The toughest test of a card player comes not with a big hand or a sheer bust, but rather with cards somewhere in between. Then it's not the deal that makes the difference, it's the sheer skill of the player.

The hand President Obama was playing in his could scarcely be called a powerhouse. Pre-speech coverage was dominated by polls showing his approval rating well underwater and the national mood dyspeptic at best. Even the improving macroeconomic picture seemed to have cheered few at the personal level, and the "right-direction-wrong-track" poll question was decidedly downbeat.

Reviews of the president's fifth year in office dwelt on a parade of bad stories, from the failure of gun control measures in the Senate to the stalling of immigration changes in the House to the revelations of government surveillance and data-gathering — all of it topped off with the meltdown of Obamacare in its first months of full implementation. On the foreign front, a possible breakthrough with Iran was overshadowed by civil war in Syria, the quagmire in Afghanistan and renewed unrest in Iraq, Egypt and South Sudan.

Yet the embattled president was not without cards to play on this night. Congress has an even deeper trough in its public approval than the White House. The Republicans bore the brunt of opprobrium for the federal government's partial shutdown in October, and had briefly seemed in free fall themselves.

Polls also showed the public strongly supportive of a higher minimum wage, extended benefits for the long-term unemployed and new rules on immigration — precisely the policy fronts on which the president planned to press forward against strong Republican resistance.

In other words, neither party came to this year's State of the Union table in a dominant position, though there surely were partisans on either side who thought they did. In the media, many stressed the long fall the president had taken since his emergence as an almost magical persona in the presidential primaries six years ago. Now the cable TV stories asked: "Is Obama already a lame duck?" Yet most were quick to add that the GOP was hobbled by miscues and was so riven with factional debate that the official party response to the State of the Union (by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers) was followed by two separate Tea Party retorts (by Sens. Mike Lee and Rand Paul).

Given this downbeat context, and noting the chief executive's rather lackluster public performances in recent months, expectations for this State of the Union were not nearly so high as they were last year. Then, the president was fresh off his re-election, replete with vindication and seeking fresh worlds to conquer. That contrast may have helped the president, who seemed to draw a kind of inspiration Tuesday night from the uninspiring circumstances of the moment.

For purposes of his one-hour address to the nation, the president once again proved himself a gamer. He was brisk and confident, the master of a text we are told was in preparation since November. Having telegraphed for days his intended emphasis on "income inequality," the president tacked slightly by talking instead of "inequality of opportunity." That caught Rodgers slightly off guard. Her text was already written to say that opportunity was the important thing, not income. It's a subtle point, perhaps, but one that afforded the president a slight edge (and demonstrated again why it is better to be the king than the king's critic).

Obama also managed to avoid a remarkable, even breathtaking array of issues one might have thought he had to deal with. He declared Obamacare to be more successful than most people think, and really, how high a bar is that? He also slid past the National Security Agency scandal that has cost him dearly on the left, and he made no mention of the deportations that have so angered immigrants' rights groups.

Yes, he touched the various constituency buttons on issues such as climate change and environmental damage. And yes, he once again gave primacy to revamping the immigration laws. But here, as elsewhere in the speech, he showed deference to House Speaker John Boehner. Obama seemed to suggest he was still willing to deal with the Republican from Ohio, especially if Boehner is able to keep his often-unruly troops in line. The president implicitly saluted Boehner for doing so on the federal budget compromise vote in December.

In sum, the Obama who delivered the speech was a nimble and adaptable player. It is the tragedy of this presidency that, to date, he has not been nearly as adept at the less-dramatic business of actually dealing with the Congress, the federal bureaucracy, the media or any of other power centers — including foreign governments.

The president has, in recent weeks, added new staff in critical positions, including senior adviser John Podesta, who is a veteran of Bill Clinton's later years in the White House, and new faces in the legislative affairs office. There is some cause for hope that these new players will help the president extend his talent for presentation to produce more successes in policymaking.

 kronk wrote:
I watched Season 1, Episode 2 of the Vikings on the DVDs. Great series so far.

 kronk wrote:
No spoilers! We're watching them so that we're ready for Season 2!

 kronk wrote:
The State of the Union or Vikings?

 Grey Templar wrote:
I vote for Obama to do the SOTU while wearing chainmail, a horned helmet, and drinking copious amounts of mead

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I like the Viking SOTU address, reality is so much more disappointing

chaos0xomega wrote:
Whats The State of the Union?

 Ouze wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:
Whats The State of the Union?

It's a constitutionally mandated message the President of the United States must deliver to Congress and the people periodically on his or her recommendations for steering the nation. In modern times, it's a televised speech once a year.

 d-usa wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
I like the Viking SOTU address, reality is so much more disappointing

I will answer that post with the new "I see what you did there" gif courtesy of the SOTU speech:

 d-usa wrote:
Joe Biden is everyone's crazy hillarious uncle at the thanksgiving dinner.

A State of the Union address is often difficult to fact-check, no matter who is president. The speech is a product of many hands and is carefully vetted, so major errors of fact are relatively rare. But State of the Union addresses often are very political speeches, an argument for the president’s policies, so context is sometimes missing.
Here is a guide through some of President Obama’s more fact-challenged claims, in the order in which he made them. At the end, we also examine one fishy fact in the Republican response. As is our practice with live events, we do not award Pinocchio rankings, which are reserved for complete columns.
State of the Union address

“The more than eight million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years.”
The president is cherry-picking a number that puts the improvement in the economy in the best possible light. The low point in jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has indeed been a gain of about 8 million jobs since then, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. (Obama, saying “businesses,” appears to be referring to private sector growth of 8.2 million; adding government jobs reduces the total to 7.6 million.) But the data also show that since the start of his presidency, about 3.2 million jobs have been created — and the number of jobs in the economy still is about 1.2 million lower than when the recession began in December 2007.
“A manufacturing sector that’s adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.”
The low point for manufacturing jobs was reached in January 2010, and there has been a gain of 570,000 jobs since then. But BLS data show that the number of manufacturing jobs is still 500,000 fewer than when Obama took office in the depths of the recession — and 1.7 million fewer than when the recession began in December 2007. The gain in manufacturing actually has begun to stall a bit in the past year. The only reason Obama can tout a gain in manufacturing jobs “for the first time since the 1990s” is because, before the recession, manufacturing had been on a slow decline for many years.
“Our deficits — cut by more than half.”
The federal budget deficit has declined in half since 2009, from $1.3 trillion to about $600 billion, but that’s not much to brag about. The 2009 figure was not just a deficit Obama inherited from his predecessor, since it also reflected the impact of decisions, such as the $800 billion stimulus bill, enacted early in the president’s term.
Moreover, the deficit soared in the first place because of the recession, so as the economy has improved, the deficit naturally decreased. The United States still has a deficit higher than it was in nominal terms and as a percentage of gross domestic product than it was in 2008 and a debt much greater as a percentage of the overall economy than it was prior to the recession.
“Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”
Close readers of the president’s speeches might have noticed an interesting shift in the president’s rhetoric. Just in December the president gave a speech on economic mobility in which he three times asserted that it was “declining” in the United States. But earlier this month, renowned economists Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez and colleagues published a paper based on tens of millions of tax records showing that upward mobility had not changed significantly over time. The rate essentially is the same now as it was 20 years ago.
Still, the same study confirmed that income inequality had increased in the same period. “Hence, the consequences of the ‘birth lottery’ — the parents to whom a child is born — are larger today than in the past,” the paper said, offering the analogy of a ladder in which the rungs have grown farther apart but the children’s chances of moving upward from one rung to another had not changed.
Both Chetty and Saez are recent winners of the biennial John Bates Clark Medal, for distinguished economist under the age of 40, and it’s a mark of their esteem that their paper would lead to such a swift change in presidential rhetoric. Even so, some might argue that Obama is stretching the use of the term “stalled,” since the main point of the research was that the trend was constant, not that it halted.
“Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.
Obama is using a figure (annual wages, from the Census Bureau) that makes the disparity appear the greatest. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, shows that the gap is 19 cents when looking at weekly wages. The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages — it is 14 cents — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers.
In other words, since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics used by the White House may be less reliable for examining the key focus of legislation pending in Congress — wage discrimination. The weekly wage is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does not include as many income categories.
Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis surveyed economic literature and concluded that “research suggests that the actual gender wage gap (when female workers are compared with male workers who have similar characteristics) is much lower than the raw wage gap.” They cited one survey, prepared for the Labor Department, which concluded that when such differences are accounted for, much of the hourly wage gap dwindled, to about 5 cents on the dollar.
“More than nine million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage.”
Obama carefully does not say these numbers are the result of the Affordable Care Act, but he certainly leaves that impression. But the Medicaid part of this number — 6.3 million from October through December — is very fuzzy and once earned a rating of Three Pinocchios.
The ACA expanded Medicaid to those who earn less than 133 percent of the poverty line — about $15,000 for an individual — to 26 states (and the District) that decided to embrace that element of the law. But no one really knows how many of the 6.3 million are in this expansion pool — or whether they are simply renewing or would have qualified for Medicaid before the new law. Indeed, the number also includes people joining Medicaid in states that chose not accept the expansion.
The private insurance numbers — about 3 million — are also open to question. The troubled federal exchange counts people as enrolled if an individual has selected a plan, but it does not know if a person enrolled and paid a premium because that part of the system has yet to be built.

Republican response

“Last month, more Americans stopped looking for a job than found one. Too many people are falling further and further behind because, right now, the president’s policies are making people’s lives harder.” — Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.)
This has become a familiar theme by Republicans, but as we have noted before, the decline in the labor participation rate is largely due to factors beyond Obama’s control — namely the retirement of the Baby Boom generation. When Obama took office in January 2009, the workforce participation rate was 65.7 percent — and now it is 62.8 percent. So there has certainly been a decline. But the rate had already been on a steady downward track since it hit a high of 67.3 percent in the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in 2012 concluded that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the participation rate comes from the retirement of the baby boomers. Critically, the research showed that the problem is only going to get worse in the rest of the decade, with retirements accounting for two-thirds of the decline of participation rate by 2020. In other words, the rate will keep declining, no matter how well the economy does.
Barclays economists, meanwhile, say that just 15 percent of the drop in the labor force stems from people who want a job and are of prime working age (25-54). “We view the possibility of a large and sudden return of previously discouraged job seekers to the labor force as remote,” they wrote.

President Barack Obama delivered his annual State of the Union address last night, making numerous claims about his accomplishments in office and agenda for the year ahead. The Onion clarifies several of the president’s erroneous and ambiguous claims below:

● “Women earn 77 cents on the dollar”: Our studies found that women are paid 77 cents on the dollar, but only truly earn about 56.

● “Already, 23 people have signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act”: This statement is true.

● “My wife, Mackenzie”: The president’s wife is named Michelle.

● “The American people are capable of great things”: The American people are capable of things.

● “I”: By positing the existence of a fixed, independent self that is distinct from the group, Obama succumbs to a classic existential misconception: reifying the ego, that illusory, shifting entity that is not apart from, but of, the whole.

● “Today, the federal minimum wage is worth about 20 percent less than it was when Ronald Reagan first stood here”: We didn’t bother looking this one up. It sounds right, though.

● “Men tend to have bigger hands than women”: This is patently true.

● “I vow to [some bs about income inequality]”: Not even fething close to the truth. You think that when the Wall Street puppet masters pull the strings, he won’t dance for them? Open your eyes!

● “This statement is a lie”: Upon investigation, it was found that this statement is in fact true.

● “We’re going all the way to state”: While we have a pretty fair shot at beating the Pierce Panthers this year, at this point in the season it’s anybody’s game and we’re definitely going to have to hustle a hell of a lot harder now that they’ve got C.J. “Cyclone” Kenner at quarterback. Go Bulldogs!

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I was doing something alot more fun.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I was doing something alot more fun. Escapist Fantasy

 d-usa wrote:

Last night in Chicago, black grassroots activists reacted to President Obama’s State of the Union address at Wallace’s Catfish Corner–and it wasn’t pretty.

J.R. Fleming of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign said, “This state of the union was the same ol’ same ol’, a bunch of talk and rhetoric to give favor to a dying economy in America–and the reason why our economy is dying is the President’s approach is always to place blame…It’s not the 1 percent problem, it’s not the 99 percent problem, it’s an American problem, and the problem is patronage, nepotism and cronyism.

Joe Watkins, Founder of V.O.T.E. (Voices of the Ex-Offender) asked how raising the minimum wage was “going to help people who don’t have any jobs right now.” Watkins remarked that despite holding a graduate’s degree, he has been unemployed for four years.

But perhaps the biggest slam was when Mark Carter, also of V.O.T.E., suggested that black Americans would be better off if the President would cut his presidency short and “just quit.” [whembly: !!!!]Carter direct his comments to the President, saying, “if this is what you call helping us, then just stop helping us.”

Carter went on to criticize the President’s record during his time in Chicago as a community organizer. “He had never done anything for the community, he didn’t know the people in the community. All those things they talk about Altgeld Gardens, he wasn’t doing that stuff for real.”