The State of the Union and Sitting in the Dark

President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address Tuesday night. The fractured Republican Party delivered 4 separate responses including a Republican Party response, Tea Party response, the "Rand Paul Response" on youtube, and a Spanish response................... The President's speech was pretty mild I thought and the Republican outrage machine is somewhat at a loss this week given President Obama's relatively benign speech......"It was so polite that only a handful of us could muster up the energy to call him a socialist dictator today," a spokesperson said today. "Even Benghazi has lost its luster. No one even called him a liar during his speech. Last year we were calling for his impeachment. But this morning --- nothing. It's really discouraging. We wanted red meat -- all we got was a tuna salad croissant." ................................. In the official Republican Party response, Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, in her fuzzy and warm way, reminded us all that if you grow up in a family where both parents work hard on the family farm, do your chores, study hard, go to college, marry a retired Air Force Colonel, get elected to Congress, you too can live the American dream. It did turn out, though, that her Obamacare nightmare story turned out to be false (as is often the case). Republicans might get more traction if they used true stories instead of story after story after story that turns out to be false. I'm still trying to figure out why Republicans are more outraged that a person making $80,000 per year might have to pay $50 a month more for better insurance under Obamacare than they are that more than a dozen Republican Governors are denying expanded Medicaid coverage to nearly 5,000,000 Americans........................................ Overall, she was a nice woman speaks soothing platitudes w/o a single policy idea. She looked at the right camera and didn't sound nutty, so that's something. The unseemly picture of Republicans scrambling to have their picture taken with a Duck Dynasty "star" was disturbing. At least Ted Nugent wasn't there.......................... Kansas Congressman Tim Huelskamp, gave his own response to President Obama's State of the Union Address last night in an interview with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow: "BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI, BENGHAZI!!!" He seems genuinely demented and earnestly wacko............................. And Rand Paul, with his frothy hair and smarmy voice, reminded me of a 7th grader demanding that he shouldn't have to read Chaucer or Shakespeare in English class because that's a violation of his constitutional rights......................... Responding to the President's declaration that Global Warming is a fact of life now, Congressional Republicans today demanded answers to why it's cold in winter. And Congressional Republicans are again debating among themselves whether to pay for stuff they bought in their semi-annual debt ceiling temper tantrums.................................. In other news:.... In a difficult week for Republicans, they had to sit politely during the State of the Union Address by President Obama, applaud politely when he said we all live in American, are now confronting divided opinions on how shabbily to treat immigrants, women, Mexicans, and the unemployed, and now have to to deal with divisions which are emerging as to whom they will designate as the Anti-Christ: President Obama or Hilary Clinton. "A consensus had developed that Obama was the front-runner for the designation, but Hilary is emerging as a potent challenger for the largely honorary post," said a Republican theocrat. "It's embarrassing that we can't even agree on who the Anti-Christ is. Difficult days are approaching as our internal debate continues." Meanwhile, Oklahoma Republican theocrats, successfully placing a monument to Christianity on State Capitol grounds are considering which Satanic monument design will be approved. The current design leader is a large horned goat sitting on a throne with children at its feet. "It's a nice design," said a spokesperson from the Oklahoma Department of Religious Intrusion into Governmental Operations. "It should complement the monument to the Ten Commandments nicely." ................. I saw a statistic that there are about 18.5 million vacant houses in the US and about 3.5 million homeless people. We could give every homeless person 5 houses and still have a million empty houses................ In ongoing talks about the civil war in Syria, Syria defends its continuing destruction of entire rebel neighborhoods as "aggressive gentrification." "It's not unlike what goes on in many urban US cities," a Syrian military leader said as he order the obliteration of a 10 square block area in Damascus. "It's like Detroit."......................... And Andy Borowitz had a great line about Edward Snowden being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize: "This makes up for not being named NSA Employee of the Month."................................ And finally on a personal note: I hate it when I'm sitting at the desk in my classroom before class grading papers or prepping and the motion-detector light switch thinks the room is empty because I'm not moving around enough and turns the lights off. I have to wave my arms like I'm signaling a jet landing on an aircraft carrier to turn them back on.