Obama’s State of the Union speech is most remembered by those who watched it (about half of the total of people who claimed they would be watching it) for a salmon joke.  You can see that here.  The speech will be remembered for further developments in the use of the Internet — as graphs and charts accompanied the speech at whitehouse.gov — including a graph made to look like a salmon.  Surely it contained a lot more items than salmon — Obama wants everyone to remember the phrase “Winning the Future”.  It is his “Building a Bridge to the 21st Century”.  Then there is his call about a “Sputnik moment”, a moment in the Eisenhower Administration when the Soviets launched a satellite and made the US fear that we were falling behind.  Interestingly enough, Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” speech was built around the unreal logic of the developments of mis-spending lots of money chasing these demons.  I imagine a world where Sarah Palin (or someone in her position of giving her response to Obama’s speech) might reference these problems in arguring on the implications of “Sputnik Moments” as against a politics of a more prudent or “limited government” mining the tax-rolls and the budget.  But she didn’t go there.  Instead, she travelled to Richland, Washington, by way of identifying “Winning the Future” with its acronym.

“What we need is a Spudnut moment and here’s where I’m going with this Greta . . . The Spudnut shop in Richland Washington–it’s a bakery, it’s a little coffee shop that’s so successful, 60 some years, generation-to-generation of family owned business that’s not looking for government to bail ’em out and make their decisions for them, it’s just hardworking, patriotic Americans in this shop. We need more Spudnut moments in America.”

As pointed out everywhere, the clientele here — out of Hanford — are from the Government, the budget of Hanford has streams coming out of the Stimulus bill, and more to the point…

… Just to be sure, the owners of Spudnut are enthused by Palin’s endorsement:
Val Driver, owner of The Spudnut Shop in Richland, Wash., told USA TODAY that Palin is “right on” when she talks about the need to cut taxes and federal spending.”

… it’s a little random.  Spudnut?  Was there no Sproutnuk around, or was that restaurant a wee bit too vegetably and touching in the realm of Michelle Obama’s “Nanny State” Obesity concerns?

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