the kicker

State of the Union, in a Word

January 26, 2011

Last night NPR asked listeners to describe President Obama’s State of the Union address “in three words,” and then ran the 4,000 responses through a word cloud generator. And?






Missed the president’s “salmon” moment? It was the laugh line in a section about (ha!) our outmoded, wasteful, convoluted government. To wit:

The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in salt water. I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.