Since I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, I think I need to.

After the U.S. President tonight gives the yearly Constitution-mandated State of the Union address, this is followed up by the televised "Response" speech given by the opposition party out of power from the White House.

This tradition started in 1966 when Republicans Senator Everett Dirksen and Congressman (and future President himself) Gerald Ford responded to LBJ's SOTU address, and this has continued yearly since then.

Except 2011 will be slightly different. Newly-inaugrated Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was choosen to give the GOP response to Obama's Address, but tonight fellow GOPer Congresswoman Michelle Bachman of Minnesota will give her own "Tea Party" response to the Address.

To say this is unprecedented would be an understatement. Imagine if when Dubya was President, asides from say Tim Kaine giving the Democratic response, you then had Bernie Sanders or Ted Kennedy on a seperate telecast give the "liberal" response. Talk about cutting the legs out from under your own party's message of unity and opposing.

Indeed the GOP leadership says that Bachman's response means nothing. Its so irrelevant, the GOP had to let everybody know very clearly that it doesn't matter. You don't issue press releases for non-problems.

This could mean a further sign of the strains within the GOP, a struggle for power and ideological direction between the Party Establishment and the much more right wing Tea Party grassroots insurgency. This will get uglier before it gets better, especially with the primaries next year.

Or this doesn't mean as much as it might, much more Bachman granstanding and ego-stroking. She reportedly was miffed when the majority House GOP refused to give her a serious leadership role within the party congressional caucus. She might be doing this to stick it the Boys' Club. She also is reportedly considering a run for the GOP Presidential nomination next year, and this "Tea Party Response" would get her more attention and feed her potential primary voting base.

Consider also that CNN is the only TV network that will air Bachman's response. Not even Fox News, who you would assume would also air this program, will televise it.

So what does everyone think? What does this mean?

Bachman is already a member of Congress who can probably go on being one for years to come. It can't do her any harm to run for President. In fact, it may put her in the position of broker during the convention and into the campaign.

I doubt anyone wants to read it, but none the less here is tonight's SOTU address in text. Reading it is much quicker than sitting through it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/25/938834/-2011-State-of-the-Union

I wanna see the response from the Rent is Too Damn High Party.

A tweet from the NYT Home page:

President Obama: inspirational optimism. Rep Ryan: cautious optimism. Rep Bachmann: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! #

Sorry I couldn't help but laugh.

EDIT - An interesting graph speculating if that $500 billion "axing" proposed by the GOP tonight became reality:

$500 billion is really not that much, but Ryan's plan won't win support from even his own party.

We can either make deficit cuts, or make cuts in MEDICARE and MEDICAID (unless we can somehow reduce the interest we pay on our debt) and while the Dems' 5 year plan to freeze non-security, discretionary spending would eliminate $400 billion from budget deficits over a decade (a relatively modest amount) not once last night did the President fully embrace the Simpson-Bowles plan because neither side is ready to commit to a full plan right now as it involves cuts in social security & medicare-caid during election season.

It's the LARGER deficit problem that should be at hand right now according to conservatives, while the dems want to kick the social security and more pressing medicare/caid problem down the road apiece. Not that cutting those programs a bit is necessarily the worst thing ever mind you, because there's plenty of investment opportunity internationally to make up for that loss.

No mention was made of the GOP proposed plan to cut 2.5 trillion in spending over the next four years. And in all of the optimism last night not once was mentioned the fact that states like Illinois are on the verge of bankruptcy nor the impending immense Fannie-Freddie bill that will come due soon.

And all of the energy plans the President made, while interesting, were 25 years down the road. Outside of Canada and Mexico every country in the energy trade is more or less our economic enemy.

Safe to say it's going to be a heated election season.

I have yet to see any deficit cut proposal that will come close to balancing the budget. Forget cutting SS or Medicare. It is not going to happen. Ditto for most of the defense budget.

Bottom line? Same thing G. H. W. Bush and Clinton did. Make cuts and raise taxes.

Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin gave the Republican reponse to the president's State of the Union address. Below is part of it:

"We believe government’s role is both vital and limited – to defend the nation from attack and provide for the common defense … to secure our borders… to protect innocent life… to uphold our laws and Constitutional rights … to ensure domestic tranquility and equal opportunity … and to help provide a safety net for those who cannot provide for themselves."

Of course, the foregoing is a paraphrase of both the Constitution's preamble and the Constitution's opening sentences of Article I, Section 8. What Ryan left out of both of those is "general welfare" which in both instances comes right after "common defense". I guess the word welfare (especially if it's general) is too strong a medicine for Republicans to swallow.

Politicians never tell the full truth and Rep. Ryan was no exception last night.

Ryan pined that "their (Democratic) actions show they want a federal government that controls too much, taxes too much and spends too much in order to do too much."

But that's not entirely true. The economic stimulus package passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress in February 2009 didn't raise taxes. Instead, about a third of the package--nearly $300 billion--was made up of temporary tax cuts.

The biggest was Obama's Making Work Pay credit, which provided up $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples.

There were dozens of other tax cuts, including the child tax credit, a tax credit for buying a home and a sales tax deduction for buying a car. (Of course many, but not all, of the tax cuts have since expired.)

Obama's health care law imposed new taxes, including a penalty for some people who don't get qualified health insurance, starting in 2014. But Obama extended Bush-era tax cuts that were due to expire at the beginning of the year. He also enacted a new one-year cut in the payroll tax for 2011 for just about every wage earner.

You say that, but fact is, one could make the argument that had the President's speech last night been delivered by a Republican, the Left would be calling today for a rescue of the downtrodden and call to arms against their billionaire oppresors.

That's because in the opinion of many, this President is now clearly a centrist, pro-business oriented fiscal conservative when compared to his stance just a couple of years ago when they were against proprietary trading on the desks of firms like Goldman Sachs, etc.

There is truth to this.

People at Huffington were pissy, one in particular called it "the most pro-business SOTU ever given by a Democratic President." Knee-jerk, overblown liberal sentiment, but they are onto something.

Certainly the political ramifications and reality of the mid-terms have forced Obama to fight in a triangulation strategy like Clinton, but that speech last night was inspired by/lifted from another President: Reagan.

Read that speech. You think Obama previously would ever use that salmon anecdote, much less two years ago? No, but that was the sort of fodder Reagan regularly deployed.

Before his election, some analysts considered Obama a possible transformative President who could alter the American political game like Reagan's Presidency did, two charismatic orators beloved (at times) by the base and absolutely despised by the ideological opposition.

Jury is still out, but apparently Obama read a Reagan biography over the holidays and I think the influence was obvious at the SOTU. Of course his best "Reagan-esque" speech was at Tucson, which personally demolished the SOTU. It didn't just satisfy what people wanted, it changed the story and the media pretty much quit the "blame game" narrative regarding the assassination attempt shortly afterwards.

Hell Appleonya liked it. I think that says enough.

In unsurprising news, Americans want to cut the deficit...just not this, and this, and this, and that...