Re; Obama's State of the Union Speech

I wish Obama had made this State of the Union address three years ago.  He’d be in much better shape today if he had been this assertive. I liked the call tonight to punish unfair trading practices by China, to reward companies for manufacturing stateside, to penalize companies that ship jobs overseas, to raise the tax rate for the wealthy to at least 30 percent, the call for investments in green technology, and the request to increase spending on and the pace of infrastructure construction. I really did not like the energy part of the speech. The time to act on global warming is now and more oil and natural gas drilling is not safe to the environment or our health. I am also skeptical of all the proposals for business tax cuts to change corporate behavior.  The business oligarchs who run this country are not smart.  They are where they are by being ruthless. Mitch Daniel, by the way, is a crashing bore and an anti-labor goon.

Michael Phillips is the author or co-author of the following books:

“White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, Texas, 1841-2001” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).

“The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics.” Co-Written with Patrick Cox. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Walter Buenger and Arnoldo de León, eds., “Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations” (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2011).

Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., “The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience” (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011).

Richardson Dilworth, ed. “Cities in American Political History” (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2011).

He will also be co-author of the forthcoming “The Radical Origins of the Texas Right” (edited by David Cullen and Kyle Wilkison) due to be published in 2012 by Texas A&M University Press; and “American Dreams and Reality: A Retelling of the American Story,” to be published the same year by Abigail Press.

He is currently collaborating, with longtime journalist Betsy Friauf, on a history of Bishop College, an African American institution originally established in Marshall, Texas, that relocated to Dallas by the 1960s before suffering bankruptcy in the 1980s. The two plan to create a website and author a book, “’God Carved in Night’: Afro-Texan Culture, Political Activism And the Rise and Fall Of Bishop College” based on this project.