first woman and first African American to represent Indianapolis.

▪ Amon G. Carter, multimillionaire oilman, civic promoter, newspaper publisher, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Never finished eighth grade.

▪ Maverick Carter, CEO of LRMR. Didn't finish his sports management degree at Western Michigan University. Instead, he apprenticed for a year and a half under a basketball senior director.

▪ Tom Carvel, inventor of the soft-serve ice cream machine, founder of Carvel ice cream stores. Did not attend college. Before he began selling ice cream, he was an auto mechanic, Dixieland band drummer, and test driver for Studebaker.

▪ Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable.com. Founded the blog website when he was 19. Retired from active blogging three years later.

▪ John Catsimatidis, billionaire oilman and real estate magnate. Studied engineering at NYU but dropped out to help a friend save his family's supermarket business. Owned 10 stores of his own by the age of 24 with $25 million per year in income. During college, he "did not study much. Would not tell my kids that."

▪ Bruce Catton, historian, editor of American Heritage, author. World War I interrupted his studies at Oberlin College. He tried twice after the war to finish college but kept getting pulled away by real jobs at a succession of newspapers.

▪ Coco Chanel (Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel) fashion designer. Left the orphanage at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a cabaret singer.

▪ Charles Chaplin, Oscar-winning actor, screenwriter, producer, director. Dropped out of elementary school.

▪ Dov Charney, founder of American Apparel. Started the company when he was a high school senior. Never attended college.

▪ Gurbaksh Chahal, multimillionaire founder of online ad networks Click Again and BlueLithium. Dropped out of school at the age of 16 to found Click Again.

▪ Chingy, aka Howard Bailey Jr., rapper. Began writing lyrics at the age of 9 and recording raps when he was 10. Never attended college.

▪ Madonna Ciccone, singer, actress. Dropped out of the University of Michigan, where she was studying dance, to move to New York to pursue a singing career.

▪ Grover Cleveland, U.S. president (22nd and 24th). Never attended college. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Winston Churchill, British prime minister, historian, artist. Rebellious by nature, he generally did poorly in school. Flunked sixth grade. After he left Harrow, he applied to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, but it took him three times before he passed the entrance exam. He graduated 8th out of a class of 150 a year and a half later. He never attended college.

▪ Joe Cirulli, founder of GHFC, a multimillion dollar fitness club company. After two years at Corning Community College, he decided to take a year off and travel around the country. Ended up following his girlfriend to Gainesville, Florida, where he started his live in health and fitness.

▪ James H. Clark, billionaire founder of Silicon Graphics and co-founder of Netscape. Dropped out of high school at the age of 17 and entered the Navy. Later took night classes and attended the University of New Orleans, where he earned a Master's degree in physics. He eventually earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah.

▪ Kelly Clarkson, pop singer. Got several college music scholarships but passed on them to move to Los Angeles to pursue a singing career.

▪ Grover Cleveland, U.S. president. Dropped out of school to help his family. Studied law while clerking at a law firm.

▪ Eleanor Clift, reporter, Newsweek. No college degree. Went to night school for several years while working as a secretary.

▪ Hank Cochran, country singer and songwriter. Worked in the oil fields of New Mexico while still a teenager. Then moved to California to sing before moving to Nashville and building a career as a songwriter of such hits as "I Fall to Pieces," "Make the World Go Away," and "She's Got You." Never graduated from high school.

▪ Paulo Coelho, songwriter, bestselling novelist. Was institutionalized from age 17 to 20. He later enrolled in law school but dropped out after one year, became a hippie, traveled the world,and later worked as a songwriter before writing his first novel. His

▪ Bram Cohen, developer of BitTorrent. He left the State University of New York at Buffalo for one year and then left. As he noted, "Were I to have to redo high school, I would just drop out immediately."

▪ Taylor Cole, actress and model. Started modeling after graduating from high school.

▪ Toni Collette, actress. Quit high school at the age of 16 to study musical theater at Australia's National Institute for Dramatic Art, but then left school there after she got her first paying gigs.

▪ Patrick Collison, software wizard. Dropped out of MIT during his freshman year to help two friends develop and eventually sell Auctomatic for millions of dollars.

▪ Christopher Columbus, explorer, discover of America. Little formal education. Home schooled.

▪ Christine Comaford-Lynch, founder of Artemis Ventures (venture capital firm) and Mighty Ventures. Dropped out of high school. Later also dropped out of the University of California at San Diego and UCLA. Dabbled as a model, trained as a geisha, spent years as a Buddhist monk, dated Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. She is the author of Rules of Renegades.

▪ Sean John Combs, rapper, producer, fashion designer, entertainer, actor, and entrepreneur. Did not finish college. As he said in an interview in Time magazine, "I'm just not that type of person. As soon as I got out of the womb, I was ready to do this. Then there's other times-I'm not really high-tech computer savvy, and there's some things that I do have weaknesses with. I don't know if school would have made that better for me. I'm cool the way I've turned out."

▪ Harry Connick, Jr., Grammy-winning pianist, singer, actor. Has sold over 25 million albums. At the age of 18, he left New Orleans to move to New York City. Did study at Loyola University, Hunter College, and the Manhattan School of Music, but apparently did not graduate.

▪ Kevin Connolly, actor. Skipped college, moved to Los Angeles to live with a bunch of unemployed actors, and finally had success as an actor in Entourage.

▪ Lauren Conrad, reality show actress, bestselling novelist, fashion designer. Moved to Los Angeles fresh out of high school to pursue acting. Never attended college.

▪ Jackie Coogan, actor. Flunked out of Santa Clara University and transferred to the University of Southern California, but never graduated.

▪ Jack Kent Cooke, billionaire media mogul, owner of Washington Redskins football team. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Noel Coward, Oscar-winning actor, playwright, director, producer, composer. Dropped out of elementary school.

▪ Simon Cowell, TV producer, music judge, American Idol, Britain's Got Talent, and The X Factor. A member of Forbes 2008 Celebrity 100, he made $72 million in 2007. He dropped out of school at the age of 16.

▪ James M. Cox, newspaper publisher, 3-term governor of Ohio, presidential nominee in 1920, founded Cox Enterprises. A high school dropout.

▪ Gerard Craft, restaurateur. Dropped out of culinary school, saying "I never did well in the classroom-I got bored." Then worked at a car wash and pool hall.

▪ Cindy Crawford, actress, model, entrepreneur. Graduated high school as the valedictorian. Then studied chemical engineering at Northwestern University for half a year before dropping out to model.

▪ Davy Crockett, frontiersman, U.S. congressman. Less than six months of formal education. Home schooled.

▪ Robert Culp, actor. Bounced around 4 colleges before dropping out and moving to New York to study acting and pursue an acting career.

▪ Charles Culpeper, multimillionaire owner and CEO of Coca Cola. Dropped out of high school

▪ Claire Danes, actress. Left Yale after two years to return to acting, but did say that "College was just so essential for my sense of self and my development."

▪ Sharon Daniels, author, The World of Truth. "Eventually I came to conclude that I could not find real knowledge in academic life, only hierarchies of knowledge that led, ultimately, to more hierarchies, not to more knowledge. I began to see university learning as limited, human, and relative. What was seen as absolutely up-to-date did not consider the infinite and timeless."

▪ Fred N. Davis III, political advertising copywriter and director. Attended drama school in college but never graduated. Left school to take over his family's PR business in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

▪ Rosario Dawson, actress and political activist. Did not graduate from college, but she did take precalculus and calculus at the Cooper Union and a civil-engineering course at Columbia. She is a firm believer in the value of education.

▪ Dorothy Day, journalist, socialist, political activist, pacifist, anarchist, suffragist. Co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a scholarship, but dropped out after two years to move to New York City to become a social activist.

▪ James Dean, actor. Attended Santa Monica College but transferred to UCLA where he dropped out during his sophomore year to pursue a career as an actor.

▪ Jimmy Dean, singer, songwriter, actor, multimillionaire founder of Jimmy Dean Foods. Dropped out of high school to join the Merchant Marines at the age of 16. Later joined the Air Force at the age of 18.

▪ Ellen DeGeneres, comedienne, actress, talk show host. Dropped out of the University of New Orleans. As he noted in an interview with Us Magazine, "I didn't go to no college."

▪ John Paul DeJoria, billionaire co-founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems hair care products and founder of Patron Spirits tequilla. Joined the U.S. Navy right out of high school. After the Navy, he spent time doing many odd jobs, sometimes living out of a car, before finding an entry-level marketing job with Time magazine.

▪ Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, billionaire, among top ten wealthiest Americans. Founded his company out of his college dorm room. Dropped out of the University of Texas to run the company.

▪ Dom DeLuise, comedian, actor. Graduated from high school, but never attended college. Instead, he began acting at the Cleveland Play House.

▪ Patrick Demarchelier, fashion photographer. His stepfather gave him a Kodak camera when he was 17. He started working at a photography store right away and never attended college.

▪ Patrick Dempsey, actor, Dr. McDreamy, juggler, race car driver. Left Maine when he was 17 for a stage-acting career.

▪ Felix Dennis, multimillionaire magazine publisher, Maxim, Blender, and others. Left home before his sixteenth birthday and dropped out of art college.

▪ The bottom line is that if I did it, you can do it. I got rich without the benefit of a college education or a penny of capital but making many errors along the way. I went from being a pauper, a hippie dropout on the dole, living in a crummy room without the proverbial pot to piss in, without even the money to pay the rent, without a clue as to what to do next. to being rich. - Felix Dennis, magazine publisher, How to Get Rich

▪ Richard DeVos, billionaire co-founder of Amway (now Alticor), owner of Orlando Magic basketball team. Served in the Army after high school. Founded Amway along with his best friend Jay Van Andel.

▪ Maria Diaz, CEO and founder of Pursuit of Excellence. Dropped out of college as a recent widow to work three jobs and care for her son. Later worked for Jenny Craig. Then set up a coaching practice that led to founding Pursuit of Excellence.

▪ Leonardo DiCaprio, actor. At the age of 14, he signed with an agent and began doing commercial work as well as acting. He complete high school with a tutor, but put off college. As he has noted, "Life is my college now."

▪ Bo Diddley (Ellas Otha Bates), rock & roll singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Never attended college.

▪ Barry Diller, billionaire, Hollywood mogul, Internet maven, chairman of IAC/InterActive Corp (owner of Ask.com, Ticketmaster, CitySearch, Evite, LendingTree.com, etc.). The son of a wealthy real estate developer, he attended Beverly Hills High School but dropped out of UCLA to work in the mail room of William Morris.

▪ Joe DiMaggio, baseball player, husband of Marilyn Monroe. High school dropout.

▪ Walt Disney, producer, director, screenwriter, animator, developer of Disneyland. Winner of 26 Oscars and 7 Emmy awards. While attending McKinley High School, he also took night classes at the Chicago Art Institute. He dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to join the army. Rejected because he was under aged, he joined the Red Cross and was sent to war in Europe. Upon his return from war, he began his artistic career.

▪ Snoop Dogg, rapper and actor. Never attended college. "A lot of people like to fool you and say that you're not smart if you never went to college, but common sense rules over everything. That's what I learned from selling crack."

▪ Thomas Dolby, musician, composer, music producer. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Robert Downey, Jr., actor. Dropped out of Santa Monica High School during his sophomore year.

▪ Betsy Drake, actress, novelist. Dropped out of high school to model and act. Much later in life, she enrolled at Harvard where she earned a master's degree of education in psychology.

▪ Dominique Dunne, actress. Went to the University of Colorado to study acting, leaving after one year to pursue her career as an actress.

▪ Eliza Dushku, actress. Moved from Boston to Los Angeles at the age of 17 to act.

▪ Tom Dwan, millionaire online poker player. Dropped out of Boston University. He started with a $50 investment and built it into millions playing poker online.

▪ Johnny Earle, founder of Johnny Cupcakes. Dropped out of music school to sell limited-edition T-shirts out of the trunk of his '89 Camry.

▪ Steve Earle, singer, songwriter, actor, playwright. At 16, he dropped out of college to become a songwriter.

▪ George Eastman, multimillionaire inventor and founder of Kodak. High school dropout.

▪ Clint Eastwood, Oscar-winning actor, director, and producer. Attended at least half a dozen schools and excelled at none of them. Enrolled at Los Angeles City College, but never graduated. Among other jobs, he bagged groceries, delivered papers, fought forest fires, and dug swimming pools. Also worked as a steelworker and logger.

▪ Mark Ecko, founder urbanwear company Mark Ecko Enterprises. Left Rutgers University during his third year to start his company with his sister, Marci, who also left college to work on the business.

▪ Thomas Edison, multimillionaire inventor of the phonograph, light bulb, and many other inventions. He quit formal schooling after his teacher called him addled. Was home-schooled by his mother.

▪ Zac Efron, actor, singer. Has not attended college, but also has not ruled out more study.

▪ William Eggleston, photographic artist. A major retrospective of his work opened in November, 2008, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He attended Vanderbilt and the University of Mississippi without graduating. At Ole Miss, he did study painting which eventually led to his interest in artistic photography.

▪ Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle software company. Dropped out of the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

▪ Queen Elizabeth II, queen of England. Tutored at the palace. Did not attend school.

▪ Philip Emeagwali, supercomputer scientist. High school dropout: left school in native Nigeria due to war but later earned an equivalency degree. Won a scholarship to Oregon College of Education but transferred after one year to Oregon State University.

▪ Eminem, rapper. Has a limited formal education, but "by the time I was 18 I had probably read the dictionary front to back like 10 times."

▪ Israel Englander, billionaire hedge fund manager, Millennium Partners. Dropped out of NYU's MBA program to work as a floor manager at the American Stock Exchange.

▪ Tom Epperson, novelist and screenwriter. After taking some classes at Henderson State University in Arkansas, he dropped out and headed for New York City to become a novelist. Four years later, he headed to Los Angeles to write screenplays.

▪ Shawn Fanning, developer of Napster. Dropped out of Northeastern University when 19 to move to Silicon Valley to further develop Napster.

▪ William Faulkner, Nobel and Pulitzer prize-winning novelist. Dropped out of high school after his second year. Also later attended but dropped out of the University of Mississippi.

▪ Perry Farrell (Peretz Bernstein), musician, Jane's Addiction, Porno for Pyros, and Satellite Party. Also producer and founder of the Lollapalooza music tour. Never attended college.

▪ Arash Ferdowsi, cofounder, DropBox.com. Dropped out of MIT to start up DropBox.com.

▪ Craig Ferguson, late night talk show host. As he noted recently, "Economists are saying that a college degree may not be necessary to succeed in life. Look at me, I didn't go to college and here I am. Seriously kids, go to college."

▪ Mel Ferrer, actor, director, producer, husband of Audrey Hepburn. Dropped out of Princeton to get into acting.

▪ Sally Field, Oscar-winning and Emmy-winning actress. Never attended college.

▪ Debbi Fields, founder of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Founded the company when she was a 21-year-old mother with no business experience. Did not graduate from college.

▪ 50 Cent, rapper. Did not attend college. As he noted, "If I had a choice, I would've been a college kid. I would've majored in business."

▪ Millard Fillmore, U.S. president. Six months of formal schooling. Studied law while a legal clerk for a judge and law firm. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ David Filo, billionaire co-founder of Yahoo! Dropped out of Stanford University PhD program to create Yahoo!

▪ Carly Fiorina, CEO, Hewlett-Packard. Disappointed her parents by dropping out of law school after one semester.

▪ Eddie Fisher, singer and actor. Never attended college. Began his singing career while still in high school.

▪ Sean Flynn, actor, photojournalist. Son of Errol Flynn, Sean left Duke University after his freshman year to star in The Son of Captain Blood. He later became a famous photojournalist covering the Vietnam War where he apparently died (MIA and still unaccounted for).

▪ Harrison Ford, actor. Dropped out of Ripon College. He worked as a carpenter for almost ten years before finding success as an actor in Star Wars and other movies.

▪ Henry Ford, billionaire founder of Ford Motor Company. Received only a modest rural education. Left his home on the farm to work as an apprentice machinist in Detroit, Michigan. Later ran a sawmill and became a chief engineer for Edison Illuminating Company before starting the Ford Motor Company.

▪ George Foreman, heavyweight champion boxer, author, designer of the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine. Quit school in the ninth grade, but did get his GED. Never attended college.

▪ Charles Forman, founder of iminlikewithyou social networking website. Left home when he was 18 to work in Korea and Japan as a programmer.

▪ John Forsythe, actor. He won an athletic scholarship to the University of North Carolina but he left after three years to pursue a career in show business. He started out as an announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers and then, noting that he liked to eat in the winter, left to pursue acting.

▪ Sutton Foster, Tony award-winning actress, singer, and dancer. Attended Carnegie Mellon University for one year and then left to pursue a theatrical career full-time.

▪ Andrew Fox, Internet entrepreneur, multi-millionaire. A high school dropout.

▪ Megan Fox, actress. Tested out of high school via correspondence and moved to Los Angeles. Landed a role in a movie after only two months. Never attended college.

▪ Michael J. Fox, actor. Dropped out of high school. Co-starred in a Canadian television series at the age of 15. Left Canada at the age of 18 to go to Hollywood to pursue an acting career.

▪ Dick Francis, novelist, jockey. Never graduated from high school because his father, as noted by the London Times, felt "that a day's hunting or show jumping was more valuable" than formal schooling.

▪ Benjamin Franklin, inventor, scientist, inventor, diplomat, author, printer, publisher, politician, patriot, signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Dropped out of Boston Latin. Home schooled with less than two years of formal education.

▪ Joe Frazier, heavyweight boxing champion. Never finished high school. Left home at the age of 15 to go to New York City.

▪ Markus Frind, software programmer, multimillionaire founder of Plenty of Fish dating website. Graduated from technical school with a two-year degree in computer programming. Did not attend any further higher education.

▪ R. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, visionary, philosopher, poet, architect, futurist. He never finished college, after being expelled from Harvard twice (one involving some chorus girls).

▪ J. B. Fuqua, industrialist, philanthropist. Never attended college, but learned about business by checking out books from the Duke University library through the mail. Later donated $36 million to support a business school at Duke.

▪ Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, rock singer and songwriter. Dropped out of NYU to pursue her music career full time.

▪ Melody Gardot, singer and songwriter. At the age of 19, while studying fashion at the Community College of Philadelphia, she was injured in a serious automobile accident that left her unable to continue college.

▪ Brad Garrett, actor, comedian. Left UCLA after six weeks to do standup comedy.

▪ Bill Gates, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, one of the richest men in the world, philanthropist. Dropped out of Harvard after his second year. As he noted, "I realized the error of my ways and decided I could make do with a high school diploma."

▪ Richard Gere, Golden Globe-winning actor. Dropped out of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst after two years.

▪ David Geffen, billionaire founder of Geffen Records and co-founder of DreamWorks. Dropped out of the University of Texas at Austin after his freshman year. Also flunked out of Brooklyn College. Admittedly, "I was a lousy student." Started work by sorting mail at the William Morris Agency.

▪ Alan Gerry, billionaire cable TV executive, philanthropist. Dropped out of high school during World War II to join the Marines. Trained as a TV repairman on the GI bill. Launched his cable business with $1,500 in 1956.

▪ J. Paul Getty, billionaire oilman, once the richest man in the world. Failed to graduate from the University of Southern California, Berkley, or Oxford University.

▪ Amadeo Peter Giannini, multimillionaire founder of Bank of America. High school dropout.

▪ William Gibson, science fiction novelist, first to use the word cyberspace. Was orphaned at the age of 18. To avoid the draft and the war in Vietnam, he moved to Canada where he worked odd jobs. Years later he finally finished his first novel, Neuromancer. Never attended college.

▪ Daniel Gilbert, psychology professor at Harvard University. Dropped out of high school but later earned an equivalency diploma.

▪ Dizzy Gillespie, musician, songwriter. Dropped out of high school but later received an honorary diploma from the high school he attended.

▪ Jackie Gleason, actor and comedian. With 36 cents in his pocket, he left home after his mom died while he was still in his teens. He soon moved beyond amateur night shows and began working as a professional. He never finish high school.

▪ John Glenn, astronaut, U.S. senator. Did not finish at Muskingum College in Ohio. According to Wikipedia, "In April 1959, despite the fact that Glenn failed to earn the required college degree, he was assigned to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of the original group of Mercury astronauts."

▪ Whoopi Goldberg, Oscar-winning actress, comedienne, talk show host. Dropped out of high school after getting hooked on heroin. Got cleaned up at the age of 20. Worked as a bricklayer and trained as a beautician before hitting it big as a comedienne.

▪ Hyman Golden, multimillionaire cofounder of Snapple. A high school dropout and one-time window washer.

▪ Barry Goldwater, U.S. senator and presidential candidate. He dropped out of the University of Arizona after one year to take over the family department store.

▪ Bob Goodson, CEO, YouNoodle.com. Dropped out of Oxford University where he was studying for a master's degree in medieval literature and philosophy.

▪ Alex Gordon, professional baseball player. "What would I do if I weren't a ballplayer? I would have finished college. I went to Nebraska, and I'm good with animals, so being a veterinarian would have been cool. I looked into it in college, but I was so busy with baseball that I didn't have time for it."

▪ Steffi Graf, tennis star. Turned professional in her teens when she ran out of players good enough to challenge her. Never attended college.

▪ Kelsey Grammar, actor. Attended Juilliard for two years but was kicked out for poor attendance. Went on to acting success in Cheers, Frasier, and Back to You television shows.

▪ Cary Grant, Oscar-winning actor. High school dropout. Left home at the age of 16 to become an acrobat and later an actor.

▪ W.T. Grant, multimillionaire founder of W.T. Grant department store chain. High school dropout.

▪ Horace Greeley, newspaper editor and publisher, U.S. congressman, presidential candidate, co-founder of the Republican Party. Dropped out of high school.

▪ David Green, billionaire founder of Hobby Lobby, religious philanthropist. Did not attend college. Started the Hobby Lobby chain with a $600 loan.

▪ Mart Green, multimillionaire founder of Mardel retail stores, CEO of Bearing Fruit Communications (aka EthnoGraphic Media), CEO and executive producer for Every Tribe Entertainment, chairman of the board of Oral Roberts University. Dropped out of college after one year. Founded Mardel at the age of 19.

▪ Philip Green, billionaire retail mogul, Topshop. Dropped out of high school to apprentice with a shoe importer.

▪ Gene Hackman, actor. Discharged after six years in the Marines, he entered college as a journalism major but after six months he dropped out for good. Since then he's earned an Academy Award for best actor (The Conversation) and an Academy Award for best supporting actor (Unforgiven).

▪ Aviv Hadar, CEO of Think Brilliant web-development studio and the tech brains behind SoulPanckage. Dropped out of college.

▪ Joyce C. Hall, founder of Hallmark. Started selling greeting cards at the age of 18 while living at a YMCA in Kansas City. Did not attend college.

▪ Harold Hamm, billionaire oil wildcatter, Continental Resources, Hiland Holdings. Left home at the age of 17, finished school a year later. Became a gas jockey before becoming a wildcatter. Never attended college.

▪ college: "I tried college at UCLA. I gave it a fighting effort and I just couldn't do it."

▪ Chelsea Handler, TV host, producer, comedienne, bestselling author. Moved to Los Angeles at the age of 19 to pursue a career as an actress.

▪ Tom Hanks, Oscar-winning actor. Dropped out of CalState University after a few years to work as an intern at the Great Lakes Theater Festival.

▪ William Hanna, cartoonist, Hanna-Barbera. He briefly attended college but dropped out at the beginning of the Great Depression.

▪ Beck Hansen, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist. Dropped out of high school to pursue his musical career.

▪ Elizabeth Hardwick, literary critic and co-founder of The New York Review of Books. Graduated from the University of Kentucky but dropped out of a Columbia University doctoral program.

▪ Martha Matilda Harper, business entrepreneur, founder of the Harper Hair Salons. At the age of seven, she was sent to work as a domestic servant. Worked as a servant for 22 years before saving enough money to start a hair salon. Never attended college.

▪ Melissa Joan Hart, actress, singer, director, producer, candy store operator. Started acting at the age of 3. Appeared in hundreds of commercials before getting the job of acting in the Sabrina TV show. Attended New York University for two years but deferred further studies when she got the TV show.

▪ Sheldon Harvey, Navajo artist, winner of the Best of Show at the 2008 Santa Fe Indian Market. Dropped out of high school to care for his wife and son. "When I dropped out of school, no one in my family thought it was the end of the world. My grandparents were from the old school, traditional people who didn't think an education was necessary to make your way in the world." He later convinced the people at Dine Community College to let him attend even though he had not graduated from high school. He took classes there but apparently did not graduate.

▪ Anne Hathaway, actress, The Princess Diaries. Began acting professionally at the age of 16. Briefly attended Vassar and New York University, but has not graduated from either.

▪ Louise Hay, one of the bestselling authors in history and founder of Hay House. Of other famous women authors, Levine Breaking News has noted, "They did not change the spiritual landscape of America and several of its Western allies. They were not pregnant at 15 and they did not lack high-school diplomas." Louise Hay did.

▪ Amber Heard, actress. Quit a Catholic high school during her junior year to move to Hollywood to become an actress. She quickly landed a small role in Friday Night Lights.

▪ William Randolph Hearst, newspaper publisher and movie producer, was thrown out of Harvard for poor grades (apparently due to heavy partying).

▪ Richard Heckmann, billionaire investor, CEO of U.S. Filter, founder of Heckmann Corporation. Went to college in Hawaii but did not graduate. "I went to Vietnam in '65 and was assigned to the 33rd Air Rescue Squadron. When I came back in '66, I wasn't in any mood to go back to school. I got a job selling insurance." He later attended the Harvard Business School small-company management program.

▪ Diane Hendricks, billionaire co-founder of ABC Supply, the largest supplier of roofing and siding materials to contractors. Never attended college.

▪ Kenneth Hendricks, billionaire co-founder of ABC Supply, the largest supplier of roofing and siding materials to contractors. Dropped out of high school, never attended college, and eventually joined the family roofing company.

▪ Kevin Hendricks, roofing store operator. Skipped college to go into the roofing business. His high school graduation present was $100, a nail bag, and a roofing hammer. Later, he turned a money-losing store into ABC Supply's biggest profit center.

▪ Lance Henriksen, actor. He dropped out of the eighth grade and ran away from home. He barely learned to read. After a stint in the Navy, he did odd jobs such as picking fruit and shrimping. As he began acting, he taught himself to read.

▪ Patrick Henry, Virginia governor, revolutionary patriot. Home schooled. Later studied on his own and became a lawyer.

▪ John Henton, actor, comedian. Never finished at Ohio State University. "I never ended up going back to Ohio State. I just wanted to be a comedian, you know, and I was getting a good response."

▪ Tony Hillerman, mystery novelist. In 1943, he dropped out of college to enter the army. He later returned to college to get his degree and also earn a master's degree.

▪ Paris Hilton, model, realty show star, singer, professional celebrity, socialite, fashion designer. Expelled in her senior year from the Canterbury Boarding School for violating school rules. Later earned her GED. Never attended college.

▪ Cheryl Hines, actress and director. Never attended college. Had a short stint in beauty school.

▪ Stanley Ho, billionaire casino operator, King of Gambling. Dropped out of college.

▪ Lillian Hochberg, founder of Lillian Vernon catalog. Did not attend college. Started the catalog out of her home.

▪ Eric Hoffer, longshoreman, philosopher, and author. A self-educated philosopher, he was at various times a dishwasher, lumberjack, gold prospector, migrant farm worker, and longshoreman. He is author of The True Believer, Working and Thinking at the Waterfront, and Reflections on the Human Condition.

▪ Dustin Hoffman, two-time Oscar-winning actor. Enrolled at Santa Monica College, caught the acting bug after taking an acting class for an easy grade, then left after a year to join the Pasadena Playhouse.

▪ Ernest Holmes, founder of the Science of Mind churches and author of The Science of Mind, ended his formal schooling when he was fifteen.

▪ Katie Holmes, actress. Her acceptance letter for Columbia University came a week after she did the pilot for the Dawson's Creek TV show. She spent the next six years acting in the TV series. She now admits that going to college as a celebrity would be very difficult. "But," she says, "Maybe I could hire a cute professor to home-school me."

▪ Odetta Holmes, the queen of American folk music, singer, songwriter, actress, and human rights activist. Studied music at night at the Los Angeles City College, but did not graduate.

▪ Dennis Hopper, actor. Did not attend college, but did study acting at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego and the Actors' Studio in New York City. When people asked him what school he went to, he would reply "Warner Bros."

▪ Vanessa Hudgens, actress and singer. Homeschooled during high school. Did not attend college. Homeschooling was great for her: "It was nice to stay away from all the drama. I'm not good with catty girls. I'm too laid-back."

▪ John Hughes, director, producer, and screenwriter. Dropped out of Arizona State University in his junior year.

▪ D. L. Hughley, sales manager, actor, comedian. Never finished high school. He got his job as a sales manager by paying "a guy I knew at Cal State Long Beach $100 to tell personnel that I was just a few credits short of graduating from college."

▪ H. Wayne Huizenga, billionaire founder of WMX garbage company, builder of Blockbuster video chain, owner of Miami Dolphins. Skipped college to join the Army. Later dropped out of Calvin College after three semesters. Started business in 1962 with a used garbage truck.

▪ Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, billionaire oilman. Only had a fifth grade education. Worked as a farmhand until he invested $50 in an Arkansas oil field.

▪ Gary Hustwit, author and publisher, Incommunicado Press. Dropped out of San Diego State.

▪ Lauren Hutton, first supermodel, actress. Attended Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans while working at a bar. Met Steve McQueen and got into acting. Dropped out of college.

▪ Don Imus, national radio host, bestselling book author. Dropped out of college after a week.

▪ Julie Inouye, actress, singer, health care advocate. Dropped out of Chico State University after dancer Harold Lang told her that she should be in New York or Los Angeles (after he had heard her sing).

▪ Burl Ives, Oscar-winning actor, folk music singer. Dropped out of Eastern Illinois State Teachers College (now Eastern Illinois University) during his junior year. As he was sitting in an English class listening to a lecture on Beowolf, he realized he was wasting his time and walked out of the class and out of college.

▪ Andrew Jackson, U.S. president, general, attorney, judge, congressman. Orphaned at 14. Home schooled. By the age of 35 without formal education, he became a practicing attorney. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Reggie Jackson, baseball player. Attended Arizona State University for two years before he was drafted by the Kansas City Athletics.

▪ Jane Jacobs, author, political activist, urban planner. After high school, she worked at a variety of office jobs and as a freelance writer. She studied for two years at Columbia University's extension school, but did not graduate.

▪ Micky Jagtiani, billionaire retailer, Landmark International. Flunked several exams and dropped out of accounting school in London. Started out cleaning hotel rooms and driving a taxi. Eventually started a retail business in the Middle East.

▪ Betty Mattas James, CEO, James Industry. Named the Slinky toy. Member of the Toy Industry Hall of Fame. She attended Pennsylvania State University but left when she married Richard James, who later invented the Slinky. More than 300 million Slinkies have been sold.

▪ Josh James, multimillionaire co-founder of Omniture. Dropped out of Brigham Young University during his final semester to co-found MyComputer.com, which became Omniture.

▪ Kevin James, aka Kevin George Knipfing, comedian and actor. Attended the State University of New York at Cortland but dropped out of college after his junior year (after taking a course in public speaking) to perform stand-up comedy.

▪ Brandon Jennings, basketball player. He was the first high school player to skip collage and jump straight into pro basketball in Europe.

▪ Peter Jennings, news anchor, ABC's World News Tonight. Failed the 10th grade. Left high school at 16 to work as a bank teller. He later attributed his failure in high school to boredom and laziness.

▪ Chris Jericho, aka Chris Irvine, WWE world champion wrestler, actor, author, radio and TV host, rock musician. Never attended college.

▪ Steve Jobs, billionaire co-founder of Apple Computers and Pixar Animation; Disney's largest shareholder. Dropped out of Reed College after six months and went to India before returning to Silicon Valley. As he said, "I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and how college was going to help me figure it out."

▪ John Johannesson, founder of Bauger Group fashion retailing group, finished Commercial College in Iceland (the equivalent of something between high school and junior college in the U.S.) and then launched a discount grocery with his father.

▪ Andrew Johnson, U.S. president, vice-president. Never attended college. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Bruce Johnson, cosmetologist and owner of Avatar Salon & Wellness Spa. Dropped out of the University of Maryland 26 credits shy of an engineering degree to study cosmetology. "I wasn't loving engineering. I was just doing it. . I don't think I would have been as stimulated by a career in engineering. I wanted to be happy and successful," he says. "You're not supposed to leave college. It was a struggle. But my heart was in this." Now his clients include Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

▪ Kenny Johnson, founder of Dial-A-Waiter restaurant delivery service. Dropped out of Wichita State University.

▪ Alan Jones, founder of Check Into Cash, former CEO of Credit Bureau Services. Dropped out of Tennessee State University to work at his father's credit agency.

▪ January Jones, model, actress. Left home three days after graduating from high school to go to New York to become a model. Later became an actress.

▪ Henry J. Kaiser, multimillionaire founder of Kaiser Aluminum. High school dropout.

▪ Rob Kalin, founder of Esty (a website that helps artisans sell handmade crafts and clothing). Flunked out of high school, briefly enrolled in an art school, and then faked an MIT student ID so he could take classes on the sly. His professors were so impressed that they helped him get into NYU where he learned out to build a website. Founded Esty with two classmates.

▪ Jeffrey Kalmikoff, cofounder and chief creative officer of Treadless.com. Never graduated from college.

▪ Dean Kamen, multimillionaire inventor of the Segway. Dropped out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

▪ Ingvar Kamprad, billionaire founder of IKEA, one of the richest people in the world. A dyslexic, he never attended college. When he was 17, his father gave him a reward for succeeding in his studies. He used this money to establish what became IKEA. As a child, he peddled matches, Christmas decorations, fish, and other sundries via his bicycle.

▪ Garson Kanin, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, memoirist, director. A high school dropout.

▪ David Karp, founder of Tumblr. Dropped out of Bronx Science at the age of 15 to be homeschooled and work for his Davidville company. Did not attend college. At the age of 17, he moved to Japan and worked remotely for an American Internet company.

▪ Alex Karras, football player, actor. Never graduated from college. As he pointed out, "I never graduated college, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's."

▪ Li Ka-Shing, billionaire, one of the wealthiest investors in Asia, plastics manufacturer, real estate investor. Had to leave school at the age of 15 to support his family after his father's death.

▪ Byron Katie, spiritual leader and author. Dropped out of the University of Northern Arizona before the end of freshman year to get married.

▪ Ben Kaufman, 21-year-old serial entrepreneur, founder of Kluster (a virtual forum that allows consumers and businesses to collaborate on the design of products and services). Dropped out of college in his freshman year.

▪ Michael Keaton (Michael John Douglas) actor. Dropped out of Kent State University after two years.

▪ Toby Keith, country music singer. After high school, he joined his father to work in the oil fields. His biggest regret, though, is never having attended college.

▪ Kirk Kerkorian, billionaire investor and casino operator, owner of MGM movie studio, Mirage Resorts, and Mandalay Bay Resorts. An eighth-grade dropout who trained fighter pilots during World War II.

▪ Alicia Keys, singer and songwriter. Graduated from New York's Professional Performing Arts School at age 16. She enrolled at Columbia University but dropped out after a semester to sign with Columbia Records.

▪ Jared Kim, founder of WeGame. Dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley halfway through the spring semester of his freshman year to devote himself full-time to starting the online gaming site WeGame.

▪ B.B. King, blues musician, songwriter, and legend. Never finished high school. "I have two laptops. I didn't finish high school, so one is my tutor: I buy software on things I don't know. I write music with the other." (People magazine)

▪ Eartha Kitt, Emmy-winning actress, dancer, singer, author, and sex kitten. She dropped out of the High School of Performing Arts to take various odd jobs. Eventually landed a job with the Katherine Dunham dance troupe.

▪ Heidi Klum, German supermodel, actress, fashion designer, television producer, and host of Project Runway and Germany's Next Topmodel. One of Forbe's 2008 Celebrity 100, she makes $14 million per year. Became a model immediately after graduating from high school.

▪ Allan Kornblum, author, poet, and publisher, Coffee House Press. Dropped out of New York University

▪ Bruce Kovner, billionaire hedge fund operator, founder of Caxton Associates, chairman of Julliard. Dropped out of a Ph.D. economics program at Harvard to drive a taxi in New York City.

▪ Jan Kramer, ice skater, actress, country singer. "The day I graduated from high school, I left for New York City," where she began acting in All My Children. Soon after, she left for Los Angeles to pursue her acting career, get parts on 90210, Entourage, and Friday Night Lights before getting a role on One Tree Hill.

▪ Chad Kroeger, frontman for Nickelback rock group. In a Playboy magazine interview, he noted that "I didn't go to school. I mean, after the eighth or ninth grade, I don't remember going to school five days out of the week, ever." He was a few credits short of

▪ Stanley Kubrick, movie director and producer, screenwriter, photographer. His poor high school grades made it impossible to attend college. He did take some photography classes at CCNY but never graduated from any college.

▪ Mila Kunis, actress. She briefly attended college, but had an epiphany: "I decided I wasn't going to take [my career] seriously and make my job who I am. I just want to be happy with my life."

▪ Olga Kurylenko, model, actress, Bond girl. Began modeling at the age of 14 in Moscow, Russia. Soon moved to Paris, France for more modeling work. Then moved on into acting.

▪ James Lafferty, actor. Has not yet attended college. But he did note in an interview that if he weren't an actor, he'd "be a junior in college."

▪ Don LaFontaine, voice-over artist who narrated more than 350,000 commercials, thousands of TV promos, and more than 5,000 movie trailers. After graduating from high school and serving in the Army, he went into business as a voice-over artist. He never attended college.

▪ Peter La Haye, Sr., inventor of plastic replacement lenses for cataract patients, owner of La Haye Laboratories and Neoptx. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Frederick "Freddy" Laker, billionaire airline entrepreneur. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Sharmen Lane, millionaire mortgage wholesaler, life coach, motivational speaker. A high-school dropout.

▪ Cathy Lanier, Chief of Police of Washington, DC. A 14-year-old pregnant high school dropout.

▪ Angela Lansbury, Tony and Golden Globe award-winning actress. She was contracted by MGM while still a teenager and nominated for an Academy Award for her first film, Gaslight, in 1944. Her Broadway stage work earned her four Tony Awards in sixteen years for Mame, Dear World, Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd. But she never won an Emmy for her work on the Murder, She Wrote television series. She also won six Golden Globes and was nominated for 18 Emmys and 3 Academy Awards. She never

▪ Ring Lardner, sportswriter and short story writer. Began his career as a teenager writing for the South Bend Tribune. He continued writing for many other newspapers, eventually landing a nationally syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune.

▪ Albert Lasker, advertising pioneer, CEO of Lord & Thomas. After graduating from high school, he started at an advertising agency as an entry-level salesman.

▪ Jillian Lauren, author. Quit New York University during her freshman year to become a party guest for a wealthy Singapore businessman. Went on to live in the harem of the prince of Brunei for a year-and-a-half. Wrote about her experiences.

▪ Ralph Lauren, billionaire fashion designer, founder of Polo. Left the City College of New York business school (Baruch College) to design ties for Beau Brummel. Launched Polo later that same year.

▪ Avril Lavigne, singer, songwriter, actress, fashion designer. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Mike Lazaridis, billionaire founder of Research in Motion. "Two months before I graduated from college, I answered a request for proposal from General Motors with a five-page pitch to develop a network computer control display system. They offered me a half-million dollar contract.. I went to the president of the university to get his permission to take a leave of absence. He tried to persuade me to finish out my year, but when I told him about the contract, he wished me the best of luck." Since that time, he hasn't had time to go back and finish.

▪ Stan Lee, comics creator, Marvel Comics (Spiderman, The Hulk, X-Men, The Fantastic Four). Started working when he was still in high school. Never attended college.

▪ Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz, portrait photographer, cover photographer for Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone magazines. Attended the San Francisco Art Institute, but apparently did not graduate. As she has said, "I was very lucky, in working for these magazines, to learn by doing, but I always regretted not having a formal education. I had to teach myself."

▪ Tia Leoni, actress. Dropped out of Sarah Lawrence College as a 20-year-old to model and act.

▪ James Leprino, billionaire, Leprino Foods. Joined family business at the age of 18. Turned business into the world's largest mozzarella producer.

▪ Doris Lessing, novelist. At the age of 14, she chose to end her formal schooling. She then worked as a nanny, telephone operator, office worker, stenographer, and journalist. Her first novel was published when she was 31. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

▪ Juliette Lewis, actress, singer, musician. At the age of 14, she left her parents and went to live with actress Karen Black, a family friend. She then dropped out of high school.

▪ Rush Limbaugh, multi-millionaire media mogul, the most popular radio talk show host ever. bestselling book author. Dropped out of college after being required to take ballroom dancing.

▪ Abraham Lincoln, lawyer, U.S. president. Finished barely a year of formal schooling. He self-taught himself trigonometry (for his work as a surveyor) and read Blackstone on his own to become a lawyer. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Charles Lindbergh, aviator, first person to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Quit the University of Wisconsin after two years to learn how to fly an airplane.

▪ Carl Lindner, billionaire investor, founder of United Dairy Farmers. Dropped out of high school at the age of 14 to deliver milk for the family store during the Depression.

▪ John Llewellyn, labor leader, president of the United Mine Workers. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Marcus Loew, multimillionaire founder of Loews movie theaters, co-founder of MGM movie studio. Dropped out of elementary school.

▪ Dan Lok, multi-millionaire business mentor, founder of Quick Turn Marketing. College dropout. His CreativitySucks website notes: A former college dropout, Dan Lok transformed himself from a grocery bagger in a local supermarket to a multi-millionaire. Dan came to North America with little knowledge of the English language and few contacts. Today, Dan is one of the most sought-after business mentors on the Web, as well as a best-selling author. His reputation includes his title as the World's #1 Website Conversion Expert.

▪ Jack London, bestselling novelist. Dropped out of high school to work. Later was admitted to the University of California but left after one semester.

▪ Sophia Loren, Oscar-winning actress, author, model. Dropped out of elementary school.

▪ Nat Love, member of the National Cowboys of Color Hall of Fame, known as Deadwood Dick, one of the first American cowboys to write his autobiography. Born into slavery. After being emancipated, he won a horse in a raffle and headed west to become a cowboy.

▪ Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Brazilian president. With a fifth grade education only, he shined shoes on the streets of Sao Paulo as a kid but later became a steelworker union leader.

▪ Barbara Lynch, chef, owner of a $10 million group of restaurants in Boston. Dropped out of high school to be a runner for local bookies. Later worked for celebrity chef Todd English. "I started my first business venture in high school, placing bets for some of my teachers with bookies in Southie.. I never did homework. I was failing everything. Senior year, they said I would have to go to summer school. There was no way I was doing that, so I dropped out."

▪ Mary Lyon, education pioneer, teacher, founder of Mount Holyoke College (America's first women's college). Dropped out of high school. Started teaching at the age of 17.

▪ Andie MacDowell, Golden Globe-winning actress and model. Dropped out of Winthrop College during her sophomore year.

▪ John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods and developer of Conscious Capitalism. Dropped out of the University of Texas six times. Never took a business course.

▪ Harry Macklowe, billionaire real estate developer. Dropped out of college to become a real estate broker.

▪ Steve Madden, shoe designer. Dropped out of college to sell shoes on Long Island.

▪ Ivory Madison, comic book author and founder of the Red Room social network for authors. Dropped out of school at the age of 13. Eventually went to law school without finishing high school or attending college.

▪ Howie Mandel, comedian, game show host. Was expelled from Toronto's Northview Heights secondary school for practical jokes gone too far. Finally got his GED in 2010.

▪ Bruno Mars, singer, songwriter, music producer. After graduating from high school, he moved to Los Angeles and signed with Motown Records. He later wrote songs for other singers and release a bestselling record with Elektra.

▪ Clancy Martin, ethics professor, novelist. Dropped out of high school, but later graduated from college. Dropped out of graduate school.

▪ Steve Martin, comedian, actor. Dropped out of Long Beach State College. He became disillusioned upon reading Wittgenstein's view that "all philosophical problems can be reduced to problems of semantics."

▪ Manuel Marulanda, aka Pedro Antonio Marin, leader of the revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The son of a peasant farmer, he had only a sixth-grade education.

▪ John Mayer, Grammy-winning singer and songwriter. Left the Berklee College of Music after two semesters to pursue a singing career in Atlanta, Georgia. "I've already won one of the biggest gambles of all time, which was to forgo an education so I could pursue a real all-or-none scenario."

▪ Martina McBride, country music singer. After high school, she traveled around Kansas playing and singing with various bands. Did not attend college.

▪ Billy Joe (Red) McCombs, billionaire founder of Clear Channel media empire, car dealerships, real estate investor. Dropped out of law school to sell cars in 1950. He owned his first automobile dealership by age 25.

▪ Gardner McKay, actor, novelist. Dropped out of Cornell University after two years.

▪ Kenneth Wayne McLeod, Ponzi schemer. After graduating from high school, he went into the insurance business. Never attended college.

▪ Leighton Meester, actress. Dropped out of high school after her junior year (but had enough credits to get her diploma). "I was very passionate about pursuing my acting career; as opposed to the daily routine of high school, which bored me to death. It was a chore - I wasn't in any after-school clubs. The only thing I did after school was go to auditions." (Seventeen magazine)

▪ Hendrik Meijer, founder of Meijer grocery stores. Worked as a barber during the depression. Did not attend college.

▪ Karl Menninger, psychiatrist. Dropped out of Washburn College in Kansas after two years.

▪ Jillian Michaels, fitness expert, reality TV star, book author. She dropped out of California State University at Northridge to be a bartender. When her boyfriend suggested she get a real job, she faked a college diploma to get a position at the ICM talent agency.

▪ Hellen Mirren, Oscar-winning actress. Left home at the age of 17 to go to London to become a professional actress. Did not attend college.

▪ Moby, author, rock star, tea-shop proprietor. Sold more than 15 million albums. A college dropout.

▪ Arthur Ernest Morgan, flood control engineer, book author, college president, director of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Left high school after three years. Later attended the University of Colorado for six weeks.

▪ Ed Morrisey, blogger at Captain's Quarters and HotAir.com. "I never finished college. I attended three or four different colleges at different times for different reasons. I never did get a degree."

▪ Chris Morrison, co-founder of PLP Digital Systems (software company). Earns more than $500,000 per year. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Matthew Morrison, actor and singer. Attended New York University for two years before landing a role in the Broadway production of Footloose.

▪ Dustin Moskovitz, billionaire co-founder of Facebook social network. Dropped out of Harvard.

▪ Kate Moss, multi-millionaire model. Attended a little bit of college, but never graduated.

▪ Charles Munger, billionaire right-hand man to Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway. Dropped out of the University of Michigan to join the Air Force as a meteorologist. Later got a law degree from Harvard.

▪ David Murdock, billionaire investor, real estate tycoon, chairman of Dole Foods. Funding a $1.5 billion health research campus in North Carolina. Dropped out of high school. Drafted into the army in 1943.

▪ Justin Murdock, investor, son of David. A college dropout and goth musician.

▪ Ted Murphy, founder, Izea Entertainment, social media marketing company. Dropped out of Florida State University to start Think Creative ad agency.

▪ Bill Murray, Golden Globe-winning actor, comedian. Dropped out of Regis University after being arrested for possession of marijuana.

▪ George Naddaff, founder of Boston Chicken and UFood Grill. Never attended college. As he put it, "School and I did not work out. So at age 17 and a half, I joined the Army." And, when he got out of the Army, his dad said if you're not going to college, you get a job. He did. The next day.

▪ Patricia Neal, actress. After two years as a drama major at Northwestern University, she dropped out and headed to New York City where she performed summer stock before becoming a Broadway star at the age of 20.

▪ David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue airlines. Dropped out of the University of Utah after three years.

▪ Jack Nelson, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Never attended college. After high school, he went to work for the Biloxi Daily Herald. Later he opened the Atlanta bureau of the Los Angeles Times and later became the Times bureau chief in Washington, D.C.

▪ Richard John Neuhaus, theologian, Lutheran minister, Catholic priest, author, civil rights activist. He took pride in the fact that he never graduated from high school.

▪ Donald Newhouse, billionaire publisher, Advanced Publications. Dropped out of Syracuse University.

▪ Jim Newton, founder of TechShop (the nation's first full-service gym for the tinkering crowd), science advisor for Discovery Channel's MythBusters series. Dropped out of college.

▪ Jake Nickell, cofounder and CEO of Treadless.com. Never graduated from college.

▪ Rosie O'Donnell, comedienne, talk show host. Dropped out of Dickinson College and Boston University.

▪ George Alan O'Dowd, aka Boy George, singer, songwriter, fashion designer, photographer. High school dropout. Never attended college.

▪ David Ogilvy, advertising copywriter and executive. Was thrown out of Oxford University at the age of 20 in 1931 during the Great Depression. Began working as a lowly cook in a hotel restaurant. Eventually became a world-class chef. Left that job to sell upmarket kitchen stoves, which led to a job in advertising.

▪ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, U.S. first lady, book editor. Dropped out of Vassar before eventually graduating from George Washington University.

▪ David Oreck, multimillionaire founder of The Oreck Corporation that builds those wonderful vacuum cleaners. When the U.S. entered World War II, he quit college to enlist in the Army Air Corps. After the war, college seemed to tame to him, so he started working as a salesman at a Manhattan appliance distributor. That job eventually led him to founding his own company.

▪ Amancio Ortega, fashion retailer, Spain's richest man, billionaire. Dropped out of high school.

▪ George Orwell (aka Eric Blair), author of Animal Farm and 1984. Instead of attending university after graduating from Eton, he joined the Imperial Police and worked in Burma. When he returned, he worked in restaurant kitchens, slept in homeless shelters, and eventually documented the condition of miners. All the time, he was writing reviews, essays, novels, and a regular newspaper column. His Animal Farm has sold more than 10 million copies.

▪ Joel Osteen, TV pastor and host of the most-watched inspirational TV show in the U.S. Dropped out of Oral Roberts University after one year to care for his mother (who was recovering from cancer). Has sold more than 4 million copies of Your Best Life Now.

▪ Dan Panoz, founder of Panoz Auto Development car design firm. Dropped out of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Gainesville College.

▪ Larry Page, billionaire co-founder of Google. Dropped out of Stanford Ph.D. program in computer science to start Google in 1998 working out of a friend's garage. He did earn a masters degree.

▪ Sean Parker, billionaire co-creator of Napster, founding president of Facebook.com. He barely finished high school (he was not interested in school).

▪ Kevin Paul, founder of KPaul, an Inc. 500 company. Joined the army straight out of high school.

▪ Harvey Pekar, comic book author. Dropped out of Case Western Reserve University. His reason? He quit "when the pressure of required math classes proved too much to bear."

▪ Nelson Peltz, billionaire leveraged buyout investor. Dropped out of Wharton Business School.

▪ Robin Wright Penn, actress. Never attended college. She was already modeling in high school and had a steady acting job at the age of 19 in the soap opera Santa Barbara.

▪ Andrew Perlman, co-founder of GreatPoint. Dropped out of Washington University to start an Internet communications company, Cignal Global Communications, when he was 19.

▪ Katy Perry, singer. Left home at the age of 17 to make it on her own in Los Angeles. Did not attend college. Worked various crappy jobs and sank into debt until she signed a deal with Capitol Records and released her bestselling album, One of the Boys.

▪ John Pestana, multimillionaire co-founder of Omniture. Dropped out of Brigham Young University during his final semester to co-found MyComputer.com, which became Omniture.

▪ Phosphorescent, country singer. Left home at 18 to tour the Southwest. Lived out of his pickup for six months.

▪ Mary Pickford, Oscar-winning actress, co-founder of United Artists. Six months of formal education. Home schooled.

▪ James A. Pike, Episcopal bishop. Dropped out of the University of Santa Clara after his sophomore year.

▪ Brad Pitt, actor, left the University of Missouri two credits short of graduating so he could begin his acting career in California.

▪ Sidney Poitier, Oscar-winning actor. Only finished a few grades. Could only read at the fourth-grade level until a friend taught him how to read better when he was a struggling actor in New York City.

▪ Sydney Pollack, movie director, producer, and actor. Skipped college and enrolled at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where he studied under drama coach Sanford Meisner.

▪ Ron Popeil, multimillionaire founder of Ronco, inventor, infomercial pitchman, and producer. Dropped out of college. He did, though, receive the Ig Nobel Award for Consumer Engineering. Inventor of the Solid Flavor Injector, Mr. Microphone, Showtime Rotisserie, and more.

▪ Dean Potter, climber and slack-liner. Enrolled at the University of New Hampshire and joined the rowing team, but quit soon thereafter. "I didn't fit in," he has said. "I wanted to destroy everybody on my team and establish my dominance, and that's all I cared about."

▪ William J. Powell, developer and owner of the Clearview Golf Club, the first U.S. golf course designed, owned, and operated by an African American; also competed in the first U.S. interracial collegiate golf match. Left Wilberforce University early because he had an enlarged heart.

▪ Seth Priebatsch, chief ninja of scvngr.com and founder of PostcardTech. Dropped out of Princeton University after one year.

▪ Jeff Probst, host, Survivor TV show. Dropped out of college to pursue a career as a singer.

▪ Bob Proctor, success speaker, bestselling author of You Were Born Rich, teacher of The Secret, and co-founder of Life Success Publishing. Went to high school for two months.

▪ Wolfgang Puck, chef, owner of 16 restaurants and 80 express bistros. Quit school at the age of 14 and got a job as a cooking apprentice at a hotel. When he told his father, he said, "Well, you're good for nothing. Cooking is for women."

▪ Dennis Quaid, actor. Dropped out of the University of Houston to pursue an acting career in Hollywood.

▪ Ashley Qualls, founder of Whateverlife.com, left high school at the age of 15 to devote full time to her website business where she made more than a million dollars by the age of 17.

▪ Daniel Radcliffe, actor. On being asked if he planned to go to college, he replied, "No, I don't. I am continuing my education. I have two weekly tutorials with a friend of mine."

▪ Stewart Rahr, billionaire founder of Kinray pharmacy distributor, philanthropist. Graduated from New York University but later dropped out of law school in 1975 to take over family pharmacy.

▪ Lew Ranieri, financier, the father of mortgage-backed bonds. Dropped out of college.

▪ James Arthur Ray, inspirational author and speaker. Dropped out of junior college to work as a telemarketer.

▪ Rachael Ray, TV chef, cookbook author. Dropped out of Pace University after two years to work and save money.

▪ Usher Raymond IV, quadruple platinum singer. He won the Star Search male teen vocalist competition when he was 18. He was signed to a music label immediately thereafter.

▪ Silvestre Reyes, U.S. representative from Texas. Got a two-year degree from El Paso Community College.

▪ Burt Reynolds, actor, number-one box-office attraction for five straight years (1978-82). Dropped out of Florida State University after football and automobile accident injuries ended his football career. Then took some classes at Palm Beach Junior College where an acting class where his teacher pushed Reynolds into acting.

▪ Dane Reynolds, world class surfer, video documentarian. Dropped out of school at the age of 16 to surf, something he called "kind of a stupid decision."

▪ Trent Rezner, musician, Nine Inch Nails. Dropped out of Allegheny College after one year to pursue a career in music.

▪ Charlie Rich, Grammy-winning country and blues singer and songwriter. Dropped out of the University of Arkansas to join the Air Force.

▪ Marc Rich, billionaire commodities investor, built Philbro into the world's largest commodities firm, founded Marc Rich & Co. Dropped out of NYU to take a job in the mail room of Philipp Brothers on Wall Street.

▪ Leandro Rizzuto, billionaire founder of Conair. Dropped out of college to found Conair with a $100 investment and the invention of a hot-air hair roller invention.

▪ Julia Roberts, actress. After high school, she headed to New York City where she pursued an acting career. Has never attended college.

▪ Pernell Roberts, actor (Bonanza and Trapper John). Attended Georgia Tech and the University of Maryland, but at both schools, as he noted, "I distinguished myself by flunking out."

▪ Andrew Robl, millionaire online poker player. Started playing poker during high school but turned professional after the second semester of his freshman year at the University of Michigan.

▪ John D. Rockefeller Sr., billionaire founder of Standard Oil, philanthropist. History's first recorded billionaire. Dropped out of high school two months before graduation. Took some courses at a local business school.

▪ Roy Rogers, aka Leonard Slye, singing cowboy, actor. Dropped out of high school. As he noted, I did pretty well "for a guy who never finished high school and used to yodel at square dances."

▪ Kjell Inge Rokke, billionaire Norwegian businessman. No secondary or college education. Started out as a fisherman at the age of 18.

▪ Ray Romano, actor, Everybody Loves Raymond. Went to college for seven years but never graduated. "I would get my student loans, get money, register and never really go. It was a system I thought would somehow pan out."

▪ Rebecca Romijn, actress, model. Deferred her studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz to pursue a modeling career in Paris, France.

▪ George Romney, automotive executive, Michigan governor, presidential candidate. Spent only a year at the University of Utah.

▪ Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. president. Attended school only for a few months. Was tutored at home. Teddy eventually graduated from Harvard University but he did not complete his law degree at Columbia University.

▪ Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com, TechTV host. Dropped out of the University of Las Vegas during his sophomore year to code software. He wrote his first software program in the second grade and was building his own machines by the beginning of high school. He started Digg with $1,200 and launched the site out of his bedroom.

▪ Alvin Roth, systems engineer, game theorist, book author. Dropped out of Van Buren High School (Queens, New York) during his junior year. His explanation: He was understimulated. Applied to college and graduated with an engineering degree from Columbia University and a doctorate in operations research from Stanford University.

▪ Asher Roth, hip hop artist, I Love College hit song. Dropped out of West Chester University after being signed.

▪ Karl Rove, presidential advisor. Left the University of Utah after two years to work for the college Republicans.

▪ J.K. Rowling, bestselling novelist (Harry Potter series), first billionaire author. Never attended college.

▪ Frederick Henry Royce, multimillionaire co-founder of Rolls-Royce, automotive designer. Elementary school dropout.

▪ Michael Rubin, founder of Global Sports. Dropped out of Villanova University after six months. He admits, "If I had to do it over again, I would have gone to college. I missed out on that. The business responsibilities weighted hard on me in my late teens and early 20s."

▪ Phillip Ruffin, billionaire casino operator. Dropped out of Wichita State to flip burgers. With the money he saved, he invested in oil and real estate. Eventually got into casinos. The best day of his life? August 10, 2007. The day he put $1.24 billion into his checking account.

▪ Rene Russo, model, actress. After a year at Burroughs High School in Burbank, California, she dropped out. At the age of 17, she took a job inspecting lenses in an eyeglass factory, but was soon discovered by a model agent.

▪ Haim Saban, billionaire producer of Power Rangers TV show, owns stake in Univision and Paul Frank Industries. Never attended college.

▪ William Safire, columnist for the New York Times. Dropped out of Syracuse University to take a job as a researcher for a column.

▪ J.D. Salinger, novelist, Catcher in the Rye (with over 60 million copies sold so far). Briefly attended Ursinus College and New York University before publishing short stories in Collier's and Esquire.

▪ Carl Sandburg, poet, historian, Pulitzer Prize winner. Had little formal education but later attended Lombard College and graduated.

▪ Colonel Harlan Sanders, multimillionaire founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC). Elementary school dropout but later earned a law degree via correspondence course.

▪ Sankaralingam, social and political reformer, founder Land for Tiller's Freedom. A member of the high caste in India, he quit college to join Gandhi's movement for India's freedom.

▪ William Saroyan, Oscar-winning screenwriter, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. High school dropout.

▪ Vidal Sassoon, multimillionaire founder of Vidal Sassoon hairstyling salons and hair-care products. High school dropout.

▪ Al Schneider, founder of Schneider National freight company. Had an eighth-grade education.

▪ Richard Schulze, billionaire founder of Best Buy. After high school, he sold electronics for his father's distribution company and later opened a car-stereo shop. Did not attend college.

▪ Ryan Seacrest, multimillionaire radio and TV host. He turned a high school internship at a local radio station into his own show. At 19, he dropped out of the University of Georgia and headed to Hollywood to build a career in radio and TV.

▪ Seal, aka Seal Henry Olusugun Olumide Adeola Samuel, R&B singer and songwriter. He received a two-year associate's degree in architecture. He struck out on his own at the age of 15.

▪ Kesha Rose Sebert, singer and songwriter. Quit high school weeks before graduating and passed on a scholarship to Barnard College to go to Los Angeles to break into the music business.

▪ Kyra Sedgwick, actress. Briefly attended Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Southern California before dropping out to act full time.

▪ Tom Selleck, actor. Left USC three classes short of a degree to become a contract player for 20th Century Fox. "I started out at about $35 a week, so it was a pretty big risk to leave college to do that. But it's like my dad always said: Risk is the price you pay for opportunity."

▪ Doug Selsam, inventor of The Sky Serpent wind generator and heavy metal guitarist. Attended the University of California at Irvine, but never graduated.

▪ Drew Sementa, founder, Premier Payment Systems. Left the University of Central Florida after his junior year to join a dot-com.

▪ William Shakespeare, playwright, poet. Only a few years of formal schooling.

▪ Shakira, singer and songwriter who has sold more than 50 million albums. Attended a modeling school for awhile. Never attended college, but founded Pies Descalzos to provide educational opportunities to thousands of Colombia's poorest children and Barefoot, a nonprofit organization to provide schooling opportunities for millions of children around the world.

▪ Adam Shankman, dancer, choreographer, director, producer, reality show judge. Dropped out of Julliard to return to Los Angeles to pursue a choreography career.

▪ Walter Shorenstein, billionaire real estate investor, Shorenstein Properties. Dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania. Began buying commercial property after serving in the military during World War II.

▪ Harper Simon, musician son of singer/songwriter Paul Simon. Enrolled at the Berklee College of Music but quit before graduating.

▪ Alan Sillitoe, novelist. He left school at the age of 14 to work in a bicycle plant.

▪ Russell Simmons, multi-millionaire co-founder of Def Jam records, founder Russell Simmons Music Group, creator of Phat Farm and Baby Phat fashions, foounding partner of UniRush Financial Services, creator of Global Grind website, bestselling author, movie and TV producer. Left City College of New York to begin promoting local rap music acts (which he eventually signed to his music label) and producing records.

▪ John Simplot, billionaire potato king. Dropped out of 8th grade and left home at the age of 14. He sorted potatoes and raised hogs before saving enough money to buy his first potato field. Became a millionaire by the age of 30.

▪ Jessica Simpson, singer and actress. Left high school at the age of 16 to pursue a singing career. Later got her GED. Never attended college.

▪ Isaac Merrit Singer, sewing machine inventor, multimillionaire founder of Singer Industries. Dropped out of elementary school.

▪ Christian Slater, actor. Dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting.

▪ Alfred E. Smith, governor of New York and presidential candidate. Left school at the age of 14 to help his family after his father died. He would later joke that he received his FFM degree from the Fulton Fish Market in New York City.

▪ Elinor Smith, aviatrix, the Flying Flapper. By the time she was 17, she was ferrying passengers on short hops from Roosevelt Field in Long Island. By 18, she had her own sight-seeing business. Never attended college.

▪ O. Bruton Smith, billionaire. "I didn't attend college, but still had a good time. I think I probably had more fun than any human deserves a right to have."

▪ Patti Smith, poet, visual artist, songwriter. Dropped out of teacher's college to start life as an artist in New York City.

▪ Walter L. Smith, president of Florida A&M University. Dropped out of high school but later earned an equivalency diploma at the age of 23.

▪ Will Smith, Grammy-winning rapper, actor. Did not attend college. As the Fresh Prince, he and DJ Jazzy Jeff released their first album before he finished high school. They received the first Grammy for a hip-hop act. Due to the success of that first album, Smith decided to forgo college for show business.

▪ Daniel Snyder, billionaire owner of Snyder Communications and Red Zone Capital, owner of the Washington Redskins. Dropped out of the University of Maryland.

▪ Kevin Sorbo, actor, director, producer, and model. Left Moorhead State University early to pursue a career in acting.

▪ James Spader, actor. Dropped out of high school. As he noted, "I left high school with the option of returning whenever I wanted. The high school was tremendously gracious in that way. They said, Any time you want to come back, we'll welcome you. Maybe I should take them up on it. I'd probably make great use of it."

▪ Britney Spears, singer, actress, youngest woman to have five albums debut at #1 on the Billboard list. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Steven Spielberg, billionaire movie director and producer, co-founder of DreamWorks. Rejected by the best film schools, he enrolled in and then dropped out of Cal State Long Beach. Received a degree in 2002.

▪ Gwen Stefani, singer and songwriter, No Doubt. Struggled in school. Never attended college. "School was just really hard for me. I didn't want to fail. I wanted to be smart! But I was really dreaming. . It makes me sad when I think about it. I still have nightmares about tests."

▪ Kristen Stewart, actress. Dropped out of school in the seventh grade to study independently. "That was a necessity. When I would go away to work, my teachers would only give me a portion of my schoolwork, and I would come home and they'd fail me. I was very happy to leave."

▪ Patrick Stewart, actor, producer, director, writer. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Ben Stiller, actor, director, and producer. Went to the UCLA film school for nine months and then headed for Broadway. As he noted, "I was the guy who dropped out and moved back in with his parents."

▪ Emma Stone, actress. At the age of 15, she gave her parents a PowerPoint presentation about ditching high school to pursue a career as an actress. Her mother accompanied her to Hollywood so she could become an actress.

▪ Sharon Stone, Golden Globe-winning and Emmy-winning actress, producer, and model. Dropped out of Edinboro State University.

▪ W. Clement Stone, multimillionaire insurance businessman, founder of Success magazine, and author of a number of books on positive mental attitudes. At the age of six, he sold newspapers on the south side of Chicago. By the age of 13, he owned his own newsstand. He continued to work odd jobs until his mother bought a small insurance agency, where he helped her by selling insurance. At the age of 21, with $100 in his pocket, he established the Combined Registry Company insurance business which he built into a multi-million dollar business. He dropped out of elementary school but later attended high school night courses and some college.

▪ Hilary Swank, actress, swimmer, gymnast. Dropped out of South Pasadena High School to act professionally. When she was 15, she and her mother headed to Los Angeles with $75 in their pockets.

▪ Mark Sykes, art dealer, gambler, bookie, gentleman, and rogue. Attended Oxford University for 18 months (primarily running highly profitable card games); then dropped out to gamble professionally.

▪ Jessica Szohr, actress. Has not yet attended college. "I moved from Wisconsin to L.A. when I was 18." (CosmoGirl magazine)

▪ R.F. "Rawley" Taplett, founder of R.F. Taplett Fruit & Cold Storage Company, multi-millionaire investor. Had only a high school diploma.

▪ Channing Tatum, actor. Washed out of college in West Virginia at the age of 18. Became an actor after stints as a construction work, perfume spritzer, and model.

▪ Alfred Taubman, billionaire chairman of Sotheby, real estate investor, mall operator. Dropped out of the University of Michigan. Made his first fortune investing in shopping malls.

▪ Jack Crawford Taylor, billionaire founder of Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Dropped out of Washington University to serve as a fighter pilot in the Navy during World War II. Sold cars after the war before starting a car leasing company.

▪ Zachary Taylor, U.S. president, general. Little formal schooling. Home schooled. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Timmy Teepell, chief of staff for Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. A product of home schooling, he never attended college.

▪ Kelly Thiebaud, model and actress. Her mother made her finish high school, but she never attended college. As she noted about

▪ staying in high school, "At the time I hated it. There's so much opportunity out there! But I'm thankful for it now, because the experience helped me stay grounded."

▪ Dave Thomas, billionaire founder of Wendy's. As a youngster his family moved around a lot. While working as a busboy at the age of 15, he refused to move once again with the family. Instead, he dropped out of high school and went to work full time in a restaurant (moving in with the family that owned the restaurant).

▪ Billy Bob Thornton, actor. After taking some classes at Henderson State University in Arkansas, he dropped out and headed for New York City to become a rock star. Four years later, he headed to Los Angeles to become an actor.

▪ Kip Tindell, founder of the Container Store. Dropped out of the University of Texas. As he noted, "I crammed a four-year program into about eight years."

▪ Leo Tolstoy, count, novelist (War and Peace, Anna Karenina). Dropped out after three years at the university.

▪ Marisa Tomei, Oscar-winning actress. Transferred from Boston University after one year to attend New York University, but dropped out within a year to continue her career as an actress.

▪ Adam and Matthew Toren, founders of YoungEntrepreneur.com. As they noted on their website, Entrepreneurs at an early age, Matthew and I had already started six (toot toot) businesses by the time we graduated high school. We were both offered college scholarships, but turned them down - it was clear to us that college was not in our future. Within a week of graduating high school, we bought a bar/café/billiards location, which we overhauled, re-branded and turned into a hot spot; and on the 12-month we sold it for a great profit.

▪ Doris Eaton Travis, a Ziegfield Follies girl, actress, singer. Started at the Follies the day she finished eighth grade. Earned her high school diploma at the age of 77. Finally graduated from college at the age of 88.

▪ John Travolta, actor. His parents allowed him to drop out of Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey for one year to pursue a theatrical career. He never returned.

▪ Derek Trucks, singer and musician. Attended high school on the road while playing for the Allman Brothers Band. Never attended college.

▪ Isaac Tshuva, billionaire builder, industrialist, and hotelier. At the age of 12, he started working as a laborer to support his family while attending school at night. After three years in the army, he skipped college to begin working in construction.

▪ Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, former slave, humanitarian, spy, nurse, suffragist. Did not attend college. A big promoter of education even though she was illiterate.

▪ Frederick Tudor, the Ice King. Dropped out of school at the age of 13. After loafing for a few years, he retired to his family's country estate to fish, farm, and hunt. Eventually, he began shipping ice from his Massachusetts pond to tropical countries for use in cooling drinks and making ice cream.

▪ Ted Turner, billionaire founder of CNN and TBS, owner of Atlanta Braves, philanthropist, America's largest land owner with 1.8 million acres. Was asked to leave Brown University during his fourth year. Got suspended twice, once for having a girl in his room and he doesn't remember the second reason. "I'm down to a little more than a billion. You can get by on that if you really economize and don't buy a lot of planes and yachts and stuff."

▪ Fred Tuttle, dairy farmer, actor. Dropped out of school in the 10th grade and spent most of his life as a farmer. Became a celebrity as a 77-year-old actor in the movie Man with a Plan.

▪ Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), printer, riverboat pilot, prospector, newspaper reporter, humorist, bestselling novelist. Left school a year after his father's death, never went beyond the fifth grade. Nonetheless, he still wrote the first great American novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

▪ Jamie Tworkowski, surfer and founder of To Write Love on Her Arms. College drop-out. Also dropped out of high school but eventually went back to finish. "It wasn't my choice to walk away from school. I was hanging around with guys older than me, and I'd skip school to play with them. I kept missing more and more school, and I got busted for it finally. But I went back. I felt like I'd be a real stooge if I didn't at least finish high school."

▪ Mike Tyson, heavyweight champion boxer; the first boxer to hold the WBA, WBC, and IBF heavyweight titles at the same time. Made his professional boxing debut at the age of 18. Never attended college.

▪ Albert Ueltschi, billionaire founder of FlightSafety International pilot training schools. Dropped out of the University of Kentucky to follow his passion, flying planes. After flying for PanAm for ten years, he founded FlightSafety.

▪ Donald Eugene Ulrich, aka Don Rich, country music guitarist and fiddler. Quit college to join The Buckaroos. The band had 19 #1 country hits during the 1960s.

▪ Leon Uris, bestselling novelist. Dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to join the U.S. Marines.

▪ Jay Van Andel, billionaire co-founder of Amway (now Alticor). Served in the Army after high school. Founded Amway along with his best friend Richard DeVos.

▪ Martin Van Buren, U.S. president. Little formal education. Began studying law at the age of 14 while apprenticing at a law firm. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Cornelius Vanderbilt, railroad magnate and one of the wealthiest Americans of the mid-1800s. Had little formal schooling. Was considered uncouth and illiterate until he became too rich to ignore.

▪ Anton van Leeuwenhoek, microbiologist, microscope maker, discoverer of bacteria, blood cells, and sperm cells. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Jesse "The Body" Ventura, wrestler, actor, Minnesota governor. Dropped out of North Hennepin Community College after one year.

▪ Kat Von D, aka Katherine Von Drachenberg, reality TV star, tattoo artist, skateboard designer, developer of makeup line. Dropped out of school at the age of 14.

▪ Frank Vos, advertising executive, Frank Vos Agency. Did not finish college. But, when he retired, he sold his company and got a B.A. and M.A. in American history from Columbia University.

▪ Andy Wachowski, screenwriter, director, The Matrix. Dropped out of Emerson College.

▪ Larry Wachowski, screenwriter, director, The Matrix. Dropped out of Bard College.

▪ Donnie Wahlberg Jr., singer (New Kids on the Block), actor, music producer. Never attended college. Started his singing career at the age of 15.

▪ Mark Wahlberg, rapper (as Marky Mark), model, actor, producer. Dropped out of school for good at the age of 16.

▪ Theodore Waitt, billionaire founder of Gateway Computers. Dropped out of the University of Iowa one semester short of a degree to start Gateway with his older brother in 1985.

▪ Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist, co-discover of evolutionary theory. Left school at the age of 14 to go to work to support his family. Wallace was self-taught, via frequent visits to libraries and workingman's institutes, while working as a land surveyor, a builder, and a school teacher.

▪ DeWitt Wallace, founder and publisher of Reader's Digest, philanthropist. Dropped out of Macalester College after one year. Dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley after the second year.

▪ Y.C. Wang, billionaire founder of Formosa Plastics. Never attended high school.

▪ Ty Warner, billionaire developer of Beanie Babies, hotel owner, real estate investor. Dropped out of college to go on the road selling plush toys.

▪ K'naan Warsame, aka K'naan the Skinny, Somali refugee, rapper, and rock star. Dropped out of high school after the 10th grade. Was featured in a $300 million worldwide advertising campaign by Coca-Cola.

▪ George Washington, U.S. president, general, plantation owner. Ended his education after a few years of elementary school. Of the 43 people who served as president of the United States, 8 never went to college.

▪ Keith Waterhouse, journalist, comic novelist, Billy Liar. Was inspired to drop out of school and become a writer after reading Mark Twain and P.G. Wodehouse.

▪ John Wayne, actor, attended the University of Southern California for two years on a football scholarship. He dropped out to work as a propman and stuntman for movie studios.

▪ Michael Weatherly, actor, Dark Angel and NCIS. Dropped out of American University at the age of 21 to pursue acting full time.

▪ Sidney Weinberg, managing partner of Goldman Sachs, aka Mr. Wall Street. Dropped out of the seventh grade in Brooklyn.

▪ Jerry Weintraub, movie and music producer. Joined the Air Force instead of going to college. Later studied acting at Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse.

▪ H.G. Wells, science fiction author. Dropped out of high school to help support his family. Eventually completed high school and went on to college.

▪ Leslie Wexner, billionaire founder of Limited Brands. Dropped out of Ohio State law school. Started the Limited with a $5,000 loan from an aunt.

▪ Dean White, billionaire hotelier and billboard magnate. Dropped out of the University of Nebraska to join the Merchant Marine Academy. Served during World War II. Then took over family business after the war and built it into a billboard and real estate empire.

▪ Shawn White, multi-millionaire Olympic snowboarder and X-Games skateboarder. Did not attend college. Turned pro in skateboarding at the age of 16.

▪ Kristen Wiig, comedienne, actress. Took an acting class her freshman year at the University of Arizona, got the acting bug, dropped out after one year and headed to Los Angeles to make it as an actress.

▪ Michelle Williams, actress. Was legally emancipated at the age of 15 from her family. Never went to college.

▪ Bruce Willis, actor. Dropped out of the theater program of Montclair State University after his junior year. He asserts that a college diploma "is just a trophy. I have some bowling trophies I think would be worth about the same thing."

▪ Gretchen Wilson, country singer. Quit school after the eighth grade. Finally earned her GED equivalency degree in 2009. "I've wanted to go back and get my GED for years, ever since I quit school after the eighth grade. I had a troubled childhood and I just wanted to get out of the house and on with life as quickly as possible. And back then I thought it wasn't important to have a high school diploma to chase my music dreams. But I always knew that finishing high school would make me feel a little more complete." (Redbook magazine)

▪ Kemmons Wilson, multimillionaire founder of Holiday Inns. Dropped out of high school.

▪ Woodrow Wilson, U.S. president, college president. Dropped out of Davidson College, but eventually graduated from Princeton University.

▪ Reese Witherspoon, Oscar-winning actress and model. Starred in her first film at the age of 14. Enrolled in Stanford University but dropped out to pursue acting full time.

▪ Tyrone Wood, director of Scream Gallery, son of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. Education: "The school of life."

▪ Tiger Woods, golfer. Turned pro at the age of 20 after attending Stanford University for a year or two.

▪ Frank Lloyd Wright, architect, interior designer, leader of the Prairie School of architecture. Voted as the greatest American architect of all time by the American Institute of Architects. Attended a high school in Madison, Wisconsin, but apparently never graduated. He was admitted to the University of Wisconsin as a special student and took classes part-time for two semesters. He left school without getting a degree. He left to work at an architectural firm in Chicago, Illinois.

▪ Orville Wright, inventor of the airplane. Dropped out of high school in his junior year to open a printing business.

▪ Wilbur Wright, inventor of the airplane. Completed four years of high school but never received his diploma. Did not attend college.

▪ Noah Wyle, actor. Never attended college. After private high school, he went straight to Hollywood to pursue a career as an actor.

▪ Ed Wynn, comedian and actor. Left home at the age of 16 to join a theater company.

▪ Jerry Yang, billionaire co-founder of Yahoo! Dropped out of Stanford University PhD program to create Yahoo!

▪ Jay-Z (Shawn Carter), rapper, entrepreneur, owner of Rocawear clothing, co-owner of New Jersey Nets basketball team. Never attended college. "I'm a thinker. I figure things out. I don't have a high level of education, but I'm practical-and I have great instincts."

▪ Babe Didrikson Zaharias, golfer, basketball player, Olympic track and field star. Did not attend college.

▪ Frank Zappa, rock musician. Probably dropped out of college. As he noted in liner notes for his Freak Out album, "Drop out of school before your mind rots from our mediocre educational system."

▪ Catherine Zeta-Jones, actress. Dropped out of school at the age of 15 to join a touring production of The Pajama Game.

▪ Emile Zola, French novelist. Failed his baccalaureate, which I believe is the French way of saying he did not graduate from college.

▪ Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire founder of Facebook. Dropped out of Harvard to continue working on the social networking website he founded in his dorm room in 2004. Facebook has more than 300 million users.

So what are we teaching our students? Are there courses on how to become a billionaire, or an inventor? Are they teaching students in schools how to think out ahead of the curve? No. They are teaching people to work for billionaires, and inventors, and actors, and creative genius. How many Frank Lloyd Wrights have colleges produced in design courses? How many Steven Spielberg's have film schools produced. How many colleges have film classes that study Stanley Kubrick, yet Kubrick never went to college.

I've been in the work place for a number of years, and I've worked with hundreds of kid's right out of college that hadn't even begun their education yet. In fact, many of them don't yet possess the real life understanding that makes them efficient employees straight out of college. They have an understanding of the function of their profession, but not real life application. The worst are the "professional" students who come out of college with a master's degree but very little actual work experience. What many of these people have in common is a genuine fear of the real world, and they crave the safety and controlled circumstances of academia. That's my personal take, and source for my beliefs. I'm all for an education if people want to spend their money on it. But I don't see the current education system creating the exceptional individuals every company wants to hire. The best explanation I've ever heard to explain the reason for this was in the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

My personal education continues each day, and I would say that I am a lover of books and learning. But I also like to question. And with these facts, many questions must be asked, among which; how much are we willing to spend on education? What do we really want from it?

RUSH: A few words about Andrew Breitbart. I've known Andrew Breitbart since the 1990s when he was working with Matt Drudge to help produce that page, the Drudge Report, each and every day. He grew up in West Los Angeles, surrounded by liberals, father-in-law Orson Bean, the comedian. Sometime during the 1990s, the early nineties, Breitbart had an awakening. He was constantly questioning what was all around him, which was really extreme liberalism, and he became, as many of you in the audience know, a bulldog. He literally was an indefatigable bulldog for the conservative cause. He did things that nobody else has done on the Internet where there are a lot of players. He accomplished quite a lot, much more than a lot of people.

A lot of people get into the business for a number of reasons. His was to effect change. He really sought to effect change above everything else. A lot of people get into it to make a name for themselves. He was about that, too, of course, but he really was about effecting change, and he did on numerous occasions with ACORN, Anthony Weiner, Shirley Sherrod, just to name three of his most famous examples. But he was a bulldog. He was walking outside his home in his neighborhood in Brentwood just after midnight, keeled over. People had talked to him two hours prior, he sounded perfectly fine. They're shocked. Family's stunned. I mean there were some reports of health problems, but there was no indication of this.

So everybody's in a state of shock today trying to make sense of it. And when something like this happens to somebody a lot of people know at a very young age, you could say he died too young by half, he's 43, life expectancy in the early eighties. You're reminded once again, it's become a cliche but it's worth mentioning. You only get one life, and most people don't get as much out of it as they could. Human nature. And one of the reasons that most people don't get the most out of their lives that they can is they can't stop thinking about themselves. And the more you think about yourself the more depressed you're gonna get. Human nature. The more you think about yourself, the less you are aware of things going on outside your sphere. It's hard not to do that, and Breitbart did that.

Breitbart was outside himself in all of his quests. When I say indefatigable, I never heard of him sleeping. I know he did, but he was constantly on the go. He was also a grateful guy and very thoughtful. He was a guest at our wedding in 2010, and about two months prior he sent Cookie a note, wanted to know if she knew who one of my most inspirational figures was. She told him. He presented us with a classic painting of Ronald Reagan, and every year since, every birthday, three birthdays, he has sent me a giant painting, a different rendering of the American flag.

It's a very sad thing to see this happen. And I've been made aware that some of the leftists on Twitter and other blog sites are filled with an unspeakable callous and coarse mean-spiritedness today. When I heard about it I went to some of these sites and I read some of the tweets, some of them from well-known left-wing journalists, Slate.com, you would not believe it, I'm struck. What is there to compromise with these people? Where is the area for compromise with these people? I mean it is really vicious stuff, which, in the end he would have loved and was a testament to his effectiveness and how effective he was.

Even today, the AP in their story/obit of Andrew Breitbart misrepresents him, even in death. And maybe fittingly, given his quest in life, this AP article is a textbook example of the kind of outrageous mendacity in the news media today that he fought against. Even in death the AP cannot refrain from lying about him and misrepresenting him. They treat his posting of the Shirley Sherrod video clip as one of the highlights of his career only in order to use it against him. But Breitbart's clip did not misrepresent her views.

The clip that he posted -- he had the Big Government websites, Big Journalism websites -- the clip that he posted of Shirley Sherrod contained enough of her comments that any fair-minded viewer would realize she was telling the audience about her previous prejudices. This was the case involving all of the mythical black farmers that were signed up for a giant government payout. She and her husband were in on that, and so many of them were not qualified to receive the payment. They all got the payment on the basis of past racism and bigotry and all of this. He exposed Shirley Sherrod, just as he exposed Anthony Weiner's photos, or Anthony's Weiner photos, he exposed 'em. Where's Weiner today? He's walking the baby to the dry cleaners in Queens.

Then there was ACORN. Remember the James O'Keefe videos. That was Andrew Breitbart. They went walking in portraying a pimp and a prostitute looking for ways to scam the system, and there was ACORN telling 'em how to do it. All caught on tape. It caused ACORN to theoretically shut down, and change their name and come back to life as a bunch of separate organizations. The AP article damns Andrew Breitbart with faint praise. It describes him as "an outspoken critic of the mainstream media but was lionized by his fans for his efforts at exposing government corruption and media bias." Now, was he only lionized by his fans?

Wouldn't you think that real-life journalists would applaud Breitbart's efforts to expose government corruption and media bias? I mean, what does the media claim to exist to do? To hold the powerful accountable! "Speak truth to power," is that the phrase? Well, the mainstream media has become part of the power. When that power is held by the Democrat Party, the mainstream media covers up the corruption. He was exposing it. He did more and greater work than Woodward and Bernstein! He should have been one of their heroes. But he wasn't. He should have been given the same kind of hero worship that Woodward and Bernstein have gotten. And unlike the work of Woodward and Bernstein, Breitbart's investigations were actually truthful.

Now, at the bottom of the article, the AP notes that, quote, "Breitbart's websites also featured a 2009 hidden-camera sting video that brought embarrassment to the community group ACORN. The videos show ACORN staffers offering advice on taxes and other issues to actors posing as a prostitute and pimp," close quote, which is another blatant misrepresentation. We all know that those ACORN staffers were doing more than "offering advice on taxes and other issues." Why else would they have been fired? They were all fired in humiliating disgrace. Why did ACORN lose its funding? Why was it disbanded, and then rebranded and put back together?

All in all, this AP article just goes to show that the country desperately needs another thousand more Andrew Breitbarts, if you ask me. He was something. Constantly on the go. Constantly revved up. He was at Tea Party event. He went to CPAC. He would even occasionally go to breakfast meetings of various Republican members of Congress, sit with them and discuss strategy, the way to effectively advance ideas and be victorious. You know, all of us are unique. It's true to say that there will never be another Andrew Breitbart. There will never be another anybody because we're all unique. I hope that the people who worked with him can maintain the tradition, the energy, and the effectiveness that his websites all were after his passing.

I know they're going to try, and I know they'll do it with a sense of honor, duty, and devotion to Breitbart as well as the fact they love it, too. It's just really a sad thing. Everybody is totally taken by surprise, as I say. He was on the phone with people two hours before he died. Nobody knew that anything was wrong. Now, he'd had some health problems. People knew that. But there was no terminal diagnosis involved here. There was no ongoing illness that people were aware of. There were some health problems, but nothing that indicated anything like this. Except maybe to people very close to him. Who knows?

But at ten o'clock last night people were talking to him on the phone and two hours later he keels over on the sidewalk in his neighborhood in Brentwood. He'll be missed by a lot of people. I will say one thing that happened to him. The Pigford thing. That was the Shirley Sherrod case. That was the USDA. The Pigford settlement. This is where all those black farmers scored big on the federal government for past discrimination way, way back. They just tried to find as many people as they could that had never been farmers; family had never been farmers. It was one of his highlights of his career. But I noted change in him over the years, and I think this is a life lesson.

Over the years, the whole thing he was involved in seemed to lose some of the fun factor as the intensity and the seriousness of it picked up. And this loops back to the notion that we all only have one life. I hope that that didn't have anything to do with it. I mean, he was very intense. He was profoundly intense, and at times he'd get very mad, very angry -- as we all do -- and very frustrated. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to be effective. He was far more effective than he probably ever dreamed, but probably wanted to be even more so. So let's hope that the people who were around him, who were inspired by him, can keep his work going as though he were still there.

'Cause that work is crucially important to a lot of people on the conservative side. As I say: Remember, now, he grew up in West LA. He grew up surround by liberals. He told me. We interviewed him here for his book. We interviewed him for the Limbaugh Letter. He described the process that he took, or that occurred to him as he began to question some of this stuff that just been inculcated, drilled into him from the time he was born. He began to question it. A lot of it didn't make sense. And then one day, a big burst of reality hit, and his life changed forever. Andrew Breitbart was 43 years old and he's going to be missed by everybody who knew him.

RUSH: Did anybody ask like I'm gonna ask now: "Why did Sandra Fluke want to go to a Catholic college? Georgetown's a Catholic college. Why go there? Well, from the Washington Post: "Fluke came to Georgetown interested in contraceptive coverage. She researched the Jesuit college's health plans for students before enrolling. She found that birth control was not included." Quote, "I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise a quality of my education in exchange for my health care." So why the hell go to Georgetown? Why didn't she go someplace else? She wanted to go there to stir it up! She's a plant, an anti-Catholic plant from the get-go on this. I was gonna move on to other things, and I am, but I got more questions now.

RUSH: Look, this Sandra Fluke stuff and the free contraceptives, if all of it is a little esoteric, and I hope it's not, I think we've made this abundantly clear what's going on, but the simplest way to understand this, it's just a new welfare program. And "welfare" is a bad word, and they can't use it, they can't sell it, so now it's disguised. Welfare disguised as women's health, or women's reproductive rights. But it's just another welfare program. That's all this is. Here we have a woman, Sandra Fluke materialized out of nowhere, it seems, to testify before a committee to talk about the Republicans denying women their contraceptives.

It's all fake, ginned up, trumped up, and phony. But I finally asked myself, why go to a Catholic college? You want to have all the sex you want all day long, no consequences, no responsibility for your behavior, why go to a Catholic college? And therein lies the answer to all of this. Washington Post: "Fluke came to Georgetown University interested in contraceptive coverage." Now, stop and think of that for a moment. Here you have a female student arriving on campus interested in contraceptive coverage. When you are reviewing schools for your kids to attend, do you look around at contraception coverage? Well, Fluke told the Washington Post that she did. The Washington Post reports that Fluke "researched the Jesuit college's health plans for students before enrolling, and found that birth control was not included." And she enrolled anyway. Why? Quote, Fluke, "I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care."

In other words, Georgetown's a great law school, I'm gonna go there even if they don't have contraception. I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna make them give me my contraception. So why did she have to go to Georgetown? Why didn't she go someplace else instead of trying to get them to change their religion? If you ask me, this is part of the coordinated assault on the Catholic Church, and this little bomb is like a hand grenade with a timer that has just been waiting for the right political moment to be exploded. You must understand none of this just happened. None of this evolved naturally. This is a Democrat plot waiting to be hatched to create a new welfare program and, at the same time, trying to cast Republicans into the election year as anti-female. Fluke is a typical liberal.

Now, this ginned up birth control crisis just shows there's literally nothing the Democrats will not use for political gain to advance their agenda. They're the ones who have no respect for women or for human life or for anything. This woman is being used. Do you realize at the end of the day what's happening here, the Democrats are putting on parade a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her-life woman. She wants all the sex in the world, whenever she wants it, all the time. No consequences. No responsibility for her behavior. That is what the Democrats consider a great example of citizenship, an oppressed victim of something. She's a typical liberal. She stands on her head and says the rest of the world is upside down. She went to Georgetown University knowing their views and demands they change their religion for her.

This has never been about birth control. It's about political control and creating a new welfare program. Fluke spent the past three years lobbying the administration to change its policy on the issue, Georgetown University. So she is a reproductive rights activist. That's how she is being portrayed. You know what I would ask her? Ms. Fluke, could you explain to me, since you are in law school, what is the legal definition of a reproductive rights activist so I understand the foundation of your testimony and your arguments. What intellectual criteria do we use to determine your expertise in being a reproductive rights activist. What classes did you take, at what school? What have you written on the subject? What lab or field experience do you have which qualifies you as a credible reproductive rights witness in this hearing? Why are you even here, is what I would ask her, if I were a Republican on the committee.

Georgetown's a pretty expensive school. I don't buy your argument that's it unaffordable. Have you ever heard of the term "budget"? Have you ever heard of aspirin? Have you ever heard of saying "no"? You can't afford it, you don't buy it. You can't afford it, you don't do it. But it's asinine to tell us this is unaffordable. And then I would ask her if she thought Hugh Hefner would be a reproductive rights activist. Is Eliot Spitzer a reproductive rights activist? Bill Clinton? How do you become one? Listen to this sound bite. Grab number 30. This morning in Washington on Capitol Hill there was a hearing of the health subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, testified, and Tim Murphy, a Republican from Pennsylvania, had this exchange with the secretary of Health and Human Services.

MURPHY: I just want to get this on the record, Mr. Chairman. So you're saying by not having babies born, we're gonna save money on health care?

SEBELIUS: Providing contraception as a critical preventive health benefit for women and for their children reduces health --

MURPHY: Not having babies born is a critical benefit? This is absolutely amazing to me. I yield back.

RUSH: Avoiding pregnancy. They're portraying it once again, pregnancy as a disease. Not having babies born is a critical benefit for health care. Fewer babies, less cost. Fewer babies, less expense. This hearing today is all part of this scam to create a new welfare program. But we've been here before. Remember this from Nancy Pelosi.

Washington Post: Meet Sandra Fluke: The Woman You Didn't Hear at Congress' Contraceptives Hearing

CNSNews: Sex-Crazed Co-Eds Going Broke Buying Birth Control, Student Tells Pelosi Hearing Touting Freebie Mandate

UK Daily Mail: A Third of UK Women Would Swap IQ for Larger Breasts. Maybe President Obama will mandate this as a part of free healthcare?

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

Conservative Review
Issue #218	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	March 4, 2012