earthquake. clearly there s going to be a change in direction. but i don t think anyone knows the answer to how it s going to turn out. host: we will open up our phone lines, and you can also reach us by to witter and by email as the conversation proceeds with david keating. we d like your questions or comments for him. we ll go to phone calls in just a couple of minutes. you heard a number of people call us during theast segment, concerned about the ex-ploy exportation of american jobs overeast. i wonder what your opinion is about free trade deals and what role they have played in bolstering the economy or exporting jobs. guest: there s no doubt that free trade is something that has bolstered the economy here in the u.s. one way of looking at this, to make it easier to understand, is that the united states, one of the geniusesf the constitution and the founding fathers, when they designed the new united states of america was that we would have a free trade inside the unite
we are going to be talking about all this later on with david keating and blanche lincoln, the former arkansas senator. in our final segment this morning, we will learn more about how u.s. students are doing on american history studies. as we began this morning, we are going to look at a provocative ad we saw in usa today. they ask the question is the american dream dead? kep good friday morning to you. you can also send us a twitter message this morning if you would like to talk about our question this morning is the american dream dad? twitter.com/cspanwj. this is a full-page ad in usa today. it is sponsored by americans mutual insurance company. they are asking people to answer. we thought we would ask you the question. some say the american dream is dead. we think they are wrong. what do you think? let s play a bigger impact all of that piggyback off of that. usa today had other versions of this in its editorial pages. the lessons for america is a new series. as th
she was kind enough to mention a little bit something about my background. and he mentioned that i m an author and a father of four children and for a while we had three children under 3. now, we ve got the oldest one turns 8 next month but she s 8 going on 58 and she reads a gazillionth grade level and that and she s curious about daddy s book and what is daddy writing? the words are long for a sev d she s dying to write about them and she wants to talk about that and i want the meeting of the minds and what motivates me. all right. we re going to sit down and talk about it and we read together a part of one of my books and she basically was getting it. i thought this was really fantastic and i realized not long ago that she really able to absorb some of these things and this is not a made up phony lonely story when i got wind with a conversation she had with one of her peers. and she were talking about some old time story that her friend read, a 19th story about penny
he liked children, which is sort of interesting when you think about the rest of his life. he was able to be apparently childlike with children but you don t get a sense of him as a warm and funny person otherwise. .. sure. yes. and i think he could have he wouldn t have had to a different kind of johnson would not have had to go along with everything the republicans wanted to do. one of the things he did do but i didn t try to convey a talk about in the book is that his recalcitrant gave aid and comfort to the southerners, and people said you know, we would have accepted anything in the immediate aftermath of the war we would have accepted anything, any terms, but he gave us hope of the white man s government and so we need to hold out. and so, i think will he played i think is the symbolic role of the president as leader that was important. if he hadn t so strenuously opposed voting rights, if he hadn t said it caused efforts to bring about land reform it s not to say t
pentagon. it is an anthology. there are 10 offers. authors. we picked areas we have experience in. i can boast and say they are truly extraordinary essayist to give people an insight beyond the superficiality of how the pentagon operates and how to cope with it and how to understand what it is doing. in the struggle to find in the struggle to find a title, i quickly rejected the pentagon for dummies title. and i asked some others if i could steal their title, and they said no. we settled on the pentagon labyrinth. why are you doing this? i think our system is breaking down. the system of checks and balances is not operating properly. i worked on the hill for 20 years, and congress has three essential powers, the power to go to war, the power of the purse, and the power to investigate. the first two powers, to go to war and of the purse, are meaningless if congress does not exercise the power to investigate, and it is not doing that. it is doing a lousy job. it is ac