SHORT AND TO THE POINT: What he said.

ANKLE-BITING PUNDITS will be liveblogging the Democratic rebuttal. They’re running an open comments thread, too.

NICE JOB. The inaugural was OK, which for Bush is a success. This, on the other hand, was actually good, making it Bush’s best speech ever, I think. He seems much more comfortable and relaxed, probably because of the Iraqi elections going so well. I think we’re just figuring out just how much the Administration’s plans turned on that. He bet on the Iraqi people, and he won.

UPDATE: Matt Barr emails: “September 20, 2001 is a pretty high hurdle.”

Yeah, but in a way this was just the second half of that speech.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Krauthammer calls it “pedestrian.” Taegan Goddard, though, observes: “It was very powerful stuff, no matter how scripted,” but adds, “I do wonder what some of Bush’s base thinks about the kiss he gave Sen. Joseph Lieberman as he made his way out the House chamber, however.” Hmm. I must’ve missed that part . . . .

And Brendan Loy says the quote of the night came from Andrew Sullivan, on CNN. (But there’s a pretty good one here: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!)

MORE: Here’s a transcript of the speech as delivered.

Mickey Kaus: “Not exciting, but highly effective. Or, rather, highly effective because it wasn’t exciting.” He likes the Social Security treatment, too.

David Adesnik: “Don’t the Democrats have something better to offer than telling us the Indians and Chinese are going to steal our jobs?”

The Diplomad: “It’s quite an experience sitting in front of a large screen TV in a foreign land surrounded by foreigners — many of them not friendlies — listening to the President of United States speak.”

Jeff Goldstein offers a summary of the Democratic response that is similar to Andrew Sullivan’s. But very nuanced.

MORE STILL: Pelosi is busted not only on style, but on substance: Luckily for the Dems, nobody was watching by then.

Meanwhile, Pejman Yousefzadeh writes: “This speech was infinitely better than the State of the Union address President Bush delivered one year ago.” He didn’t like the gay marriage stuff, though.

PRAISE FOR THE TROOPS, and a posthumous medal-of-honor winner’s parents. Nicely done, and a very long ovation.

UPDATE: Oops. The medal-of-honor winner was SFC Paul Smith. Those were the parents of Sgt. Byron Norwood.

IT’S HOT LIVE STATE-OF-THE-UNION CHAT at The Command Post. Express yourself!

BOBBY JINDAL and some others are holding up purple fingers as Bush talks about the Iraqi vote.

TOUGH ON SYRIA, easy on the Palestinians. Got a big ovation on the Syria part, too. Hmm. But now he’s talking about Iran. . . .

To the Iranian people: “As you stand for your own liberty, our nation stands with you.” Big ovation — dems stand too.

UPDATE: Hosni Mubarak may not like it.

“THE ONLY FORCE POWERFUL ENOUGH TO STOP THE RISE OF TYRANNY AND TERROR, and to replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. Our enemies know this, and this is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called ‘the evil principle of democracy.’ . . . The advance of freedom will lead to peace.”

Gotcher “root causes” approach right here! “Exit strategy,” too!

He’s spelling out the Bush Doctrine more clearly than he’s done before.

“FREEDOM FROM FEAR:” Nice FDR allusion, but I’m still not impressed on homeland security.

THIS SHOULD MAKE JERALYNN MERRITT HAPPY: More for DNA testing to ensure innocent aren’t convicted, more for training defense lawyers in capital cases.

GAY MARRIAGE, ABORTION, STEM CELLS, I disagree with him on all of these. Republicans seem to be applauding, Dems remaining seated.

Capt. Ed notes: “He spent ten minutes, by my watch, on Social Security. He spent thirty seconds on the Federal Marriage Amendment. Anyone need an explanation?”

I’M AGNOSTIC about Social Security reform, but pitching it to “young Americans” is a shift. Most talk about Social Security has been aimed at old people.

UPDATE: Interesting cross-generation blog-dialogue on Social Security. Maybe Bush knew what he was doing.

FULL TEXT of the speech, here.

BR’ER RABBIT ALERT: “I welcome the bipartisan enthusiasm for spending discipline.” Translation: You called me a big spender — now don’t complain about the cuts.

UPDATE: Ditto the energy stuff, especially the nuclear bit. You complained I didn’t have an energy plan — well, here it is!

LAPHAMIZATION ALERT: The Telegraph is already reporting: “President George W Bush said last night the Iraqi election had opened a ‘new phase’ in the troubled country, allowing American forces to shift their attention from stemming the insurgency to training Iraqi security forces.”

SOTU BLOGGERS: Capt. Ed is liveblogging. So is Stephen Green, and John Cross. Power Line, too. And here’s a list with a lot more folks who are doing the same thing. So is WorldWideRant.

Patrick Ruffini will be liveblogging, but he’s also preblogging via the prepared text.

UPDATE: LaShawn Barber offers an open comment thread if you want to weigh in.

VIRGINIA POSTREL writes about Andrew Sullivan’s blog-hiatus, and I just got an email from a journalist asking me questions about the burdens of blogging. So since it sounds like this topic is coming up, here are some thoughts.

Virginia (and Andrew, and for that matter Mickey Kaus) are all right that there’s a tension between blogging and doing longer, more thoughtful work. (As Kaus says, “The short deadline usually beats the long deadline, and a blog is a continuous short deadline.”)

I deal with that, because I write two or three law review articles a year, and they’re long and require a lot of thinking. I have to block out time to do that, and sometimes I find it helpful to use a computer that’s not on the web.

But it works the other way, too. The Insta-Wife has been having a lot of health problems lately — this is an intermittent thing — and when that happens I’m really not in the right mental and emotional state to engage in that kind of big-project concentration anyway, and when I try there’s usually some sort of interruption. I can blog from the cardiologist’s waiting room — and I have — but I couldn’t get much work done on a book or a law review article in that setting. And when you’re in a cardiologist’s office, you’d lots rather blog than pay attention to what’s around you . . . . (I notice there are a lot of bloggers with sick wives, like Capt. Ed and Bill Hobbs, to name just two, so I must not be the only one to feel that way).

There are two downsides to blogging. One is that it can fill up your time, one five-minute chunk after another. The other — much worse — is that it forces you to pay attention to the news, which is usually depressing, infuriating, or frightening, or some combination of all three.

But the upside to blogging is that it can be done in five-minute chunks. My usual strategy is like the old story about filling the can with rocks and sand — if you put the big rocks in first, there’s plenty of room for the sand to flow around them, while if you put the sand in first, the rocks won’t fit. I try to schedule the big stuff first, and blog around it. And when the rocks won’t fit, even by themselves, there’s still room for the sand.

JUST GOT AN EMAIL FROM CNN ON THE EASON JORDAN SCANDAL (the new one, not the old one). I’ll be frank — I don’t believe it. Here’s what it says:

Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan’s remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions.

Mr. Jordan was responding to an assertion by Cong. Frank that all 63 journalist victims had been the result of “collateral damage.”

Pardon me if I don’t fully trust Jordan in light of his past behavior. And it sounds like there’s more than just context involved. I’ll believe it when I see the video, or a transcript.

UPDATE: Roger Simon comments: “A full and direct explanation from Mr. Jordan himself is needed here, not corporate spin, especially given the rather different accounts from eyewitnesses.”

JIM LINDGREN: “Incredibly, the European Union has come out against human rights activists in Cuba and in favor of Fidel Castro.”

It’s not that incredible. But Vaclav Havel is unhappy with the E.U.:

I can hardly think of a better way for the EU to dishonor the noble ideals of freedom, equality and human rights that the Union espouses — indeed, principles that it reiterates in its constitutional agreement. To protect European corporations’ profits from their Havana hotels, the Union will cease inviting open-minded people to EU embassies, and we will deduce who they are from the expression on the face of the dictator and his associates. It is hard to imagine a more shameful deal.

Cuba’s dissidents will, of course, happily do without Western cocktail parties and polite conversation at receptions. This persecution will admittedly aggravate their difficult struggle, but they will naturally survive it. The question is whether the EU will survive it. . . .

It is suicidal for the EU to draw on Europe’s worst political traditions, the common denominator of which is the idea that evil must be appeased and that the best way to achieve peace is through indifference to the freedom of others.

Indeed it is.

ACTIONFIGUREGATE: More over at GlennReynolds.com.

UPDATE: Shannon Love writes:

The whole ActionFigureGate episode really makes me think about the standards applied by international major media(IMM) to the stories they disseminate. Why was major media so quick to disseminate pictures of an action figure as a genuine hostage photo?

More to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases?

The quickest way to get the prime spot in IMM today is to release a picture of somebody with a gun to their head. The IMM will immediately disseminate the picture and all your demands and statements!

For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising.

Back in the 20’s and 30’s, businesses tried to advertise themselves by pulling dangerous publicity stunts. They used human flies, faked car crashes, exploding buildings or anything they thought would get them free media attention. After a time, however, the media developed a consensus standard that such events would not be reported and the stunts for the most part stopped .

The media stopped covering the events for two reasons: (1) they sold advertising so giving away free advertising hurt the bottom line and (2) people were getting hurt and they were getting hurt only because the media was paying attention. When they stopped paying attention, people stopped getting hurt.

In fact, media organizations were held liable for injuries that resulted. Read the whole thing.

BILL FRIST will not be running for reelection in 2006. Here’s a look at the race for his seat, which is already shaping up.

A VICTORY in the War on Terror — brought to you by G.I. Joe and his friends!

OPERATION PHOTO lets you donate your used digital cameras to the families of servicemembers serving abroad, so that they can email family photos. Sounds worthwhile to me.

ARE THOSE REAL INSURGENTS, or “action figures,” on this week’s Newsweek cover?

I’m just, you know, asking.

REACHING OUT TO THE OPPOSITION: A nice exchange at LT Smash’s place.