Priorities

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"He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient."

U.S. Constitution
Article II, Section 3

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This probably shouldn't surprise me.

But yesterday — the very day that the Labor Department reported that 85,000 more jobs were lost in December and the unemployment rate remained at 10% for the third straight month — it was stated by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs that Barack Obama will not disrupt the plans of TV addicts who want to watch the season premiere of Lost by scheduling his State of the Union address for that night.

Now, I know my regular readers probably get tired of hearing me talk about unemployment, even though it affects me directly and I have been waiting for nearly a year for this president to do something — anything — to encourage job creation, so let me briefly recap some of the other matters of concern:

• Security — After being told "the system worked" by an incompetent Homeland Security secretary, we have had two incidents in recent days in which the misbehavior of airline passengers has required fighter jets to escort commercial flights to places that were not their original destinations.
  
  Perhaps it was appropriate — given the apparent obsession over the Lost premiere — that the first incident was sparked by a note from a passenger that referred to Gilligan's Island.


• Two wars — We don't hear much more about them than we did during the Bush administration, but America still has troops fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nevertheless, they have combined to suck more than $950 billion from our economy — and we will continue to squander money overseas until our troops are withdrawn. Supposedly, that will happen during Obama's term in office, but aren't we entitled to an update on our progress?


• State budgets — New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes that "[t]he states are in the worst fiscal shape since the Depression." And he's right.

Well, that's really just the tip of the iceberg.

But I think it makes my point without belaboring it.

Let's see a show of hands from those who think a TV show — any TV show — is more important than the state of the union.

Well, I can name at least one person who was concerned enough about it to ask Gibbs about it — ABC correspondent Ann Compton.

ABC, in case you didn't know, is the network that airs Lost.

I guess that tells you all you need to know about the priorities of ABC's news division. And those priorities can be summed up in one word — ratings.