Rich Galen quotes the end of Obama’s speech …

My fellow Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy. Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress – to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice, and fairness, and equality under the law, so that the words set to paper by our founders are made real for every citizen.

The America we want for our kids – a rising America where honest work is plentiful and communities are strong; where prosperity is widely shared and opportunity for all lets us go as far as our dreams and toil will take us – none of it is easy. But if we work together; if we summon what is best in us, with our feet planted firmly in today but our eyes cast towards tomorrow – I know it’s within our reach.

Believe it.

… and the rhetoric discredited by the reality of Obama’s terms in office — or, put it another way, the American sentence, which is after all the fault of those who voted twice for Obama.

Watchdog compiles five points you didn’t hear Tuesday, including …

1. Raising the minimum wage will kill jobs

Byron Schlomach, director of the Center for Economic Prosperity at the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, heard loud and clear the president’s plea for Congress to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10.

Obama even took things a step farther, saying he will sign an executive order unilaterally increasing the minimum wage for workers under new federal contracts.

But what Schlomach didn’t hear the president say is the likely outcome of a minimum wage hike.

Schlomach said the measure will hurt the very people it’s trying to help by forcing companies to scramble for ways to cut costs, which could lead to fewer jobs. …

2. IRS harassment isn’t a big issue for the Obama people

Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is suing the government on behalf of 41 conservative and tea party groups after allegations of targeting by the Internal Revenue Service, said he wasn’t surprised that Obama did not mention the controversy.

“They’re taking every step possible to minimize this scandal and the targeting that was done,” Sekulow said.

“This is your Department of Justice, your FBI, paid for with taxpayer dollars. It’s not a place for partisan politics … To this date, no one’s been fired. Some people have retired, some have resigned. We’ve had one person take the Fifth —  Los Lerner — and those are key finds that there was more than just bureaucratic mistakes afoot here.”

3. NSA spying will continue

Despite a major National Security Agency leak threatening to undermine America’s national and economic security, fueling domestic and international backlash over fears of a growing Orwellian electronic surveillance nightmare, President Obama gave the scandal a passing mention during his address.

Out of the speech’s 7,032 words, “privacy” and “surveillance” were both mentioned once, and in the same paragraph. He also did not endorse any measures to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, a federal privacy law that allows for federal government agents to access without a warrant emails and text messages older than 180 days. …

4. Even the government knows pre-k doesn’t work

The president spent more time talking about preschool than programs that actually work to improve education, said Jason Bedrick, policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom.

“His pre-K idea is a mistake,” Bedrick said. “There is no real evidence that pre-K will do all the things his administration claims it’s going to do.”

The government’s own study of its Head Start preschool program showed that, if the program benefits children at all, the benefit disappears in a few years, he said.

“Head Start has been a complete failure,” he said. “We don’t have any results for this program and it does not make sense to expand it.”

The president should have turned the nation’s attention to school choice programs, which have been successful, he said. …

5. The private sector deserves credit for energy gains

Some in the energy industry didn’t like what they heard in Obama’s speech.

“When we produce more oi,l more taxes are paid, more people are hired who also pay more taxes, and our energy prices go down and we save americans money at the pump,” Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, said in response to the president’s speech. “It also increases our energy security and reduces our fears of what the Middle East does with their energy resources. Raising taxes on energy production does exactly the opposite. It’s really pretty simple.”

The Lignite Energy Council, which represents North Dakota’s coal industry, found the president’s words on energy contradictory.

“He touts increased oil and gas development while ignoring the fact that the increases come on private land, while his own policies stifle development on federal lands,” Jason Bohrer, a spokesman for the group, said in response to the speech. “He talks about an ‘all of the above’ energy approach while embracing rules from the EPA that would take our most affordable source of energy — coal — out of production. And he talks about helping lower- and middle-income families while driving up their energy costs.”

On the other hand, Obama apparently lied repeatedly, according to Hot Air:

Usually after the State of the Union, we’d feature a media fact check to see where spin crossed the line in the presidential address into “You lie!” territory. Perhaps because Barack Obama managed to “win” Politifact’s Lie of the Year in 2013, we have a few media outlets on the case today — the Associated Press, Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post, and Politico all got rapid research completed overnight. What nuggets did they find?

OBAMA: “Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”

The AP and Kessler picked up on this one, while Politico never bothers to mention anything on the core issue of Obama’s speech. Kessler throws a flag on this one:

Close readers of the president’s speeches might have noticed an interesting shift in the president’s rhetoric. Just in December the president gave a speech on economic mobility in which he three times asserted that it was “declining” in the United States. But earlier this month, renowned economists  Raj Chetty, Emmanuel Saez and colleagues published a paper based on tens of millions of tax records showing that upward mobility had not changed significantly over time. The rate essentially is the same now as it was 20 years ago. …

Obama: “More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage.”

All three media outlets dinged this claim. Politico says that the President is “technically” correct, but Kessler reminds readers that Obama has lied about this before. “Obama carefully does not say these numbers are the result of the Affordable Care Act,” Kessler writes, “but he certainly leaves that impression. But the Medicaid part of this number—6.3 million from October through December — is very fuzzy and once earned a rating of Three Pinocchios.” All three note, as the AP does, that “it’s not known how many of those who signed up for private coverage were previously insured.” One insurer says that figure is 89%, which means only a small number of the uninsured have been added net to the insured rolls.

Obama: “I will issue an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay their federally funded employees a fair wage of at least $10.10 an hour — because if you cook our troops’ meals or wash their dishes, you should not have to live in poverty.”

Politico and the AP both hit this claim. The contract requirement won’t start until next year, and it only applies to new contracts. Both also note that “his ability to act unilaterally on this point is very limited as most employees of federal contractors make well over $10 an hour.” The AP also point out that this won’t be added to renewed contracts, so the actual impact of this will approach nil.

OBAMA: “We’ll need Congress to protect more than 3 million jobs by finishing transportation and waterways bills this summer.  But I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible.”

Only the AP points out that the “shovel-ready” argument still lives, in concept if not in name. The problem now isn’t so much red tape as it is funding, and Obama can’t do that on his own. Obama wants a tax hike on businesses to extend this work that even Democrats are probably wanting to avoid in an election year.

“A manufacturing sector that’s adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.”

Kessler’s the only one to notice this:

The low point for manufacturing jobs was reached in January 2010, and there has been a gain of 570,000 jobs since then. But BLS data show that the number of manufacturing jobs is still 500,000 fewer than when Obama took office in the depths of the recession — and 1.7 million fewer than when the recession began in December 2007.  The gain in manufacturing actually has begun to stall a bit in the past year.  The only reason Obama can tout a gain in manufacturing jobs “for the first time since the 1990s”  is because, before the recession, manufacturing had been on a slow decline for many years.

He’s also the only one to notice this on jobs:

“The more than eight million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years.”

The president is cherry-picking a number that puts the improvement in the economy in the best possible light. The low point in jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has indeed been a gain of about 8 million jobs since then, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the data also show that since the start of his presidency, about 3.2 million jobs have been created — and the number of jobs in the economy still is about 1.2 million lower than when the recession began in December 2007.

Let me provide the final fact check on this point, from my post-speech reaction at CNN:

He started out the speech bragging about adding eight million jobs in four years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that figure is 7.5 million since December 2009, although it’s closer to 6.5 million in the Household survey. Even at the higher number, job growth works out to an average of 156,250 net jobs added each month.

Thanks to population growth, the U.S. economy needs to add about 150,000 jobs each month just to stay even in terms of workforce employment. What President Obama fails to mention is that his economic policies have dragged employment and active engagement in the workforce as a percentage of the civilian population down from 64.6% at the beginning of that four-year period to 62.8% now, a level not seen since Jimmy Carter gave his first official State of the Union speech in 1978.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty contributes something Obama did mention:

Imagine somebody comes along and says, “Okay, America. We’ve tried that approach and we’ve seen what it gets us. Let’s try a different approach. Let’s try an approach that sets you up for the future with three accounts.”

Those three accounts are a 401(k) or IRA, a 529 plan for education, and a health savings account.

Each of those accounts operates on the same basic concept: You put money in, sometimes your employer kicks some money in, and the government gives both of you some big tax incentives. Unlike a bank savings account paying one tenth of one percent to one percent (annual percentage yield), money put in these accounts gets invested in a fund that you choose and most years increases in value by several percentage points. These funds can go down in value, but most years will go up in value, and some years will go up a lot, depending on how the market and broader economy perform and the judgment of the folks managing the fund.

The 401(k) or individual retirement account: These types of accounts accumulate retirement savings; 401(k)s are set up by employers; IRAs are, as their name suggests, set up by individuals.

The 529: This is an education-savings plan operated by a state or educational institution designed to help families set aside funds for future college costs. Your contributions are not deductible when you make them, but your investment grows tax-deferred, and when you withdraw to pay for the college costs, you pay no federal tax on that. Plan assets are professionally managed either by the state treasurer’s office or by an outside investment company hired as the program manager.

The health savings account:

Health savings accounts, the investment account that typically accompanies high-deductible health plans, are enjoying a boost: In 2013, some 7.2 million people had HSAs, up from 6.6 million in 2012, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. During that period, assets also leapt, reaching $16.6 billion in 2013, up from $11.3 billion in the previous year.

HSAs typically run in tandem with a high-deductible health care plan, with the intention that insured people tap the HSA itself to cover qualified medical expenses. Employers and insurers generally like HSAs because insured people are using the account to foot the bill for services until they hit their deductible. In theory, if employees are aware of the real cost of medical services because they are shelling out for those expenses, they’ll become more educated consumers, according to Paul Fronstin, senior research associate at EBRI.

Employers and employees can contribute to HSAs, and the chief benefit is that the funds contributed won’t be subject to federal income taxes when deposited. Any distributions made for qualified medical expenses can be made without incurring taxes.

Many successful, secure Americans have these accounts. If everyone in America had these three accounts, their worries about paying for their retirement, paying for their children’s education, and paying for their health care would be greatly ameliorated. Not completely erased, but everyone in America would have one, two, or three little nest eggs, each enjoying the fruits of compounding returns. As time goes by, your accounts would grow and your worries would shrink.

We could either mandate these accounts for every American . . .

(sound of conservatives drawing swords from sheaths)

. . . or we could make it unbelievably easy to set up these accounts. (My aim, of course, is to turn every American into an investor, from birth to death.)

You’ve just had a child? Congratulations, mom and dad, here’s the setup form for your 529 plan with your child’s new Social Security card. Plug a bit in every year over eighteen years, and you’ll have a nice pile of money to put towards college, trade school, etc. If anything, we should expand it so that your 529 never goes away, and you can put money in at any time to use on a graduate degree, certification programs, or any other instructional course.

You’ve just turned 18? Congratulations. As you pick up your driver’s license, here’s the setup form for your IRA and Health Savings Account.

Instead of fining people one percent of their income for not having health insurance— up to 2 percent in 2015 and 2.5 percent in 2016, let’s make it easy to put one percent of your pre-tax paycheck into any or all of these accounts. Let’s let Americans pay one less percentage point of their current 6.2 percent Social Security tax into their IRA or 401(k). Let’s let Americans pay a half a percentage point of their current 1.45 percent Medicare tax payment into their health savings account!

(Sound of Democrats drawing swords from sheaths)

We can fiddle with the tax code to give employers huge incentives to match donations to these accounts. (Democrats: “Hey, you’re reducing revenue!” Me: “Yes, and ameliorating three big problems that all of this federal spending has tried to address and largely failed: anxiety over paying for health care, education, and retirement.”)

You know who once supported one piece of this proposal? Hillary Clinton, back in 2007, who wanted a universal 401(k). One wrinkle was that she had the federal government matching the first $1,000 in savings for married couples who earn up to $60,000 a year and would match the first $500 for married couples who earn $60,000 to $100,000 a year. These matching donations from Uncle Sam would cost $20 billion to $25 billion per year. Not her worst idea ever, but I’d prefer to give an employer a tax incentive or give the individual an expanded tax deduction –deduct 105 percent of your annual contribution? 110 percent? — than have the U.S. Treasury match your contribution. …

A ‘Three Accounts’ approach to Americans’ economic security would be big, it would be bold, and it would tap into Americans’ distrust of Washington, now reaching Deepwater-Horizon-level depths. We can tweak the details, but the idea is to give all Americans the tools to build their own prosperity and restore their confidence that tomorrow will be better than today.

Katie Pavlich also noticed repeated Obaman hypocrisy:

President Obama said it was an “embarrassment” that in today’s American society women get paid less than men, ignoring the fact that his White House pays women less than men.

Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).President Obama said, “I will act on my own to slash bureaucracy and streamline the permitting process for key projects, so we can get more construction workers on the job as fast as possible,” and urged Congress to send him legislation to make it happen while ignoring the Keystone Pipeline, a project that would create thousands of jobs and one that has been sitting on his desk for years waiting for approval.

On foreign policy President Obama said, “America must move off a permanent war footing,” while refusing to acknowledge his administration’s meddling in places like Egypt, Libya, Syria and Honduras.

When discussing veterans and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, President Obama said, “As this time of war draws to a close, a new generation of heroes returns to civilian life. We’ll keep slashing that backlog so our veterans receive the benefits they’ve earned, and our wounded warriors receive the health care – including the mental health care – that they need,” while failing to acknowledge Obamacare has destroyed those healthcare benefits in Tricare.

Facebook Friend Brian Fojtik wanted to hear something else too:

The President could have said things that were music to my ears.

He could have said “We need a more libertarian country that is based upon recognizing and honoring the inherent rights of individuals – and insisting that the actions of the federal government fall only within the limited scope allowed under our U.S. Constitution. And he could have insisted that we eliminate the corporate income tax, eliminate our current individual tax system in favor of a very low, flat tax, end the war on drugs, get government out of the marriage business altogether, eliminate the use of the Commerce Clause to justify every intrusion of the federal government into state or individual activity, stop bailing out banks, insurance companies or ANY private interests, allow private entities to unleash a responsible harnessing of the nations’s energy potential, dismantle our broken and non-functioning immigration system for one that is more open, more responsible, free and realistic, encourage states to be free to support school choice for all children and families, immediately begin implementing REAL free trade the world over, appoint judges that understand limited government as provided within the Constitution and individual liberty and are committed to stopping government’s abuse of those rights, and work to return power, rights and responsibilities back to the 50 laboratories of democracy in the states and to the People where it belongs …. blah, blah, blah”

[note these are things I would like]

And I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t give a damn.

HIS. WORDS. MEAN. NOTHING.

Those that go back and are seduced by the siren’s cry of his hollow words are the same as the battered spouse (man or woman) that go back once again to the abusive spouse (man or woman) for one more chance because that battering spouse is really a good person … and “oh how I love him/her.” …