Lies per minute

Miles per hour, revolutions per minute, PSI, BTU, now add LPM - lies per minute to the lexicon. The State of the Union didn't set a record for lies per minute but it was thick with deception. The "addicted to oil" statement seemed promising but what initiatives were proposed? What funding was offered and, by the way, how is it going to paid for? In his 2003 State of the Union W offered $1.2 billion to fund hydrogen cars and hydrogen infrastructure. Any update on that? Is it possible nothing ever happened? I'm going to bet yes.

The economy under W has created 2 million jobs over the last five years and 4.5 million over the last two and a half years. Guess which time period he talked about last night? He also bragged about how the deficit will be reduced by half by 2009. Mind you this is due to offsets from the Social Security trust fund and forget that the over $400 billion deficit will still be over $200 in 2009. The "commie left" group The Heritage Foundation says CBO is wrong and that the deficit will explode. The real nonsense is that W has also asked for his tax cuts, which expire in five year, to become permanent which would ballon the deficit even higher than anyone projects. W's projected halving of the deficit assumes tax cuts end and then asks for his tax cuts to be renewed and made permanent. I thought Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay are on trial for the same kind of accounting at Enron. Are they now presidential advisors? I guess they could use the State of the Union for their defense and W as an expert witness on accounting.

My favorite part of the speech was when W said, "The United States could have accepted the permanent division of Europe, and been complicit in the oppression of others." What was that conference at Yalta in 1945 about again? oh yes, to permanently divide Europe. "We'll take Western Europe and West Berlin, you take everything else." W should have known this not because he reads you know, history books, but because last year he went to Latvia and cited Yalta widely regarded as having paved the way for the Soviet Union to dominate not only the Baltic states but also Eastern Europe for nearly half a century. And to make the point that the United States owns up to "the injustices of our history," he reminded his audience of the shameful heritage of American slavery and centuries of racial oppression.

"The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact," Bush said, linking it to British appeasement and Soviet deal-cutting with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. "Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

Lies? Deception? Misleading arguments? Phony budget and jobs numbers? History butchered like a spring lamb? No mention of New Orleans? No mention of public corruption? Add that to dragging Cindy Sheehan out of the House, who had a ticket to the speech, and arresting her for wearing a shirt with the count of the U.S. war dead on it and you'll really know the State of the Union.