A few readers have asked about SOTU plans for the evening, as they relate to the site. Alas, I will not be live-blogging the speech — I’ve never been able to figure out how to listen, analyze, and type simultaneously — but I thought I’d create an open thread for readers who wanted to discuss the address.
So, before the speech, feel free to make predictions about what we’ll hear and see.
After the speech, feel free to weigh in on what you saw. Was it a good speech? Will it affect the political landscape? How was Tim Kaine’s response? How was the media coverage of the address?
Rest assured, there will be full team coverage in the morning — and by “team,” I mean me — unless something truly remarkable happens, in which case I’ll probably feel compelled to mention it later tonight.
Update: Don’t feel like waiting up and sitting through all the applause? Think Progress has a copy of the entire speech, which was embargoed, but which they broke. Why? Because, as the TP gang put it, “We’ll start respecting White House embargoes when they start telling the truth.”
Update 2: I’m not sure where this first appeared, but I got it via email and thought it was amusing.
For the first time since he was elected President of the United States, George W. Bush’s State of the Union address tonight will be simulcast in English, the White House confirmed.
With the president’s approval ratings sagging, the decision to simulcast the speech in English was widely seen as an attempt by the president to make an appeal to a broader audience.
“The majority of people in this country are English speaking, and quite frankly, we can’t afford to ignore them any longer,” one senior aide said. “Hopefully, by doing the English simulcast, we’ll be reaching out to a lot of those folks.”
Once the decision was made earlier in the month to launch the historic first English simulcast of a speech by President Bush, then began the hard work of translating the text of the address from Mr. Bush’s language into English.
Davis Logsdon, a professor of linguistics at the University of Minnesota, was one of several scholars approached to do the translation who ultimately quit in frustration.
“The problem is that the language the president speaks, by most measures, is not a language at all,” Professor Logsdon said.