The State of the State statement

Yes, the State of the State address was Tuesday, and I technically haven't posted about it yet. But that's because I've already written about most of what I heard -- the school construction plan, the amount of teacher pay raises, the eminent domain proposals -- and the other stuff, especially the tax-cut promises and the anti-gambling language, is what you'd expect to hear from a Republican incumbent in an election year.

Among the indisputably good ideas, one would hope that basic decency impels the Legislature this year to raise the state's income-tax threshold above $4,600 a year for a family of four, and our public schools long have needed to add a week to their instructional calendar to keep up with practices in other states.

It'd also be nice to see lawmakers take advantage of relatively sunny economic times to make structural overhauls to put the state on solid financial footing and stave off proration in harder times, but this is the Alabama Legislature we're talking about, so I won't get my hopes up.