Speech! Speech!

Assuming you saw the President's address to Congress last night. Apparently The Daily Beast has highlights from it. I thought it was a bit professorial, and painfully fast-and-loose with the facts, but overall a pretty decent speech (with quite a finish).

Ultimately, I don't see this changing much. And I believe Joe "You Lie" Wilson, for all his lack of manners, probably did an excellent job of undermining Obama. If you think about the subset of people who came into the speech against Obama's reform efforts but were warming up to it as the speech went on, that sort of outburst is exactly the sort of thing to snap one out of the increasing level of trust building between the speaker and viewer throughout the speech, reminding viewers that there was a reason they opposed this guy before, and his "sweet-talk" shouldn't necessarily win them over now.

As a side note, it is sort of terrifying how divisive this issue has been, given that there's so much everyone agrees on (like pre-ex's). I mean, even the school speech was a bitter partisan issue. And Drudge Report is reporting higher readership than at the same time a year ago, which is astounding given that a year ago we were in the height of the election season (and about two weeks into the Sarah Palin Era).

news bloopers

I enjoy bloopers of all sort, because I like watching others embarrassed, so these news bloopers from HuffPo are enjoyable (someone needs to teach me, again, how to embed video) . A few are dumb, but the "Terrifying Criminal Mastermind" is pretty hilarious. Also, as per usual, I love Anderson Cooper.