SOTU Tweets Blogathon: Good Morning Dubai....

Good morning, Dubai! Where it is now 10:00 a.m. Kudos to Aston Villa, the last place team in the English Premiere League for their 1-0 triumph over Crystal Palace.

Here is our final list of tweets, which does NOT involve any commentary from the likes of George F. Will and Fozzie the Bear.(pict. center).......

1) Taz Ahmed (American Muslim female comedian, activist): Can you PLAY INTO THE MODEL MINORITY STEREOTYPE any harder, Nikki Haley ?!?!?!

2) Catholic Democrats: So Nikki Haley is just repeating GOP talking points w/a clenched jaw and a southern accent? Cool, it's not like we expected anything else.

3) Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va., pict. top): As POTUS noted the scourge of opioid addiction  cuts across party lines. Let's come together to lift up communities hurt by this epidemic.

4) Andrea Mitchell (NBC, she is mentioning Sen. Ted Cruz R-Tex.,pict. bottom; he was campaigning for president in New Hampshire today instead of being at the SOTU): Ted Cruz rejects POTUS criticism of his threat to carpetbomb ISIS, says Obama and Hillary Clinton are putting their head in the sand regarding terrorism.

5) Jonathan Scott (Huffington Post): Wolf Blitzer also thought Jesus was born in Jerusalem on Celebrity Jeopardy.

6) Maryland Dem Party: Nikki Haley literally said nothing. Nothing of substance, and no answers.

7) Chuck Todd (NBC): If it's possible for Haley to actually rise up on the VP short list, she accomplished that as well tonight. Strong showing for SCGOV.

8) Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY): POTUS is right, vote. Speak out. Stand up for others, esp the vulnerable, knowing each of us is only here 'cause somebody stood up for us.

9) Josh Kraushaar (National Journal): Donald Trump is providing a rare moment of bipartisanship tonight.

10) Liz Mair (conservative new media adviser): "Judging by Twitter, it appears that continuing to watch 'Making a Murderer' (a Netflix doc series) was the right call."

11) 9NewsDenver: "SC Gov. Nikki Haley sounds optimistic tone in GOP SOTU response."

http://www.lizmair.com

http://www.goodmuslimbadmuslim.com/tazandzahra/

http://www.catholicdemocrats.org/

http://www.9news.com/

GOP Debate from Boulder, Colorado: Politics vs. Sports (1 of 3)

Though tonight's CNBC  Republican debate was held in Boulder, Colorado, as opposed to Ames, Iowa, we are going with an image of Cy, the Iowa State mascot, as we were also keeping track of an Iowa State home volleyball versus Kansas as well as the World Series. We will say who won that game in a later entry.

Here are tonight's tweets:

1) Chris Cillizza (Washington Post): Say what you want about CNN's intro music and stuff, it's WAY better than this.

2) Crowley Report: Let's keep the camera on the panel said a CNBC director who should be fired.

3) Boer Deng ("The Times" of London): Trump clearly never saw Mulan_you know the Great Wall gets breeched.

4) Liz Mair (conservative political strategist): "Donald Trump literally just compared Latin American unauthorized immigrant to Mongolian hordes. Interesting."

5) Jonathan Chait (New York Magazine): "First question for Donald Trump: Has your entire campaign been a dream"

6) Cyclone Volleyball: Maggie Anderson sends a serve wide and we on the board in the third set, 1-1."

7) Joe Perez (Kansas City Royals fan): Please never show the Matthew McConaughey commercial my World Series.

8) David A. Bell (Princeton U historian): Food fight!

9) Kai Ryssdal (host of NPR's "Marketplace"):Why is Trump going after John Kasich? Don't quite get it.

10 for 10 (8th Entry): The First Line of the Novel 'Choke'

Greetings to our blog readers in Macedonia, Belgium, and Jordan.......in order to substantially increase our global audience we will name drop Serbian soccer player Branislav Ivanovic of Chelsea and German striker Mesut Ozil , who is of Turkish heritage, for Arsenal.

Tonight actually marks the 10th anniversary of our first blog entry here on this blog, to our knowledge only four or five people read that one. Hopefully, at least 98 will read this entry (nudge, nudge, wink, wink....)

On a personal note, we want to send our kudos to Chris Hurst, the 11:00 news anchor for WDBJ-7 in Roanoke, Va. If you watched CNN a few weeks ago, you saw him speak with Anderson Cooper, he has been through a lot. Tonight marks his second week of returning to the broadcast booth. Since Roanoke is our hometown, we wish Hurst the best.

We were hoping a joke about Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor who dropped out of the Republican presidential candidate race, but we are running late, and you can see the tweets of his former employee Liz Mair, which are indeed quite amusing.

Tonight, we are going retro with the first line of Chuck Palahniuk's great 2001 cult classic novel "Choke." A few years ago, we had lots of fun with posts about the first lines of novels, such as Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which we must profess to have never read!

Here is the first line from "Choke:"

"If you're going to read this, don't bother. After a couple pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you're still in one piece. Save yourself."

http://chuckpalahniuk.net/