Wednesday, January 26, 2011

The State of the Union

The State of the Union

It's fucked. Ha! Just kidding. That's not what Obama said. Though I wish he did. But it's not like anything Obama said came as much of a surprise. You see, much earlier in the day a draft of Barack Obama's state of the union speech was leaked out and I was most excited to hear the reaction to the following proposed idea by our President...
I will impose a 5 year federal spending freeze


A spending freeze.. yeah, let's just turn that knife. Perhaps I just wanted to hear something so out of the norm by Obama. Something like
"We will create a bomb that can destroy the moon by the end of this decade, not because it is easy but because it is hard"
Then I would look at the state of the union and realize that at least things could be a lot worse. As it stand, I'm pretty sure that rising corporate profits will probably not keep millions of Americans from losing their houses. It really makes you just sort of sad to see such a reform president getting totally worked over by corporate interest.

But sure enough, he's going to try to freeze the budget.. You know, exempting military and "security" spending from the freeze, of course all in the name to satisfy the right. At the same time proposing new infrastructure spending in a hapless attempt to satisfy the left. I'm fairly certain that we'll be tired of the term "budget-neutral" by 2012.

I guess we saw it coming though. After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks that the President signed, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have.

All throughout the speech I was waiting for Boehner to start crying. I'm surprised that his fake orange tan doesn't smear when he cries for any little thing. Though the only time it seemed like he was going to tear up was when he got a hand job from Obama at the beginning. So there went my hope that he was going tobe like a blubbering baby throughout the entire thing with tears streaming down his face.

Can I also point out that standing ovations really lose their value if you do them every minute. I'm sure everyone thinks that America should be the best place on earth, even at the expense of raping the workers for profits. CLAPCLAPCLAPCLAPCLAPCLAPCLAP

"The entire thing was so full of shit. Why yes, let's encourage innovation.. "

*makes college steadily less affordable*

"We need to invest in research like never before!!"

*cuts funding to all science programs and cancels NASA programs*

And Facebook being mentioned in the state of the union? Really? Is Facebook the great American accomplishment?
Barack Obama > Good speech huh?

Joe Biden likes this
John Boehner *sob*
Yes, clearly the Vodka bottle was not enough to get me through it. I needed more. Oh so much more.

This was all before he went on about ending corporate subsidization of oil. Yeah, that made me laugh. Here I thought all this reaching across party lines was to ensure that he got re-elected. If you're going to go after oil subsidies you're going to face the fact that you'll be a one-term president.



Then Obama got on with what seemed like the subject that took the chunk of attention in the State of the Union - Education. I'm not sure if it was because there was a bunch of school kids in the audience that were invited, but he really hammered home that kids should be encouraged to go to college and that adults who don't have a college degree should go back in order to set a good example.

Who the fuck has the money to get a university degree just to inspire their damn kids? How out of touch is this shit with 10% unemployment going on? To be fair now, America's school system is so terrible these days that finishing high school is arguably a step in the wrong direction.

Obama went so far as to suggest that we should treat science fair winners with the same enthusiasm as the winners of the Super Bowl. Yeah, how convenient that he stopped caring about football once the Chicago Bears got eliminated.

But hey, maybe now I'll be super excited for all the science fair winners to go and meet the president. Because I can tell you as a former winner of a science fair, good luck with getting anyone to give a shit. But I can't believe that he really said Superbowl and science fair in the same sentence. I mean, the only thing that I could think the Superbowl and a science fair have in common is.. The Jets aint shit.

But at what point in all this State of the Union ramblings did he cover how we're going to make jobs for the people unemployed NOW. I mean, forget the kids. The kids could wait. Focus on that 10% unemployment now!

Obama called for more teachers.. Yeah... become a teacher, and enjoy your benefits, salary ...uh... students. I hope you like making no money at all and having constant critiquing of your teaching tactics. Go right ahead and become a teacher and graduate with massive loans, find there are no jobs currently out there and die alone.

I know well enough about teaching that "race to the top" is a pretty terrible program and the applause that came about after it was mentioned was horrible.

I mean, did you hear the response on when he suggested that more people become teachers? There was a massive amount of clapping going on for the call in treating teachers with respect. These same claps are being produced by those who so easily slash education funding.

As if 100,000 new teachers with non-competitive salaries and one year contracts sounds like a good thing. I'm seriously not going to become a teacher when my city is considering cutting 9,600 school positions. But then again, who can turn down being a teacher? You make 1/10 of what you could in the private sector.

But yeah. Obama sure made a poignant statement on unemployment tonight.... oh wait. Yeeeeeaaaaaahhh..... I think the only thing that he even suggested in helping the economy in unemployment was getting China, South Korea and India to export more goods from us.



But I have an important question about that for the President. Why would any corporation hire Americans under any circumstances in a globalized world? And I don't mean set up shop. I understand that. But why would anyone Hire Americans at all?

I think the real entertainment happened after the speech. With both Paul Ryan AND Michelle Bachmann issuing rebuttals to Obama's speech. Yes, you heard that right. The right is doing TWO rebuttals.

Bachmann is doing the tea party rebuttal. As if the republicans aren't pissed enough that they're splitting the party enough. Where is the green party rebuttal or the socialist party rebuttal? How the hell is the tea party legitimate enough to have their own address. It's like congress, except instead of senators it's old fat white people in scooters purchased by medicare (Socialism!)



Apparently Bachmann literally looked at the NBC camera through the entire speech instead of the CNN camera. The NBC camera was set up for the post-speech interview. Brain Williams greeted her after on NBC by saying "Thank you for finding your way to our camera".

If this wasn't proof that Bachmann's just plain crazy and that's really what made this post speech rebuttal entertaining, then you're probably not familiar with her. If you're not familiar with her ramblings, here's Anderson Cooper, tearing her apart on her claim that the Founding Father's eliminated slavery.



I guess the real question I have is how anyone in the right is going to rebute Obama adopting their own policies. But apparently that was some sort of CNN exclusive.

To be honest, I just cannot imagine why anyone would watch CNN or any cable news channel anymore. Even if you're watching it ironically, you're seriously bat shit insane or just really like suffering. If you think MSNBC is better than Fox News you're crazy. CNN has to be arguably the worst because they've managed to convince people that it's the "neutral" station. Neutral in this country is somewhere right of Reagan.

It doesn't change the fact that after watching this spewing of political nonsense I wanted to cut to a picture of Krusty the Clown asking What the Hell was that?! My soul felt empty after dealing with that much crushing reality that the true answer to what the state of our union really is "Completely and utterly fucked"

But hey, let's take a look to what reaction to the speech by Obama was from NPR listeners..



"Optimistic" "inspirin" What the hell? Did they listen to the same speech I did? I do like that Salmon is in large bold letters. I am left with the knowledge now that Salmon in water is monitored by a different government agency than water on my plate. Though I'm still not sure which agency overlooks Smoked Salmon on a cream cheese covered bagel with some sliced red onions.

No comments: