Obama vs. iPad

I was torn.  Which was more important?  The State of the Union or The iState of the Nation?  In the end I watch the highlight reel.

John STEWART was funny but Mark STEYN nailed him.

• Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 90 minutes at the State of the Union.
• Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court.
• He does Nixon impressions, too: "We do not quit," he said.  Boy, you can say that again! So he did: "We don't quit. I don't quit," he said. 
• As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem – from health care to education, banking to the environment – the solution is more Washington.
• Obama blames "Washington" – a Washington mired in "partisanship" and "pettiness" and "the same tired battles" and "Washington gimmicks" that do nothing but ensure that our "problems have grown worse." Washington, Obama tells us, is "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems."
• So let's have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
• Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama's speeches?
• Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliché, to "double down."
• What's the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his student-loan "reform" proposals: If you choose to go into "public service," any college-loan debts will be forgiven after 10 years.
• Because "public service" is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. C'mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people to go into "public service." Why?
• Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured or marketed any product other than himself. So, quite reasonably, he sees government dependency as the natural order of things.

Meanwhile, Steve JOBS looks tired - poor guy, this looks to me like his last hurrah.

Michelle is gona be pissed

This was pretty funny.

Overlooks Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez .... but not this?

This was excellent - Mark STEYN you do us proud.

Some gems:

• The president of the United States may be reluctant to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to the plate and speak truth to power.

• Gates then told him, "I'll speak with your mama outside." Outside, Sgt. Crowley's mama failed to show. But among his colleagues were a black officer and a Hispanic officer. Which is an odd kind of posse for what the Rev. Al Sharpton calls, inevitably, "the highest example of racial profiling I have seen."

• Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper, and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a "liar." I considered my options:
  

• Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission and possibly shot while "resisting arrest";
• Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.
• I chose the latter course.

• Was the cop right? I dunno. I wasn't there. Neither was the president of the United States, or the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Cambridge. All of whom have declared themselves firmly on the side of the Ivy League bigshot. And all of whom, as it happens, are African American. A black president, a black governor and a black mayor all agree with a black Harvard professor that he was racially profiled by a white-Latino-black police team, headed by a cop who teaches courses in how to avoid racial profiling.

• My advice to professor Gates for future incidents would be to establish his authority early.

• "Roses are red, Violets are blue, Victims are black, Like 2 Live Crew."

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