Wednesday, January 26, 2011

What If We Lose The Future?

A few thoughts on last night's speech:
  • Let's get this out of the way: there's no getting around how awful "winning the future" sounded. Maybe it was just me, but when I heard it was going to be the speech's theme, I winced and really hoped it wasn't true. Obama usually has very good speech writers, so I'm a bit confused how something so corny would be allowed make it this far.
  • Positive: the number of "winning the future" references on this blog will skyrocket, so there's that.
  • Pleasantly surprised that he mentioned infrastructure spending as much as he did, especially trains. Would have been a good opportunity to call out asshole Republican governors who turned down high speed rail projects, but you go to war with the Barack Obama you have, not the one you'd like to have.
  • Well done mentioning the dream act and immigration reform, although talking about when it actually had a chance to pass last month might have been a bit more helpful.
  • The talk about how we have the highest corporate taxes in the world made me enraged, because it's a right wing talking point and it leaves out the fact that most major corporations DON'T PAY ANY TAXES. 
  • Michelle Bachmann's Tim and Eric style response video mentioned our horrendous unemployment rate a lot. Barack Obama didn't. This is a problem.
  • David Sirota had the tweet of the night, which I'm kind of surprised more people didn't notice: 
No seriously - someone PLEASE tell me he didn't cite transcontinental railroad built by Chinese labor as proof we'll outcompete the Chinese.
This sounds awful, but I enjoyed the speech much more when you set your expectation level for "Eisenhower Republican", and react from there. Depressing, but there's no need to get your hopes up for stuff that isn't going to happen.

What did you all think?

No comments:

Post a Comment