I was so disappointed to have to miss the SOTU in order to attend the last soccer game of my high school senior. Truth be told, I probably could've watched it since I live 5 time zones from Washington.........but for some reason I already knew what I would be hearing.

So instead, I watched the most passionate, hard fought game I've ever seen, only to see my daughter's team come out on the bottom in overtime, losing 3-2. It was the end of a long day.

Having 2 teenage daughters, you're always worried about what the future holds for them...but it was even more disturbing today after Samuel Alito was sworn into a lifetime job of deciding which personal decisions they may make on their own without idealogical, government interference.

There were so many things I wanted to tell her tonight when she quitely cried in bed. About how tomorrow things won't hurt so bad, about the positive future she will have as she goes off to college, about changing the world for the better. But the words just couldn't come out of my mouth.

Erin's team are the Warriors - they're allowed to get away with an "unpolitically correct" name since we live and she was born in Hawaii. I like to think she will carry on the tradition of Warrior and fight for causes she believes in.

Zero-emission coal-fired power plant is nonsense. Even if you make advanced filters to eliminate ash, SOx & NOx it will always produce huge amount of CO2. Same problem is with natural gas-fired power plants. I'm curious how he wants to achive this goal.

And there we have it: Kerry, the quintessential waffler and flip-flopper and "yes-before-I-said-nay"-sayer - even Michael Scherer noticed it.

How on earth do you expect to get a fair shake for Democrats in the so called mainstream media when even Salon gives Kerry the Fox News treatment. I'd say pretty much everybody in that room was constantly agonizing about whether to clap, to sit or to stand. Even these bold and decisive Republicans. But who does Scherer single out?

You guessed it.

Who did Bush keep winking at during the speech? I caught him doing it two or three times after the big applause lines when he must have figured the camera had panned over to his slobbering sycophants on the Republican side of the aisle.

He looked off to his right and winked with that little sneer of his. "Yeah, that was a good 'un."

I looked for Karl the Impaler but I didn't see him. The president was glancing toward where the Supreme Court justices were seated. Maybe he was winking at Alito. "You and me, bud. Got 'em where we want 'em."

Scherer says last night's speech lacked any blockbuster "16 words." Au contraire. I can't believe Bush's handlers let him make this blunt admission of one of the Administration's biggest failures:

"We will not sit back and wait to be hit again."

So there you have it. The Bush Administrationi was "sitting back" when 9/11 hit, despite dire warnings from Richard Clarke, despite FBI agents raising the alarm about people learning to fly planes but not land them and, most tellingly, despite a Presidential Daily Briefing titled "Osama Determined To Strike Inside The U.S."

And yet, he still maintains that illegal domestic surveillance without a warrant is the only way to keep us safe? Try listening to your own advisors and reading your own PDBs for a starter, eh? What a fraud.

Once more into the abyss. To have made it through SOTU06 without: new with named evil nations, no evident drive towards expansion of the current batch of wars and not even one hint at abolishing pesky amendment 22 nor too many coded biblically based (wink wink) metaphors.

I was left somewhat relieved, although more than a little concerned that no one expressed open revulsion at the president's unfortunate policy directions, ie no one hissed or threw fruit. Is there no opposition? Why do presidents require cheer squads? A lot of the Pavlovian whoops and hollers seemed far creepier than Howard Dean's campaign slip.

It is more than ironic, in a country where irony flows down mightily the way justice should, that Cindy Sheehan was ejected from the House and arrested for wearing a t-shirt that listed the number of dead American soldiers in the Iraq War and asked "how many more?"

The media have gotten the story very wrong when they've bothered to report it. Here's Sheehan's account:

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/02/con06043.html

Anyone else notice how when Bush made reference to the leadership in Iran, it was a "regime"? He used the word three or four rimes. He does not refer to the leadership of the UK or Russia (or, certainly, of the US) as a "regime."

Interesting. Somewhere deep inside the clashing cogs of the spin machine, some bright apparatchik has put a red line under that word; the meme is being spread. (I can't help but think of Dustin Hoffman's character saying "Shoe. Shoe. And old shoe. Something about a shoe.")

Yup, Iran doesn't have a government, or a leadership, or even powers that be. It has -- dum dum dum -- a "regime."

And we all know what W does with "regimes," don't we?

I didn't watch the SOTU. I can't stand George W. Bush, and listening to him talk for an hour without saying anything new is something I consider masochistic torture. Simply put, I just can't handle any more anger. That being said, from reading Scherer's account, it appears that this year's speech was an exercise in redundancy. Not only was there not anything new, but they didn't even bother to rephrase the old stuff. Since the SOTU has long ceased to be a means of informing Congress pursuant to Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, all of this was laughably predictable.

In this morning's paper (Utica Observer-Dispatch, a USA Today clone), the top headline reads, "Bush Embraces Alternative Fuels," as if we're supposed to believe he's had an epiphany in the last year an suddenly realizes that our addiction to oil is something that has to be broken in order to achieve energy independence. I could have told him that five years ago, and my experience in Big Oil consists of pumping my own gas at Nice 'N' Easy.

I did watch Gov Kaine give the Democratic Response. My impression is that he's not really comfortable reading from a TelePrompter, so it came out rather wooden considering the media was billing him as a Democratic rising star, but it still made more sense than anything the President or his men have said over the past year. It's a shame the Democrats couldn't hold auditions to see who would give the Response rather than pick someone they barely knew just because he's the new Democratic governor of a red state. Maybe next year, they can have Cindy Sheehan do the honors.