All presidential administrations have vacancies — that’s inevitable — but an analysis of appointments data by ProPublica reveals that more presidentially appointed positions were sitting vacant at the end of President Obama’s first term (13%) than at the end of Bill Clinton’s (11%) or George W. Bush’s (10%) first terms.

Key finding: “At least 68 of the positions remain vacant, including 43 that have been vacant for more than a year.”

Michigan state Sen. Tom Casperson (R) told a radio show he’s not sure where Obama was born, according to Deadline Detroit.

Said Casperson: “I don’t know because it seems like that issue was dropped immediately as far as the major media went. My gut tells me if it had been a different president, say George W. Bush, they’d have been digging into like there was no tomorrow and trying to get to the bottom of, which they never really tried to get to the bottom of.”

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds justt 29% of respondents say they agree “with most” of what Republicans in Congress have proposed versus 45% for Obama and 40% for congressional Democrats.

An identical 29% have a favorable view of the Republican Party (compared with 49% for Obama and 41% for the Democratic Party.

The public also believes the GOP is more partisan: 48% say Obama wants to unifying the country in a bipartisan way, while 43% say he’s taking a partisan approach. By comparison, 64% say Republicans are taking a partisan approach, versus 22% who say it’s focused on unity.

Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew’s original employment contract at Citigroup included a bonus guarantee if he left the bank for a “high level position with the United States government or regulatory body,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Roll Call reports Lew’s nomination is up for a vote in the Senate Finance Committee this week.

President Obama “is just seven days away from the first significant test of his second term as deep spending cuts loom, yet inside the White House a clear sense of confidence stands in contrast to the air of crisis that surrounded previous fiscal showdowns with Republicans,” the New York Times reports.

“The confrontation holds peril for both the president and Republicans. But for now, Mr. Obama believes he is acting from a greater position of strength, advisers say, pointing to several recent polls that show he holds an upper hand in the budget debate. Yet his standing would be at risk if the so-called sequester caused economic growth to collapse.”

Byron York: “There’s no doubt President Obama is using the so-called Washington Monument maneuver
in the fight with Republicans over sequestration budget cuts. It’s a
time-honored tactic of bureaucratic warfare: When faced with cuts, pick
the best-known and most revered symbol of government and threaten to
shut it down.”

A new USA Today/Pew Research poll finds President Obama “starts his second term with a clear upper hand over GOP leaders on issues from guns to immigration that are likely to dominate the year. On the legislation rated most urgent — cutting the budget deficit — even a majority of Republican voters endorse Obama’s approach of seeking tax hikes as well as spending cuts.”

“The survey underscores the quandary for the GOP as it debates the party’s message in the wake of disappointing losses last November for the White House and in the Senate.”

Key finding: “Now just 22% of Americans, nearly a record low, consider themselves Republicans.”

These results mirror a Bloomberg poll released last night.

Hillary Clinton will charge $200,000 for a two-hour speech when she hits the speaking circuit in a few months, the Washington Times reports.

First Lady Michelle Obama cut her hair because she’s having a mid-life crisis, the New York Daily News reports.

Said Mrs. Obama: “This is my midlife crisis, the bangs. I couldn’t get a sports car. They won’t let me bungee jump. So instead, I cut my bangs.”

President Obama “is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House,” Politico reports.

“Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.”

The Obama administration “is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics,” the New York Times reports.

“The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.”

President Obama played golf today with Tiger Woods, “once the sport’s dominant player before his career was sidetracked by scandal,” the AP reports.

Weekly Standard: “The White House confirms today that President Barack Obama will be vacationing in Florida this weekend. His wife, First Lady Michelle Obama, will be in Colorado. The two daughters will be with Michelle.”

“While the rest of his family will be skiing, Obama is expected to be hitting the links with golf pros and buddies in Florida.”

“The president likes to attack Congress, but if he is serious about enacting this agenda, I think it must start with the part of this Congress that his party controls — the United States Senate. What can he get passed in the United States Senate?”

— House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), quoted by The Hill.

Joe Klein: “Barack Obama, liberated from the thrall of electoral politics, has now given us two major speeches to set the style and substance of his second term. Both were powerful; both had moments of high passion, a quality the President kept in mothballs for most of his first term. But neither was daring; neither pointed a way past the rutted politics of the moment. They assumed the status quo. They paved the way to past arguments.”

“We’re citizens, Obama amplified. But most of us aren’t very active citizens, though, and the President never addressed the responsibilities that accompany citizenship. He asked nothing of us. But government isn’t only about taking from some and giving to others. It is about the creation and maintenance of something much larger than all of us–a learning, evolving democracy, which requires an informed, rigorous public. I haven’t heard a politician speak honestly about the sacrifices required for greatness in a long time.”

Ezra Klein: “After an election, the winning party typically tries to pass the policies it campaigned on while the losers go back to the drawing board to try to work up a more appealing agenda. But last night’s dueling speeches revealed, strangely, the reverse.”
 
“President Obama’s agenda has become much more ambitious since the election, ranging from universal pre-kindergarten to raising the minimum wage to gun control to immigration reform. But neither the Republican Party’s agenda nor its rhetoric has changed a whit.”

Wonk Wire has a good round up of the policy proposals included in President Obama’s State of the Union address.

Politico: “Twitter exploded during Sen. Marco Rubio’s Republican response to the State of the Union, as the Florida senator appeared a little sweaty and dry-mouthed at mid-speech, taking an awkward swig from a bottle of water that had been placed off-camera. Rubio handled the hullabaloo with some humor, later tweeting a picture of the water bottle.”

[Read more…]

A new CNN/ORC instant poll found that 77% of those watching President Obama’s State of the Union had a somewhat or very positive view of the address, while 22% had a negative response.

However, Obama was speaking to a relatively friendly audience. Of those who watched the speech, 44% were Democrats and 17% were Republicans.

Said pollster Keating Holland: “Tuesday night’s State of the Union audience is more Democratic than the nation as a whole, which is typical for a President Obama speech and indicates that the speech-watchers were predisposed to like what Obama said. When George W. Bush was president, his audiences were more Republican than the general public at that time, and his speeches were usually well-received for that same reason.”

President Obama was significantly more combative, audacious and partisan in this State of the Union address than in previous years.

He repeatedly backed policies that most Americans find popular — but that Republicans oppose — continuing to drive a wedge into his opposition. At the same time, he sought to fire up the Democratic base as he readies a major congressional push to solidify his legislative legacy. And if Congress won’t act, he made clear than many of his proposals could be done — or at least started — by executive action.

One example was climate change. Obama suggested the EPA could regulate carbon emissions without new legislation that might never get out of the House or Senate. But it’s something his liberal base has been waiting four years to hear.

Obama was also particularly sure to tie the nation’s repeated budget crises firmly around the neck of Republicans. He indicated he was ready to compromise but that he would not sacrifice investments in the middle class for the sole purpose of reducing the deficit. Obama also made sure to point out that nothing he proposed tonight would add a single penny to the national debt.

An emotional push for gun control topped off the president’s speech. He repeatedly called for a vote on his proposed gun curbs. “They deserve a vote,” he said as he named victims of gun violence.

But the biggest difference in this speech than those over the last four years is that Obama seems to recognize he’ll get little help from congressional Republicans. Gone were the bipartisan platitudes. Gone were the olive branches to his rivals. Instead, Obama made clear he’s ready for a fight.