During his coverage of President Bush’s State of the Union address MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews suggested that Bush’s speech would help presidential contender Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “I tell you, tonight was a John McCain speech, in many ways,” Matthews said, citing the president’s emphasis on earmark reform and ’success’ in Iraq.

UPDATE: In an interview with McCain, Matthews suggested that McCain is the only candidate who supports earmark reform and an an aggressive war on terror.

“The President gave your speech tonight…he talked about earmarks….terrorism…it was your speech, Senator.“

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush falsely suggested that the Iraq war has made America safer.

My fellow Americans: We will not rest either. We will not rest until this enemy has been defeated. We must do the difficult work today, so that years from now people will look back and say that this generation rose to the moment, prevailed in a tough fight, and left behind a more hopeful region and a safer America.

In reality, “the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.” According to the National Intelligence Estimate:

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

During his last State of the Union address tonight, President Bush proclaimed that he trusts the choices of the Iraqi people.

We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace. In the last seven years, we have witnessed stirring moments in the history of liberty and these images of liberty have inspired us…In the long run, men and women who are free to determine their own destinies will reject terror and refuse to live in tyranny. That is why the terrorists are fighting to deny this choice to people in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Palestinian Territories

But a majority of the Iraqi people have chosen to oppose a prolonged U.S. military presence in Iraq. According to the latest opinion polls, a majority of Iraqis have little confidence in American and coalition forces and 79 percent oppose the presence of coalition forces in Iraq.

While President Bush urged Congress to limit spending on entitlement programs, he made no mention of the taxing cost of the Iraq war on the economy. While prewar estimates predicted that the Iraq war would cost $50-60 billion, according to the National Priorities Project, puts the current price tag at $489.6 billion dollars; when indirect costs are considered, some economists estimate that the war has cost “more than $2 trillion.” In fact, Americans spend:

- $200,000 a minute on the war.

- $275,000,000 per day

- $200 billion a year.

- $4,100 per household

More spending is on the way. According to the AP, the “White House will ask Congress next week for another $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

In tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush misrepresented the housing crisis in New Orleans.

Tonight the armies of compassion continue the march to a new day in the Gulf Coast. America honors the strength and resilience of the people of this region. We reaffirm our pledge to help them build stronger and better than before.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed “nearly 41,000 inexpensive rentals.” Since then, the city of New Orleans began demolishing “4,500 units of public housing, making way for mixed-income neighborhoods with only 800 units of public housing, an 82% reduction in size.”

The city is facing an acute housing shortage. Rents have almost doubled since before the storm. But HUD, the federal housing authority, is pressing ahead with the demolition. 50% of families who want to but are unable to return to New Orleans make less than $20,000 a year.

In his State of the Union address President Bush said that “we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers.”

To keep America competitive into the future, we must trust in the skill of our scientists and engineers and empower them to pursue the breakthroughs of tomorrow.

But as ThinkProgress has pointed out, the Bush administration has regularly undermined independent scientific research, shaping government science around administration ideology. According to the government’s top global warming researcher, James Hansen, who has previously revealed “the government’s efforts to muzzle him from speaking out about climate change,” the White House Office of Management and Budget censors “all government scientists…to make sure that it’s consistent with the President’s budget.”

Do you know that before a government scientist testifies to Congress his/her testimony is typically reviewed and edited by the White House Office of Management and Budget? When I asked for a justification, I was told that a government scientist’s testimony “needs to be consistent with the President’s budget”.

During tonight’s State of the Union address, President Bush said that the “the people’s trust in their government is undermined by congressional earmarks.”

Last year, I asked you to voluntarily cut the number and cost of earmarks in half. I also asked you to stop slipping earmarks into committee reports that never even come to a vote. Unfortunately, neither goal was met. So this time, if you send me an appropriations bill that does not cut the number and cost of earmarks in half, I will send it back to you with my veto. And tomorrow, I will issue an Executive Order that directs Federal agencies to ignore any future earmark that is not voted on by the Congress. If these items are truly worth funding, the Congress should debate them in the open and hold a public vote.

In fact, under Democratic control, earmarks “are down more than 40 percent from the last budget passed by Republicans .” President Bush’s executive order, however, “won’t apply to the thousands of earmarks that accompanied a massive spending bill he signed last month,” leaving in place “11,735 earmarks — totaling $16.9 billion under White House estimates — that were contained in the just-completed 2008 spending bills.”

After meeting with military officials, Rep. Ike Skelton (D-MO), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, opened today’s committee hearing “with an expression of concern about trends in Afghanistan.”

I believe that we currently risk a strategic failure in Afghanistan and that we must do what it takes to avoid this disastrous outcome. We must re-prioritize and shift needed resources from Iraq to Afghanistan. We must once again make Afghanistan the central focus in the war against terrorism.

Indeed, total violence increased by 27 percent from a year ago. According to Retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan who testified in front of Skelton’s committee today, the number of roadside bombs increased by 425 percent between 2004 and 2007; suicide bombings soared from “three in 2004 to more than 130 in 2007.”

The enemy in Afghanistan — a collection of al Qaeda, Taliban, Hezb-e Islami and foreign fighters — is unquestionably a much stronger force than the enemy we faced in 2004.

Today, in a video on Current.com, former Vice President Al Gore endorsed gay marriage.

“Gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women — to make contracts, to have hospital visiting rights, to join together in marriage, and I don’t understand why it is considered by some people to be a threat to heterosexual marriage…Shouldn’t we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to ones partner regardless of sexual orientation?“

While the remaining Democratic candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Barack Obama (D-IL), and John Edwards (D-NC), all support the overturn of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and civil unions, Gore is among the few prominent politicians to support same sex marriage. Here is a run down of other prominent supporters: New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-WI), Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and former Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI).

UPDATE: From Raw Story:

During his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2000, Gore said he supported domestic partner benefits for gays and lesbians but opposed “changing the institution of marriage as it is presently understood — between a man and a woman.

From JohnMcCain.com:

The American people have been alienated from the process of self-government by the overwhelming appearance of their elected leaders having sold-out to the big-moneyed special interests who help finance political campaigns.

From tomorrow’s New York Times:

Mr. McCain said he was raising money on Mr. Giuliani’s home base for a simple reason. “It’s the Willie Sutton syndrome,” Mr. McCain said at a news conference in Pensacola, referring to the bank robber of the 1930s. “They asked him why he robbed banks, and he said it’s because that’s where the money is.”