Krauthammer On SOTU: "Tone Was Srained and Unctuous"

What is mandation
[ Improve ] Sarah Palin used the word "mandation" when discussing President Obama's State of the Union address. Palin said Obama was calling for a "mandation" on Health Care. The problem is that it is unclear if "mandation" is even a word. It cannot be found in any dictionaries. Some websites claim "mandation" is another form of involuntary servitude. According to the OED, a mandation means something committed to memory as a sermon . In use since 1867. First answer by

Pro or Con, Lobbying Thrived
President Obama has blamed many factors for the stalling of his Health Care overhaul, from the recent Special Election in Massachusetts that deprived Democrats of their supermajority in the Senate to his own failure to better explain the legislation to the American people. He has also prominently blamed Lobbyists, taking them to task in his State of the Union address last week as he cited "Special Interests and armies of Lobbyists and partisan politics." Clearly, Lobbying has been a major...

Chris Matthews "Forgot He Was Black" Comment Sets Internet Ablaze [VIDEO]
Erin Burnett thing? — but this one appears to have been a doozy. Last night, after the State of the Union, Matthews was chatting on air with Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann when he started waxing poetic on how President Obama has come into his own as the leader of this country, and how racial divides seemed to have evaporated when he addressed U.S. citizens and politicians alike last night. That’s when the journo came out with the now oft-repeated phrase: “I forgot he was...

Charles Krauthammer: The Real Detainee Scandal
Washington — The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any Administration, as it surely did to the Bush Administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government. After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama Administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the...

Charles Krauthammer: #1 Obama Fan!
A few days ago, Charles Krauthammer was not so impressed with President Obama . He was vain . He was a mediocre one-term president . His SOTU was strained and unctuous , not to mention strange and incongruent . Bah! But today, all that changed — thanks to Obama’s extraordinary 85-minute GOP Question Period . Suddenly, Krauthammer was filled with praise: “I thought it brought out the best in Obama,” gushed Krauthammer. “He engaged in a fairly high-level...

Soft on Terror
By Charles Krauthammer, Townhall The way team Obama reacted has left our nation more vulnerable The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any Administration, as it surely did to the Bush Administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government. After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama...

Obama Is No JFK -- By: NRO Staff
Yesterday’s announcement that the Obama Administration plans to scrap funding for voyages to The Moon and to Mars, shows how low President Obama’s horizons truly are.  As Charles Krauthammer wrote ten years ago this week: It took 100,000 years for humans to get inches off the ground. Then, astonishingly, it took only 66 to get from Kitty Hawk to The Moon. And then, still more astonishingly, we lost interest, spending the remaining 30 years of the 20th century going around in...

The Krauthammer Prescription
"Insuring the Uninsured is a moral imperative," Charles Krauthammer wrote last week. But "the Democrats,” he went on, “have chosen the worst possible method — a $1 trillion new entitlement of stupefying arbitrariness and inefficiency." What should we do instead? Krauthammer's answer: Pass "targeted measures that attack the inefficiencies of the current system one by one — tort reform, interstate purchasing and taxing employee benefits." I’m...

President Obama schools Republicans on policies and truth
During the State of the Union address this past week, President Obama told the assembled legislators that he would meet with them and discuss the issues that divide the two sides so they might work through their differences and actually pass some legislation. Yesterday, Mr. Obama met with Congressional Republicans in Baltimore, and agreed to allow live television coverage. According to White House sources, the Republicans were reticent to allow cameras, but relented for the sake of transparency....

Fooling some of the people all of the time
A day after bashing Lobbyists, President Barack Obama's Administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday's State of the Union.   The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to "a series of conference calls with senior Obama Administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address." ... Some Lobbyists say they are extremely frustrated with the White House for...

Fooling some of the people all of the time
And these people must seriously be stupid : A day after bashing Lobbyists, President Barack Obama's Administration has invited K Street insiders to join private briefings on a range of topics addressed in Wednesday's State of the Union.   The Treasury Department on Thursday morning invited selected individuals to "a series of conference calls with senior Obama Administration officials to discuss key aspects of the State of the Union address." ... Some Lobbyists say they are extremely...

SOTU From An Energy Perspective
Wednesday’s State of the Union address was as much about the subjects the President avoided as about the issues or policies he proposed. The word “wind” occurs not once in the speech. References to Solar Energy have to do with the number of jobs created building solar panels. Gone are the promises of a future of Rainbows, Unicorns and Magic Windmills ; the Administration seems to have come to the realization that wind and solar may make a marginal contribution, but they will...

Views on the News " 1/30/2010
In a speech that signaled his intention to "start anew," perhaps the most notable feature of President Obama's first-ever State of the Union address was how remarkably stale and boring it sounded. Against the backdrop of plummeting poll ratings and the election of a Republican Senator in Democrat-friendly Massachusetts " an unmistakable message about

Obama stronger on the left
by Mark Silva This is the way a loose ball is played: The president scored a slam-dunk the other day in Baltimore, with his stand-up defense of his policies in front of the House's Republican Caucus, the way his supporters saw it - Organizing for America was circulating an emailed video of the encounter to supporters around the country. But the president got no bounce out of his State of the Union address the other night in Washington, with the Gallup Poll's tracking surveys showing an even...

Supreme Court Judge Alito gets flack for SOTU, but Scalia and Thomas didn't even show up
View all » Much attention has been given over to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito's apparent displeasure with President Barack Obama's remarks during the State of the Union speech delivered on January 27th.  While what Alito did does represent bad form for Supreme Court Justices at the speech, at least he bothered to show up. The Supreme corporatists, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, didn't even go.  Perhaps they were looking over the dissent from the...

Bush 10th grade, Obama 8th
President Obama’s State of the Union was the 4th dumbest of the 68 or so State of the Union speeches given by U.S. president, Smart Politics reported . Using the Flesch-Kincaid test of words per sentences and the syllables in the words, Smart Politics figured Obama’s speech on Wednesday was at the grade level of 8.8. Hmm. That’s low enough that I could probably write his next SOTU. “Interestingly, George W. Bush’s 10.4 Flesch-Kincaid score was also higher than...

Saturday reading: Scared
Genius from the BBC. Holden Caufield delivers the State of the Union. Obama goes to the ballgame. Anthony Weiner says the backing down on the trials makes New York look scared. The Military will hold a "special investigation" into Don't Ask. Don't Tell, postponing action. Irwin Stelzer would prefer uncertainty to the status quo. The Sex tape is somewhere safe. Tea Party Convention organizers push back. And Jurgen Habermas arrives on Twitter.

Arena Digest: POTUS wrong on SCOTUS?
This was a very partisan, unpresidential State of the Union address, but there is one particular on which I will comment. The president said: “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for Special Interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our Elections. Well, I don’t think American Elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful Interests, or worse, by foreign entities.” Here the...

State of the Union 2010
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Chris Matthews on Obama: 'I forgot he was black'
NEW YORK – MSNBC's Chris Matthews says President Barack Obama has done so much to heal racial divisions that he "forgot he was black" while watching his State of the Union address . Those four words — "forgot he was black" — so instantly set the Twitter world afire that Matthews came back less than 90 minutes later Wednesday night to explain what he meant. The MSNBC commentator said it was noteworthy to him that a black president was addressing a room of mostly white...

House Republican Retreat with Pres. Obama
Pres. Obama spoke to House Republicans at their two-day retreat in Baltimore, MD. He repeated his State of the Union address plea for bipartisanship on Health Care and other economic issues. GOP leaders commented later, following shortly after a question-and-answer session with the President. Hat tip Richard

Bil Browning: Gay Hoosier Is White House Guest for State of the Union Address
Indianapolis resident Trevor Yager, an openly gay business owner, has been picked by the White House to be the First Lady's guest at tomorrow's State of the Union address. Yager co-owns TrendyMinds, an Indianapolis advertising agency celebrating its 15th anniversary this year. In 2009 the agency grew by more than 200%, doubled the number of employees and gained 15 new accounts. None of this would have been possible had it not been for President Obama's welcoming climate for small...

Mark Steyn: In Obama's America you'll all work for the government
Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 90 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected Poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, "After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle." Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to...

Post-SOTU poll shows disbelief among most voters on Obama claims
Did Barack Obama sell Americans on his claims of progress in Wednesday night’s State of the Union speech?

Trey Ellis: Today's Q&A;: Is Obama the new Comeback Kid?
His State of the Union speech, finally, forcefully challenged the GOP and reminded Americans that he inherited a country in shambles. Sure, the speech should have come in September, Health Care has been teetering since the summer, GOP lies had been left to fester unanswered since practically the beginning of the Health-care debate. Still, better late than never. His bitch slapping the GOP and their talking points on their home court today hopefully reminded them that he is the most powerful...