It's not often that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi camps under the GOP tent, but that's just what happened recently when she broke ranks with Bay Area Democrats and the Obama administration and voted to keep billions of dollars in federal student aid flowing into the coffers of for-profit colleges.

She had her reasons. Some of the biggest recipients of the $32 billion in federal student loans and Pell Grants each year paid to for-profits are in her district - including major Democratic donor John Sperling, founder of the online University of Phoenix, the nation's largest for-profit college.

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You'd never believe it, but some of these fake-college fat cats donate to Nancy Pelosi!

Campaign finance records show that the 90-year-old Sperling, along with his son Peter and their Apollo Group Inc., have poured about $600,000 into Democratic and Republican campaigns since 2008, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, where Pelosi has been a major fundraiser. [...]

An Apollo Group spokesman said in a written statement they were concerned that the impacts of the proposed restrictions weren't fully understood and that they could limit student options and potentially "unfairly disadvantage hundreds of thousands of historically underserved students."

DICTIONARY FOR THIS LAST PARAGRAPH:

concerned—want to keep gouging the government and bankrupting poor people for useless "degrees"

proposed restrictions weren't fully understood—realized they hadn't shut up other members of Congress with enough campaign contributions

limit student options—disallowing "education" that only exists to exploit poor people for cash

historically underserved students—people who only go to college when they see a slick commercial on teevee and are lured into a fake college with a series of lies

[San Francisco Chronicle via Wonkette operative "Alanhw"]