Article 2 Section 3

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient..."

I'm a political junkie, and I do enjoy keeping running commentaries of things that are happening on my TV. So, the State of the Union address is a no-brainer for me. Just to be clear, I'm not going to try and document everything the President says, this isn't the New York Times (for one thing, I might still have one or two readers, "Haw Haw!, your medium is dying"). I'm also making no promises that this blog entry will be well written, intellectually organized or correctly spelled. I'll just pick out some of the things that jump out at me.

It's probably easiest to do the highlights from the pre-speech stuff by network.

Fox went with solo O'Reilly until about five minutes before the speech. He spent his first segment bragging about his ratings. Seriously, someone needs to tell Fox that half of their viewers are watching for laughs(and the other half are watching while trying eat their soup with a fork). Bill also spent a lot of time talking about how boring he thought the speech would be and how painful it would be for him to watch. Awesome job of getting people engaged Bill, well done. Bill also had Dick Morris on at some point. The bridge Dick lives under must be right by Fox's building, he's there all the time.

MSNBC gave us the usual 8PM Olbermann hour with some extra special guests as we got closer to the speech. My favorite single moment came at 8:18PM, when they appeared to run a commercial for the show I was already watching. Keith's favorite topic tonight was the ACORN video kid and his friends who got arrested for scamming their way into a Senator's office. Keith was a little too giddy about this for me.

This is just some dumbass kid who stumbled onto the ACORN story. He got lots of publicity because Republicans hate ACORN. Also because he had the good sense to use his hot friend as the hooker, which certainly didn't hurt with making the whole story good TV. So then he tried to find other ways to get on TV, but I guess his hot friend was gone, he probably tried to sleep with her, so he needed a new idea and wound up committing a felony. It's just a sad story of a moron and the other morons who encouraged him. I don't feel all that interested in it.

In a huge upset, easily the funniest pre-speech coverage was CNN's. CNN had Campbell Brown moderating a 10-person panel. Ten. TEN! And they had other guests via satellite. Everyone got to say four words, Paul Begala's "Hope President speech good" was especially poignant.

Wolf Blitzer was there too, but he spent most of the hour lurking behind one of the panels near his magic wall. The ten panel members appeared to be sharing 6 laptops. For what? Are there speech exit polls coming in, are they coming in before the speech? Were they on twitter and facebook since they only got to talk for 20 seconds each? CNN also had this whole room full of people at computers who were going to be following and analyzing the speech. No kidding, there may have been more people on CNN during the pre-speech than there were in the House chamber during the speech. I could go on about this all night, CNN's pre-speech hour was mind blowing.

Quickly, my wish list of three things I'd love to see tonight, but aren't going to happen:
1) I'd like to see the President challenge any Republican to a fist fight.
2) I'd like to see the President fire someone on the spot with no warning. I'd vote for Janet Napolitano
3) I'd like to see the President break out a quick Bush impression.

OK, OK, enough fun. Madam Speaker, the President of the United States...

While the President makes his customary 52 minute trip from the door to the podium, I should mention that this didn't seem to start well. The two guys who announce the President's arrival spent a good 90 seconds waiting in the doorway to make the announcement. It was like Congress wasn't expecting them. "oh, the President you say? I wish I had known he was coming, I would have baked something"

Biden looks happy to be on TV, and Obama looks happy Biden and Pelosi don't get to talk.

The first section was mostly about how crappy things still are and how everyone needs to work together to move forward. A for honesty, F for being super depressing for five minutes.

The President mentioned how he and everyone else hated the bank bailout, and everyone clapped. That's funny because he and like 300 of those clapping people voted for it. Then the President said he's working on getting the rest of the money back from the banks, not as many people clapped for that one. The Republicans wouldn't even clap for the President's litany of tax cuts, and he pointed that out, which was pretty funny.

By the way, this whole clapping and not clapping thing is so petty and stupid, from both parties. These people are supposed to be running the country, every time the President finishes a sentence half of them cheer like he just cured cancer and the other half sit there sarcastically. Whenever I watch Congress I become concerned that my country is being run by kindergartners.

The President is proposing all kinds of new jobs initiatives. They include tax cuts for new hires and wage hikes as well as eliminating capital gains taxes on small business investments. He also talked about putting people to work on the infrastructure of the future, which apparently centers around very fast trains. Somewhere in this section the President accused Washington of telling us to wait for decades and letting us fall behind other countries. He kicked Washington around quite a bit tonight. I couldn't agree more, but someone should tell the President he's been working in Washington for like five years now.

The President threatened to veto any financial reform bill that isn't "real reform". I predict a future press conference in which the President pulls a few muscles straining to try and define as "real reform" whatever steaming pile of garbage the Senate tries to pass off as reform.

I'm noticing a trend here. President Obama seems to be kicking the Senate's ass a little bit. In the first 20 minutes or so, he mentioned three separate bills that the House had passed and basically said the Senate better get their asses in gear. Later, he mentioned how a bill to create some kind of fiscal committee just died in the Senate, and how he's going to create the committee he wants by executive order instead. He even spent a lot of the section on bipartisanship hammering away at the Senate. Maybe I'll get my wish and he'll challenge the whole Senate to a fist fight.

The President proposed a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants. No jokes here, I really like that idea, I hope we do it. On the other hand, he also mentioned opening up more places to drill for oil. I've never bought the argument that our oil problem is that we just haven't been looking hard enough. Unless we find an infinite oil supply somewhere, any oil we do find only extends our deadline, so why not just come up with a better idea now?

Ha! The President just sarcastically said "I know there are some who disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change". Easily my favorite moment so far.

"The best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education." I couldn't agree more. We also heard a lot about college education. Tax credits for college tuition and urging colleges to lower costs. I think the President will find that getting colleges to lower tuition costs will be about as easy as getting the Senate to get off their asses and do something.

The health care section didn't really move me too much either way. We got what was, as far as I could tell, basically the same sales pitch we've been getting about health care for the last six months. I have to say, even the President looked a little tired of talking about it. I'm not incredibly hopeful about health care reform right now.

The President started out the economy section by pointing out how the current deficit is mostly President Bush's fault, which got a weird, uncomfortable moment of laughter from one side of the Congress, I think it was the Democrats. Then we moved on to the much anticipated spending freeze (brrrrr). Another awesome moment. The President said the freeze won't take effect until next year, which drew some laughter from the Republicans. The President responded by very condescendingly saying "that's how budgeting works". I'm starting to remember why I liked this guy so much.

The President just hammered the Supreme Court's campaign contributions decision from last week, so then the nine of them had to sit there while everyone else applauded how much they suck. I'm not sure it was appropriate for the President to scold the Supreme Court in front of Congress on national TV, but they made a stupid decision and they deserved it, so there.

After about an hour, the President finally got to terrorism, security and underwear based weapons. Not much new information here, combat troops out of Iraq by August, stabilizing Afghanistan, nuclear weapons are bad, etc. But I also liked how he told Congress to stop arguing about security like little children. On the down side, he just said he was going to a summit in April to talk about securing all nuclear weapons in the world within four years. That sounds a lot like terrorists have four years to get some nuclear weapons before we lock them all up, I realize that's not a quick job, but still.

I had failed to realize how entertaining it would be to watch Biden all night. He's had times he tried to start clapping while the President was still talking, many other times when everyone else stood up to applaud about five seconds before he did. He kept nodding and smirking at everything. You could have watched this speech with the volume off and been thoroughly entertained.

There's something I was waiting for, the President just called for a repeal of don't ask, don't tell. He said "it's the right thing to do". I watched a lot of cable news today, and this detail had been leaked. There was a lot of speculation about how he was doing this to appease the left, or how it wouldn't help him with moderates. The President, during the speech, was the first person to mention that it's the right thing to do. How bad have our politics gotten when "it's the right thing to do" doesn't even enter the discussion of why a politician might be doing something.

If this speech reminded me of anything, it's why I liked the President so much as a candidate. He's funny, smart and engaging. He's incredibly condescending when he thinks people are being stupid (by the way, that's the second time I called the President condescending, it's not an insult, it's what people deserve when they say or do dumb things).

If there's one thing I need to be reminded of after this speech, it's that the President doesn't write the laws, Congress does. And the Senate will pass or not pass anything they damn well please. So we'll see if anything the President talked about tonight actually happens.

PS...I don't have the energy for the Republican response, but I predict he'll mention tax cuts at some point.