The past week in politics was, quite obviously, dominated by President Obama's "State Of The Union" speech to Congress. For those of you who may have been in a coma, here is a quick recap of the messages of Obama's speech, the official Republican response from Representative Paul Ryan, and the unofficial Tea Party Republican response from Representative Michele Bachmann:

Obama: "We can make the future so bright that O.S.H.A. will require us all to wear shades to view it."

Ryan: "Be afraid. Be very afraid! The Day of Reckoning is at hand!"

Bachmann: "Which camera? That one over there?"

This is only a slight exaggeration, I should mention. Ryan actually did use the phrase "Day of Reckoning" in his speech, believe it or not. You just can't make this stuff up, folks.

Of course, the public mostly noticed Obama's joke about fish. Sigh. You can't make things like that up, either.

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OK, it's going to a be a quick and disjointed column today, because I have to get tomorrow's Friday column done early tonight. So we return to the "three-dot column" format pioneered by the intrepid Herb Caen of San Francisco newspaper fame (who also famously coined the term "beatnik," by the way...). Today, we've got two Sputnik footnotes, a Sarah Palin chuckle, and a quick note on Obama's "ask the president a question on YouTube" session. Without further ado...

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[Program Note: "State Of The Union Week" continues today, with a look at a handful of new ideas from President Obama's speech last night. I wrote an insta-reaction to the speech yesterday, and I will be examining the specific language of the speech this Friday, but today I wanted to highlight a few things that many in the media world seem to have missed from last night's speech. President Obama proposed a number of ideas last night, amongst the continuation of themes or policies he has pushed previously. The following are the proposals which stuck out (to me) as being truly new ideas for him, and thus worth examining.]

The day after President Obama's big yearly speech to Congress and the American people, most pundits and talking-head types in the media are vying to outdo each other on stating "what it all means" or similar high-flown overanalysis. What many of them seem to have missed, however, is the fact that Obama used his speech to introduce a few topics into the political debate. Some of these topics have been around for a while, championed by various people and groups, but what seems newsworthy to me is the fact that Obama included them in his list of proposals for the future.

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[Program Note: I haven't done one of these "snap reaction" columns in a while, so I thought I'd try again tonight. It's not exactly "live-blogging," more "just after-the-fact" blogging, I guess. In any case, I'm not going to be examining the transcript of the speech itself here, but rather my general impressions after watching it. I like to write these before reading what others had to say about the speech, so I'm not influenced by what others think. I did watch some of the network responses tonight, and the Paul Ryan "Day of Reckoning" response speech (shudder), but not the Michele Bachmann Tea Party response (double-shudder). I'll get to examining the speech itself in detail later in the week, I promise.]

I'd have to sum up my immediate reaction to tonight's State Of The Union speech with the old Monty Python line: ".... and now, for something completely different ..."

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Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when pundits across the land helpfully (oh, so helpfully) offer the president advice on what he should say in his "State Of The Union" speech tomorrow. While I've engaged in this sort of thing before, this year I'd like to make predictions of what President Obama will say tomorrow night (as opposed to what I would like him to say). Which means I'm not endorsing any of this personally, merely attempting to predict what will be in tomorrow night's speech in advance.

The overarching theme of tomorrow's speech (which I'm going to call the "SOTU" because it is much easier to type) will be jobs and the economy. Obama himself previewed this over the weekend, so this is a pretty safe guess. The president will be putting this emphasis on jobs into a framework he tested out last month -- the "Sputnik moment" speech he gave in North Carolina at the beginning of December.

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With some regularity, this column excoriates the mainstream news media for all sorts of continued idiocy in the way it conducts its business. But every once in a while, we have to applaud them when they get something right. This week, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post deserves mentioning, for pledging to stay Palin-free for the month of February. Details on this in a moment.

It's rare for members of the media to perform such self-examination (and self-criticism). Especially when examining their own culpability in creating a situation. Much like vapid celebrities who are "famous for being famous" (the Paris Hiltons and Kardashians of the world), Sarah Palin is without a doubt the most famous Republican in the land -- and has been ever since John McCain announced her selection as running mate in 2008. Why this continues to be so is kind of mystifying. Palin isn't even in public office anymore, and yet the entire media world waits with bated breath for any tweet or Facebook posting from Mama Grizzly Central -- and then treats it as a major, major story immediately upon receipt. Think about it -- what other political figure in your memory has had their election "picks" tracked by major national newspapers during an election cycle (an election which Palin wasn't even directly participating in any way other than casting a ballot, it bears mentioning)? None that I can name. What other out-of-work politician is elevated to the same level as the president during a national event, as Palin was with her speech on the Arizona tragedy? Again, none that I can name.

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[Program Note: Two years ago today, President Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into office. Today, I was busy running errands and didn't have a chance to write anything, but two years ago I was on the National Mall trying not to freeze my extremities off, to witness this historic moment. So I thought I'd run the column I managed to write after the event as well as all the photographs I took while attending Inauguration Day. If you'd like, you can search my January, 2009 archives page to read all the columns I wrote about the highs and lows of Inauguration Week two years ago. I realize I could have marked the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech today, but I've already printed two speech transcripts in the past week, so I thought I'd take this route instead, to mark the halfway point of Barack Obama's first term in office.]

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The House of Representatives, as expected, just voted to repeal the landmark healthcare law which President Obama signed less than a year ago. This vote was a symbolic victory for Republicans, but not any sort of substantial change. To truly repeal the law, the Senate would have to also pass the bill the House just passed, and then both houses would have to muster a two-thirds majority vote to overcome Obama's veto. None of which is going to happen. Democrats still control the Senate, and Harry Reid has all but pronounced the bill "dead on arrival" in his chamber, meaning that today's House vote is the only victory (and a symbolic one, at that) Republicans should expect in their mad dash to repeal healthcare reform.

Which is probably fine with them. House Republicans know full well that their vote today is nothing more than empty symbolism -- but it is important empty symbolism, as far as they're concerned. The Tea Party Republicans who campaigned on the issue of "Repeal!" have proven their bona fides to their fervent supporters, and now they can throw up their hands and blame the expected inaction on Senate Democrats -- thus paying no real political price for spending time on such a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, Republicans in the House have won a single "news cycle" -- even though the more honest among them fully admit that the effort is ultimately going nowhere.

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Senator Joe Lieberman will announce tomorrow (from all reports) that he will not be seeking another term in the Senate. Democrats across the land are collectively heaving a large sigh of relief at the news. "So long, Joe," seems to be the prevailing sentiment, although if you listen closely you can hear the muttered "... don't let the door hit you on the way out," or other less-than-endearing sentiments.

Joe Lieberman's legacy will be one of a decidedly mixed nature. One might almost say "quixotic," especially in the past few years. From the heights of the Democratic Party to being little more than a pariah, Joe has charted his own course in the past decade. In 2000, Lieberman was named as Al Gore's running mate. Being a candidate for vice president launched his own presidential run four years later. But from there it was mostly downhill, in terms of how he was viewed within the party. Lieberman so annoyed his own state's Democratic voters by his staunch support of Bush's wars that he was defeated in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary, in his last bid for re-election. Joe then formed his own party and won as a third-party candidate (helped by an extremely weak Republican in the race). But even all of these were minor transgressions which could have been overlooked by Democrats. What happened next was not.

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[Note: Last week, a Defense Department official made a rather startling statement, to the effect that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeh Johnson reportedly said: "I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack." Salon has the full story, as well as a video of the speech which is transcribed below. Dr. King gave this speech in April of 1967 at Manhattan's Riverside Church. Today is a fitting day to read or view this speech, and then to make up your own mind about what Dr. King would have had to say about our current wars.]

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

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