Mr. Speak­er! The Preznit of the Untied States of America.

Con­gress­crit­ters, esteemed Cab­i­net mem­bers and oth­er besuit­ed Wash­ing­to­ni­ans, I stand before you to tell you that the state of the union is … tol­er­a­ble. After all, there’ll be an elec­tion in Novem­ber, and then it’ll all be some­one else’s prob­lem. Heh heh heh. (Applause)

We’re still tor­tur­ing peo­ple who may or may not be ter­ror­ists in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guan­tanamo Bay, but my Attor­ney Gen­er­al assures me he can stall con­gres­sion­al ques­tions about what, exact­ly, “tor­ture” means until well after the election.

My uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and ille­gal plan to spy on Amer­i­can cit­i­zens with­out judi­cial over­sight con­tin­ues apace. While Con­gress dick­ers about whether the com­pa­nies which agreed to break the law at my request should be immune from pros­e­cu­tion, the folks who con­ceived this plan and seized the chance to insert the gov­ern­ment into the pri­vate life of inno­cent cit­i­zens are going about their mer­ry way. (Applause, first from Repub­li­cans. A smat­ter­ing of Democ­rats join in when it seems like their fail­ure to applaud could be used against them in cam­paign ads.)

In Iraq, our sol­diers con­tin­ue dying at an atro­cious rate. Sec­tar­i­an vio­lence con­tin­ues apace, no seri­ous efforts have been made to rec­on­cile the war­ring fac­tions, to estab­lish a fair dis­tri­b­u­tion of oil rev­enues, or oth­er­wise build on the tremen­dous sac­ri­fices our fight­ing men and women have made. The esca­la­tion I announced a year ago, to the extent it has accom­plished any­thing, has sim­ply led to a greater seg­re­ga­tion of soci­ety. Turkey is wag­ing low-lev­el war on the Kurds; the Sun­nis and Shi­ites are draw­ing bat­tle lines and estab­lish­ing eth­nic enclaves; our sol­diers are try­ing des­per­ate­ly to hold them back from a slaugh­ter such as the world has­n’t seen since Rwan­da. (John McCain and Joe Lieber­man applaud wild­ly. Tepid applause from the audi­ence, while view­ers at home won­der if he’s for­got­ten about Dar­fur. He has.)
The esca­la­tion, which was sup­posed to be tem­po­rary, will last indef­i­nite­ly, and none of this will be resolved any time soon. Just anoth­er gift I leave for who­ev­er wins in Novem­ber. Heh heh heh.
Here at home, our econ­o­my is in sham­bles. After ignor­ing the hous­ing bub­ble, hop­ing it would pop after Novem­ber, I have no choice but to do some­thing. Peo­ple seemed to like it last time I sent every­one a check, so let’s try that again (Wild applause.) Also, let’s do some­thing for folks with mort­gages, but ignore renters, the unem­ployed, or work­ing moth­ers who have seen infla­tion in food prices vast­ly exceed rate of food stamp expan­sion. (Applause from Repub­li­cans, silence from the Demo­c­ra­t­ic side of the aisle).

I also won’t sug­gest any mea­sures to reform the mort­gage mar­ket, nor the mar­kets which trade in mort­gage debt. Even though the col­lapse of the hous­ing bub­ble shows that there were seri­ous mar­ket fail­ures, we’ll ignore it all. My suc­ces­sor can tan­gle with that, I guess.

Final­ly, after sev­en years of sign­ing what­ev­er absurd bud­get a Repub­li­can Con­gress sent me, I’m crack­ing down. Sure, ear­marks are down, but I want them cut even more. Because aim­less, bureau­crat­ic fights are more fun than actu­al­ly eval­u­at­ing whether fund­ing lev­els make sense. I know that ear­marks don’t increase spend­ing, just shuf­fle it around, and I know that ear­marks can help the folks elect­ed to rep­re­sent a com­mu­ni­ty ensure that that com­mu­ni­ty’s pri­or­i­ties are heard in Wash­ing­ton. I still want to set an arbi­trary lim­it on them, since my reck­less fis­cal pol­i­cy and the Glob­al War on Brown Peo­ple makes it impos­si­ble to actu­al­ly reduce spend­ing or cut the deficit. At least until Novem­ber, when it’s some­one else’s prob­lem. (Democ­rats applaud, until they real­ize that, in the best case sce­nario, it would be their prob­lem. As Demo­c­ra­t­ic applause fades, Repub­li­can half-heart­ed­ly take up the cheer.)

Let me con­clude by con­tin­u­ing to give lip ser­vice to the envi­ron­ment. I’ve been push­ing fan­cy new tech­nol­o­gy and unre­al­is­tic esti­mates of bio­fu­el pro­duc­tion for this long, and I see no rea­son to change now. In 2000 I said I’d do some­thing about glob­al warm­ing, but I was just kid­ding. Until it’s some­one else’s prob­lem, in which case I think he or she should take it seriously. 

(Applause, cut to Kath­leen Sebe­lius for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic response.)

About the figure: 

As always, the graph­ic above shows month­ly coali­tion fatal­i­ties in Iraq, nor­mal­ized by the num­ber of days per month. The blue line is a lin­ear regres­sion through all the data. The sol­id red line rep­re­sents a local­ly weight­ed regres­sion through all the data. The dot­ted green line is the lin­ear regres­sion through the peri­od since the surge. 

The dot­ted pur­ple and red lines allow us to exam­ine a dif­fer­ent hypoth­e­sis than we’ll hear from the Pres­i­dent tonight. As not­ed at the Thinkery, Moq­ta­da al-Sadr declared a cease­fire in August, giv­ing a six-month reprieve from Shi­ite vio­lence. Is it pos­si­ble that that change explains much of the appar­ent declin­ing trend in violence? 

To test that, we treat every­thing before Sep­tem­ber 2007 as one dataset, and treat the peri­od since then as a dis­crete time­line. As of Sep­tem­ber, the local­ly weight­ed regres­sion of Amer­i­can fatal­i­ties was still ris­ing, though the rate of fatal­i­ties was decel­er­at­ing (as it reached record lev­els). The lin­ear regres­sion since then shows a sharp decline, sharp­er than the regres­sion line since the “surge” began. This sug­gests that the cease­fire is the rel­e­vant change, and that the trend would have been upward if not for the ceasefire.

We can also com­pare the surge hypoth­e­sis with the cease­fire hypoth­e­sis. First, the cease­fire line is steep­er than the surge line. Fur­ther­more, the post-cease­fire line is a bet­ter sta­tis­ti­cal fit than the post-surge line. The AIC for the cease­fire line is much low­er than the AIC for the surge line (12.66 vs. 34.57), indi­cat­ing that stronger fit. It’s dif­fi­cult to draw strong con­clu­sions with only 5 months of data, but if that trend holds, it will strong­ly sug­gest that we are see­ing not a result of the esca­la­tion and realign­ment of Amer­i­can forces, but the effects of the tem­po­rary with­draw­al of one set of com­bat­ants from the field. When that cease­fire ends, we will see the oth­er side of the story.