nobody messes with joe. or his boss.
because my busted-#ss television still isn’t fixed, i could only experience the president’s not-state-of-the-union via good ol’ radio on NPR and that new-fangled twitter that all the kids are raving about. nevertheless, i kinda surprised myself by how often i had to stop and pinch myself to say, “holy cr*p – this guy is really the president.” he was admittedly a little short on details in his speech, but he left no doubt in my mind that he “gets it.” i actually cheered, by myself, in my kitchen last night, on several occasions. most notably when he called out the high school dropouts, saying “you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.”
i know deficit hawks are freaking out about how much debt we’re compiling, and you’d have to be crazy to not get concerned any time the trillion dollar mark gets thrown out there. but robert reich (who knows more about this stuff than i do), made a nice case the other day for keeping this in perspective. namely that in the great depression, our debt was 120% of GDP and even with the mess we’re in now, the country is holding debt at about 50% of GDP. and if you’re the type of person who’s inclined to believe FDR didn’t get us out of the great depression, and that it was a war-time economy that did the trick, consider this: war-time spending was still government spending. and the government spending obama is suggesting may actually be better than war spending because it’s an investment in the country’s future.
i couldn’t agree more that whoever dominates the world’s energy markets in the 21st century will effectively dominate the world. though i’m guessing control of the fresh water supply will figure in, too. anyway, if we get our sh*t together, america can be that guy. but we’re gonna need a whole lot of smart people to do it, and our education system isn’t cranking them out right now. and as long as healthcare costs keep eating up a larger & larger portion of our budgets (be we families or employers or governments), we won’t have the financial resources to get it all going.
that all being said, if you weren’t “watching” the #nsotu last night on twitter you missed some gems from mike madden (“Section on Ty’Sheoma Bethea, who wrote to plead for help for her South Carolina school, also known as the “Fuck You, Mark Sanford” section”). and it didn’t occur to me at the time, but bobby totally sounded like kenneth last night.