Celebrating Iraqi elections? No, I just got arrested last night.

As a blog that purports to be about politics and DC, I suppose I ought to cover the State of the Union speech, huh? Fine, fine. Here are my thoughts.

1)We've seen it five times now, but is there any creepier picture in the world than Cheney and Hastert sitting behind Bush at the SOTU, smiling their crooked smiles?

2)Let the Democratic voices be heard! For a moment I thought I was sitting in the Houses of Parliament, when the Dems chanted, "No!," while Bush fibbed about the state of Social Security. This was a good moment for them, far better than the Dem response.

3)The Dem response sucked. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are great people to have working for you in the halls of Congress, but who decided they should be the public face of the Democratic rebuttal? Is there no one with any charisma in the party? Where the hell was Barack Obama? I don't care if he's only been in the Senate for three hours, get his ass in front of the microphone every time we have to say anything. Upside: no one, and I do mean no one, not network anchors, not the cameramen, not Harry Reid's mother, watched the Dem response.

4)Bush brings back the gay marriage amendment. Note one: this is appalling, and the GOP will pay for this one eventually. Note two: he said he supports one, not he will throw his hard-earned, two-percent-of-the-vote-means-a-mandate political capital behind it. A sop to the base, who will hopefully be disappointed when saner heads prevail.

5)So, I guess we're maybe thinking about helping Iran? If I heard correctly, and I think I did, Bush clearly said that we stand with the Iranian opposition. What will we do if the opposition rises up? We don't have such a good track record on this one (see Bush I, Kurds left to be massacred), but I'm guessing, along the lines of Seymour Hersh's stunner of a piece a few weeks ago, if Bush is saying these things in the SOTU, then we probably have some boots over there passing out how-to leaflets on revolution.

6)Lots of other crap that won't ever be heard from again (see, trip to Mars).

7)Social Security. I feel that this need not be seriously discussed, because I'm fairly convinced that Bush's plan doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell, but's let's talk anyway. Almost to a point, Bush's ideas are bad. First, as everyone with a calculator has pointed out, Social Security isn't in that bad a shape. It's certainly not in crisis. A tweak or two could extend its solvency indefinitely. Moreover, as Paul Krugman points out, if the market gains Bush promises for his personal accounts come to pass, then we wouldn't have needed to make any changes in the first place. If the market doesn't grow, and SS is in real trouble, then private accounts won't do any good anyway. Second, saving in general and saving for retirement specifically are good things. We should encourage them. Encouraging them does not require a convoluted, expensive, government-run plan, claiming to save SS. If Bush wants more people to have 401(k)s, then he should design policies to that effect. Increase the tax incentives for IRAs. Make it easier, or possible, for wage labor to develop their IRAs. Encourage saving. That has nothing to do with SS, and should be kept separate. Third, it should be kept separate, because SS is supposed to exist to save people from market swings that would leave them destitute in old age. Of course, Bush guaranteed that people wouldn't be able to choose overly risky investments, withdraw their money all at once, and would be protected from crashes and the like, but then that makes the plan sound like there's not a lot of choice or market-orientation to these things. Fourth, if you think Wall Street isn't licking its chops over this, you're very much mistaken, all Bush protestations notwithstanding. Fifth, so, uh, 4% of payroll taxes are going into these accounts while there is no change in benefits for people 55 and older, and we're making the tax cuts permanent and all that other stuff, and you know he never really introduces anything that's going to raise some new revenue. This plan is costly on a scale the likes of which you cannot believe. It would make the Reagan deficits look like the take-a-penny-leave-a-penny jar. If Bush's plan where somehow to pass, we'd need record levels of saving, because no foreign investor in their right mind would get anywhere near American debt. This is really a horrible idea. Verdict: enough self-interested Congress persons fear gutting SS and heaping debt on their constituents; the bill dies.

8)One last thing: why are the President's environmental proposals always so godawful? Why hydrogen, clean coal, and ethanol (which is renewable in that you can always grow more corn, and a terrible idea in the sense that it takes a lot of polluting energy to process that corn into ethanol)? Why is Bush constitutionally (small c) incapable of proposing something that might actually be a good idea? For instance, significantly increasing MPG standards would slash our oil dependence, reduce highway fatalities (by getting rid of the super-giant SUVs), and hasten the arrival of fully electric cars (which would be way cheaper than H-cars, because there's already electricity everywhere, while the nearest hydrogen station is, uh, not close by). Best of all, it wouldn't cost the government a red cent. But, you know, it's not a handout to some industry or another, so I guess that ruled it out.

That's pretty much it. There was a lot of other frustrating stuff, but I'm sure we've all seen a Bush speech before.