I see a pretty bright line between analysis and opinion. And so, to that end, my goal on Friday nights is to try to assemble the smartest reporters who are available to me that week who have been involved in covering the news.

Discrimination at any level sends a harmful message to youth, gay or straight alike, and that discrimination has no place in Scouting.

Aspiring black leaders are often asked to transcend race, even though no one ever asked, say, Hillary Clinton to transcend gender. This is a precarious race straddle that most members of the breakthrough generation seem to reject. Even the most well meaning white Obama supporters seem to take deep satisfaction in this idea. Obama, they insisted, could be raceless, a reasurringly optimistic view of America's deepest burden that ignores countless peices of evidence to the contrary.

People do still cheer for the President. And some of the military audiences are more likely to cheer than others. I have seen him speak lately in front of groups like Freedom House, where the applause was a long time coming.

One of the unwritten rules in a presidential news conference is that he'll answer questions. If he chooses not to, there's not much you can do about it other than make yourself look like an idiot screaming, which to me is counterproductive.

We used to say in the black community that if somebody else caught a cold, we caught pneumonia.

Act right all the time, because someone's always watching.