In 2011, the State of the Union is ____________!

embargo broken! everyone react now!

http://nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/exclusive-obama-to-declare-the-rules-have-changed--20110125

chris matthews just told odonnell there will be a presidential address on gun control, a separate one, to be scheduled. news!

NFLonTheHill
If State of Union Address were on NFL Network, we would be in 4th and final hour of pre-Address show.

is this the new politics thread?

No politics in a SOTU thread -- just histrionics, like the Oscars thread.

i wonder if boehner will cry

stoked for the madness

dude is actually sort of funny now that he's free

keitholbermann
Little known Pop Culture reference: Sen. Ben Nelson was indeed the model for Stimpy of "Ren And Stimpy" #SOTU

matthews has some extra special contempt for bachmann, it's amazing

odonnell calls the tea party caucus 'the freakiest section of the congress'

lol!! xp

roberts looks old as fuck

LETS DO THIS

...........sorry, i got excited

so is this like a speed dating mixer or

i'm kinda really really loving maddow anchoring this instead of matthews or even keith

Ladies and gentlemen, we have POTUS

i'm watching this at whitehouse . gov --- what's better

no tv

cspan.org?

you could go to tvpc.com, pick a broadcast station

just you know, she has her own rhythms and whatnot that aren't full of the inane misogynist ad libs of yr matthews, say

God, Ginsberg looks old.

oh shit is it just starting now? is that a live stream on whitehouse.gov

y

coooooooooool

The applause feels muted; I guess it's because of the new cafeteria-style seating.

daniel hernandez heard there's no gun control in the speech and he is pisssssssseed

Sophistry so far.

yeah

what do you want to be when you grow up!!!!!!

He's leaning too hard on Soaring Rhetoric.

sounds like a graduation speech imo

The Internet! The Wright Brothers!

internet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Justice Anthony Kennedy spotted watching "Jersey Girl" on his smart phone

Scientists are as we speak building tubes for these magical interwebs

roofies are the answer

roofies and shingles

Biden making "this facial expression" so hard.

our government giving you shingles

lol that extended shot of the allen bros was hell of uncomfortable

what's obama going to do about the possible nfl lockout is what i want to know

boehner mentally making his shopping list

Xxpost YES

Tom Coburn seen picking nits out of Susan Collins' hair.

lmao did someone just go "wroooooooong"

Chief Justice Roberts reaching under robe for a quick "stroke."

Boehner totally rocking this year's Pantone color (honeysuckle)

Chu chu choose clean energy

fuckin 'publicans & their DIRTY ENERGY

Alito is in Hawaii! How I envy him.

its a major dilemma for sure, i dont know that sacrifice is really the story tho

― ice cr?m, Thursday, January 27, 2011 12:46 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

paying higher taxes, using less energy, driving your car less, using public transportation, etc. All these things are sacrifices.

Oil is the cheapest fuel around, and switching from that will require sacrifices. Of course in light of what will inevitably happen if we keep using oil, the sacrifice is quite small. But it's still there, and people prefer to just think we'll figure something out later.

Our energy use is simply too high and we need to mitigate that with conservation and frugality. Two things that are considered pathetic and defeatist by too much of the American public.

mandatory cloth grocery bags could probably cost obama 2012

jimmy carter's sweaters 2.0

yeah! and people like sweaters!

i dont think conservation and frugality are gonna do it tbh, not when theres 5 billion people in the world who want what we have

we just need to convince them that our lives suck

dude look at our country plzzz, yr sustenance farming is way better id totally trade my heated apartment and fancy clothes for what you have but you know i just IS THAT THE PHONE

i dont think conservation and frugality are gonna do it tbh, not when theres 5 billion people in the world who want what we have

― ice cr?m, Thursday, January 27, 2011 1:00 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark

well in terms of global warming it's a different story. But oil prices will cripple us unless we lower our energy usage dramatically.

so is this our new US Politics thread? Fine with me.

fuck no, this'd be worst title ever

i dont think conservation and frugality are gonna do it tbh, not when theres 5 billion people in the world who want what we have

― ice cr?m, Thursday, January 27, 2011

this is p crazy. for instance wiki sez like,

Europe = 11% of the world's population. North America is home to 5%.

not sure europe is pining for hyper car culture or the right not to use cloth crocery bags etc

it's easy to underestimate europe's car culture

ice craem tbombs all over this thread

the downside of fighting for something that your liberal base supports is that it will be viewed as partisan by the GOP? they ALREADY view everything he does as partisan, no matter how centrist or right-center the policies are!! it doesn't matter!

not serious? are liberals really so weak-kneed that fighting for something that a majority of liberals support (public option, etc) is not considered "not serious"? correct me if i'm wrong, but don't republicans regularly take the issues that their hard right base support (shutting down the entire government) and fight tooth and nail for them? why can't democrats do that with the left? even fucking Don't Ask Don't Tell is a big compromise - if they really wanted to fight for what the left represents they'd be pushing for a giant LBGT civil rights bill to try to make up for the last 10,000 years of ignorance. Instead they focus on making sure that openly gay people can die for stupid reasons just like straight people do. baby steps, yah, but i'm just saying the issues that are important to the democratic base rarely get strong unmitigated support from democrats, and that's not true of the right.

unwinnable? well, like others have said, how will we ever know? i understand they've been negotiating some issues for decades, tightrope walking between industry, lobbyists, advocacy groups, etc, but every once in a while a president who evidently believes in something passionately and makes his/her case to the public, and persistently, can actually have an impact on the debate. or so i have heard. don't see it much from obama.

childish?

??

― 23 24 (Z S), Wednesday, January 26, 2011 5:12 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this post is all wrong

it has nothing to do w/ the GOP viewing it as partisan, its those ppl who just jumped from 'i disapprove of the president' to 'i approve of the president.' duh

'fighting' is a rhetorical strategy, you're not understanding the diff between that & figuring out how to be most effective. the GOP has been 'fighting tooth and nail' to turn over roe v wade for years, and they're not really any further. jhoshea is right, basically the only thing the GOP has really succeeded in doing for the past 30 years is shifting money upwards

unwinnable? well, like others have said, how will we ever know? i understand they've been negotiating some issues for decades, tightrope walking between industry, lobbyists, advocacy groups, etc, but every once in a while a president who evidently believes in something passionately and makes his/her case to the public, and persistently, can actually have an impact on the debate. or so i have heard. don't see it much from obama.

well, do u think hrc fought for health care?

save-a-bammin'

xxp

^^^prefers no health care to a compromise

Dem compromises = yielding 20x in a row

fuck, this is futile

yah you should give up

I'm not sure how you convince (American) people to make personal sacrifices in order to fight global warming (or to mitigate the disaster of rising oil prices).

Framing the narrative. Make environmentalism less about "Save the dolphins!" and "The world might flood in 200 years!" and more about "Do you want everyone you know and love to stop dying of cancers?"

i do like obama but this is my favorite he's-not-liberal-enough complaint that's ever appeared on my facebook wall:

T****** is wondering what the point of even having a president is, IF HE'S JUST GONNA BE STUPID.

(have no idea what specifically it's in reference to, ensuing thread does not enlighten)

http://grab.by/8DRt

lmao

inevitable

There's been enough Reagan talk to perhaps warrant switching to a new thread or an old Reagan one.

this is one of the best magazine covers in history

Obama looks more waxen.

it is a pic from madame tussauds

Bam invited it with his warning-alarm praise for Reagan on the trail (impossible to interpret as a good thing, tho I'm sure some of you Gumbys would try it).

Every post-RR prez wants to be Reagan.

You know I cut Obama little slack, but how can you interpret his remark that Reagan was a more significant president than Clinton as praise?

I mean:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think he tapped into what people were already feeling. Which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."

It's actually a cynical remark: he's saying the people were ready for the Reagan mythos/blarney.

yep

According to the Jonathan Alter book--no idea if this is true or not, but it sounds plausible to me--the Reagan remark was primarily indended as Hillary bait. They wanted something that would get a rise out of her at that point in the campaign, something to make her overreact, and that's what they went with; the 3:00 a.m. ad soon followed, I think.

Bam is unmistakably pro-"accountability" (sic] (as long as you don't work on Wall Street, or for/with the Pentagon)

clem: according to TIME, though, the Obama camp had been so used to hearing their boss make the comparison over the years that it raised no warnings.

that reagan was by far the most influential recent president and the idea that if you want to have a successful presidency it might be worth looking at what worked for him seems like the most obvious least controversial pov

News reports keep talking about Obama reading a book on Reagan over his winter holiday break in Hawaii

The idea of Hillary bait didn't sound right to me either. I didn't see the Reagan remark as praise, didn't see it as cynical; I just viewed it as sound analysis, an acknowledgement that whatever you thought of Reagan's presidency, he was indeed transformative. It's hard to make a case that he wasn't.

Yeah, I loathed the dude but I can't gainsay his sway.

Reagan is a very peculiar kind of success story, in that he was mainly successful at being likeable, while his administration did despicable things all up and down the line. He was superb at repeating the same nostrums, with the same chuckles and faux-wise head shakes, ad nauseum. Iow, he was an amazing figurehead, lovingly painted and gilded by his faithful ship's crew.

His other major talent was horse trading with the Democratic pols in Congress, most of whom were, like Tip O'Neill, horse traders by instinct and profession from way back, which means this was no small talent. He generally came away with some concessions, which he always recast as victories for his side, but as not nearly enough, because those gosh-darned Dems just kept holding him back from making the kind of changes this country really needed.

I am pretty sure the above was not Bam's only Reagan-related remark.

Please also note "I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s..."

I wonder what those could be? As someone who was following politics in that era, I can assure you high up on that list was "welfare for the ________s." (insert the slur of your choice)

no thanks

apparently Limbaugh is venting over the Time cover; at last, in sync with the Hopers!

His other major talent was horse trading with the Democratic pols in Congress, most of whom were, like Tip O'Neill, horse traders by instinct and profession from way back, which means this was no small talent.

That to me was the flaw in Alfred's analogy the other day about selling the apple pie: you need someone who wants to buy it to work the back and forth. If you want to sell a pie, and the other side wants to buy it, then yeah, you go through the process (which both sides are well aware of) of meeting somewhere in the middle. With Obama trying to get through health care, it was more like:

Obama: "I want to sell you an apple pie for $5.00. What are you willing to pay?"
Republicans: "Beluga Whale."
Obama: "Come again? What will you pay for this apple pie?"
Republicans: "Don Knotts."
Obama: "You don't really want this apple pie, do you."
Republicans: "Socialist!"

If the pie analogy was targeted at the three or four Democrats who were a problem, though, that makes more sense. And I agree Obama could have handled those doofuses better.

ha!

If the pie analogy was targeted at the three or four Democrats who were a problem, though, that makes more sense.

but even then, since the success of the entire bill depended on securing the votes of a handful of dems, the apple pie analogy shifts to:

Obama: "Please, purchase this apple pie for $5.00. I'll go lower, even. much lower. ."
Dem swing votes: "We want you to pee on this pie a little."
Obama: "? You understand everyone has to eat this pie..."
Dem swing votes: "pee on this pie a little, or we'll poop on the pie and it will so ruined that no one will ever eat it."

who needs the Taco Bell thread?

sometimes the only analogy that comes to mind involves the TMI staples