Jonathan Chait: Is Bush Still Too Dumb to Be President? - Los Angeles Times: ". . .Oh, sure, a few of us have brought it up from time to time, but we have generally been dismissed out of hand as wacky Bush-haters. By 2004, the question had been turned around completely. Democrats had almost nothing to say about Bush's lack of intellect, while Republicans joyfully and repeatedly attacked John Kerry as an egghead. Anti-intellectualism was triumphant.
Yet it is now increasingly clear that Bush's status as non-rocket scientist is a serious problem. The problem is not his habit — savored by late-night comedians — of stumbling over multisyllabic words. It is his shocking lack of intellectual curiosity.
Ron Suskind's new book, 'The One Percent Doctrine,' paints a harrowing picture of Bush's intellectual limits. Bush, writes Suskind, 'is not much of a reader.' He prefers verbal briefings and often makes a horse-sense judgment based on how confident his briefer seems in what he's saying. In August 2001, the CIA was in a panic about an upcoming terrorist attack and drafted a report with the title, 'Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.' When a CIA staffer summed up the memo's contents in a face-to-face meeting with Bush, the president found the briefer insufficiently confident and dismissed him by saying, 'All right, you've covered your ass, now,' according to Suskind. That turned out to be a fairly disastrous judgment.
Bush loyalists like to dismiss Suskind's reporting, but it jibes with the picture that has emerged from other sources. L. Paul Bremer III's account of his tenure as head of Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority depicts Bush as uninterested in the central questions of rebuilding and occupying the country. . ."
You may have heard that recently-adopted policies are going to make it harder for students with college loans. Apparently, over the weekend, it became official.
Students across the nation will have to pay thousands more in college loans beginning Saturday, according to a series of reports released [Friday] by the research arm of the Campaign for America’s Future. College students and graduates will be pushed deeper into debt as interest rates on Stafford loans — the basic student loan — rise from 5.3 percent to 7.14 percent on old loans and to 6.8 percent on new loans at the end of this week.
Parents that take out PLUS loans to help their children pay for an undergraduate education also face rising interest rates. This Saturday, rates on PLUS loans will increase from 6.1 percent to nearly 8 percent for existing loans and to 8.5 percent on new loans, costing the average parent nationally an extra $3,000 and $3,953 respectively.
It’s perfect timing, too, in light of the fact that tuition costs have increased 40% since Bush took office.
No wonder the president has been lying about student loans for months.
– Guest Post by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report"
Do you really mean everything is not coming economic roses for everyone? Gasp!