With all the hoopla surrounding Tuesday’s State of the Union speech and the on-going Republican Clown Car primaries and caucuses, you may have missed that the annual World Economic Forum meeting is going on right now in Davos, Switzerland.

News roundup from Tuesday night, January, 24, 2012. SOTU, more takes on Obama’s economic team and the stimulus memo, Romney’s taxes and Newt’s ego, Syria, Iran, the still unstaffed Medicare Payment advisory board, mortgage principal write downs, and much more.

This is the second edition of my little experiment; in case you missed last week’s introduction, The Party Line is my attempt to take the ideas and thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head all week, and use them to kick off a weekend’s worth of conversation.

Meanwhile, I still can’t believe CNN covered the Bachmann train wreck.

If I were President Obama’s English professor, I would take points off for not footnoting his sources.

But after listening to and reading his speech, I’m struck by how disconnected that speech is from the harsh realities facing the country. To be sure, the President notes that in some areas, America is falling behind China or India and is ranked 9th, or umpteenth, or something other than “we’re number one!” So what? Is that really the problem we should worry about?

• Big media reax here, here, here, and here.
• Blog reax here, here, here and here.
• Paul Krugman on the Ryan response.
• Oops.
• Heh.

What did you think of the speech? My reaction: Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Please take a look at my analysis of the full speech, which was released about an hour ago. Also, if you want to look at a scorecard from last year’s State of the Union, look at this HuffPo checklist from 2010.

Let the liveblog begin.

Much of tonight is about a plan to “win the future” – ironically the buzzword that Newt Gingrich frequently has used in the title of a book. This is a relentlessly optimistic, even jingoistic, speech about how America can stay on top in the future. He will say that “the world has changed” and He highlights “five pillars” for the future that are critical, in Obama’s view, to the economy. These are innovation, education, infrastructure, budget deficit, government reform. All of this is part of the “Sputnik moment” to react to competition from overseas and make America a leader again. I join this call for a Sputnik moment by endorsing better data collection of radio-signal distribution in the ionosphere. What, have we all forgotten the real meaning of Sputnik?

The 2006 midterms were a disaster of biblical proportions for the Bush administration and the Republican Party. They lost the House, the Senate, and a raft of governors’ mansions and state legislatures. It was much worse than the “shellacking” the Democrats took last November. And how did George W. Bush respond to the American people’s complete rejection of the Republican agenda? He doubled down on it.