Some State of the Union news from around the web ...
- Early numbers showed President Obama's speech getting high marks with the viewing public -- and many of the pundits agreed.
- Political Correction provides a fact-check on both the official Republican response from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and the calamity-ridden fail of Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-MN) unofficial Republican response.
- And speaking of Ryan, One Wisconsin Now notes that the budgetary messiah of the GOP "voted for eight straight Republican budgets that increased spending by a staggering 50 percent."
- Joan Walsh points out what was missing from Ryan's response:
Rep. Paul Ryan railed against the deficit without proposing even one specific cut. He didn't talk about his own infamous "Roadmap," maybe because most analysts have called it a budget buster, even though it essentially replaces Social Security and Medicare with vouchers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Ryan's plan wouldn't balance the budget until 2063, and would add $62 trillion to the debt by then. Citizens for Tax Justice said Ryan's Roadmap raises taxes on 9 out of 10 taxpayers and while slashing them for the wealthiest.
... and what was in Bachmann's response:
She flashed Perot-style charts blaming rising unemployment solely on Obama, and ranted about 16,500 new IRS agents supposedly hired to enforce Obamacare (Factcheck.org has already debunked that myth).
Bachmann ended with a shot of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima (which she mispronounced) and compared it to Americans fighting the debt crisis ... Unfortunately, she was looking at the wrong camera for the entire speech, so she always seemed to be looking over the viewer's left shoulder (in my case, at my dog Sadie.) It was a little creepy.
- Politico's Jonathan Allen produced the first false equivalency take on civility during last night's address, where he held up Rep. Paul Broun's tweet:
Mr. President, you don't believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism
... with Harry Reid's fact-check of Paul Ryan's so-called "roadmap."
- And for those who had money riding on it, yes, he did:
Rumor has it that it was snapped at the moment Obama said, "I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies."