There is always much to discuss after a State of the Union address, and Tuesday’s speech is no different. Sam Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute, shared his thoughts:
Read more on State of the Union: The Government is Here to do Stuff for You…
During Tuesday’s State of the Union, President Obama called for an increase in preschool education in order to prepare workers in the future:
…none of it will matter unless we also equip our citizens with the skills and training to fill those jobs.
Read more on It’s a Bad Idea, Mr. President: Why More Preschool Won’t Help…
It was William F. Buckley who said “conservatism takes into account reality.” Reality has become the giant political obstacle for conservatives when it comes to governing, campaigning, and political messaging. It seems too many Americans still love their freedoms but eschew many of the responsibilities that come with it. That’s the crisis we face, the lack of responsibility and our collective grasp on reality.
On National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg reflects on President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, and flags the “reality-denial” that is expressed by “a few token references to free enterprise and rewarding individual initiative (to reassure us we’re still living in America instead of just another declining European social democracy).” More:
Read more on Samuel Gregg: An Alternate Reality State of the Union Address…
Over at National Review Online, Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg recaps President Obama’s State of the Union address:
There is always something surreal about a Chicago politician talking about “fairness” and “playing by the rules.” There is something even more bizarre about a president talking about the need to expand energy production after his administration has generally undermined significant progress in facilitating energy development for three years in the middle of a recession. And who would describe Detroit as “on the way back”? A stroll down the ghost town otherwise known as downtown Detroit — which is teetering on the edge of being put into administration — would suggest the opposite. It’s not often that I agree with very much said by the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd, but this State of the Union speech illustrated that the lady was dead right in describing the Obama presidency as a bubble within a bubble.
Read more on Samuel Gregg: Obama SOTU full of ‘hot air, populism, contradictory promises’…
I was asked for my initial reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, and the handsomely redesigned Think Christian posted them last night, “Jobs, Steve Jobs, and the State of the Union.”
When it comes to energy policy, there is no perfect fuel. But in these debates, as elsewhere, the imaginary perfect fuel cannot become the enemy of the good.
And for the first time in recent memory, this means that nuclear energy, by all accounts a good alternative for the scale of demand we face, might be getting a seat at the table. Coal, which still provides more than half of the energy for the American grid, is cheap and plentiful, but environmentally and politically costly. And according to Popular Mechanics, it can only be “cleaned” up so much. That leaves a huge gap for other sources to fill.
In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama commented that “even though banks on Wall Street are lending again, they’re mostly lending to bigger companies. Financing remains difficult for small-business owners across the country, even though they’re making a profit.”
Read more on Obama to Small Businesses: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help….
I’ll be watching President Bush’s final State of the Union speech tonight and PowerBlog readers are invited to react and respond in the comments section below.
I’ll be updating this post throughout the night (below the break) for those of you interested in the (running) commentary. For now, let me just add this spoiler: the State of our Union is strong!
And for those of you who subscribe to SIRIUS Satellite Radio, I’m scheduled to discuss the speech at 10:40 PM Eastern on The Catholic Channel, channel 159. The conversation will focus especially on the proposed tax rebates, the federal budget, and tax cuts. Update: The audio of the interview is streaming here (download MP3 here). Read more on PowerBlogging the State of the Union…
More from the State of the Union:
“…the number of children born to teenage mothers has been falling for a dozen years in a row.”
That’s a good thing. But there’s still a marriage crisis, and part of it is related to birth rates among unmarried women: Births to unmarried mothers reached a record high of almost 1.5 million and made up 35.7% of all births in 2004. Unmarried births made up the majority of Black (69.2%) and American Indian (62.3%) births, nearly half (46.4%) of Hispanic births, and 23.5% of Caucasian births. Source: Marketing to Women (Kaplan, 2006), p.3.
