More on the “dramatic decline” in SAT scores. S.M. writes:

I’ve been tutoring high school students for a number of years now, helping them prepare for their SATs. In the current discussion about the decline in test scores, it’s important to note that not only was the test lengthened and a writing section added, but the actual content of the reading and math sections was changed. The analogy section (in my opinion as a linguist, the most interesting and insightful part of the old test) has been replaced by questions based on short reading selections, and the math problems are mildly more difficult in the moderate/hard range than they were just a few years ago. The changes in the reading are such that more students, often very good ones, don’t have enough time to finish a section. Add to all this the fact that the overall length of the test is dramatically increased and it’s no wonder that average scores are declining a bit. I’m actually surprised that the reported decline is as small as it is.

A.B. concurs:

While making shockingly little money at my first job in DC, I worked at second job at a test-prep firm in Bethesda. As part of my job, I took the new SAT last year. And, much to my chagrin, I did worse than I did in high school — way worse. This may be a product of the fact that I have already been to college and didn’t have a lot riding on the test, but I think it also had something to do with the fact that the new test is hideously long. I have had students who probably would have tried the test a second or third time to raise their scores, had the first one not been such a miserable experience. No matter what the College Board says, fatigue is a factor, and students who have had professional preparation to deal with that fatigue are going to do better. (Students who have had professional counseling on how to convince the College Board to let them take the test over several days are way out front on this.) We shouldn’t just be worried about a small dip in the scores, we should be worried about the achievement gap that changes in the test is opening.

I haven’t heard from anyone with relevant experience taking the Post‘s alarmist line.

Cato welfare dude Michael Tanner argues that “since Lyndon Johnson declared War on Poverty in 1964, the poverty rate is perilously close to where we began more than 40 years ago.” He notes that if “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What does that say about our welfare policy?” But look at the historical tables in 1964, 19 percent of the population was poor. Today, that’s 12.6 percent. There are around 300 million people in America, so the 6.4 percentage point diminution in poverty is worth about 19.2 million non-impoverished people. By comparison, just 17.8 million people live in Florida.

Back to the table, though, and you’ll see that poverty actually fell quite rapidly from 19 percent in 1964 to 12.6 percent in 1970. Throughout the seventies, the average poverty rate was about 11.8 percent. At around the end of this period Ronald Reagan falsely claimed that the war on poverty had failed (as you can see, poverty rates fell dramatically) and curtailed anti-poverty programs. As a result, since then poverty rates have largely bounced up and down roughly in step with broad macroeconomic trends, but have never re-reached the seventies-vintage lows on a sustained basis.

So, yes, whether or not you favor spending money on giving stuff to poor people, it remains the case that — surprise! — poor people benefit from those services.

Recently, we learned that a “nice little Guatemalan man” paints Sen. Conrad Burns’ (R-MT) house. Now we learn that terrorists “drive taxi cabs in the daytime.”

A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations responds.

Whoa! New poll shows primary challenger Steve Laffey way ahead of incumbent Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), 51-34.

Update: And that’s despite the hefty sum spent on the race by the Republican National Senatorial Committee to defeat Laffey.

Yup, there was a second hold on the porkbusting database bill — Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV).

In a new statement, Byrd admits to placing the hold and says he’s now released it.

The wages of confusion. Bush today:

If America were to pull out before Iraq can defend itself, the consequences would be absolutely predictable — and absolutely disastrous. We would be handing Iraq over to our worst enemies — Saddam’s former henchmen, armed groups with ties to Iran, and al Qaeda terrorists from all over the world who would suddenly have a base of operations far more valuable than Afghanistan under the Taliban.

I and everyone else have been complaining awhile about Bush’s habit of conflating various groups. We see here, though, that this isn’t just some matter of intellectual fastidiousness. The idea here is that absent the US military, we would be handing Iraq over to some nefarious — and, admittedly, it would be quite nefarious — coalition of Baathists, Iranians, and al-Qaedists, presumably joined by Dr. Evil and the Cobra Commander. Back in the real world, though, these groups are fighting each other. What’s more, the “armed groups with ties to Iran” include the political parties that comprise the Iraqi government. So what is it our troops are accomplishing amidst this frothy mix of bad actors?

In all seriousness, what? Because here’s the rub. If we were looking at a situation where maybe the decision to launch the war didn’t look like such a hot idea, and maybe the reconstruction had proven much more difficult than we’d hoped, and maybe the slog so far had been long and hard and looked to continue to be long and hard for a while, I still could easily see myself convinced that the best thing to do was stay firm and continue with the policy. But looking back over, say, the past three years since the end of our first summer in Iraq, it doesn’t appear to be the case that the situation has improved at all with regard to the problems Bush is pointing to. So what, honestly, is the point? What about the events of the past year makes it look like things will be better one year from today? Already, the apparent gains from the Baghdad security initiative are looking mighty short-lived, just as every skepticism-minded person predicted.

Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is writing a book about himself! But will he cry on Oprah? That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.

“[Iran’s] progress is far less than expected,” said David Albright, a nuclear expert who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security. “Whether it’s because of technical problems or self-restraint it’s hard to gauge, but I don’t think the U.S. can deliver on its promise to get hard sanctions when Iran is barely progressing.”

There’s still an issue here, a real one. The spread of nuclear weapons is against the interests of the United States and the creation of a viable global non-proliferation framework is very much in our interests. But there’s no need for panic and paranoia, sentiments that are being fed in this country by a combination of GOP political needs and the fact that many of the Bush administration’s leading lights just are panicky and paranoid in their approach to the world.

Chris Van Hollen does his penance for mild dissent from the AIPAC line.

With the FBI raiding his son’s Alaska State Senate office, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) might want to review his own ties to the company which has drawn the feds’ curiosity.