1. A new analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice has determined that the Buffett rule as laid out in Obama’s SOTU could raise up to $50 billion per year to pay down the deficit, while affecting just 0.08 percent of taxpayers. – Analyzing the Buffett Rule

2. President Obama is announcing Friday morning a new proposal to limit federal student loans for students going to schools not making an effort to curb costs. There will be more details when he speaks at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. – Obama to Announce Proposal to Push Colleges to Lower Tuition

3. Watch a 1994 debate between Mittens Romney and Senate incumbent Ted Kennedy, where a partially vibrant Romney attacked Kennedy’s blind trusts, saying: “The blind trust is an age-old ruse. You give a blind trust rules. You can say to a blind trust, don’t invest in properties which would be in conflict of interest or where the seller might think they’re going to get an advantage from me.” This is completely opposite to what Romney says about HIS blind trusts today – plus, and most gratifyingly, Sen. Kennedy went on to trounce Mitt’s ass in this video and in the voting booth:

4. The newly-released GDP numbers fell a little short of expectations, but given the larger trajectory, it was at least encouraging to see the domestic economy moving in the right direction in the final three months of 2011. [...] Here’s a chart showing GDP numbers by quarter since the Great Recession began. The red columns show the economy under the Bush administration; the blue columns show the economy under the Obama administration.  –  Economy shows signs of life

5. “If President Obama is the food stamp president, then Bush was the planes flying into the buildings president.” – Bill Maher, HBO’s Real Time

6. Goodbye to unions, goodbye to the middle class: the percentage of workers represented by a union dipped slightly in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday, as organized labor came under attack in states once considered union strongholds, including Wisconsin and Ohio. – Union membership slipped further as attacks came in 2011

7. Romney is also obviously shameless, a mushy walking inconsistency, and is also quite a facile liar. But he is incredibly disciplined. It ought to be humiliating news that after a year of campaigning and seventeen debates, Romney had to go find a debate coach, so that he might arrange the syllables coming out of his mouth in such a way that he sounds at last like a man one wouldn’t be ashamed to vote for… — Facile Mitt Aims for Newt in One Fell Floridian Thwack

8. The Obama administration announced Friday a new inquiry to investigate fraud in the mortgage-backed securities market, whose billion-dollar implosion helped trigger the global financial crisis. – White House announces investigation of subprime mortgage fraud

9. A full 100 percent of economists agreed that permanently raising the federal tax rate by 1 percent for those in the top income tax bracket would increase federal tax revenue over the next 10 years. By contrast, only 66 percent of the general public agreed that this was the case, with just 50 percent of Republicans concurring and 80 percent of Democrats. The misconception could partly explain why there’s such aversion to tax increases. – Ezra Klein: Average Americans don’t think like economists

10. The security camera video of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s encounter with Nashville airport TSA agents is here, complete with wacky libertarian captions, so now you can make your own determination about how full of shit he was when he told his communications manager he was being detained by the TSA. Our verdict: still totally full of shit… Maybe Rand Paul speaks in a kind of old-timey way, and uses “detained” to just mean “slowed down…” – Video Shows Exactly How Full of Shit Rand Paul Was About Being ‘Detained’