Even understanding that anything even remotely related to football in Texas takes on quasi-religious overtones, this might seem rather remarkably tone-deaf. But see, one involved a Texan and former president asking children to volunteer and the other involved a sitting president asking children to study hard and stay in school.

Get the difference? Nah, me neither. Unless it's because one of them is a colored fella?

ARLINGTON, Texas — Arlington Superintendent Jerry McCullough issued a statement Friday apologizing for how the district handled President Obama's live speech on Tuesday.

The decision not to show the speech live to school children became particularly controversial after it became known that the district had previous plans to bus about 500 fifth-graders to attend an event with former President George W. Bush. The event, which is scheduled later this month at the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, will be an announcement about a volunteer initiative for the 2011 Super Bowl.

"In retrospect, I can see how the district's decisions concerning these two events could be seen as favoring one event over another," McCullough said in his written statement. He later said, "I apologize that my decisions on behalf of the district have disappointed or hurt people."

The district allowed students to miss half a day of school on Tuesday if they wanted to watch the event live elsewhere and recorded the speech for later use. McCullough noted that he is encouraging teachers to use Obama's speech in their classrooms when and how they deem appropriate.

While we all know facts haven't a damn thing to do with the manufactured outrage about that Communist Negro in the White House talking to our poor defenseless children, this might put matters into perspective for the rest of us.

From Media Matters:

On November 14, 1988, Reagan addressed and took questions from students from four area middle schools in the Old Executive Office Building. According to press secretary Marvin Fitzwater, the speech was broadcast live and rebroadcast by C-Span, and Instructional Television Network fed the program “t o schools nationwide on three different days.” Much of Reagan’s speech that day covered the American “vision of self-government” and the need “to keep faith with the unfinished vision of the greatness and wonder of America” but in the middle of the speech, the president went off on a tangent about the importance of low taxes:

Today, to a degree never before seen in human history, one nation, the United States, has become the model to be followed and imitated by the rest of the world. But America's world leadership goes well beyond the tide toward democracy. We also find that more countries than ever before are following America's revolutionary economic message of free enterprise, low taxes, and open world trade. These days, whenever I see foreign leaders, they tell me about their plans for reducing taxes, and other economic reforms that they are using, copying what we have done here in our country.

I wonder if they realize that this vision of economic freedom, the freedom to work, to create and produce, to own and use property without the interference of the state, was central to the American Revolution, when the American colonists rebelled against a whole web of economic restrictions, taxes and barriers to free trade. The message at the Boston Tea Party -- have you studied yet in history about the Boston Tea Party, where because of a tax they went down and dumped the tea in the Harbor. Well, that was America's original tax revolt, and it was the fruits of our labor -- it belonged to us and not to the state. And that truth is fundamental to both liberty and prosperity.

Oh. My. God. Now I understand. Reagan indoctrinated all those schoolchildren, and they grew up to be... tea baggers!

During the question-and-answer portion of the event, Reagan returned to the topic, this time telling the students that lowering taxes increases revenue:

Q My name is Cam Fitzie and I'm from St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Virginia. I was wondering if you think that it is possible to decrease the national debt without raising the taxes of the public?

PRESIDENT REAGAN: I do. That's a big argument that's going on in government and I definitely believe it is because one of the principle reasons that we were able to get the economy back on track and create those new jobs and all was we cut the taxes, we reduced them. Because you see, the taxes can be such a penalty on people that there's no incentive for them to prosper and to earn more and so forth because they have to give so much to the government. And what we have found is that at the lower rates the government gets more revenue, there are more people paying taxes because there are more people with jobs and there are more people willing to earn more money because they get to keep a bigger share of it, so today, we're getting more revenue at the lower rates than we were at the higher.

And do you know something? I studied economics in college when I was young and I learned there about a man named Ibn Khaldun, who lived 1200 years ago in Egypt. And 1200 years ago he said, in the beginning of the empire, the rates were low, the tax rates were low, but the revenue was great. He said in the end of empire, when the empire was collapsing, the rates were great and the revenue was low.

The students probably didn’t know any better, but this is an idea that has been rejected by virtually every economist not named Larry Kudlow.

Well, I'm just going to say it: Obama gives a very nice speech, but his plans worry me. Ever see "Minority Report," the movie with Tom Cruise? Set in the future, he works for the Department of Pre-Crime. The police use technology to predict who will commit crimes, and they arrest them before the crimes happen.

Don't pretty this up, folks. This is exactly the position Obama expressed in his speech today, and if we keep silent simply because he's a Democrat, well, we're not doing our job as citizens of this democratic republic.

I agree wholeheartedly with what Digby said:

I know it's a mess, but the fact is that this isn't really that difficult, except in the usual beltway kabuki political sense. There are literally tens of thousands of potential terrorists all over the world who could theoretically harm America. We cannot protect ourselves from that possibility by keeping the handful we have in custody locked up forever, whether in Guantanamo or some Super Max prison in the US. It's patently absurd to obsess over these guys like it makes us even the slightest bit safer to have them under indefinite lock and key so they "can't kill Americans."

The mere fact that we are doing this makes us less safe because the complete lack of faith we show in our constitution and our justice systems is what fuels the idea that this country is weak and easily terrified. There is no such thing as a terrorist suspect who is too dangerous to be set free. They are a dime a dozen, they are all over the world and for every one we lock up there will be three to take his place. There is not some finite number of terrorists we can kill or capture and then the "war" will be over and the babies will always be safe. This whole concept is nonsensical.

The real terrorists, I'm afraid, are the self-serving hawks who promise to explode a political dirty bomb in the halls of the capitol every time someone tries to be sensible about American foreign policy and national security. They are still running things. They have always run things. And the sorry fact is that their dominance is a decades long model of bipartisan comity.

Glenn Greenwald:

So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.

In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing. That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

And Will Bunch sums up:

No matter how much Obama tries to blame this on the Cheney torture policies (which created that inadmissible evidence), two wrongs don't make a right. What he's proposing is against one of this country's core principles, which is habeas corpus. No matter how many guidelines that Obama and his administration try to impose, there is nothing in the Constitution that would permit the indefinite jailing of people "who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes" but who "nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States" -- nor should their be. Not even if we ever do develop the mind-reading powers of a "thought police."

This is why people need to keep the pressure on Obama -- even those inclined to view his presidency favorably. Because while clearly his overall approach to torture and detention issues are "on the right track" as opposed to the very "wrong track" of Cheney and Bush, it is so easy inside the Beltway to start veering off the rails. Making people accountable for the torture and Guantanamo debacles of the Bush years requires the American people constantly holding our new president accountable, too.

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Last night on Bill O'Reilly's Fox show, warming up for President Obama's speech, Karl Rove helpfully wants that he might be getting overexposed:

O'Reilly: I don't -- I don't know -- and he's gonna take most of the hour, because all the networks are gonna show him now, he's on every network -- No American Idol tonight, all you people singing and dancing, you're not gonna get it tonight! But I'm just worried he's going to lose everybody because he's just going to be saying the same thing we've heard a million times before.

Rove: Well, he does need to say something new, but it needs to be something people find credible and achievable. But you're right, he's getting -- there is a danger of getting overexposed here. I wrote a column last week in the Wall Street Journal saying that he was winging it, that they were just throwing things out there without knowing exactly how they were going to resolve them, whether it was the stimulus bill where they let Congress write it, or Guantanamo, where they said we're going to close it but we don't know what we're going to do, or nullifying all the authorities on enhanced interrogation techniques and then realizing they needed to have some such authorities. So he's gotta be careful tonight that he does not sound like he's winging it.

He's also got to be worried about overexposure. I mean, in the first month, he has traveled more than any president in history. He has been gone from Washington more days than any president in their first month in office. And he's been around the country, getting on the television, doing events to draw attention to himself -- there is a danger of being overexposed, particularly if it sounds like he is saying the same thing.

One can perhaps understand why the person whose job it was to handle George W. Bush would be sensitive about public exposure to the president. After all, his experience was that the more the public saw his charge, the less they liked him. I don't think President Obama has that problem, though.

Now, it's true that Obama needs to be surrounded by more, similarly effective voices who can do some of the heavy message lifting. It's an unfortunate fact that so far he's having to do nearly all of it himself.

But when Karl Rove offers Democrats helpful advice like this, one can't help but utter a low mordant chortle.

After all, what's killing Republicans in the polls right now is how effective Obama has been when he gets out in public. He stayed out of the public eye for the better of the week the stimulus bill was getting under way, and he paid for it by letting Republicans briefly get the upper hand on the public-relations war.

He's going to need help. But Obama is his own best weapon right now, and he'd be foolish not to use it. Karl's kindly advice notwithstanding

Q: How do you know Obama's speech was well-received?

A: Pat Buchanan can't shut up about how much he loved it.

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BUCHANAN: "I stand with Obama! It was a genuinely outstanding speech, it was magnificent. I saw Cuomo's speech, I saw Kennedy in '80, I even saw Douglas MacArthur, I saw MLK; this is the greatest convention speech and probably the most important because unlike Cuomo and the others, this was an acceptance speech, this came out of the heart of America, and he went right at the heart of America. This wasn't a liberal speech at all. This is a deeply, deeply centrist speech. It had wit, it had humor, and when he used the needle on McCain, he stuck it into McCain and it was funny. It was Kennedy's speech in '80. I laughed with Kennedy when he was needling Ronald Reagan."

  Barack Obama dismantles piece by piece the Republican "judgment" attack with the quote of the night.

The record's clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush ninety percent of the time. Senator McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than ninety percent of the time? I don't know about you, but I'm not ready to take a ten percent chance on change.

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Full transcript below:

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