about Bush are the ones you have to dig deep to find; they're not the ones that get played and replayed on TV stations owned and operated by and for the benefit of our corporatocracy... which is to say: NOT YOU.

There was, for example, that quotation from his old Prof at the Harvard Business School in re: how he looked down upon poor people, and blamed them for their own poverty.

There was that brilliant repartee when some citizen said to him at some event that he wasn't all that thrilled with what he was seeing from the Bush Administration: "Well, who cares what you think?"

Best of all though was when, on one of his innumerable road shows with HAND-PICKED supportive audiences (I think it was one of the "Let's Save Social Security by Destroying It" shows), he was presented with a working-Mom (possibly single, not sure) who told him how she had to work THREE JOBS to keep her family going; I think she was worried about losing one of them... his response: "That's just great!"

The sooner we send this overprivileged, phony, alcoholic, arrogant, hypocritical, and cowardly piece of white trash back to his beloved private sector, the better for all of us.

...but could you please clarify exactly what you mean by

" a social nuisance and cartoon of the Cindy Sheehan sort"?

Do you mean to say that loudly and repeatedly making points that badly needed to be made -- and, fortunately, thereby helping to break through the self-censorship of a corporatocracy-controlled "Main Stream Media" that apparently feels it is not their place to inform us when political leaders are lying through their teeth -- makes one a "nuisance" and a "cartoon"? (Especially when partly as a result of those points' having been made, the polling of said politicians has dropped precipitately.)

Or is it perhaps that you mean that loudly and repeatedly making points that YOU DISAGREE WITH is sufficient to earn that label? Little hlep here, please?

And while we're at it - I used to LOVE Saturday mornings; what's so wrong with cartoons, anyway?

Mike Bergin asks, "What is so wrong with an objective, quantitative, nationally administered exam?" What is wrong, as other posters have said, is that the presumption of "objectivity" is highly suspect.

Let's take, as an illustration, a couple of factoids from the analogous exam required to get into law school, the LSAT. (The LSAT used to be written by ETS, the same agency that writes the SAT. While this is no longer the case, the similarities are still dramatic, even overwhelming -- and one's SATVerbal score is a very good predictor of LSAT scoring capability.)

In answering an LSAT question, if you take the phrase "either/or" to mean "just one of," as most people do, you will get the answer wrong. If you translate "either/or" to mean "or both, unless the two options are dictionary-definition mutually exclusive," you will get the answer right.

Similarly, in answering MOST Question-types in the LSAT's so-called "Logical Reasoning" sections, it is necessary that you NOT attack the "evidence" lines in the given argument stimuli, and answers that attack the evidence lines will be wrong answers. However, there is ONE Question-type in which this rule reverses, and if you DON'T select the answer that attacks the evidence lines, you will be wrong.

Is either of these an "objective" measure of anything? If so, what?

What it mostly reflects, as poster momacress pointed out, is how well you know how to take tests in general -- and the specific terms of the exam in front of you in particular. Someone who takes a course or gets tutoring that teaches those particular things (shameless self-promotion: if you have to take the LSAT, pls visit testwell.com) is hugely advantaged over someone who does not. This is very likely part - though certainly not all -- of why the single best predictor of someone's SAT score is parental income. (Unlike my firm, which uses need-based sliding-scale tuition, the test-prep industry as a whole is accessible only to people of significant means.)

And of Laynegt, who claimed, "The SAT is not any more vulnerable to coaching than any other test of anything. Hold a free throw-shooting contest and you'll find people who've practiced shooting free throws tend to do better..." I must ask: are there specific tricks to shooting free throws that are accessible ONLY to people who get PROFESSIONAL coaching, and not to anyone else, no matter how athletically gifted? If not, then the analogy falls apart.

But then I remember the 2500+/- and soon-to-be-more dead servicepeople, the thousands of wounded, the tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis who have died for his hubris, and the tens of millions -- sorry HUNDREDS of millions -- of American citizens, workers, taxpayers, parents, grandparents, children... ALL of us who are going to be paying the price of this pinhead's arrogance, selfishness, shortsightedness, and stupidity for generations to come, and that almost-feeling goes away quickly.