President Obama delivers his State of the Union address tonight at 6:00 pm PST/9:00 pm EST.

You’re invited to join us tonight for a special Live Chat during this address and the Republican response to it. After the live events are over, you can join us on this thread for a continuing discussion of the night’s events.

You can watch and live chat in one of two ways:

1. You can watch the live feed below and use the Live Chat widget in the right column.

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If you’re watching on tv, we’d recommend using the Live Events page for your Live Chatting enjoyment.

There is a lot at stake for this nation and for President Obama’s re-election so this should be quite a meaningful address. We hope you’ll join us for it!

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(LIVE FEED SCREEN REMOVED AFTER SPEECH)

Click the arrow below during Mitch Daniels’ response to the SOTU when you believe he is not being forthright:

There were so many worthy nominees deserving this PlanetPOV award for The Biggest Political F#%! Up of 2011, let’s just say that there are no winners, only losers and bigger losers.

Narrowing the list down to fifteen leaves out a number of viable nominees so please feel free to vote for any of these and/or nominate your own favorites (unfavorites?) in a comment below and folks are encouraged to vote for any of those by replying to that comment affirming your vote.

In any case, please vote for a maximum of five whether in the poll below or by replying to one nominated in a comment below.

Okay, here we go, in no particular order or sane rationalization, our fifteen candidates:

Grover Norquist’s concubines…also known as “The GOP” have cheated on him. They’ve had an affair where they got into bed with those who want to raise taxes…but it was only on the lower 99% of American workers. They’ve explained to Grover, “They don’t mean anything to us, we’re not in love with them. It was just political!”

And Grover has already forgiven them…in fact, he confessed to a degree of arousal over the thought of the majority of Americans being bent over by House Republicans.

The fraud of the Norquist no-taxes pledge has been publicly exploded now and as long as Dems don’t overlook this opportunity, the entire raison d’etre for the Republican Party will be invalidated in the minds of most Americans.

Add to this the calls from House and Senate Repubs, as well as GOP Presidential candidates like Prozac spokeswoman Michele Bachmann campaigning for the poor and lower middle class to be taxed heavily (the bullshit term they use for taxing the poor is “broaden the tax base”) and you have a class warfare loving, tax loving GOP.

One would have been mistaken all year, underestimating the lengths to which the hostile, ignorant and hypocritical Repubs would threaten the sanctity of Congressional precedents and the security of this nation. We’ve seen them hold the gun to Americans’ heads enough times this year, threatening, “We’ll do it! We’ll waste them!” like two dimensional villains from an old Dirty Harry movie so we’re hardly shocked by it happening again.

But this time, it’s a little different. This time, these Republicans are threatening to raise taxes if they don’t get their “One MILL-ion dollars!”. Republicans killing a tax cut bill which would result in raising taxes? As Rick Perry would say, “Oops!”

This time, they are rejecting a truly bipartisan bill that 89 out of 100 Senators voted for. This time they are telling the Senate Republican leadership to kiss their asses. This time they are already at 9% approval and most Americans blame them far more than Dems for Congress’ being a failure. And this time, there will be an election in about 10 months.

Today, the Republicans may well have jumped the shark for good. It is hard to see them having any legitimacy from this point forward with the American People (Tea Baggers excluded) in any of their claims for having good reasons for causing gridlock. They have openly stated that defeating Obama is their priority. Okay, America believes you so you can stop with the excuses.

Today, addressing John Boehner and his crocodile tears about wanting to compromise to save Americans from a tax increase, Nancy Pelosi responded, ““He is not Lucy and we are not Charlie Brown.”

A very apt analogy. The entire year the Repubs have said, “Go ahead Charlie Brown, kick the football,” then pulled it away and America landed flat on its back again and again.

Unlike hapless Charlie Brown, Democrats and other Americans have had enough and won’t fall for it again. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have firmly stated that they will not assign conferees to run at the ball the Republicans are holding now.

The House Republicans are the ones who are stuck. They may try to present a confidence that they can fool the public into blaming Obama for the approaching tax hike on Americans but behind the phony self-righteousness is a recognition that it’s not so likely.

When 89 Senators vote for a tax cut, that includes most Republican Senators. So, though House Repubs will continue to try and hang the tax increase on Dems, they are opposing Dems and Repubs in order to screw everyone more.

Let’s also remember that just weeks or months ago, these same liars who claim they’re blocking the payroll tax cut because it’s only two months instead of a year, were loudly declaring their opposition to ANY payroll tax cut. They are bald face liars, plain and simple and thanks to our lazy media, their feet are rarely held to the fire for their blatant bullshit.

As for the Dems in the Senate agreeing to further negotiations, I say they are absolutely correct in saying “no”. First, this is yet another case of the Dems compromising and moving to the right then when that effort is rejected, the already compromised position is framed as a Dem position that needs to compromise with an even farther right position.

Enough!

If payroll taxes need to go up for a month for the fury of the American Public to crash down on these deluded fanatics, so be it. Give into bullies or terrorists and all you get is more of the same. President Obama and the Dems in Congress have compromised repeatedly, even in this case, dropping the tax on the wealthy and agreeing to the Keystone Pipeline provision.

And why have they done so? To protect the American people from the Republican’s vicious agenda. So the contrast is clear, Dems compromise to keep people receiving unemployment and payroll tax breaks, Republicans compromise from destroying the lives of many to destroying the lives of some (check out some of the horrendous things in the House Payroll Tax bill, including slashing unemployment payments from 99 weeks to 59 weeks which would cut off 3,347,942 Americans from receiving UI…that should help in a recession!)

It’s high time to drive the stake through the heart of the Tea Party and the Republican House and make sure that the public throws them in the ash heap of history in November 2012.

It’s kind of ironic that Newt Gingrich is vying for the GOP Presidential nomimation, the current Republican House looks to have made the same kind of political miscalculation that Newt made when he ran The House and shut down government. Repubs then were convinced the public would side with them and against President Clinton when they did so. Instead, Newt was gone shortly afterwards and Clinton was solidly re-elected.

The House Repubs look to have overplayed their hand today in the same way. Whether they panic at the backlash and sign onto the two month extension of the payroll tax cut or not, they are branded by this and for folks who have a memory that can last at least ten months, this would look to be the last straw that breaks the zealots’ back.

What’s the difference between Hannibal Lecter and the GOP? One is a crazed sociopath that wreaks destruction on innocent victims and the other was played artfully by Anthony Hopkins.

We may have become so accustomed to the outrageously hostile and vicious conduct of the GOP and the matter-of-fact presentation of it by the Mainstream Media that we may be allowing the abnormal psychological reality of it to slip past us.

It is not normal in a truly representational government to have one of two major parties controlling a nation, dedicated to harming 99% of the people in that country. It simply is not.

Nor is it psychologically well adjusted for a group of people to intentionally threaten the safety of or damage an entire nation of people purely to gain greater power and wealth.

There was a brilliant method presented in the remarkable and highly recommended documentary, The Corporation, which, in one segment, psychologically analyzed corporations as if they were people and their indisputable conclusion was that if corporations are people, they are sociopaths.

In light of the last year of destructive and vicious behavior of Tea Party Republicans in the House and the ongoing hateful rhetoric from the GOP and their Presidential candidates about gays, blacks, the poor, women, the unemployed, Latinos, Muslims, those exercising their Constitutional right to protest, etc., I wondered, if the GOP was analyzed as a person, would it fit the definition of a sociopath?

Here is a list of traits, courtesy of the Mayo Clinic, that are commonly displayed by people who have Antisocial Personality Disorder…aka “sociopaths”:

• Disregard for right and wrong

• Persistent lying or deceit

• Using charm or wit to manipulate others

• Recurring difficulties with the law

• Repeatedly violating the rights of others

• Child abuse or neglect

• Intimidation of others

• Aggressive or violent behavior

• Lack of remorse about harming others

• Impulsive behavior

• Agitation

• Poor or abusive relationships

• Irresponsible work behavior

I don’t know about your count but when I consider the actions and words of Republican Politicians, the Tea Party, the GOP Presidential Candidates and the corporate financiers of the GOP, I found it a 100% match up.

So let’s consider for a moment two things, the normalization of sociopathy as a legit political mindset and sociopaths controlling power locally and nationally in the U.S..

Thanks to the news industry merging with the prostitution industry (“Hi, you lookin’ a date or an update?”), EVERYTHING can be legitimized as long as it attracts viewers and raises advertising rates. So, sociopathic outbursts and actions are presented by the MSM as just as palatable and considerable as those coming from well adjusted politicians.

If there is no critical filter, no ethical standard, no discernment by the media that bombards us from every direction, between what is insane and what is sane, if both are merely “different opinions” of equal standing, then we, as members of this society, can become corrupted and in a way, sociopathic as well.

There is no public good served by sociopathic pursuits or the validation of them. And yet, the obvious lies and deception served up by the GOP to the media to justify their actions and intentions to assault the majority of Americans are freely broadcast to the country in an alleged display of being “fair and balanced”.

This one-two punch of thinly disguised sociopathy by a political party and the media’s presentation of it as being as legitimate as any other political sensibility has brought our society and politics to a point of absurdity never witnessed before in American history.

From Supply side economics insisting that the only way to make 99% of Americans rich is to make the top 1% richer.

Or the solution to joblessness in America is to cut the deficit so that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans in government jobs would be put out of work.

Or the way to reform healthcare and make access and affordability better than when insurance corporations had all the power over that is to repeal all the reforms made in the Affordable Care Act and let the health insurance corporations go back to calling all the shots.

On that last point, it’s too bad we don’t have single payer health insurance for our entire country because The GOP in particular seems greatly in need of mental health services.

And the sobering thing is, our nation and many state and local governments are being controlled by such sociopaths. Putting aside the damage they have and are doing (instituting Voter ID laws that could prevent five million or more eligible citizens from voting, outlawing collective bargaining, slashing programs that help the most desperate and vulnerable among us, etc.), the damage they are doing to the character of our society is profound.

It is now a given that we may have leaders of our cities and/or states who are a threat to our best interests as the majority. It’s a deterioration of our democracy to have to accept such a reality, an affirmation that the sociopathic corporations have so much power over our democracy that they can foist their sociopathic surrogates upon the people.

What is emerging as a silver lining in this very dark cloud is that the American people are rising up chanting the famous Howard Beale line from the movie Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

There is only so far that you can push people. Sociopaths have no sense of that, they will simply continue serving their own gratifications no matter the impact on others because they have no empathy for the feelings of others…and that is their downfall.

It certainly seems that national sentiment is strong and growing against the GOP and Corporate sociopathy that continues to be foisted upon the citizens of this country.

And that is doing wonders for my mental health.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. (The Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, 1787)

The Nature of OWS
There is such a sad feeling in this country now that our government seems to have completely failed us. Justice. Domestic Tranquility. Common Defense. General Welfare. Blessings of Liberty. All seemingly gone or vanishing. It’s been coming for a long time. 2008 is our generation’s 1929.

And for nearly three years, the proposed remedy to the meltdown in the economy has been less of everything……less service, less education, less support, less building, for the 99 percent and less regulations and less taxes for the 1 Percent and the rest of the Top 5 Percent.

Occupy Wall Street has changed the conversation. Until now Big Money associated with the Conservative Right and Represented by the GOP has controlled the conversation and Democrats have fallen in line with much of the media accepting their script. It was deficits 24/7. Those to the Left, the Populists, the Progressives moaned, groaned, complained and argued. But to little effect.

And then the Occupy Movement emerged: a true populist group, not prepackaged, not co-opted, not sponsored, not bought and paid for. It was authentic, angry, disorganized and messy.

But what became clear was that the Occupiers were connecting with and activating a lot of people, inspiring them to snap out of their apathy and to demand change. If all they accomplished is to reestablish a sensibility amongst most Americans that we need serious changes in the way the wealthy and their corporations control our nation and its economy; and that we need to reverse the real class warfare that has transferred huge amounts of power and wealth from the middle and lower classes to those who were already wealthy and powerful, then we will have a voting public pushing candidates to either follow them or be swept aside. Then substantial, fundamental change will really come.

Who speaks for the Movement? No one and every one. There is a unique character to the OWS movement. Born out of social networking, it has a unique sense of “we” and “us”. The Occupiers sincerely don’t want and would distrust anyone who became the voice or face of OWS because they see it as communal. For them “official representation” is seen as a form of disrespect for the primary character of the movement. Furthermore, putting the movement into a few hands makes them the target for smears, attacks and easy labeling which in turn reflects on the Movement.

Objectives
So what do they want? What does the Occupy Movement stand for? The core idea is pretty evident: The injustice of the rich and powerful 1% rigging the system against the 99%. It is important that the rest of the messeage be as succinct and clear; and be limited in scope and realistic. The Movement needs to define A) What is Wrong, B) What Needs to be Done, C) How Do We Do It?

So far the Common Ground that has emerged is that the great economic and social injustice has been perpetrated on and then hidden from us. This reality is being made known and taken to heart. With knowledge comes resolve to remedy the injustice. The remeedy will require Legislative, Judicial and Executive Action.

If Occupy hopes to effect those changes it wants, the Occupiers must depend on the system that we have. Sidestepping it will accomplish nothing but worn shoe-leather, nights in jail, and soggy rain-soaked sloganeers. They have to work with what we have. Political involvement is imperative by the movement at large in the coming months.

The most effective and expeditions way to do this is to identify leaders in government and in business who share the Movement’s core values and push them forward as leaders for the 99 Percent who share the Movement’s goals.

Among the most important specific goals are:
A) Insist that Every Government Effort be Shaped and Promoted as Work for the Majority
B) Get the Big and Secretive Money out of the Electoral Process beginning with efforts to expand disclosure and transparency in funding and to overturn Citizens United.
C) Restore an Appropriate Level of Taxation for the Wealthy and the Big Corporations.
D) Rebuild the industrial, manufacturing, commercial base focusing on small and midsize business and jobs

All of this needs to be accessible in a Declaration of Principles and Aims that will be the common reference point for those of, with, and for the Occupy Movement.

Strategy
Occupy started as a social networking movement, and that remains central to its identity. Occupations take place in the “Real” and “Virtual” worlds. Keeping both alive is essential to the Movement. Twitter feeds, blogs, websites, satellite and network presence will remain linked to folks living in tents, gathering in assemblies, making speeches and homemade signs, marching and chanting. The sites are the Ethernet, the World Wide Web, city parks, banks, corporate headquarters, centers of political power, small towns and large cities. What is now needed is a blueprint as to next steps. Some thoughts:

1) Within the Next 10 Days. Hold a “Moving On” Rally to close the Movements “First Season” in every city/town where an Occupy Event has taken place, large or small. Feature The Declaration, strong grass roots speakers, creative signs, singing/chanting, a march to a symbolic place and then a closing in a gesture of solidarity. Negotiate with city governments to avoid confrontation. If necessary shrink the size of the encampment to a manageable level.

2) Maintain an encampment in the Big Cities where possible: Washington, New York, Atlanta, Los Angelos, Seattle (and any others where a local group is willing to organize). Rotate Occupiers as needed. Have big gathering days (one night/day a week or on key dates). The rest can be smaller and symbolic. Make a national call for sleeping bags, blankets, tarps, heavy clothing, etc. to see the people through the cold with collection centers; for money donations; get a Credit Union to manage the funds donated

3) Call for a National March/Occupation In Washington in Mid-June. Schools will be out. The weather will be cooperative. Time it to match the Congressional Calendar to be sure the House and Senate will be in Session (and when they announce the date tie it to that Calendar so that any change by the members hoping to avoid the Occupation will be labeled as the cowardice it would be).
- While encouraging everyone who can to get to DC, encourage smaller in-solidarity-with occupations as part of the whole plan.
- Set up meetings with individual members of Congress and the President.
- The pivotal moment in the Occupation should be at the Capitol with a formal presentation of the Declaration to representatives of the national government. It will be interesting who shows up and who doesn’t. Presence or absence will make a statement.
- Make a special effort to get the MSM pulled into the event. Involve them from the first. Plan for maximum coverage: think visually. Keep to your announced and widely disseminated schedule. Have designated spokespersons available at organizing centers with prepared materials ready for distribution.
- Use the assembly model to plan out the next six months focusing on the national elections aiming to turn the Movement into Occupy the Election.

Tactics: A Code for Common Occupation
To be effective those who respond to the call to occupy will need to know what to do and what not to do.
- Remember everyone is watching. Supporters watch to be inspired. Opponents watch to find proof of fraud, ignoble behavior, or sinister motives.
- No drugs and very moderate alcohol use.
- In signs, posters, slogans and chants be clever without being gross.
- Follow the leaders: agree to abide by the decisions made in the assemblies
- Movement leaders (with help) must teach and insist upon the ways of non-violence in word and deed in what they do as they encamp and march, and in how they react to the behavior of others (the crowds, the provocateurs, the anarchists, the police). Violence on their part will feed into the right wing’s image of the Movement and give officials and the police excuses to crack down.
- Think defensively. Backpacks with heavy cloth soaked in water, swimmer goggles and bike helmets will provide nonthreatening protection to those caught up in a tear gas, flash bang grenades, pepper spray and batons assaults.
- Keeping to the Encampments at Night. No night movement. No night demonstrations. That is where/when the trouble happens. That is when it is easiest for things to get out of control and for over-reaction on both sides to escalate. That is when provocateurs on both sides can work their deviltry cloaked by darkness and confusion.
- Consider using some of the donated cash to hire a reputable security firm to provide protection, protect the encampment areas from thieves and vandals, assist organizers in keeping order, and in liaison work with the police.

A Word About Authorship: This piece is the result of the work of a small group of “vets” of the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements working on-line, and done in cooperation with the Occupy Organizing Committees in Two Cities. Members of the PlanetPOV community contributed a number of ideas to the work. With thanks to AdLib, Adonai, Chernynkaya, Emerald1943, Foodchain, KillgoreTrout, Sabreen60, and SueinCalifornia