It's not just President Obama, but he does tend to fall into the trap too often. I don't really know anybody who has taken seriously those supposedly inspiring Presidential anecdotes that crop up in speeches all the time. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes--they all embellished the stories that their speech-writers fed them. But it can really bite you on the ass in a speech that is at least partly about other people distorting the truth : Last week, when the President addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech on health reform, he referred to some of the untruths – okay, lies – that have been spread about the plan and sent a clear message to those who seek to undermine his agenda and his presidency with these tactics: "We will call you out." Unfortunately, as Lynn Sweet at Politics Daily points out , that speech came with an anecdote that ... wasn't true: When Obama spoke to Congress about health care reform on Sept. 9, he attempted to put a human face...

[I'm not referring to Tina Turner's ex.] Curiously enough, though I am not their biggest fan by any means, I think that CNN has put out the most even-handed coverage of responses to former President Jimmie Carter's racism charges about many opponents of President Obama. Unfortunately, the manner in which the article is written does not lend itself to excerpting, so visit it here . I have been sorting out my own thoughts about the Carter assertion, which now have surfaced in two different venues, his NBC interview and his speech at Emory University. From what I can tell, the Emory University speech constitutes [choose your term] either fine-tuning or back-tracking by the former President: "When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the b...

Just think of it as my daily contribution to the coarsening of the American dialogue on the Second Amendment. [h/t Real World Libertarian ]

I have said many times here that I am a Constitutionalist, and I do believe that within the US Constitution and Bill of Rights one of those rare events occurred wherein something fundamentally important about a free society was set down on paper and enshrined into law. I enjoy reading Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and Paine. But I also feel--both as a scholar and a teacher--the need to examine completely divergent viewpoints: not to debunk them, but hopefully to learn from them. One historian who always teachs me to re-frame the familiar is Francis Jennings--one of America's leading scholars on Native American studies. About a decade ago, Dr. Jennings wrote The Creation of American: Through Revolution to Empire , and I have been reading it again as I somewhat unsuspectingly agreed to conduct several in-service trainings for History Teachers in the colonial/revolutionary period this fall [I thought I was agreeing to do the Civil War era; really do have to learn to read the fine pr...

My wife and I discovered this about two months ago and I have been meaning to blog about it sooner. We have the State of Delaware prescription plan and do our business with the local Eckerds. One day the pharmacist suggested to us that we really should have the Eckerds' pharmacy card, which is free. I had always thought that those pharmacy discount cards were for people who did not have good prescription plans. He showed me the error of my ways: on the particular generic medication we were refilling that evening, the 90-day supply was (no kidding) nearly $12 cheaper than through my prescription plan. It isn't always the case, but on about one out of three drug purchases we make at Eckerds the store discount card comes out to be cheaper than the prescription plan. Here's the catch: they are not automatically allowed to check and give you the best price between the two. You have to ask, each time you are filling a new prescription. That's a pain, but doing so, for a ...

From Reuters regarding President Obama's rather vague strategic goals for Afghanistan and Pakistan: Topping Obama's objectives, according to a draft document obtained by Reuters, was improving Pakistan's counterinsurgency capabilities and building up Afghan security forces so that the role of the United States could be reduced. But the document offered few specifics and set no target dates. It said the administration would assess its progress against the goals by the end of next March. Now let's go off the net for the moment, and examine Thomas T. Hammond's Red Flag over Afghanistan , which is pretty much seen today as the definitive contemporary short work on the Soviet experience there: From page 160, the sub-section entitled "The Disintegration of the Afghan Army": The Soviets probably assumed that the Afghan Army would be of great assistance in suppressing the rebels, but they have been disappointed. In fact, one might say that the Afghan army has be...

From Coyote the only sentence you really need to read to know we're simply insane: In the US last year, 754,224 people were arrested for possession (not dealing or production) of marijuana. Three-quarters of a million people. At that rate, we arrest 2.5% of our population every decade. Damn demon weed.