Tag Archives: State of the Union

SOTU — 2014

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

What I thought the President needed to do:
Let me start from what I didn’t think he needed to do. President Obama did not have to appear to be reaching out to Congressional Republicans nor, for that matter, Congressional Democrats. He doesn’t much like them. They don’t much like him and, unlike Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama is not a good actor.

What he did need to do was to make a start in reassuring interested Americans that he is capable of not just getting through the next three years (he only got through 2013 because December 31 happened); but that he can do even small things to help the economy and the people who go to work every day to make the economy work. Continue reading →

Molly’s First State of the Union

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

It was Molly’s first State of the Union Address (she is four months old) and whatever the President said clearly didn’t agree with her. To say she was fussy would be an understatement. She moaned. She complained. She cried. And then she burped.

Okay, well maybe she had a bad case of gas. But after the listening to the President spend some more of her money, I wouldn’t blame her if she were more than a bit upset. Continue reading →

Not a Long, Nor a Long-Lasting Speech

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

“The state of the Union,” the President reported last night, “is stronger.”

He said, to prove his point, we have created more new jobs, sold more American cars, bought less foreign oil, and are sending fewer soldiers into battle.

That is like saying (on the day pitchers and catchers officially reported to Spring Training sites) that a batter going 4-for-4 has raised his batting average by .100 percentage points, without pointing out he was batting .053 and is now batting .153. Continue reading →

Obama Revealed

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Free from the burdens of a reelection campaign, presidents who win second terms reveal themselves when they come to Congress to give their fifth State of the Union address.

They can’t say the same thing that they just said in their inaugural address, because that would be really boring (not that most States of the Unions aren’t boring. They are.)

George W. Bush revealed himself to be a confident gambler who decided to bet all of his chips on Social Security reform. Bill Clinton revealed himself to Continue reading →

State of the State of the Union

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

From Paris, France

I am in Paris for one afternoon and overnight because the non-stop service from Oujda, Morocco to Dulles International Airport just outside Washington, DC hasn’t yet begun. We flew into Orly Airport which is the Newark Airport of Europe. If you can arrange a trip that doesn’t include Orly, I recommend you do that. But, any story that ends with, “and then we had dinner in Paris” is a pretty good story.

Washington, DC is awash in activity surrounding the President’s State of the Union address tomorrow night at nine Eastern time. Continue reading →

State of the Union: Truth or Dare?

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In the 1981 classic movie, Absence of Malice, lead character Michael Gallagher tells reporter Meghan Carter that everything she wrote about him was accurate, but none of it was true.

I thought of that line as I watched the State of the Union speech January 24.  Everything the President said that night was accurate, but much of it wasn’t true.

That conundrum is among the principle reasons why governing has become so difficult and why Washington is so dysfunctional.

In order for opposing sides to negotiate their way to consensus, they must first agree on their facts.  They can have differing opinions on the meaning and import of those facts, but they have to get their facts straight first. Every parent knows you can’t resolve a dispute between two children until you know how it started and who id what to whom. You’ve heard it many times at the outset of political deliberation:  Let’s first determine on what we can agree before addressing that on which we differ. Continue reading →

America Needs to Go For a Long Run

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The Long Run was one of the best albums ever produced, and I was thinking about the title song on Tuesday.

I have long believed that our federal government is far too focused on short-term thinking, and our policies are not built for the long run. And I think that most voters get that fact, which it is one of the reasons they are so frustrated with our national politicians.

Probably the best part of the President’s State of the Union speech came when he used the word “durable” to describe his vision of the American economy.

Of course, it was all bullshit, because the President has been the king of the temporary fix, but the sentiment is exactly right. Our economy needs to be built for the long run.

What does that mean? Continue reading →

State of the Union: Did you know?

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

One of the big things about the State of the Union address is talking about which Cabinet Secretary has been sent to an undisclosed location in case the Capitol Building goes up in a cloud of neutrons and there is no one left to run the government.

Last night that honor went to the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack who was a former Governor of Iowa.

According to the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, after the Vice President, Speaker of the House, and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the order of succession to the Presidency is: Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of Defense, Attorney General, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary of Commerce, Secretary of Labor, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Energy, Secretary of Education, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Secretary of Homeland Security.

Which are more-or-less in the order the Cabinet Department was created. Continue reading →

Hardest Job in Town: Boehner’s

BY STEVE BELL

Far from yielding an ambiguous electoral outcome, the Iowa caucuses solidly confirmed the Balkanization of the Republican Party, a fact that will lead to potential electoral failure in 2012 unless neutralized soon. These internal divisions hurt the party’s leadership in Congress in 2011;  they have already improved Democratic chances to retain the Senate, gain substantial seats in the House, and keep the White House in 2012.

Super-imposed on this chaos is a 2012 Congressional legislative schedule that virtually no one on Capitol Hill believes has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever passing.

Let’s take a look at the GOP. Mitt Romney gets a quarter of the vote, what we can call the “competency vote.”  Ron Paul gets  a quarter of the vote, what has been called the “Libertarian” vote, mostly male, mostly an exaggerated macho response to external order, such as a  government provides. Rick Santorum, coupled with the Michelle Bachmann Continue reading →

No Need to Respond

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Originally written on September 7th, 2011

Ev and Gerry started the whole response thing.

Everett Dirksen and Gerry Ford, the former Senate Republican leader from Illinois and the former House Minority Leader (and later President) from Michigan used to have a radio show broadcast from the Capitol.

They turned that radio show into a televised rebuttal to President Johnson’s 1966 State of the Union Address.

Dirksen, with his mop of white hair, and Ford, with his bald pate, must have been quite a sight in the years leading up to the Age of Aquarius. Dirksen was the one who famously said, “a billion here, and a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.” Continue reading →