Just a few minutes before your opportunity to play O-Bingo.
Well, it’s easier on the liver than a drinking game.
[Update as the speech begins]
I liked this particular subtitle:
“Let me be clear” – Warning to “have your shovel ready.”
I would say that listening to an Obama speech is definitely a shovel-ready project. Hip waders are handy, too.
[Update after half an hour or so]
Well, not that I’m surprised, but he’s laying out a program of every statist/fascist wet dream from TeddyR to present. The State will be responsible for us, from cradle, to early education, to all education, to college for all Americans (is that even a rational goal?) to grave. We no longer have any individual responsibility. The State will provide.
[Update after the speech]
Jim Garaghty notes the irony:
“We are not quitters,” says the guy who left the Senate before serving a full term.
So, what is he running for now?
[Update a couple minutes later]
Matt Welch is already manning his shovel:
The president has not even begun his non-State of the Union tonight, and already (at least according to leaked excerpts) he’s full of s**t…
Wonder what he’ll say now that he’s actually heard it?
[8 PM Pacific update]
I agree:
Oratorywise, so good. Ideawise, so weak. Combination, so dangerous.
Well, the campaign continues. And of course, that’s how propaganda works.
[Update at 8 PM Pacific]
Man bites dog. MSNBC is actually fact-checking the president.
[Updaten at 8:20 PM Pacific]
Apparently, “freedom” isn’t high on the president’s agenda. Not that I’m surprised.
[Update a couple minutes later]
A commenter asks what I thought of Jindal’s speech. I didn’t pay that much attention, but here’s a pan of it.
Well, I’m sure Robin Hood can provide very well, just so long as the supply of fat merchants to rob never dries up.
Carl,
the only way Sir Robin can bail us out is by robbing passing a UFO. A couple of tons of gold-pressed latinum from a passing Ferengi freighter would do it. With NEW and FREE funding we could pay off current debt and spend without incurring new debt.
However, my few economics courses taught me that you can’t negate debt by robbing from Peter (our grandkids) to pay Paul (Porkulus). My econ professor could have been wrong, but my calculator rarely is.
How appropriate the little people get their tax bailout all $13 of it starting April 1.
Rand, did you hear Jindal’s rebuttal? I’d be interested to hear what you thought about it.
I half listened to it.
Jindal is the anti-Obama, in that he’s actually more comfortable in extemporaneous settings, and less so in prepared speeches. But he has a couple years to improve.
I also wish that he wasn’t into exorcism and creationism…
Well, I’m sure Robin Hood can provide very well, just so long as the supply of fat merchants to rob never dries up.
Perhaps President Obama will have a Monty Python moment…
We’re just going to waste the billions of dollars the President wants to spend on “clean, renewable energy,” unless there’s hope that some day the President and most members of the House and Senate can understand that the Laws of Thermodynamics are not repeal-able, and are not an evil invention of BushCheney. Until that day, all national-level energy plans are doomed to failure because the persons doling out the money, and creating the laws and regulations, will be at the intellectual mercy of whichever snake-oil salesmen (oops – I meant lobbyists) can best convince them that their interest groups’ perpetual motion machines can rapidly replace all of those evil, Gaia-destroying hydrocarbon energy sources.
True story,
I have a stupid little blog made up of friends who are politicaly minded.
Everything said by everyone was said by myself, or one of my co-bloggers (not the commenters, the bloggers) on the spot,and likely would have been made by all of us, if we could type at the speed of obama’s idiocy, which I think is like dividing by zero.
I don’t say that cuz I or my friends are so smart, but rather because it’s pathetic that the rest of the nation is so stupid, that it needs to be handed to them, just to be ignored, and they vote for this retard anyways, cuz he’s cute or some crap.
Jindal was weak, and I agree with you. He’s not a good performer, and while bush isn’t as good as jindahl in the extemporaneous, bush was greatly harmed for his own self consciousness about policy, and allowed himself to be handled, same with Palin.
Dem’s are better at being puppets, ‘pubs are better at being themselves.
We need to learn to use that.
Jindal thinks it’s wasteful to spend money monitoring volcanos. I wonder what he thinks about monitoring near earth asteroids.
I was also struck by Jindal’s volcano comment – it seemed like the equivalent of McCain complaining about the Adler Planetarium’s “overhead projector”, except with more deadly consequences, but then I wondered if the libertarians at transterrestrial would prefer private volcano monitoring for profit… ….In addition to obvious threats to national security such as the Yellowstone supervolcano, there are more mundane needs: the Air Force recently had to move a squadron of aircraft in Alaska to avoid their planes ingesting volcanic ash from a recent mini-eruption which needed monitoring. But maybe Jindal was just trying to criticize basic scientific research, which is a disappointing target.
When Jindal criticized the high speed rail line proposal from Disneyland to Las Vegas, I thought it was clever (but misleading) that he relabeled all of LA as “Disneyland”, and I thought it was bizarre that he said “magnetic levitation” would be used. Did he just make that up? Maglevs make the train sound like another ride at Disneyland, which may be why he said it, but in real life, I don’t think maglevs are being seriously considered (in the USA) for such long distances.
Not to distract from Obama, but Jindal was more of a novelty.
I thought he was rushing through the speech way too fast. It just sounded like a lot of lofty rhetoric to me. Early takes on the speech said it was supposed to ease our fears of the economy and downplay some of the doom and gloom that Obama has been portraying so far. I dunno, in all his rambling I still heard the word “crisis” slipped in there and the constant urging for immediate action. Seems like we are still stuck on chicken little mode to me.
When he got to the part where he basically kept saying, ‘It’s for the children!’ over and over again I turned it off. Nothing of value for me to hear. I am just certain our children will be so grateful of our concern for them that they really won’t mind the 75,000 dollars in debt they’ve already inherited the moment they shoot out of the womb.
I just get the distinct impression with Obama that he wants to be presidential so bad that he is just acting like a little kid running through a toy store touching and playing with all the neat shiny new babbles that are within his reach. It has been like this the whole way along since before he even won the election. The faux presidential seal during one of his pressers. The trips over seas as a representative of the U.S. to visit heads of state — as a candidate. Basically turning the ‘Office of the President Elect’ into a unheralded position of President Pro Tempore effectively influencing policy in parallel to the actual President. Spending as much money in the first 30 days as some presidents go through in 4 years. And then he even couldn’t wait for the normal State of the Union — so it’s the Un-State of the Union address.
If you ask me this man is already displaying the dangerous tendency to rush things and repeatedly step well outside of the lines of what is acceptable and conventional. One thing that I have learned as a technician, and I’m certain doctors understand this as well, is that impatience and wild reactions to perceived issues will often harm the device or patient worse then if you did nothing at all. Time and again politicians display their ignorance when they say we have to make a choice, we have to do something. Well, doing nothing IS a choice. Someone needs to tell the President these three words — Primum non nocere.
“I also wish that he wasn’t into exorcism and creationism…”
Is “into” the right term? the Grateful Dead were “into” LSD. Jim Jones was “into” koolaid ceremonies.
JFK believed as Jindal does, as do millions of Catholic and Orthodox Americans, it ain’t new, and Jindal didn’t “invent” them. Most uf us actually leave the decisions about exorcism up to the church.
It’s understandable that you don’t get or discount these concepts. You don’t believe in their basis, God, the Devil and demons. So what? We’re all free, so far, to believe what we want. Plus, I’ve never known a Catholic politician make policy based on those beliefs. The three most prominent certainly don’t let their Catholic Doctrine get in their way!! I never consider these beliefs when I vote. My beliefs as a Catholic don’t intersect, always, with the Constitution, so I vote for the welfare of the whole.
Then again maybe Jindal can exorcise the bread and circuses mentality from D.C. and create some Americanism there again. Maybe we can go back to using our own Constitution and American Ideals for ruling and running our country.
I don’t care how they do “it” in Sweden, Norway, Spain, France, Indonesia, Japan, China, etc.
IF Jindal’s a Catholic I doubt he believes in “Creationism.” The Catholic Church long ago accepted the theory of evolution. What he believes is that God created the universe, which is what all Christians believe, and is certainly not “Creationism” as the term is officially defined.
In any case, I don’t care if he believes in sacrificing bulls to Ba’al every vernal equinox, as long as he doesn’t want to use taxpayer money to do it. I’m really tired of this dickering over the religious beliefs of politicians. Historically we’ve had leaders whose beliefs have been all over the Christian map. At least in the late 20th century this didn’t seem to matter, except with Kennedy the Catholic, only I believe the issue there was the Protestant fears of too much influence by the Vatican, not whether or not he believed in evolution. (By the way, it has always struck me as amusing that even though Bush has always been portrayed by the secular, Christian-fearing press as some sort of foaming at the mouth Bible-thumping fanatic, he actually has belonged to two of the mildest Christian denominations: the Episcopal and Methodist churches.)
I believe he and Laura are and have always been Methodists, but attended “the church of Presidents” while in Washington probably because of security logistics. And that church happens to be Episcopal.
Andrea,
as a Catholic, I must have missed the memo where,
“The Catholic Church long ago accepted the theory of evolution.”
Didja get that straight from Nancy Pelosi!? It sounds like the half-informed, self serving stuff she spouts.
The church’s stand is actually “theistic evolution”. Origin of the species stands scientifically and is acknowledged that way. But it begins after that whole pesky “Let There Be Light”, thing. Which goes with the Big Bang nicely. Ever see an explosion without a flash of light?
That aside, I’ve yet to see anything saying Jindal has voted on a single item based on anything but his conservative views. And again, he’s not the only Catholic in elected office.
Pelosi doesn’t count really, I was a just joking.
The Pope, when he was a cardinal serving in some role determining how to express what the Catholic church believes said in an official church statement in 2004:
“According to the widely accepted scientific account, the universe erupted 15 billion years ago in an explosion called the ‘Big Bang’ and has been expanding and cooling ever since. Later there gradually emerged the conditions necessary for the formation of atoms, still later the condensation of galaxies and stars, and about 10 billion years later the formation of planets. In our own solar system and on earth (formed about 4.5 billion years ago), the conditions have been favorable to the emergence of life. While there is little consensus among scientists about how the origin of this first microscopic life is to be explained, there is general agreement among them that the first organism dwelt on this planet about 3.5 – 4 billion years ago. Since it has been demonstrated that all living organisms on earth are genetically related, it is virtually certain that all living organisms have descended from this first organism. Converging evidence from many studies in the physical and biological sciences furnishes mounting support for some theory of evolution to account for the development and diversification of life on earth, while controversy continues over the pace and mechanisms of evolution.”
The Vatican’s chief astronomer said: “”Intelligent design isn’t science even though it pretends to be. If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.”
Jindal is the anti-Obama, in that he’s actually more comfortable in extemporaneous settings, and less so in prepared speeches.
Lorie Byrd might agree.
Steve, I meant what Bob said. What did you think I meant?
The last time the religion of government officials mattered was roughly early 1600s Massachusetts Bay Colony. Religion is just one of those Tests of Correct Thinking of which the left is so fond, inasmuch as they cling to the quaint hope (and fear) that one’s intellectual framework matters more than, say, character and morals.
I don’t know if this is because they’re proud of their intellect, or ashamed of their character.
I didn’t see where Bob said anything about creationism. I thought YOU were taking a shot Jindal’s beliefs. If I’m wrong, it was in the misreading of the comments.
I guess my skin is still raw from arguing, with local secular humanists and atheists, who are in reality ex-Protestants with no Catholic teaching, who have been telling me that Pelosi is right and the Pope is wrong on what the Catholic Church believes. Again, it was my misreading based on years of defending my beliefs in a world where Jesus is not allowed on the Courthouse Lawn. A lawn that is being cut by a guy named Hay-Zuse, who shouldn’t be here at all.
Steve, yes, you’re wrong about what I said. I was not taking a “shot” at anyone. As for Pelosi, I wasn’t even thinking about her — I try never to do so, and that has made me a happier person.
Andrea.
I almost spit tea everywhere when I read what said about Pelosi. I try to keep her off my radar too. But if I open my eyes, there she is, on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, interweb pages…
She’s like a bad smell in a dumpster that never quite leaves the area. And when she leaves for even a split second. Stinko Harry pops up.