I have just finished reading President Bush's State of the Union address. Did I miss something by reading the text and not watching the speech on television?

Hope so, because reading the text, the State of the Union's predictability was matched only by it's mediocrity. President Bush ran down the list, checking off the boxes: "Coretta Scott King? Check. Optimistic note on Iraq? Check. Soldier's wife? Check. Play up the economy? Check. Tax cuts for corporations? Check. Sensible immigration reform, check; end our dependence on foreign oil, check; more educations spending, check—

"Wait, I'm not sounding to sensible and centrist, am I? I'd better obliquely imply that Jack Abramoff is gay:"

They [Americans] are concerned about unethical conduct by public officials, and discouraged by activist courts that try to redefine marriage.

"Hopefully that's got me covered on social issues. I mean, I'll throw in some coded anti-abortion stuff just to be sure, but I think I can check that off the list, too. That just leaves 'AIDS is a tragedy' and I think that's everything. Yeah, that's everything.

"Stay in school, God Bless America, I'm outta here."

The President touched all the bases he needed to touch, defended himself against the Democrats issue-of-the-week (the NSA wiretaps, for those of you not keeping score) and he said some pretty words. But there were no unifying themes, no penetrating insights, no new ideas. (Well, OK, there was the one joke about "two of my dad's favorite people: me and President Bill Clinton." That was funny, but makes me wonder if there's any truth to the rumor that 43 and 41 aren't on speaking terms.) It was a laundry list. But unlike President Clinton's laundry list State of the Union speeches, it wasn't a list of new policy proposals. It was a list of things we already knew.

State of the Union? Check. Reaction blog post? Check.

Goes to Stanley Kurtz, writing in The Corner:

Nobody knows whether the election win for Hamas will help or hurt the cause of democracy in the Middle East...

The post itself is worth reading, if only to see how much this election has shaken the post-Orange and Cedar revolution assumption that elections are the key to peace in the Middle East.

This weekend was Tsagaan Sar. I love living in a big city. Why, just ordering breakfast in D.C. is more interesting than all of Provo: "Good morning. How was your weekend?"

"Okay. I sat around playing Escape Velocity all weekend. How about you?"

"I had a good time. It was New Years."

"New Years?"

"The Mongolian Lunar New Year."

"Really? Cool. What's that like?"

Turns out there's a goddess named Bituun Baldanlham, who rides her mule around the countryside. You're supposed to put three pieces of ice outside your front door for the mule to drink. It's like Passover, but it's in Mongolia and it's New Years.

"So what do you call New Years?"

"Tsagaan Sar."

"Zaganscar?"

"You're not very good at pronouncing Mongolian words."

"That's okay, I'm not very good at pronouncing English words."

"The usual sausage egg 'n cheese?"

"Yeah."

On the way to the office, I thought I spotted Bituun Baldanlham, but it was just James Carville on the big screen above Channel Seven's studios. James Carville's 30-foot-tall head is more than anyone should be forced to endure at 7:30 in the morning.

I'm sorting faxes when I notice another advertisement. This one is for the 8th annual Government Performance Summit, which bills itself as "The Most Comprehensive Government Management and Measurement Event of the Year!" Now it may be grammatically correct to end a sentence containing the phrase 'government management and measurement' with an exclamation mark, but I don't think it's ethical.

Keynote Speakers [the flyer reads]

• Hon. Mike Johanns,
  Secretary of Agriculture, USDA
• Hon. Clay Johnson,
  Deputy Director for Management,
  White House Office of Management and Budget
• Hon. Jo Anne B. Barnhart,
  Commisioner (sic), Social Security Administration
• Marta Brito Perez,
  Associate Director, Human Capital Leadership & Merit
  System Accountability, OPM

So, wait, maybe there's something in an old Miss Manners column I haven't read that suggests we address the Secretary of Agriculture as "Hon. Mike Johanns," but the deputy director of OMB gets an 'honorable' and the associate director of OPM doesn't? And to add insult to injury, Clay Johnson gets his acronym spelled out while Marta Perez doesn't. What did the Office of Personnel Management do to offend these people?

We get quite a few of these sorts of advertisements and part of my job is to dispose of them. (Exciting work, huh?) I did get one last fall that I've kept on file. It was a booking form from Entertainment With Class, a company in Maryland. It includes contact information, details of the event, legal disclaimer, and a list of the entertainers available. For example, the female entertainers include Sparkle, Puddin', Brown Sugar, and Dallas. The male entertainers include Nubian King, Razor, Sexecutioner, and Wiggles.

Clearly, Wiggles is the classy one.

The bus drivers of Tehran are going on strike this Saturday. According to the Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (nominee, 2005 "Most Awkward Name" award), the bus drivers are protesting "poor conditions, the lack of the right of having an independent union and the persistent imprisonment of their colleagues."

Good for them, of course, and it's a shame the American media isn't covering this. Michael Ledeen points out the story at National Review's blog. He also writes, without any indication that he realizes the hilarity of the situation:

so far I'm aware of exactly two men ... who have called for support for the Bus Drivers' Collective: Jimmy Hoffa Jr. and Rick Santorum.

Forget photo's of Bush and Abramoff. I want to see Hoffa and Santorum!

The President made a telephone call this morning to a group of anti-abortion protestors, saying:

We're vigorously promoting parental notification laws, adoption, teen abstinence, crisis pregnancy programs, and the vital work of our faith-based groups. We're sending a clear message to any woman facing a crisis pregnancy: We love you, we love your child, and we're here to help you.

We're from the government, and we're here to help. Heh.

Just saw Sen. Orrin Hatch's IMDB biography.

US senator from Utah, 3 January 1977 - present.

Favorite poet: Sara Teasdale.

A staunchly conservative Republican, Hatch once hired a young woman named Eliza Florez as a page on his staff. After she left his employ she began a new career as adult film actress Missy Manners.

Cool. I went up to the Supreme Court today to see the protesters and think about the Alito nomination. Had some interesting times.



I've got my first session of Intro to Japanese in half an hour. Woo!

I got the first two seasons of The West Wing on DVD over Christmas and was rather surprised to realize that when President Bartlett was shot just at the end of season one, he was standing just outside my office. We're located next door to an exhibit of part of the Berlin Wall where they filmed the cliffhanger first season finale. I spent part of my lunch break wandering around, tracking down the precise spot where Toby found Josh in a puddle of his own blood. Cool.

Flying into Seattle, colors look brighter. I don't just mean the "I'm traveling, no work, a bit of money, gonna see my family" sort of glow you get. I mean the colors are literally brighter: it's almost always overcast, and the sky is dark, dark grey, like you always see in drawings of London. This increases the contrast between colors like red, green, and yellow. As the plane drops down, the buildings and cars seem brightly painted; the grass and trees are more vibrant. Everything seems brightly painted, as if the landscape were exquisitely detailed models from the old Mr. Rogers television show.

Then the plane gets a little lower and it's cruising over power lines and freeways, past the big FedEx planes across the tarmac, and over the runway, floating gently just above the ground. There's a moment suspended in time, and then there's a bump. Just like that the plane has gone from graceful sky-machine to the world's ugliest, most inefficiently designed Greyhound bus, and the first person to get their bag out of the overhead gets a gift card from IHOP, so by all means, use those elbows!

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is the lower 48's closet airport to Japan, with a dozens of flights to Tokyo, Okinawa, Taipei, Soul, and the other cities in what I like to call "The Area of the World Sadly Within Range of Kim Jong Il's Serious Psychological Problems and Also Missiles." The signs and the pre-recorded admonitions to keep your luggage with you at all times are in English and Japanese. There are customs machines; they look just like e-Ticket machines and have large Japanese characters--Hiragana? Katakana?--directing visitors to slide their electronic passports, place their fingers on the fingerprint readers, and generally pretend this is an episode of Star Trek. Only with Kim Jong Il, who is too unrealistic a character to be in a science fiction show.

I'm taking a Wednesday night course in Japanese this spring, and a weekend Intro to Photography course, mostly to get at a darkroom again. It's the part of the money I inherited I know my grandmother would approve of me spending. The iPod, not so much, but learning is the single most important thing we can do, and school is sometimes a surprisingly good place to learn. I'm looking forward to it, although right now I'm also looking forward to getting into Minneapolis alive: I'm writing on my way back to D.C., and going over the Rockies had more bumps than an M.C. Hammer video.

Note: When you're reduced to making fun of the 1980's, you have nothing more to say. Here are pictures of family in Seattle:



And now it's coming up on midnight at a small hotel in West Bloomfield, which is south of Minneapolis and not, sadly, in Bloom County. So: no Opus the Penguin, but there is a Chili's across the street. Also, I got a free ticket from the airline for being willing to give up my seat on an overbooked flight. So I guess I'll be getting out to Utah sooner rather than later.

The hotel has a banner that reads "FREE WIRELESS INTERNET" in large letters tacked over the side of the roof that faces the freeway. The free wireless internet consists of as many error messages as you can handle in the rooms, free of charge. They also offer free long distance calls, except the phones don't work.

I should have made the airline give me free meal vouchers. I actually enjoy, all things considered, reading in a cheap-but-clean hotel room and checking my e-mail in the lobby by the coffee machine. But the $12.99 I spent on buffalo wings at Chili's is gonna haunt me for a while.