Obama hates his dog, because he wasn't born in Kenya

Fox News is certain to pick up this ONN report that reveals just how black as coal the president's heart is.

Herewith an excerpt from an upcoming book:

Dear God in heaven! Refusing to play fetch with the pleading pooch because he's too busy "giving speeches and traveling to foreign countries." Probably ignored Bo while trying to solve the jobs crisis, too.

Buddy Clinton was right by the president's side, humping Monica's leg while she was giving Bubba a hummer. And history hath recordeth that Nixon dropped out as Ike's running mate to spend more time with Checkers.

The congressman who wants to cut off funding for Obama's teleprompter should get cracking on a resolution to have the Washington ASPCA take Bo to the pound. Ted Kennedy must be turning over in his grave.

(Via HuffPo)

Coitus interruptus

Or something not quite like that.

The messiah returns

This was not Photoshopped, dude. This is from Reuters.

Obama rocks -- SOTU open thread

From CNN:

A majority of Americans who watched President Obama's State of the Union address said they had a very positive reaction to his speech, according to a poll of people who viewed Tuesday night's address.

Full results (pdf)

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey indicated that 52 percent of speech watchers had a very positive reaction, with 32 percent saying they had a somewhat positive response and 15 percent with a negative response.

Great collection of photo funnies at Wonkette, by the way:

Obama actually hoodwinked the GOP

Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:

Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 - and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years - which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat? 

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.

Andrew Sullivan:

It was staggering to me how many tangible concessions Obama was able to get for one symbolic give. The GOP got to protect the very rich to the tune of $120 billion for two years. In return, Obama got the $360 billion tax cut for the middle class he wanted, plus $450 billion on extended unemployment benefits, the pay-roll tax cut and EITC and college tuition funding. In the process, he got the GOP to endorse a huge fiscal stimulus for Obama as he runs for re-election - a stimulus that could, according to Morgan Stanley, push economic growth to as much as 4 percent next year. That might be an overshoot - but it's surely salient that no one thinks the package won't boost growth at all.

Ha, ha, ha, tea partiers, roll over and die.

Stat of the day

The New York Times crunches the numbers:

At least a quarter of the tax savings will go to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.

Dems won't abandon the cave man

Steve Kornacki tells why the president didn't get rolled:

Democrats, by and large, believe that Obama has been operating in good faith. This is different from the intense skepticism that (George H.W.) Bush already faced from the GOP base, which remembered him as the moderate who blasted Reaganomics as "voodoo economics" in his 1980 presidential campaign, when he made his deal with the Democrats. In raising taxes in '90, Bush was confirming what the right had long suspected about him. Obama, though, has more wiggle room with his party's voters. Which is why the concessions that he won from the GOP are so important. As part of the deal, expiring unemployment benefits for millions of Americans will be extended for 13 months. Just as importantly, there is now a real prospect that the Senate will act on repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy and ratification of the START treaty before this month's lame duck session ends. Is extending tax cuts for the richest Americans (and blowing another hole in the deficit in the process) a steep price to pay for all of this? Absolutely. But that's politics: Obama took the best deal he could possibly get. And he got enough out of it that Democratic voters, who still like him enormously, can rationalize their way to supporting it (or at least not feeling betrayed by it) -- no matter how much grief Obama takes from liberal activists and commentators....

Some of the most vocal liberals will argue that Obama should have refused this deal, dared the GOP to let all the tax cuts (and unemployment benefits for millions of Americans) expire, and used his bully-pulpit to convince Americans that Republicans did it all in the name of protecting millionaires and billionaires from a tax hike. This wouldn't have worked, though. As the 2010 midterms demonstrated (hardly for the first time), when the economy is stalled, voters look for reasons to blame the man in charge -- whether it's logical or not. Obama is in no position to win a P.R. battle with the GOP right now. That's just reality, and on Monday, he dealt with reality and came away with the best compromise he could get.