This week's topic: Obama as President?

Alright. This is going to be fascinating. This week's topic, "Obama as President?" is full of possibilities. Let's go over the ground rules.

Please understand the following:

The two of us have flipped a coin to decide who will go "pro" and who will go "con" on the weekly issue. Our posts do NOT reflect our personal politics, and those who know us personally are asked not to attack either of us for being "traitors" to a point of view (see SITE RULES in sidebar). The idea behind what we are doing is to teach everyone (and ourselves) how to better discuss and debate issues without resorting to diatribe, passion, emotion, or any other "less than rational" dialog. Any comment that includes vulgarity, name-calling, or any statements that are not supported by empirical data or honest emotion (without disrespect) will not be tolerated on this blog, and are not welcome here. If you feel strongly about an issue, feel free to say why, but please back your position up with a citation to the reference material from which you learned your point of view.

We intend to support our "pro and con" positions with neutral fact websites or other neutral resources such that every post we make is beyond reproach from a journalistic standpoint. In the case that we get information from a less than neutral website (and we will endeavor to figure this out in advance), we will indicate that in our posts. To the extent that we succeed at this, this site should flourish. We've called it an experiment; this is partly because we don't know if we can do it by the rules, but we will try. We ask only that commenters try as well. Please see the section on site rules in the sidebar. Note that it is our hope that all participants, including your hosts, but also school teachers and college professors will utilize this site to help people learn how argument and persuasion can and should be done. This means there is no room for vulgarity, name calling, or angry and unsupported rhetoric. If you don't follow comment rules, your comment will be removed. Young people may be reading here! Please act accordingly!

For posting rules, which reiterate these points and others, please see the sidebar entitled: Site Rules.

What will follow are individual postings by Dano and Reed on the topic for this week. Please feel free to comment on them, and expect us to comment on each others' posts as well. This is a learning process for us all.

One administrative note: we are attempting to have comments show up immediately under the relevant posts, but this has proven to be a glitch on our hosting site. If you want to see your comment, for now, you must click on the small "comments" link below the post. This will bring up a screen that shows all comments for each post, and you can bring up the original post there as well. We're trying to fix this problem.