The Institute for Public Accuracy has a PDF critique of the State of the Union for public distribution at: http://accuracy.org/s2006.pdf.  Please spread the word about this to activists.

The Guardian is reporting that Bush told Blair "that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of 'flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours'. Mr Bush added: 'If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]'."
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7408

This came out in a memo obtained by Phillipe Sands, QC, for the new edition of his book "Lawless World."  The memo is apparently the minutes of a two-hour meeting between Bush and Blair (and possibly the cast of Monty Python) which took place at the White House on January 31, 2003 – close to two months before the "decision" to go to war. 

Bush jumpstarts the alternative energy movement with his own hot air demonstration

When Gore Vidal endorsed last night's demonstrations against Bush’s ridiculous I-am-the-state theatrical stunt, he added the pithy comment: "Go back to Crawford. We’ll help raise the money for a library, and you’ll never even ever have to read a book." As always, Vidal has perfectly framed the argument for resistance to this anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-thought, anti-agenda. And while the networks and pundits and media shills gawk and preen and profit off the spectacle of this horrific failure, this loser in the most profound sense of the term, this puppet plutocrat who brings nothing to the table except for his legendary ability to drink everyone under it—an as-yet-unindicted war criminal with more blood on his hands than the tyrants from whom he liberates the world in the name of (and at the direction of) his Lord and Savior—we must make our own noise, in the name of the unnumbered and unidentified dead whose corpses pave the way to Heaven for Bush and his psychopathic band of theocrats.

Hours after Coretta Scott King died, President Bush led off the State of the Union address by praising her as “a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream.” For good measure, at the end of his speech, Bush reverently invoked the name of her martyred husband, Martin Luther King Jr.

The president is one of countless politicians who zealously oppose most of what King struggled for -- at the same time that they laud his name with syrupy words. It wouldn’t be shrewd to openly acknowledge the basic disagreements. Instead, Bush and his allies offer up platitudes while pretending that King’s work ended with the fight against racial segregation.

Now that Dr. King’s widow is no longer alive, the smarmy process will be even easier: Just praise him as a beloved civil rights leader, as though the last few years of his life -- filled with struggles for economic justice and peace -- didn’t exist. Ignore King’s profound challenge to the kind of budget priorities and militarism holding sway today.

For the State of the Union on Jan. 31, the president was eager to

I'd become so used to Nicholas Kristof's January visits to prostitutes in Cambodia that it was a something of a shock to find him this January in Calcutta's red light district instead.

As readers of his New York Times columns across the past three years will know, around this time -- a smart choice, weatherwise -- Kristof heads into Southeast Asia to write about the scourge of child prostitution. One can hardly fault him for that, even though Kristof's bluff busybody prose is irksome, as he takes his pet peeve out for an annual saunter, the way A.M. Rosenthal did for years with female circumcision in Africa.

So far as I know, Rosenthal never actually bought a young African woman to save her from circumcision. Maybe they aren't for sale. In 2004, Kristof did buy two young Cambodian women -- Srey Neth for $150 and Srey Mom for $203 -- to get them out of brothels in Poipet. There was something very nineteenth-century about the whole thing, both in moral endeavor and journalistic boosterism.