9:00–We’ll be watching the State of the Union on PBS. We figure that’s the equivalent of non-denominational.
9:08–You could cook an omelette in the time it takes him to work his way down the aisle.
9:09–I noticed on “Robot Chicken” whenever they do stuff set in Congress, the flag is always backwards. They should fix that.
9:10–I’ve never understood the need to introduce him twice.
9:11–Starts with a joke. Bold choice.
9:12–Yes, because bi-partisan has been the watchword for the last seven years.
9:13–I wonder if he’ll quote David Bowie at some point.
9:14–Who are those nuns and why do they look like they want to slap somebody?
9:16–The guy sitting next to Nancy Pelosi looks asleep.
9:16–What’s wrong with his skin tone? He looks jaundiced.
9:17–Seriously, Ryan? You can’t even applaud for marriage equality?
9:17–He said he was going to ask four questions. I thought sure he was going to ask why is this night different from all other nights.
9:19–How can we make politics reflect what’s best? That’s easy: shut all the conservatives up. Problem solved.
9:21–So the entire GOP is peddling fiction? I can see that.
9:23–We agree that Jon Snow shouldn’t be dead in “Game of Thrones.”
9:24–Ryan won’t applaud MAKING COLLEGE AFFORDABLE?! Jesus Christ.
9:24–Bernie Sanders has been saying community college should be free for years.
9:30–Nice comment about food stamp recipients.
9:32–“We were walking on the moon.” Which to this day some people still refuse to believe, so it all goes around, I guess.
9:34–I remember the West Wing episode where Bartlet wanted to say that we were going to cure cancer in his state of the union.
9:35–Uhm…because we’re insane?
9:37–Remember when Obama’s critics declared that if he were reelected, gas would be up to $5-$6 a gallon by this point?
9:38–A 21st century transportation system. Ðámņëd right. Where are the flying cars and hover boards that actually hover?
9:40–Or they call the Ghostbusters.
9:45–And, oh yeah, we killed bin-Laden.
9:46: THERE we go.
9:48–“Quogmire?” Is that like quagmire?
9:52–That’s pretty much what Jesus said. “That which you do for the least of my brothers, you do unto me.”
9:54–So there goes Donald Trump’s campaign.
9:57–So it’s never gonna happen, is what he’s saying.
10:00–Yes, but one of the main reasons for the divisiveness in DC is the GOP’s determination to stop everything that Obama does, no matter what. It’s no longer about serving the people. It’s about stopping government.
10:08–But he doesn’t see it on the Internet, that’s for sure.
10:09–Crap! They ALWAYS say the state of the union is strong. I was so pleased he avoided the cliche and then at the end, boom, there it was.
Pretty decent overall, I believe. Thoughts?
• 
Re: Double introduction. Just in case anyone doesn’t realize who he is. Yes, I am rapidly losing respect for the American population intellect, or at least parts of it.
The nuns are the Little Sisters of the Poor. They’re suing the government over contraception coverage in the ACA. And nuns ALWAYS look like they want to slap someone.
Would have been fun if they cut to Kim Davis when marriage equality was mentioned.
Serve corporations, oppose Obama, deregulate everything (except the uterus, of course). Same old, same old.
Pretty decent, as long as you live in Obamaland, that sweet community where minimum wage jobs are an advancement, where health insurance at three times the cost as before he took office is affordable because the ‘government’ is paying for most of it, and a destablized Middle East has nothing whatsoever to do with his policies…
Sorry, I usually have a much better appreciation for fiction.
I’m going to be polite…
If you want to blame Obama for a ‘destabilized’ Middle East, then you have no fûçkìņg clue what reality is.
People like CharlieE are deluded, ignore him. You know how it is with neocons.
In addition to what Craig J. Ries said, the health insurance thing is wildly deceptive, too. Yes, it’s more expensive now than when he took office, and perhaps by threefold. But that’s nowhere near as expensive as it would’ve been had no ACA passed and we were still on the old system.
Before the ACA, before Obama was even elected (let alone inaugurated), for years before, health care costs including both insurance premiums and out-of-pocket (OOP) expenses for an average middle-class family of four had been rising at roughly quintuple the rate of the average middle-class household income.
By mid-2017 (about 1½ years from now, tops), it was projected that total health care costs (premiums + OOPs) would reach and shortly thereafter surpass 50% of the average household income. That means that health care costs would take up as much of a typical household budget as everything else (food, shelter, clothing, utilities, transportation, savings, education, etc.) combined! And soon afterwards take up more of the budget than everything else combined!
A mere ¼ decade later, circa 2020, the premiums alone would equal and then surpass everything else, including the OOPs! By about 2028, premiums & OOPs would equal and then surpass the entire average middle-class household income, leaving zero for anything else, and by 2032, premiums alone would match and then surpass the entire household income, leaving nothing even for the OoPs!
You simply cannot have a functioning economy under those conditions. You just can’t. People have to have money to spend or there’s no economy. That’s what an economy is. We were looking at the complete collapse of civilization itself as we’ve known it due to this reason alone!
I don’t just mean “damage” or “decimate” or “devastate.” I mean destroy. As in make it not exist anymore, at all, period, except in historical memory. As in, “Hey, you know that ‘economy’ and ‘civilization’ thing humanity used to have? Whatever happened to that?” That’s where we were headed.
The ACA is a flawed hodgepodge of a solution at best. What’s actually needed is full Single Payer. That said, the ACA is considerably better than what we had before. The actual Obamacare (which the ACA as passed is not and never was) with its Public Option (remember that?) would’ve been even better, but not as good as full-on Single Payer.
Coma,
You act as though the ACA actually did anything to stop that decline into barbarism, instead of accelerating it! You don’t realize that, the entire time it was being passed, the Ins. Cos. were basically doing a “Don’t throw me into dat der br’er patch!” while in actuality they were writing the darn thing! What did they want? More vict…I mean subscribers, and for the government to pay them more. What did they get? Exactly that.
Yes, something needed to be done, but again, Obama just said “Handle it” to Congress, and in their typical “Where can we make us money” fashion they did. That is one of the reasons I believe he has no leadership. He truly seems to believe that his every whim is law, and then is baffled when anyone says otherwise. He learned nothing in his brief congressional career about how things actually get done…
Full Single Payer/Public Option isn’t going to happen just like that. Take it from a Canadian, it takes years to implement this kind of thing (it took about thirty years to get it here in Canada from when Tommy Douglass first proposed it.) Also, you’ve been deluded by idiots like Michael Moore and his ‘documentary’ Sicko to believe that countries like France and Germany have single payer/public option, when they don’t (in France half is held by private insurance with the rest held by public, and the same exists in Germany.) The U.K. has full National Health, and so do a few others, but in most of the countries, it took years to get it-something like the ACA was probably what was implemented before there was a full public option. You need to try and build on what Obama did, instead of just blasting him for something that wasn’t realistic at the time and that was never going to be passed with the kind of opposition in the House & Senate that Obama had. This kind of all or nothing bûllšhìŧ just gets you nothing.
I didn’t say that the ACA stopped the rapid rise of health insurance costs. But it did slow them down somewhat. Not nearly enough, but somewhat.
No health are solution will work, not even full-on Single Payer, that does not address the elephant-in-the-room question: not “Who’s going to pay the high costs of health care?” but rather, “Why is health care in the USA so expensive (and by so much more than other peer nations) in the first place!?”
Required reading before you Reply to me again. Until you have read this (all of it), you are simply not intellectually qualified to debate me on this subject:
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us by Stephen Brill. At least read the short version that took up the entire March 4, 2013 issue of Time Magazine (other than their regular non-article features — this was the first and to the best of my knowledge only time that they have devoted the entire articles section of their magazine to a single article — it’s that important). You can read a teaser here or pay to read the whole article (free if you have a Time Magazine subscription) — it’s well worth it.
He has since expanded it to a full book: America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System.
Coma,
Sorry, don’t have enough time to read these, but I have lived them. Also have a brother in law that is a psychiatrist so get to see things first hand.
The basic truth is that in health care, as in higher education, the bill is being paid by somebody else. As a ‘Somebody Else’s Problem’ it only gets lip service from folks who are supposed to do something about it, on both sides of the aisle and in the industry.
My comment was all about that, rather than do something about the fundamental problem of reducing the costs of health care (or higher education or any number of other problems) Obama just decided to hide the problem a little more by having the government help pay for it. There are too many entrenched interests that assume that, no matter what they charge, SOMEONE is going to pay for it.
I am afraid that, until some of these health care organizations start going into bankruptcy because everyone refused to pay their prices, it will only get worse…
I remember reading that article. It was masterful. Thanks for the tip about the book; I’ll be sure to pick it up.
PAD
I don’t blame him for the middle east, but his policies sure haven’t helped much. Too much “If I do this, then these guys won’t like me, but if I do that, these other guys won’t like me…” so he usually did nothing, or acted too late to matter, or sent contradictory messages to both sides (Shades of Kuwait!)
So, no, I don’t blame him for the situation, I blame him for a total lack of leadership from day one. He lives in Obamaland, where his suggestions should just be obvious to everyone, so why should he actually DO anything! Of course, he never really HAS don’t anything in his entire life, so why should he do anything now!
As opposed to the miserable, nonexistent reality you and most conservatives live in.
Sa wha? Is this a little projection from you? You live in a miserable, nonexistent reality, and you assume everyone else lives in the same state?
By the way, the correct procedure in public debate is to counter my argument with actual data! Say, some brilliant diplomatic coup that the Obama administration has brought off in his term of office. Wait! You can’t think of one? Then I accept your ad-hominem as your only recourse! 😉
CharlieE, what the frack do you and most of the neocon dumb-áššëš want? It seems that you and your neocon bunch don’t want anything but a dog-eat-dog planet. And can you be any more of a racist moron?
“That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
There was not a single lick of data in your post, so there was no obligation on Neil C.’s part to refute your complete and total lack of data or evidence of any kind other than “because I said so, that’s why!” bare assertions.
Tell Osama bin Ladin and Muammar Quadaffi about Obama’s lack of leadership.
Thank you again, Coma, for actually responding with data and facts!
Osama is an actual point in your favor. He told the folks in the intelligence community to keep looking, and they found him, and then had the balls to go through with an operation in an ‘allies’ jurisdiction to take him out.
Quadaffi is not a point in your favor. He took advantage of a movement in the region and finally decided to support it, and then let Benghazi happen to completely nullify the point. (I don’t know about providing sufficient security in an area in rebellion. It might annoy the neighbors…)
From there you can go to Russia, Syria, Iraq and any number of other areas where the basic policy was ‘How to drop the ball!’
Actually, I give him one more point – the Ebola outbreak in Africa. I guess he felt some loyalty to his ancestral homeland (insert snark about his birthplace here. 😉
Very funny comments Mr. David. I was thinking many of the same things. I found it very bold and positive that he stood up for Muslims.