[EWTN News Nightly] THREE MARTINI LUNCH: JANUARY 20, 2015

tutsdot.blogspot.com - National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's topics: Republicans look to roll back Obama regulations, the impending drudgery of the State of the Union speech, and Michael Moore slams "American Sniper."



SOTU: Semi-retired troll ready to bring his troll A-game

Prepare yourself at 9 p.m. ET for the magic that only a seventh-year State of the Union speech can create. Every SOTU is a political Groundhog Day but tonight's looks to be more repetitive than usual - tax hikes on the rich, some whining about the Citizens United decision, a few studiously vague sentences on "progress" made in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, etc. Seventh verse, same as the first. What's novel is the new reality in Congress and Obama's reaction to it.

Having just seen Democrats obliterated in an election which he himself sold as a referendum on his policies,The Oneis going to greet the Senate's Republican majority by…doubling down on the policies that got obliterated. He calls that "playing offense." Conservative commentators, recognizing that Obama's proposals are going nowhere legislatively, aptly call it trolling. The more he irritates the GOP by pushing bills they want nothing to do with, the greater the chance that they'll engage him in a war of words, supplying media oxygen for those bills. Better to have them preoccupied with rejecting his proposals than pushing popular ones on him, like Keystone approval, that he'll be forced to reject.

So that's what you're in for tonight, a solid 60-75 minutes of the most powerful man in the world essentially trying to irritate his opponents because he now lacks the votes he needs to actually get his agenda passed.David Frum asks an interesting question, though: What if the GOP isn't Obama's only target tonight? When you look at the redistribution ideas he's offering, like funding "free" community college by taxing the 529 savings accounts that middle-class Americans are using to pay their kids' college tuition, it's hard to imagine the public turning against the GOP for opposing him. But it might set a progressive benchmark that a certain not-so-progressive Democratic frontrunner might be reluctant to defy...

Also read:

5 good reasons to blow off Obama's speech

Kyle Derangement Syndrome

Posted by Tutik W