by Patrick Appel

Full text of the speech here. The NYT compares the words used in SOTU speeches since Roosevelt. Nyhan calls the SOTU the "most overcovered event in politics relative to the amount of the news that's made." His take on the spin:

Instant polls of people who watch the speech are meaningless (it's a non-random sample skewed toward the president's supporters, among other problems).

The claim that presidents get a bounce from the speech is a widely debunked myth (most don't).

Legislative seating may matter over the long term, but not for one night.

Drezner:

[T]he percentage of the speech devoted to microeconomic "competitiveness" issues vastly exceeds the amount devoted to long-term macroeconomic policy.  If the federal government really wants to create a better climate for innovation, it needs to send a credible signal that steps are being taken to deal with long-term budgetary problems.  That section of the speech was, er, less solid. 

Alana Goodman:

Obama reaffirms the importance of supporting democracy movements around the world. This type of rhetoric had been toned down during his administration, and so it’s nice to hear him say it so firmly tonight: “And tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”

Drum is unimpressed by Obama's five-year discretionary spending freeze:

Let's all keep in mind that budgets are set one year at a time, and they're mostly set by Congress. The president has a certain amount of agenda-setting power, but that's about it. Members of Congress will do whatever they want, and next year they'll once again do whatever they want. If that means spending more money, they'll spend more money. Obama could announce a hundred-year discretionary spending freeze and it would mean about as much as a five-year freeze. This is more a PR exercise than anything else and should be evaluated on those terms.

Garance Franke-Ruta:

Tonight is about many things, but one of them, perhaps encouraged by the pressures of the 140-character tweet stream, is KEYWORDS. Ones the White House is emphasizing: innovate, educate, build, reform, responsibility. Ones it is not: "climate; gun; abortion(/choice/women's health); Clinton; Bush; Israel; Egypt; England."

The topic of gun control does not come up in the speech.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Great: President Obama is open to one of the Republicans’ crummiest ideas. There’s no need for a federal takeover of medical-malpractice rules.

Chait:

The substance of Obama's speech was moderate liberalism -- we like business, but government has a role too, neither too much nor too little, etc. It's hard to attach that kind of case-by-case pragmatism to an overarching theme. But I do think Obama pulled it off pretty well. He took a fairly hackneyed idea -- the future -- and managed to weave it into issue after issue, from infrastructure to energy to deficits to education and even foreign policy.

Pareene:

Oh god he's doing Reagan. The government is so big and complicated, I have a folksy anecdote about fish that illustrates the absurdity of the entire enterprise of managing a massive, wealthy, post-industrial nation. (Obama is also bad at delivering "jokes," his apparently developed sense of irony nothwithstanding.) Oh, now we're done with "wasteful government spending" and on to our on-going fight against al Qaeda abroad. We're going to kill all the terrorists. All of them! Also we're going to leave Afghanistan. Or begin to leave. Begin to start to leave.

Krugman:

Considering the rumors a few weeks ago, which suggested a cave on Social Security, this wasn’t too bad. Obama said that we’re going to do something about Social Security, but unclear what. And in general he at least somewhat stood his ground against the right. In fact, the best thing about the speech was exactly what most of the commentariat is going to condemn: Obama did not surrender to the fiscal austerity now now now types.

Greg Easterbrook:

In the address there was a lot of talk about jobs and innovation, both obviously important: but issues that no president controls. There was talk of better access to high-speed Internet and of regulatory and tax-loophole reform: not one single person opposes either. There was dream-world talk of high-speed rail and energy in the year 2035. But there were precious few specifics regarding what will be done right now to address runaway federal debt. And runaway federal debt, which suggests the U.S. future may be less bright, is a major issue holding the economy back.

Steve Coll:

This really is a much more mainstream American speech than his last one, which was very New Deal-ish. He supposedly read Lou Cannon's Reagan biography over the holidays. 

Avik Roy:

PPACA’s infamous 1099 rule, which requires individuals and businesses to fill out a separate IRS form for any vendor they spend more than $600 on in a given year, was one of the fiscal devices the law’s authors used in order to improve its CBO score. Repealing it appears to have garnered bipartisan support. If Republicans intend to offset this tax increase with spending cuts or other tax increases, it is strategically important that those offsets are unrelated to PPACA, so as to improve the CBO score for repealing the law at a later time under reconciliation rules.

DiA:

I cannot think of a worse model for future growth than the bygone space-race which was little more than hugely wasteful technological peacocking by cold-war superpowers.

Yglesias:

I thought it was a good speech; an example of trying to govern from the White House. I would say that zero percent of the speech was dedicated to building support in congress for concrete pieces of legislation that the President hopes to sign into law. And it’s too bad that the president’s not in a position to promise to shepherd big bills through congress. But the reality is that he’s not. So he’s wisely floating above the fray, issuing “sounds good but hard to do in practice” calls for smart infrastructure investments, tax reform, less oil subsidies, etc. Most likely none of it will happen. But it will definitely sound good, and if the president’s lucky some of it will happen! 

(Pie chart from Ezra Klein)

by Patrick Appel

Nate Silver recommends ignoring moments "likely to have any impact on perceptions of Mr. Obama in the near term" but instead to focus on sections that "might hint at the White House’s thinking on some of the more difficult strategic choices it faces over the next 6 to 9 months." Among the topics Silver will be listening for:

How Mr. Obama will try to maneuver against the G.O.P. on the issue on which he might be most vulnerable: the federal budget deficit. Popular approval of Mr. Obama’s handling of the deficit is just 38 percent, according to a CNN poll released yesterday. Major changes to Social Security appear to be off the table — although, considering how unpopular they would be, it is hard to know whether the White House was seriously considering any in the first place. But the White House will need to have some sort of response to Republicans ready on the deficit, particularly since a budget hawk, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, is set to deliver the Republican rebuttal.

by Patrick Appel

Larison advises against it:

The [Obama] administration should urge the Egyptian government to avoid violence, and it should be willing to withdraw aid if Mubarak uses excessive force against protesters, but publicly backing the protesters simply contributes to an escalating confrontation that cannot end well for the protesters or the U.S.-Egyptian relationship. 

by Patrick Appel

Sully picked a good SOTU to miss, according to Alex Massie:

[T]his is an unusually unimportant State of the Union address. As Ezra Klein notes, these things rarely make much of a difference (they rarely confirm or reverse any prevailing media "narrative") and, in any case, the White House seems to have prepared the ground quite effectively this year. Plus, the PResident's poll numbers are reasonably healthy and there's some reason anyway to hope that better economic times lie ahead.

Andrew is too sick to live-blog, but I'll be trawling the blogs for SOTU reax - in case Alex is wrong.

by Zoe Pollock

Michele Bachmann puts the others to shame. Or as one reader puts it:

Anyone can hog an aisle. Only Bachmann can put a Vulcan grip on the President.

by Zoe Pollock

David Frum lays out the ground rules for planning a SOTU:

At the first meetings on the State of the Union in November, somebody — maybe the president himself — will usually say: "We don't want to do just another shopping list." After two, three, sometimes four months of hard work, what emerges is... a shopping list.

And you know what? It turns out that the viewers at home like shopping lists. President Clinton's States of the Union were almost universally condemned by journalists and communications professionals as sloppy monstrosities. Too long, too shapeless, just one damn thing after another. Yet after each, Clinton's numbers would surge. People liked the big formless blob speeches, despite their frightening length: 77 minutes in 1998, 79 minutes in 1999, 85 minutes in 1995, 89 minutes (the all-time record!) in 2000. The longer the speech, after all, the more likely you are to hear something that directly concerns you.

by Patrick Appel

Joe Klein confesses:

I especially hate the day before the State of the Union message because....every last interest group in Christendom, including the Jewish and Islamic ones, sends out e-missions about what the President really should say about everything from junk food to oil subsidies. And the New York Times inevitably collects a dozen of the usual suspects to make modest suggestions about themes the President should strike, which inevitably are their own entirely predictable hobby horses. And people like me talk about what the President has to do in his speech in order to thrive politically; we are almost invariably wrong, so I've pretty much stopped doing it.

A resident of Kasserine, central Tunisia, demonstrates in front of the Government palace in Tunis on January 25, 2011 as he holds a portrait of his brother Mohamed Mbarki, who was killed during clashes with Tunisian security force in December. The brothers came from a poverty-stricken rural region where the crackdown against a wave of social protests in the final days of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali's regime was at its harshest. In defiance of a curfew and state of emergency, they travelled through the night in a ragtag line of cars, trucks and motorcycles from towns across the rocky region far from Tunisia's luxurious Mediterranean resorts. By Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images.

by Patrick Appel

Larison guesses not:

I would be surprised if the word Egypt appears anywhere in the State of the Union tonight. For one thing, if he mentions Egypt he will almost certainly feel compelled to mention his Cairo speech, and a lot of administration policy matches up pretty badly with many of the statements in the Cairo speech (and that’s not necessarily a bad thing!). Probably everyone in attendance knows that Obama has not made a priority of human rights or political reform in his dealings with Mubarak, so what does Obama say about the protests? When it has had to choose between not inserting itself into a foreign political crisis and “speaking out,” the administration has more or less consistently chosen the former. That was the right decision regarding Iran in 2009, and it was the right decision on Tunisia this winter. 

by Chris Bodenner

Charles Mudede updates it in light of today's events:

I locate Obama's speech in Cairo "A New Beginning". From this point radiates these recent turbulence in the Arab world. Yes, Tunisia caught the State Department completely by surprise. But what Obama did was precisely lessen the tension between the Arab nations and the US, and this in turn meant, for the subjects of Arab nations and also Iran, more anger could be committed to local rather than international matters. None of this would be happening if George W. Bush were in power. All he could do was intensify Arab nationalism, and this nationalism benefited the rulers, kept them in power, kept attention away from their dark doings.

This is only a rough theory. More information will, of course, change this theory. Egypt is a complicated country.

by Patrick Appel

Babak Dehghanpisheh and Mandi Fahmy look ahead:

Will Mubarak soon be joining Tunisia’s Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia (as some protesters were chanting today)? For the moment, that seems unlikely. Egypt’s vast security apparatus is widely viewed as being much more brutal than its counterpart in Tunisia, and has managed to keep Mubarak in place for nearly 30 years. Wire agencies reported a handful of protesters being killed in today’s demonstrations. If the protests continue, the casualties will surely mount. “The regime is going to come back very strongly,” says Hamid, of Brookings. “Unlike their Tunisian counterparts, they’ll be more ruthless. They’re not going to simply sit back and let this protest movement grow.”

(Photo: Egyptian demonstrators protest near Egyptian police to demand the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak and calling for reforms on January 25, 2011. The protesters, carrying flags and chanting slogans against the government, rallied in a protest inspired by the uprising in Tunisia which led to the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images)

by Chris Bodenner

Eric Trager captures it:

But a telling comment came just after cannons, shooting gas-infused water, dispersed crowds along one major Cairo thoroughfare, when a man turned to me and said, "We want a revolution. We don't want Hosni Mubarak."

That man was a police captain.

by Patrick Appel

Shadi Hamid sized up the America's dilemma earlier today:

Tunisia, as far as U.S. interests are concerned, was expendable. The revolt was spontaneous and leaderless. Islamists - mostly in prison or in London - were nowhere to be seen on the streets of Tunis or Sidi Bouzid. But if Egypt is lost, it will be lost to an uprising that includes some of the most anti-American opposition groups in the region, including the Muslim Brotherhood - by far the largest opposition force in the country.

The U.S. is - at least in the short term - stuck.

For those reasons, Allahpundit isn't cheering for the opposition:

by Patrick Appel

Lynch is hopeful that the protests in Egypt are part of a larger wave:

by Chris Bodenner

Gordon Reynolds narrates a riveting account of his role - and that of Twitter - in today's protests:

There had been tweets that protests would be staged in Tahrir Square and in the downtown neighborhood of Mohandeseen. These tweets were received by Egyptian authorities monitoring the hashtag #jan25, and they deployed a massive security  presence to deter any demonstrations. Officers stood in groups of 6 to 8, on nearly every street corner. They blockaded the entrance to the parliament building. The teams stood quietly with folded arms watching the empty streets as the sun rose over the Nile. ...Not a demonstrator was in sight, and sensing this protest had ended before would begin, I went home.

When I arrived, the Twitter hash #jan25 lit up. Someone said that earlier tweets had been deliberately planted as decoys to mislead authorities. Now, in dozens of real locations throughout the city, protesters had begun to mobilize. I ran out the door and took the subway back to Tahrir Square.

When I arrived, the protest had begun. In the street a group of close to 200 Egyptians, mostly men, were standing, chanting and waving flags. Blocking both sides of the street were lines of police in riot gear. Immediately surrounding them, outnumbering the protesters, were older Egyptian men and young women.

Continued here. Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images.

Just a note of deep regret I won't be able to live-blog the SOTU tonight. I haven't missed one here for years, but what are you going to do? It's just a severe mix of asthma and bronchitis and some unexpected medication side-effects that also affected my lungs, making everything worse. The docs want total bedrest and no work until I'm better.

I know it's weird telling total strangers about your health but that's the price of being a 24/7 blogger. I have nowhere to hide when I get sick. So apologies for TMI. But it's nothing that serious and I'll be back as soon as I'm able to breathe right. Meanwhile, the Dish is in the ablest hands. See you soon and many many thanks for the many kind emails. --- Andrew

by Chris Bodenner

Marc Lynch scratches his head over the network's slow response to today's historic protests in Egypt:

Al Jazeera has played a vital, instrumental role in framing this popular narrative by its intense, innovative coverage of Tunisia and its explicit broadening of that experience to the region. Its coverage today has been frankly baffling, though. During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

Some speculation from Angry Arab:

Many Egyptians are furious that Aljazeera has not been covering the massive protests in Egypt today. Explanation?  Mubarak visited Emir of Qatar last month and basically reached an agreement to reduce Aljazeera's critical coverage of Egypt and Mubarak's tyranny.

by Chris Bodenner

A key cluster of updates from Enduring America:

1610 GMT: The Anonymous collective has knocked the website of Egypt's Ministry of Interior off-line.

1600 GMT: A fireman in Oum El Bouaghi in eastern Algeria has tried to commit suicide by pouring lighter fuel on himself and setting it on fire. He is in stable condition in hospital. On 16 January, a civil protection officer attempted self-immolation in the same barracks.

1555 GMT: Lest we forget, given all the excitement in Egypt, there is still a volatile situation in Tunisia.... Hundreds of protesters in Tunisia continued to demonstrate outside Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi's office today, maintaining the pressure to force out Cabinet members linked to the former ruling party RCD.

Scott Lucas captions the above video:

General Rachid Ammar, the head of Tunisia's Army, speaks on Monday to protesters in Tunis (see updates and analysis for details)

by Chris Bodenner

The Guardian captures a dramatic dispatch:

The video journalist Mohamed Abdelfattah has posted some distressing tweets – using the Twitter for Blackberry app – from the scene of the protests, where he says he has been arrested. Here's some of his posts – all filed within minutes of each other and presented here in chronological order.

@mfatta7 Tear gas

@mfatta7 I'm suffocating

@mfatta7 We r trapped inside a building

@mfatta7 Armored vehicles outside

@mfatta7 Help we r suffocating

@mfatta7 I will be arrested

@mfatta7 Help !!!

@mfatta7 Arrested

@mfatta7 Ikve been beaten alot

by Chris Bodenner

Into the night:

Nighttime protest in Alexandria after the jump:

by Chris Bodenner

A Gchat exchange sent by a reader with a friend studying in Cairo:

by Chris Bodenner

First Iran then Tunisia now Egypt:

More than 90,000 people signed up on a Facebook page for the Tuesday protests, framed by the organizers as a stand against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment. But the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most powerful opposition movement, said it would not officially participate, though its members were among the protestors in Cairo.

The government is assigning blame to the Brotherhood - and blocking Twitter:

According to TechCrunch, third party servers are still being used to tweet within the country, many using the #Jan25 hashtag.

As Foreign Policy is reporting, Facebook is still being used to help organize and broadcast the protests as well, largely on the page "We Are All Khaled Said." Says FP:

Regarding the above shot:

[T]his incredible photograph from abdulrahman is making the Twitter rounds.

The Guardian and Enduring America are live-blogging. An Egyptian reader writes:

by Chris Bodenner

Simon Tisdall orients us with some background:

Egypt is not Tunisia. It's much bigger. Eighty million people, compared with 10 million. Geographically, politically, strategically, it's in a different league – the Arab world's natural leader and its most populous nation. But many of the grievances on the street are the same. Tunis and Cairo differ only in size. If Egypt explodes, the explosion will be much bigger, too.

Michael Scherer reminds us that Cairo was the site of Obama's historic address to the Muslim world:

Even though the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak is an ally of the United States, it would be jarring if Obama makes no mention of this unrest in his speech tonight, or in some other public statement.

by Chris Bodenner

Breaking:

Two Egyptian civilians and a police officer have reportedly died after a wave of unusually large anti-government demonstrations swept across the country. ... Thousands of Egyptians took to the streets on Tuesday in what were reportedly the largest demonstrations in years, and which they explicitly tied to the successful uprising in nearby Tunisia.

Another dramatic clip after the jump:

by Conor Friedersdorf

Parents in middle-class nations around the world should want to send their kids to American colleges. Young strivers should dream of working in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs from Israel to Indonesia should be visiting venture-capital firms in San Francisco or capital markets in New York. Global engineers should want to learn the plastics techniques in Akron and retailers should learn branding and distribution in Bentonville and Park Slope.

– David Brooks

Father in developing nation: Son, in order to improve our family business, we sent you to America, where you spent 90 days studying branding and distribution. What best practices have you learned?

by Chris Bodenner

A reader draws our attention to a great single-serving blog called "Historical Meet-Ups", which has this to say about the Wilde-Davis connection:

[Wilde] blew through Beauvoir, Mississippi on his way to Montgomery, Alabama to deliver a lecture on “Decorative Art” at the local opera house. The seemingly mismatched pair actually found they had a lot in common. Wilde remarked on the similarities between the American South and his native Ireland: both had fought to attain self-rule and both had lost. He went on to declare that “The principles for which Jefferson Davis and the South went to war cannot suffer defeat.”

As for the ensuing lecture, that proved to be something of a letdown.

by Zoe Pollock

Michelle Rafferty gets to the root of Starbucks' large cup rollout with Greg Dietrich, who works in the coffee trade business:

[Starbucks has] already lost a lot of customers to McDonalds/ McCafe due to quality and price. McDonalds has better coffee.

by Zoe Pollock

Christopher Hitchens demolishes the "falsification of history" in The King's Speech:

In point of fact, Churchill was—for as long as he dared—a consistent friend of conceited, spoiled, Hitler-sympathizing Edward VIII. And he allowed his romantic attachment to this gargoyle to do great damage to the very dearly bought coalition of forces that was evolving to oppose Nazism and appeasement. ...

by Conor Friedersdorf

– Alex Knapp continues blogging Liberty and Tyranny. I recently discussed the subject generally with James Poulos. And I talked about other things here with Katherine Mangu-Ward.

– This is as delightful a story about trying to avert a foreclosure as you'll ever read.

– With a small bribe you too can walk into Nobu like it's Whole Foods.

– My favorite pharmacy in America is located in the Florida keys.

– Choose your own adventure.

– Sorry to repeat myself, but I remain obsessed with Pat Dollard's War On Hollywood.

– Jon Stewart at his cable news critiquing best. Can even a casual Daily Show viewer deny that the medium is a joke?

by Patrick Appel

Ta-Nehisi - exhausted by this perennial debate - continues to argue that slavery and abortion are not analogous:

by Chris Bodenner

Sunk with the help of a friendly ghost.

by Patrick Appel

Frum, who saw through Palin from the start, counters Douthat:

[L]et me try to explain why the Palin phenomenon cannot be left behind quite so fast.

by Zoe Pollock

Steve Kornacki identifies the worst culprits during the President's entrance into the House chamber. From my years at the PBS NewsHour when it was part of my job to log such shots, the aisle hogs always struck me as transparently comical - what could they possibly be saying to the President that's actually important - and ultimately indicative of the bizarre theater of politics. That said, there's a certain beauty in watching the shameless repeat offenders.

by Chris Bodenner

Ali Vaez compares and contrasts the two uprisings:

by Conor Friedersdorf

Over at Cato, a sobering assessment:

Since the tea party took off last year, pundits have predicted that its anti-spending zealots would eventually target the Pentagon... The evidence that the new Republicans will challenge defense spending is slight... There is no "isolationist" wing of the GOP. Of the Republicans' 47 senators and 242 representatives, only 5 percent (15 members) expressed support for cutting defense spending. Adding those in the "ambiguously for" category makes it 13 percent. Forty-one percent are against cutting defense spending; with those ambiguously against, it's 60 percent.

The tea party is not mellowing Republican militarism. If it were, freshman Republicans, who mostly proclaim allegiance to the movement, should be more dovish than the rest. That's not the case. Five of the 101 Republican freshmen and 10 of the 184 who aren't newcomers support cutting defense spending. That's about 5 percent of each group.

Skepticism about foreign wars and current defense spending is much more pronounced among voting Republicans than the representatives they elect. But the conservative movement seems cool with this particular elite, Inside-the-Beltway consensus. To be fair, the ideological market for bellicosity in foreign affairs subsidizes some top-notch magazine features at The Weekly Standard. Stripped of foreign policy and Palin it's one of my favorite publications! It seems like National Review could differentiate itself and justify its position as flagship publication of conservatism by hosting the strongest voices on all sides of this question.

Why hasn't that happened? Or have I missed some NR coverage on the subject? It would be rivetting to see Daniel Larison, Michael Brendan Dougherty and Andrew Bacevitch square off against Victor Davis Hanson and Andy McCarthy. I honestly think NR's readership would enjoy that debate, and although I assume I'm being naive in not understanding why it won't happen, I don't actually understand why it won't.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

Well, the snow, the large body of water frozen, and the dull twilight sky suggest that this is somewhere in the extreme northern latitudes.  I'm going to be different from everyone else who will probably guess Alaska or Iceland and go with Churchill, Manitoba.  It sits on a large body of water, Hudson Bay, that would likely be frozen solid at this time of year (which leads to the town being a big tourist haven for people who want to watch polar bears).

Another writes:

I never even attempt these contests because I'm intimidated by the sheer amount of work people seem to put into the posted correct responses. But in this case, the photo reminded me so strongly of Deadhorse, Alaska that I felt compelled to try. I spent a summer there after high school working for an oil company as a "stickpicker", picking up debris that gets swept to the tundra while the snow is high and must be cleaned up during the summer thaw lest it endanger the local wildlife. My dad (an oil company employee, who had gotten me the stickpicking job) also had tons of pictures of the "town" during the winter, and this could be one of them.

Another:

Based on the short distance between waves, I would infer that this is located on one of the Great Lakes. One thing I’ve learned living in Michigan is that waves on the Lakes are “closer” than oceanic waves (don’t ask me why). I’m going to guess that this is Kingston, Ontario. I really don’t have any profound reason to say so, other than I am currently reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace, which is partially set in Kingston, and I’m a great believer in serendipity.

Another:

Is this Fort Ontario, in Oswego, New York? Looks like the furthermost eastern shore of the Great Lakes. I know them well, having attended college on the same shore just 1/2 mile away.  Burr.

Another:

I can't pinpoint it, but this looks to be a photo from somewhere in the vicinity of Skagen, Denmark. I'm guessing that's the Kattegat Sea out there, and that's the coast of Sweden visible on the horizon. What I can't find exactly is that stone house with the chimney. Darn.

Another:

The photo was taken from the third floor of a house in the Molbogholman area, on the island of Skorpa, near the town of Kristiansund, Norway. Judging by the relative reflections of the window, the cameraperson was sitting on the edge of a bed, probably the "Bjørn Irkestøm-Slater Walker" model.

Another:

Kirkwall, Orkney, in northern Scotland? Several clues were preset. The house on the edge of the frame is unmistakably Scottish and there are possible runway lights, indicating we are close to an airport.  Kirkwall seems to be the only airport close to the coast and the photo vantage point is clearly where the airport perimeter is closest to the coast. The light is also that of midwinter Scotland.

Here is a screenshot from Google's satellite view. There is some sort of tower visible at the highest magnification and this would be the actual vantage point.  I also include an image of the airport for illustrative purposes (and probably fair use) and it shows the low headland and a wider expanse of similarly flat terrain behind it.

Another:

I believe this is RAF Leuchars airbase, in Fife, Scotland.  The block of flats is unmistakably built of Scottish stone, and the body of water is the local estuary.  The snow on the ground would not be surprising for January in that area.

Another:

Inverness, Scotland? Just a guess. I spent a year in Aberdeen doing graduate work, and in viewing this photo I began to feel as depressed as I felt during that year of bleakness.

Another:

Instant reaction - that's St. Andrews!

by Zoe Pollock

Jill at Feministe responds to Saletan's challenge:

We’re debating the rights of some group of theoretical women who want to have post-viability abortions, and who have no medical reason to do so, and who were perfectly able to access abortion earlier in their pregnancies. Why? Seriously, why are we doing that? There are not significant numbers of these women. Abortions after 24 weeks are already highly restricted, and can’t just be done on a whim. This is not really a significant point in the abortion debates, theoretically or realistically.

What does impact thousands and thousands of women is the fact that abortions are hard to get because anti-choicers have erected a bunch of barriers, using many of the same arguments that Saletan focuses on in this piece...

by Patrick Appel

The top questions - as voted on by the internet - all relate to drug policy. Scott Morgan sighs:

Honestly, it blows me away that the White House is still putting on these sorts of forums, knowing as we all do that questions about legalizing drugs will win and that, in all likelihood, the President won't answer them. Of course, the whole thing is just a big publicity stunt, but it's premised entirely on the concept that people get to vote on what issues they want the President to talk about. That's the hook, and ignoring it makes the whole exercise seem a bit ridiculous.

by Conor Friedersdorf

In theory, it shouldn't be difficult. I'm a fiscal hawk with libertarian instincts on domestic policy. I am skeptical of President Obama's signature legislative achievement. And the Obama Administration's record on civil liberties vexes me – the executive branch thinks its unchallengable say so is sufficient to assasinate Americans, even if it requires waging drone war sans Congressional authorization in neutral countries. Yes, I know. It's the unhinged opposition to our president that causes some of you to look past these flaws. I'm as appalled as anyone by the absurd, paranoid accusations made by Dinesh D'Souza and Andy McCarthy. I've demonstrated the holes in their thinking as forcefully as anyone. But it isn't a mark in a leader's favor when he or she is attacked unfairly.

George W. Bush wasn't like Hitler. Barack Obama isn't a Kenyan anti-colonialist who has allied himself with radical Islamists. Can we put Visqueen sheeting down, accept that the kids are going to hurl food at one another in the den, and disappear into the dining room for a frank conversation among adults? Our last two presidents are unlike one another in most ways. It so happens that what they have in common is tremendously consequential. Both presidents needlessly undermined civil liberties, the separation of powers, and the rule of law in the course of fighting the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Had President Obama merely lived up to his own pre-election rhetoric on civil liberties, I'd be here arguing for his second term. As it is, I'm very much hoping for a change of leadership.

by Patrick Appel

Beinart says that Obama won't touch gun control in the SOTU:

Unlike crime, which was a constant presence, continually reminding Americans of the absurdity of allowing dangerous people to buy high-tech weapons, episodes like the one in Tucson produce a temporary spike in support for gun control, which quickly recedes. According to a CNN-Gallup poll, 28 percent of Americans said the Giffords shooting made them more likely to support gun control. But according to Pew, there were similar spikes after Columbine and Virginia Tech, and they had no lasting effect.

(Photo: Gallup)

by Conor Friedersdorf

– At Big Peace, Ben Barrack lays out the Truther case that the Bush Administration was in on the 9/11 attacks – after explaining why conspiracy theorists believe that GWB was complicit, he explains that the real conspiracy that day involved Muslims infiltrating the United States in large part thanks to Grover Norquist.

– At Big Hollywood, we're informed that failing to defend Rush Limbaugh when he is accused of racism is analogous to appeasing Nazis:

The politically correct chickens are coming home to roost in the Orwellian world of the organized left’s free-expression-stifling speech codes. To paraphrase Martin Niemöller’s famous admonition about complacency with totalitarian fascists:  “First they came for Rush Limbaugh and called his satire racist, and I didn’t speak out because Rush Limbaugh is a conservative.  Then they came for Dr. Laura and called her commentary racist, and I didn’t speak out because Dr. Laura is a conservative…”

All this by way of reporting that high school students will be allowed to use the n-word in a school play despite their superintendent's objections.

– Over at Big Government, James M. Simpson explains that a "globalist totalitarian dictatorship" is "invading a town near you." And with what weapon will these tyrants make you subservient to their  regime?

To promote their socialist nightmare, Marxists must use deceptive language and tactics. In “Sustainable Development” they have found a magic mantra. It has allowed them to insinuate all their socialist fantasies into our legal code, under our noses, with little or no fanfare, scant public debate and graveyard noises from our treacherously AWOL mass media, right down to the local level – with our permission.

So beware the forces of sustainable development.

I've merely linked, excerpted and fairly summarized three posts at three different Breitbart sites. If he reads this post, and concludes that it's a net negative for his pubishing empire, he might consider why that is so.

 by Zoe Pollock

Blake Hounshell parses the Al Jazeera leaks, which hinted at major Palestinian concessions offered to Israel:

If [the Guardian's] speculation is right, the leakers intended to embarrass their former bosses. Mission accomplished.

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I'm getting fed up with the Douthats of this world and the entire Republican party's attempts to blame the insidious Palin presence on the liberals coverage of her. (I'm an Independent by the way.) Its strictly Rove 101: Accuse the other side of doing what your yourself are guilty of.

by Conor Friedersdorf

A guest post at James Fallows' blog explains how they're preventing the release of historical documents pertaining to RFK's time as attorney general.

Varanasi, India, 2 pm

by Zoe Pollock

Cord Jefferson has some, with "'Nigger Day' In a Country Town," originally published in the New York Times on November 30, 1874:

If America's relationship with its black population is a plane crash—James Baldwin theorized in a 1966 essay that "the Negro-in-America is increasingly the central problem in American life"—"Nigger Day" should be considered a sort of black box, a reminder of how calculated and insidious the variety of attention paid to American blacks was, even as this post-slavery segregation was about to be codified into the Jim Crow laws that would blanket the South.

I love this article for many reasons—not least because I love history!—but primarily because, in a few simple, condescending paragraphs, it highlights pretty much every single problem that will burden American race relations 137 years into the future, as if the author were some snooty Nostradamus.

by Patrick Appel

An alternative to Obama's SOTU address.

by Conor Friedersdorf

I've never seen a political ad quite like that. And I wonder how the average voter will react. Is it so slick and movie-trailer like that it'll turn people off as they recognize that most of its power is drawn from mood manipulation? (If the Pawlenty Administration goes to war it'll be set to the best musical score ever!)

Or will its surface-level appeal work?

by Conor Friedersdorf

A reader writes:

Why do you assume liberals who watched Keith Olbermann didn’t do those other things too?  I subscribe to Washington Monthly, I read the NYTimes daily, I have read Tocqueville, I read political blogs daily…and I still enjoyed watching Keith (in fact I usually did some of those other things WHILE watching Keith).

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

The core mistake people are making is misreading what happens when the pigs and birds disappear into little poofy clouds. Why should people interpret that as death? In real life, people's bodies don't disappear when they die. Why should disappearance necessarily imply death in video games?

Video games' convention of disappearing bodies doesn't signify death. It signifies defeat. Certainly, this defeat may come with death, but not necessarily. Defeat can come just as easily by being rendered unconscious or otherwise disabled.  It's inefficient for game designers to devote resources to rendering objects that are no longer relevant to gameplay. 

It would be ambiguous in the case of Angry Birds if the narrative context didn't clarify things by providing animations at the close of its chapters. In these, we see the reappeared pigs lying bruised, beaten, and bandaged at the feet of their avian vanquishers. The pigs are defeated, dispirited, but not dead.

Well the black round birds, which explode like suicide bombers, certainly die.