We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin.

As though it was Hussein who attacked Bush with a massive volley of cruise missiles and killed his child in a precision air strike, and not the other way around.

Congress has changed, but our responsibilities have not.

It was our fault then, and it's our fault now. My lack of ideas is still my lack of ideas, and your inability to act is still yours. My unwillingness to listen is still securely my own, and still you consistently irritate me with your unwillingness to let bygones be bygones. He's dead now, okay! Does it really matter any more, which of us was lying to Hans Blix?

Some in this Chamber are new to the House and Senate ... Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on – as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.

As a friendly reminder to the newbies: work is to be done on alternate Tuesday afternoons, on every third Thursday after a come-from-behind win by a Washington-area professional sports team, and in the week immediately following a State of the Union address.

We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 – and met that goal three years ahead of schedule.

Boy, am I glad I listened to my Treasury secretary when he suggested that we double our estimate before publicly announcing any budgetary goal. (I wonder if he had any other good ideas. Wait -- who am I to wonder?)

Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate – they are dropped into Committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You did not vote them into law. I did not sign them into law. Yet they are treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice.

Answer me this: how am I supposed to claim credit for this hard-earned pork when it's not even referenced in the bill I've signed?

Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.
Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.

-- Homer, "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?"

Yet we are failing in that duty – and this failure will one day leave our children with three bad options. Everyone in this Chamber knows this to be true – yet somehow we have not found it in ourselves to act.

You know, I could have sworn my speech-writers told me this part was about entitlements. But it sounds like something else entirely. Well, on further reflection, I suppose I felt entitled to take Baghdad this time around. Yeah, you could call it that.

With this reform, more than 100 million men, women, and children who are now covered by employer-provided insurance will benefit from lower tax bills.

Heh, heh! Suckers! It's true that their tax bills will be lower. What I didn't tell them was that their employer will no longer be helping them out on health care, and so their medical expenses are going to go through the roof. But those dumb asses never read the fine print ahead of time, so it's smooth sailing from here on out.

... this reform will level the playing field ...

[This is interesting. Income redistribution is typically a Democratic idea, is it not?]

A second task we can take on together is to design and establish a volunteer Civilian Reserve Corps. Such a corps would function much like our military reserve.

It would give people across America who do not wear the uniform a chance to serve in the defining struggle of our time.

You see, the military REALLY needs J2EE programmers. Iraq's web services infrastructure is already in shambles, and still it is under constant attack by reactionary Islamists who advocate a return to monolithic design and waterfall development. But a recent RAND study found that nine out of ten J2EE programmers can't be trusted with automatic weapons. So you can see our dilemma. Here we are proposing a workaround that allows us to call them away from their six figure jobs on a moment's notice and send them into harm's way without a gun. Don't worry for their safety -- we'll just hire some Blackwater guys to escort them around. Or some Macedonians, maybe; I'm guessing they're much cheaper, and after all, we are trying to balance a budget here. If their aim is a bit off, just give them bigger guns.

State of the Union 2007