Speech

A speech by President Obama has prompted accusations of "indoctrinating" America's youth and led to calls for "transparency" -- nearly a week before the address is scheduled to be delivered to the nation's schoolchildren. The U.S. Department of Education last week announced plans for the president to speak "directly to the nation's schoolchildren about persisting and succeeding in school," as Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in an e-mail to principals at more than 100,000 schools. The 15- to 20-minute address is scheduled for Tuesday, the first day of school for many districts, at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. It will be broadcast over the Internet, on C-SPAN and via satellite.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon has lost his first scrape with the new Congress, and it hasn't even been sworn in yet. In a sign of the altered political map, Calderon postponed his annual state of the nation speech scheduled next week after lawmakers from the newly dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, objected to the timing. Calderon, a conservative, had planned to deliver his address from the National Palace on Tuesday morning before a select audience; his office was already sending out invitations.

washington -- Former First Lady Laura Bush on Monday expressed support for President Obama's decision to speak to the nation's schoolchildren, saying it was "really important for everyone to respect the president of the United States." In an interview with CNN, Bush, a former schoolteacher, said: "There's a place for the president of the United States to . . . encourage schoolchildren" to stay in school. Parents and others, she said, need to send that message as well. Bush also praised Obama's performance, saying that "he's tackled a lot to start with, and that's made it difficult."

Conservative activists blasted it as socialist. Worried parents called for boycotts. School administrators struggled over whether to let students hear it. But in the "back to school" speech Barack Obama plans to give Tuesday, he will do what American presidents have done before -- urge students to work hard, stay in school and follow their dreams. "If you quit on school, you're not just quitting on yourself, you're quitting on your country," Obama will say in the speech, which is loaded with similar exhortations.

Neither cable, Internet, radio nor a roomful of sheepish and harried adults could deliver the president's address to the 27 fifth-graders in Alice Cho's class at Commonwealth Avenue Elementary in Koreatown. But the message of hard work and resilience got through. The apparent culprit Tuesday morning was interference from a line of television vans in front of the school. Everything had worked perfectly Friday in a test, officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District said.

Sixteen years ago this month, a popular young Democratic president went before a joint session of Congress to sell his major domestic policy initiative -- healthcare reform -- and failed utterly. That chief executive, of course, was Bill Clinton, and tonight the country will see whether the implosion that crippled his administration in the years that followed also will afflict President Obama. Obama already has established himself alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan as one of the great presidential orators in modern history.

The cable TV channels fired their screeching engines hours in advance. A "Health Care Make or Break Moment" screamed a CNN headline. Countdown clocks at Fox and MSNBC ticked inexorably toward 00:00, the moment when President Obama would face down a joint session of Congress. This had to be really, really big, I learned all day Wednesday from the excitable people on cable TV -- a speech that likely would determine the fate of healthcare reform and, perhaps, the Obama presidency.

At least the shocker this year was related to music. The MTV Video Music Awards are always willfully chaotic, keeping alive the myth of pop as the provenance of rebels by placing a bunch of moderately edgy celebrities within a festive environment and fueling the mood with sexy performances, off-color jokes and "incidents" that are often staged, but good for a thousand Twitter tweets. One of these mostly bogus controversies usually goes a bit deeper, hinting at real issues of identity, status, personal power and self-expression -- the sticky stuff from which pop music is, in fact, made.

Headline that bounced around the Internet over the weekend: "Is Michael Jordan planning to start a 50-and-over league?" The quick answer is no, because it takes time to examine how an off-hand comment Jordan made during his Hall of Fame induction speech can be twisted into such a headline. What Jordan said: "Although I am recognized with this tremendous honor of being in the Basketball Hall of Fame, I don't look at this moment as the defining end of my relationship with the game of basketball.

Getting big-boxed in Re "Politically correct, he isn't," Sept. 20 Thank you for your article about R. Rex Parris. We shop in Lancaster, and relatives live in Quartz Hill near where the proposed Wal-Mart is supposed to go up. I wrote Parris a letter protesting that decision because there is another such store only a few miles away; I think we have too many big-box stores too close already. From what I've read, Parris also is fond of "legislating morality" at Lancaster city meetings.