State of the Union (SOTU for short)

I stayed up and watched it. It was unsatisfying. It ran forever. It was mostly bafflegab, motherhood and apple pie. Obama isn't changing direction, at least not much. The speech had no overall unity, it was a collection of political sound bites, one after the other, each one so vague as to be meaningless. It certainly didn't call the democrats to arms in the face of the Scott Brown threat, or state broad principles that drive his administration. No rousing lines to match "We shall fight them on the beaches,... " or "Ask not what your country can do for you..."
A few surprises. Obama admitted that his health care is not politically popular. This provoked a nervous titter of laughter. Then he said they ought to pass it anyhow. A real democrat here. Clearly Obama has gone far beyond believing that politicians are supposed to represent the voters. Obama still believes in global warming and still wants the job destroying cap & trade bill. He mentioned foreign trade and Columbia, South Korea, and somewhere else, but he did not advocate passing the free trade treaties for those countries bottled up in Congress.
He attacked the recent Supreme Court decision that overturned McCain-Feingold and allows unions, corporations large and small, and other organizations to, print and televise their viewpoints about political matters. Freedom of speech for unions and corporations. Obama is against it, although he didn't state what he wanted to do about it.
One good thing, he did speak up in favor of nuclear power and domestic oil and gas production. That was the only good thing in an hour and a half.

Who caused Great Depression 2.0?

Actually, it's like Murder on the Oriente Express, they all did it. But, one major villain is Elliot Spitzer, New York Attorney General and later Governor. While Attorney General, Spitzer targeted Hank Greenburg, president of AIG. Spitzer made such a stink that Greenburg stepped down as president. He never actually brought charges against Greenburg, but he made blood curdling threats which panicked AIG's board.
AIG was Greenburg's personal creation. He had assembled company after company into the biggest insurance company in the world. Greenburg was the only man competent to run AIG. He was a difficult man to work for, and so all the competent people in the organization had left for greener pastures, leaving a corporation staffed with narrow gauge yes men. With Greenburg gone, AIG began to slide down hill. The surviving management began gambling in the "credit default swap" market to make a quick buck.
Credit default swaps are insurance under a silly name. The deal goes like this. The seller, for a small fee, promises to insure some other company's debt against default. They became immensely popular with traders in risky bonds and securities. Give AIG a small cut, and take the rest of the income risk free. What's not to like?
When the market collapsed in September, AIG suddenly had to pay off zillions and it didn't have the money. Eventually we taxpayers paid off $140 billion of AIG's bad bets, making the buyers (Goldman Sachs, Lehman, Merrill Lynch & company) whole. We probably should have flushed the buyers down the drain, but at the time responsible officials (Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed chairman Bernanke) thought that was just too dangerous. They only flushed Lehman and paid off the others.
If savvy old Hank Greenburg had still been running AIG, this probably would not have happened. Elliot Spitzer drove the man with his finger in the dike away and sure enough, the dike failed.

All the data that is fit to print

Is the world getting warmer? How do you tell? One way is to look at temperature readings from the past. NOAA has collected thermometer readings going back to 1701 and posted them on line.
One would think, that you just average all the temperature readings over one year, and you have the average temperature for that year.
Other clever folks have been looking at the raw data and finding discrepancies in it. Jogs up and down, missing data, "urban heat island effect", and other stuff. The clever folk advocate "correcting" the data to "eliminate errors". Trouble is, the "correctors" seldom explain the basis of the "corrections". Worse, some of them work for NOAA and have been "correcting" the raw data files. The "hockey stick" graph was produced by "correcting" the data.
Years ago Scientific American did an article on historical temperature. They gathered up all sorts of records and them "corrected" the data for all sorts of effects. Scientific American, to its credit, did explain their corrections. After doing all the correction, the author declared a small amount of global warmin was visible. However, the amount of warming was smaller than the corrections applied.
Moral of the story. Stick with raw data. Corrections are untrustworthy.

Doing Osama's propaganda for him,

An audio tape surfaced, alleged to be from Bin Ladin. As usual, our brain dead CIA is doing voice analysis and will pronounce the tape authentic.
Why do we do this? Bin Laden audiotapes are bin Laden propaganda. Every time we "authenticate" Bin Laden's propaganda we make it more effective. Lots of people have doubts about these audiotapes. But after his enemies, the American CIA, pronounce them real, many will believe them.
Let Bin Laden do the heavy lifting to convince the followers (including the MSM) that his propaganda is coming from him, rather than imposters.

The power of the mouth

On Meet the Press this morning:

Anchorman David Gregory: "What will President Obama do to improve the economy?"

White House staffer Valerie Jarrett : "He will give a State of the Union Address..."

Highly effective that.

Full body scanners == Electronic Strip Search

In reaction to the serious screwup that allowed the crotch bomber to board the aircraft, the TSA has ordered 150 "full body scanners" essentially small radar sets that see thru clothes. The scanner images are black and white, a little fuzzy, but embarrassing. If they were a bit less fuzzy you could peddle them as pornography. I sure wouldn't want anyone to see my full body scan.

Instead of harassing passengers, we ought to be looking for the bureaucrat[s] who failed to react to the bright red flag warnings the crotch bomber was waving furiously as he boarded. Single male, paid cash at the airport for his ticket, no luggage for a trans continental trip. He should have been marked for extra scrutiny just for that. The Amsterdam airport should have asked him to step aside, patted him down, and interviewed him. If the bureaucrats had been really efficient, a computer search would have turned up the father's warning that the son was turning radical. These things didn't happen. Let's find the negligent bureaucrats and hang them out to dry.

And please lay off us poor passengers.

Brown was elected by independents

Us Republicans need to keep that in mind. Massachusetts Republicans are only 12% of registered voters. Independents are 52%. Brown won by 52%. Assuming every registered Republican voted for Brown, that means the other 40% came from independents and democrats.
Independents tend to be fiscal conservatives and social liberals. Republicans need to concentrate on fiscal issues and stop worrying about the social issues.