I have a feeling of dread about tonight's State of the Union Address. There are grumblings that Bush will announce all sorts of big dreams, and the federal spending increases that go along with them. The Wall Street Journal notes that the drunken GOP sailors have even managed to outspend Bill Clinton. And with this year's appropriations bill, it is only going to get worse.

Steve Moore of the Club for Growth calls this bill a pork-laden monstrosity worse than any ever produced when Congress was controlled by "tax-and-spend" liberals. There's federal money for the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and one traffic light somewhere in upstate New York. There's $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Coralville, Iowa. (For that price we could send the whole town on a rain forest vacation.) There's $2 million for a golf awareness program in St. Augustine, Florida. The number of such earmarked federal expenditures has quintupled in the past five years to about 10,000, worth $23 billion, for 2004.

Our two party system is a miserable failure. Republicans want to keep writing checks without having the money to cover them, while Democrats want to keep writing checks and raise everyone's taxes (especially the evil, hated, "rich") to pay for it.

The party that gets my vote in November will be the party that promises to put away the checkbook. And if neither party will commit to that, then neither one will get my vote. As Neal frequently points out, the only difference between Democrats and Republicans right now are tax cuts and the war on terror.