All praise Warlord Obama and his armada of drones dropping fire on people around the globe. From Yemen to The Philippines, America's reach is truly boundless.

Thank you Mr. President for your encouraging support for LBGT in the House chamber last night. It must be really cool to be a 10-year-old or so, gay, and hearing those words, and knowing that your sexual orientation is not a problem from the President of the United States. Totally unfathomable that I would have heard those words from JFK, LBJ, or Nixon when I was a child.

the unemployment number has never included people who've given up looking for work.

and republicans never gave a fuck about them until there was a black muslin in the white house. they still don't, except as a cudgel.

I understand that the President usually reads from a pollyanna script during the state of the union, but to ignore the ignominious levels of police violence directed at non-violent black americans--e.g., Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, among many others, is quite the bummer, and par for the course of a President that likes to keep his hands clean of any controversy, particularly when it involves people of little power.

@5, well, he didn't ignore it complety:

I see it in the American who served his time, and dreams of starting over — and the business owner who gives him that second chance. The protester determined to prove that justice matters, and the young cop walking the beat, treating everybody with respect, doing the brave, quiet work of keeping us safe.

Fun things Americans have done:

1. Got off Middle East oil. So troops home, only GOP Americants care about Iran or Saudis now.

2. Half of US GDP in mostly blue states has 10-50% solar wind renewable new energy built now. Only GOP Americants stuck on dying fossil fuels like coal oil gas. Times up!

3. Drone bases, drone refit packages for naval destroyers tankers, stealth drones and stuff in case N Kotea whacks out all deployed. Cost 1/20th prior forces. Stop building 20th Century ships & jets now. Don't need them.

So how good are things in America right now? They are OK to great if you're in the top 5%, because your income is growing. If you're in the the 95%, your income and net worth have been flat or declining for at least the past three decades. Things are fantastic if you're a bankster, because your industry has remained basically deregulated during all of the Bush's two terms and Obama's 7 years in office. You greatly benefited from Obama appointing a bank lawyer to run the Justice Department for the first six years of his terms, because that kept all of you banksters totally free from prosecution. Yes, you had to pay some fines and penalties, but that came out of the hide of your shareholders and corporate insurance companies, not your salaries and bonuses, and you were able to claw it all back, and then some, simply by raising your fees and luxuriating in the near zero interest rates you've been able to take advantage of since the global economy tanked in 2008.

The stagnant economy has been mediocre, or worse, for just about everyone else, but yes--things could have been worse. We could have been stupid, like the IMF, the German banks and the EU central bankers who have saddled the Euro Zone with soul crushing austerity for everyone except the Germans and the Scandinavians, and of course the 5%. The economies of most emerging nations have been contracting for at least the past couple of years, and China's economy in a shambles, so it would totally suck to live there, even if the air were breathable. Any day now China's economy could go down the toilet and spark panic that that easily tank other economies and drag down even the marginally recovered US economy back down into the abyss.

Obama's failure to hold the banks accountable has severely eroded support for the Democratic party, because when the Democrats don't stand up for average working people (vs. the banks), tons of people stop voting, or even get sucked in by the crap being spewed by the GOP, and in the long run, this is very, very bad for our country. At a time in history when we desperately needed another FDR, instead we got a sold out, corporate president who is arguably to the right of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and that has been heart-breaking people who bought into the hopey-changey thing and sincerely wanted to see our country move forward instead of backward. As explained here, all of this has been a tremendous gift to the right, but it may be too late to repair the damage:

https://newrepublic.com/article/124918/r…

@ 9, I totally agree with you, but what's he supposed to say during the STFU?
"My fellow Americans, 95% of you are hopelessly FUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHKKKKKED!!!1!"
That's not gonna make for good teevee.

Nikki went lefty (from Trump) to compensate for the right turn of Dems. She managed to rid SC of the Confederate flag emblem and kept the state together after the church shooting. Sure you can say, that's too much credit for one lost, red soul, but probably no more than what Obama claimed for himself.

Besides, Obama and Ryan still need TPP to pass before the election. So gotta have that hopey-changey bit till the last adieu.

@9: Are you just waking up to the way things have always been? You're right; it could have been worse. Way worse. EU worse. Or, alternately, GOP worse. The recovery act he did pass was half tax cuts, not Keynesian stimulus.

A giant douche or shit sandwich, that's always the choice. Obama's been a reasonably tasty shit sandwich. Inequality was baked into the cake when Speculation became the growth driver of the Economy, long before he took office. He didn't invent the Derivative.

Good one Max. Your gag reflex provoking metaphor pretty much sums it up.

@13: Technically it wasn't his metaphor. It's from a South Park episode from a few years back, though they used the phrase "turd sandwich".

Correction, not "a few years back," but over a decade ago. 2004 was over a decade ago. When the hell did I get old?

@12: "He didn't invent the Derivative."
Don't go blaming Newton and Leibniz for the economy now!