Stock up at the liquor store tonight! SOTU drinking games.

[Adam]

There are a few out there. Just depends upon which one you want, and how badly you want to abuse your liver.

The Cloture Club has one. I've never actually even heard of the Cloture Club before, but this was actually the first hit on google and they have a pretty good graphic:

Debate Drinking actually has people choose sides.


If your liver just can't take it or you'd just rather not go to work hungover Wednesday morning, Americans for Tax Reform has a bingo game you can play, and I suppose one could drink while playing if you wanted to.

Enjoy!

[Gingersnap]

LOL! I'd like to play the drinking game but I have to work. The bingo is interesting. Sadly, this is not a speech I need to see in real time so I guess I'll catch it later.

[Michele]

This will be a speech for his true believers only. They need to know who they are running against in the 2014 (FNC, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party) and what their theme(s) will be..War on Women and Income Inequality will most likely be his front runners.

[Adam]

This will be a speech for his true believers only. They need to know who they are running against in the 2014 (FNC, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Party) and what their theme(s) will be..War on Women and Income Inequality will most likely be his front runners.

Peggy Noonan nailed it pretty hard a few days ago. Short version: no one even listens to Obama any more. Not even Democrats:

No one's really listening to the president now. He has been for five years a nonstop windup talk machine. Most of it has been facile, bland, the same rounded words and rounded sentiments, the same soft accusations and excuses. I see him enjoying the sound of his voice as the network newsman leans forward eagerly, intently, nodding at the pearls, enacting interest, for this is the president and he is the anchorman and surely something important is being said with two such important men engaged.

But nothing interesting was being said! Looking back on this presidency, it has from the beginning been a 17,000 word New Yorker piece in which, calmly, sonorously, with his lovely intelligent voice, the president says nothing, or little that is helpful, insightful or believable. "I'm not a particularly ideological person." "It's hard to anticipate events over the next three years." "I don't really even need George Kennan right now." "I am comfortable with complexity." "Our capacity to do some good . . . is unsurpassed, even if nobody is paying attention."

Nobody is!

He gave a speech on the National Security Agency, that bitterly contested issue, the other day. Pew Research found half of those polled didn't notice. National Journal's Dustin Volz wrote that Americans greeted the speech with "collective indifference and broad skepticism." Of the 1 in 10 who'd followed it, more than 70% doubted his proposals would help protect privacy.

Ouch! And this is Peggy Noonan! This isn't Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or even George Will: Noonan, who hasn't necessarily been a champion of Obama, has certainly been exceptionally kind toward the administration and Obama personally ever since he began running for President at the 2004 DNC.

[Adam]

Reason has updated with one this afternoon. This one appears to be for the hard-core alcoholic:

Take a drink, and click a link, any time President Obama…

• Mentions inequality. Take another if, in the same sentence, he refers to “the wealthiest Americans.” Chug the rest of the bottle if he mentions “the 1 percent.”
• Describes government spending as an investment.
• Talks about economic mobility without noting that mobility has not changed in fifty years.
• Forgets to apologize for lying when he said that people who liked their doctors and their health plans could keep them under Obamacare.
• Says the words “nation building at home.”
• Falsely insists that there’s no evidence of any abuses of power at the National Security Agency.
• Grudgingly admits that the surveillance state may have gone too far—but calls for weak reforms that won’t rein in its power.
• Credits Obamacare for its Medicaid enrollment, despite the fact that we have no idea how many Medicaid enrollees since October are for people who are newly eligible under the law.
• Mentions Syria, which Obama wanted to bomb, and then (thank goodness!) didn’t.
• Says anything interesting about foreign policy.
• Falsely presents something as a false choice.
• Starts any sentence with the words, “Let me be clear.” Double shot if it’s an ad-lib not in the prepared text.

Finally, take a drink any time the cameras cut away to Chad Henderson, the Obamacare poster boy who told reporters he was among the first to sign up under the law but hadn't actually enrolled in health insurance. He says he'll be there, as a guest of Texas GOP Rep. Steve Stockman.

I'd better pick up a couple more bottles on the way home.

[Gingersnap]

I'd prefer to drink to insensibility before the speech just to avoid all the Newspeak.

[Adam]

"Finish your drink if Obama mentions the government shutdown."


Oh dear.

[Adam]

Oh shit. "Upward mobility" and "inequality." I've already got a pretty serious buzz on....

[Gingersnap]

Pace yourself. Maybe not a shot with every mention; try for a 3:1 ratio. Eat bacon sandwiches.

[Adam]

Nine million people signed up for Obamafail! Wow! What a spectacular bit of bullshit that is!

[Adam]

Bears repeating. A lot.

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[Gingersnap]

LOL! And people think I'm a big reactionary when I say we should term limit all of these people. Yes, the new learning curve would be steep. No, the Republic would not die when the political class had a leash.

[Adam]

LOL! And people think I'm a big reactionary when I say we should term limit all of these people. Yes, the new learning curve would be steep. No, the Republic would not die when the political class had a leash.

I'm still a fan of a Constitutional amendment that mandates a maximum of twenty years in federally-elected office. You can have three House terms, one in the Senate, and then go for the Presidency for two terms, and then you're out, period. If you decide to do four House terms and a trip through the Senate, then you've used up 14 years; you can still run for President, but you go in knowing that you can only get one term. If you want to rot in the Senate for the rest of your life, then you get three terms, and then it's time to go home, unless you would like to do one term in the House, knowing that you'll only have one term at that. You can do ten terms in the House if you can survive that many elections, and then you're done.

I would even be willing to accept this as a repeal of Amendment XXII: if someone can manage to make it into the Presidency five times (consecutive or not), if they can actually tolerate twenty years of living in the prison of the White House, if they manage to do that job for twenty years without borrowing a pistol from the Secret Service and blowing their head off in the Rose Garden, then so be it. The one thing that I would demand in such a case is that there is no "familial succession:" the spouses of the President can't run, nor may the sons or daughters, nieces, nephews, etc. Stretch it out to a "one-step, one-generation" rule: anyone who is a single "step" away by marriage or blood is forbidden of the Presidency.

[scott]

I'm still a fan of a Constitutional amendment that mandates a maximum of twenty years in federally-elected office. You can have three House terms, one in the Senate, and then go for the Presidency for two terms, and then you're out, period. If you decide to do four House terms and a trip through the Senate, then you've used up 14 years; you can still run for President, but you go in knowing that you can only get one term. If you want to rot in the Senate for the rest of your life, then you get three terms, and then it's time to go home, unless you would like to do one term in the House, knowing that you'll only have one term at that. You can do ten terms in the House if you can survive that many elections, and then you're done.

I would even be willing to accept this as a repeal of Amendment XXII: if someone can manage to make it into the Presidency five times (consecutive or not), if they can actually tolerate twenty years of living in the prison of the White House, if they manage to do that job for twenty years without borrowing a pistol from the Secret Service and blowing their head off in the Rose Garden, then so be it. The one thing that I would demand in such a case is that there is no "familial succession:" the spouses of the President can't run, nor may the sons or daughters, nieces, nephews, etc. Stretch it out to a "one-step, one-generation" rule: anyone who is a single "step" away by marriage or blood is forbidden of the Presidency.

Do you have any idea how powerful and micromanaging the government would have to be to pull off such a limit? The cure is worse than the disease.

[Gingersnap]

I like it! I would add that you can't run for the next thing within 6 years of doing your last thing.

Just because we have become used to feeding the political beast doesn't mean that we can't get used to doing it a different way. Yes, the destruction of dynasties and constant lobbyist vampirism would take some getting used to and it wouldn't be a smooth transition but so what?

What's most important? Reducing (we can't eliminate it) political corruption or feeding it and hoping it doesn't bite?