The President Almost Put Me to Sleep A Few Times ... I Guess That's Good

If we want to "tone down the level of political rhetoric" the place to start is at the top. This SOTU was most unexciting, but, considering the degeneration of our national political dialogue, it was what was needed from our President. In Tucson, President Obama gave an inspirational and moving speech to begin the healing. Tonight, at the SOTU, Mr. Obama closed the circle with a boring speech. It may seem dissonant, but a boring, slightly wonkish speech is exactly what the country needed in the wake of the shooting of Rep. Giffords and against the backdrop of extreme partisanship. And the President delivered.

Rep. Paul Ryan gave a slash and burn reply filled with LIES (here is point-by-point factual rebuttal) in which he laid out his fantastical Ayn Rand libertopia with the most interesting line, a Social Security and Medicare declaration of war against the younger generations of future retirees: Only "people in or near retirement will be protected." For everybody else, say 55 and under, Ryan plans to turn Medicare into a voucher program and hand our Social Security retirement over to Wall Street bankers, in what would become the largest transfer of wealth in American history since Bush and Obama cut taxes for the super-rich. Paul Ryan is an ideological criminal, picking the pockets of the middle class to destroy the New Deal and feed Wall Street bankers. This punk will not get away with it. Ryan's scheme is about as popular with the American people as his bible, Atlas Shrugged.

Paul Ryan, Republican Tea Party VAMPIRE, Delivers INSANE Ayn Rand Response to The SOTU

Finally, Ryan delivered a laughable line: That the American free enterprise system did "more to help the poor than any other system designed." BULLSHIT. President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society achieved the greatest drop in the poverty rate in the U.S., by cutting it in half with his "War on Poverty." Tragically, those amazing gains in ending poverty altogether in the world's richest country were rolled back in 30 years of Reaganomics, ravaging the middle and lower classes. It's not about helping the poor; it's about ending poverty and giving poor people the dignity and opportunity to rise above their station, into the middle class. And that WAS NOT achieved by the American free enterprise system, but by the European social democracies. That's just a fact.