State of the Union Rebuttal

President Obama painted a rosy picture of the state of the union on Tuesday night in a flowery speech about how America is on the way back. Who is he kidding? In just a few minutes the Mud Bay Blog identified a number of serious issues with the union that NO ONE seems to be working on. Here are five:

The price of cookies has skyrocketed.

Government claims to the contrary, there is serious inflation in the food sector. As an example, the price of cookies has gone through the roof. The QFC is charging $5 for a 10-ounce package of Lorna Doones. The problem extends to other baked goods too. We are being gouged not only to indulge our sweet tooth but just to break our daily bread. According to the Internet, the culprits are the sugar industry, unions, Big Oil, Nabisco, the FDA, NAFTA, wheat farmers, and, counterintuitively, Obamacare. In other words, there are too many places to point the finger. Well, arrest them all, I say, even if it would be like trying to break up an OWS demonstration. Lorna Doones are that important.

This year’s Super Bowl has been done before.

After months of playing football two teams are left standing: the New York Giants and the New England Patriots. Only problem is that the same two teams duked it out 4 years ago in Super Bowl 42 (if I have my Roman numerals right). You probably remember the game. Eli Manning against Tom Brady with Manning’s team pulling out the win at the end in a close game. There’s no change this year in the quarterbacks or the coaches—Mr. Never Smile (Bill Belichick of the Patriots) and Mr. No Fun (Tom Coughlin of the Giants).

The NFL, which prides itself on providing great sports entertainment, is staging a game we have already seen. That’s right, in the biggest sporting event of the year, pro football is basically going with a rerun. (I did read that there are several new commercials.) If you don’t think that’s a problem, you can get ready for the game by watching the movie Rudy again.

It takes too long to fly from Seattle to San Diego.

Flight time alone is about three hours and that doesn’t count the time consumed by security, baggage handling, and travel time to the airport. Three hours to go 1050 miles! I know this because I make the Seattle-San Diego fight several times a year. Substitute in a route you fly a lot and I bet the result is the same. Airplane flights take too long. Flying faster doesn’t seem to be a priority. Boeing keeps rolling out an innovative new “7” series every few years, but air speed is stuck in a time warp. There hasn’t been an increase since D. B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Orient flight out of Portland in 1971.

What are the airlines doing about this? Nothing. Their priority is figuring out how to layer on fees without driving customers away. Well, a word to the airlines. Fees and bad service may annoy customers, but slow fights will make them die of boredom. And you can’t bring back people who are dead.

Local news shows spend too much time reporting the weather.

With weather, as the saying goes, it is what it is. Local TV stations don’t need to spend 10 minutes out of a half-hour broadcast showing fancy graphs and satellite images while droning on about convergence zones, the stormtracker, cloud cover, and Doppler radar. People just want to know the forecast. That’s all. No jargon. No B.S. If you know, tell us. If you don’t know, tell us. Just don’t spend so much time on it. Then get back to the entertaining stuff like fires, car wrecks, stabbings, and the wisdom and courage shown by elected officials.

You can’t get a good deal buying gold coins on Ebay.

You would think that with thousands of listings for gold coins on Ebay, a patient bidder might luck into a great price in a “no reserve” auction, which is how most coin auctions are structured. No way. There are too many bidders with the same idea (some of whom are probably using their office computers), and the “My Ebay” watch and search tools are too sophisticated to let any bargains slip through. In every auction I have “watched” this month, the coins have been bid to a price higher than an online gold dealer would charge. Go figure.

Who are all these bidders and how do they have so much money to invest? Shouldn’t they be putting their money to a more productive use like creating jobs? Or is the steadily climbing price of gold a comment on the real state of the union? For the record, gold has gone up about $60 an ounce since President Obama’s speech.

I’m sure you can think of more issues to add to the list.