President Obama’s State of the Union speech “will be less a presidential olive branch than a congressional cattle prod,” Politico reports.
Excellent. Hell, if the President wants to curse at the Republicans, I am perfectly fine with that.
“Emboldened by electoral victory and convinced the GOP is unwilling to cut deals, Obama plans to use his big prime-time address Tuesday night to issue another broad challenge at a Republican Party he regards as vulnerable and divided, Democrats close to Obama say.”
“He’ll pay lip service to bipartisanship, but don’t expect anything like the call for peaceful collaboration that defined his first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, they say.”
Paul Krugman at The New York Times writes several paragraphs of eyerolls over the Republican Ignorance Caucus:
To be sure, [House majority leader Eric] Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”