SOTU highlights

Cindy Sheehan was arrested for "protesting" at the State of the Union speech last night. She was a guest of Lynn Woolsey, and was wearing a t-shirt that said 'support our troops'. I won't say exactly what I think about this yet (though you can probably guess), other than to say that anyone who gets arrested in the Capital building and has the guts to tell the officers that they're idiots gets my support.

Bush said we're addicted to oil, thereby putting me in the uncomfortable position of actually agreeing with him on something. But the problem, in my eyes, is not our dependency on foreign oil, or oil in general: it's that we're addicted to copious, endless energy. We're a nation of cars that get 17 miles to the gallon. The problem's not going to be solved by shifting to a dependency on ethanol or natural gas or hydrogen or even electric cars (because that electricity has to come from somewhere). The problem will only be solved by a cultural change. Don't ask me how to do that: I don't know (give me a few years to work on it).

And amongst other issues: we're not going to clone human embryos because life is sacred. I wonder if Bush is willing to go and sit with, say, a soldier who served in Iraq and sustained a spinal injury, and tell him that life is sacred, so while we could be working on research that could cure paralysis (for example), we're not going to. We're also going to hire and train thousands more teachers for AP math and science courses, and ignore the fact that we could really use that money to, say, improve the public schools that aren't offering many AP courses because they're located in Inner City USA and don't have the money to help students graduate.