SOTU, Part II

It was about where I left off that I began to realize we had not yet had our Santorum sighting. Very sad.
9:39 Tax cut time. Rousing applause from the right about the $880 billion in tax cuts (and from myself). I was not as impressed by his call to halve the deficit by 2009. This is nice, but... we can do better.

9:41 I thought the Rise of the Dems when Bush said we couldn't save Social Security reform was funny, followed by boos. But...a commission? We have had one every administration!!! They say the same thing. Here is what we should have said. "Not everyone can inherit wealth." (Cut to Rockerfeller, Kennedy.) "Not everyone can marry into it." (Kerry.) "Nor can we expect unnatural means of preserving the system." (Chappaquiddick.) "Privatize now." (GOP rises in applause.)

9:43 D, the attorney, laughed when he heard that W wanted to bring back the line-item veto, since it has been decidedly (wrongly) by the Court that it was unconstitional. McCain's emphatic cheering...nice. I told D we had a new Court, to which he concurred. Do your jobs, John and Sam.

9:46 Not enough was said on health care, in my opinion. What was said was good. More HSAs. I am not a fan of malpractice reform, since shitty doctoring is shitty doctoring.

9:48 Energy efficiency. Very interesting. Clean coal and nuclear? I like it. Ditto for wind and solar. Like Thomas, I'll believe it when I see it. The "car talk" part of the speech....well, this is good, but 75% by 2025? Not soon enough. Nor did the President mention recycling. One should we should mention is that in America's largest cities (all of which are run and populated by Democrats), recycling rates are 5%. But they are the environmental party.

9:50 Education. Somewhere, old-school GOPers who wanted to eliminate the department of education are choking on their scotch. I had sort of figured his speech would go here- as Governor of Texas, he made his mark in that state with education. Where they will get the teachers, beats me. Do we want 30,000 more unionized employees?

9:53 First Santorum sighting at the end of his back-end pro-life paean. Good to mention welfare reform. Would have liked more about culture- especially activist judges and marriage. We have elections in ten months, and we need to remind people which party is the pro-marriage one, W.

9:55 Roar of GOP about Roberts and Alito. And rightly so.

9:57 Not nearly enough was said about reforming Congress. Yes, it affects mainly the GOP, but the Dems have had their hands in the til as well, and it would have been a perfect time to take the moral high ground and say what types of reforms are needed. That these reforms would coincidentally include much less spending...

10:00 Had a laugh about the ploy to use African-American churches to fight HIV/AIDS. Considering all the press the church gets about bigotry against homosexuals...I don;t think so. Maybe W is making inroads here. Maybe Rove has some nice commercials for the SF market.

All in all, not a homer, but a solid double to the wall. I suspect the Dems will muck most of it, and W will be afraid (being an election year) to push them...but the issue will still be security, and if we stick to that, we should be fine.

I am sure my friend WWE (http://worstweatherever.blogspot.com/) fully concurs.