President Obama just gave his State of the Union address, and incase you missed it, we’ve put together a quick and dirty outline of what he covered.

Health Care

Obama said he is willing to discuss changes that would improve the Health Care measure but, he remains steadfastly opposed to a full-blown repeal of the sort approved by the House last week.

“What I’m not willing to do is go back to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a pre-existing condition,” the president said.

The president did reach out to Republicans, particularly on deficit reduction. He offered unspecified reductions to the Medicare and Medicaid programs beyond those in the health law. And he said he would also look at “medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits.”

Jobs

Faced with painfully slow U.S. job growth and a 9.4 percent unemployment rate, it’s no surprise that President Obama spent most of his State of the Union speech talking about jobs and job creation.  The president noted the economy is growing again, and stock prices and corporate profits are up sharply.

But the president said that in a globalized world economy, the question is “whether new jobs and industries take root in the U.S. rather than somewhere else around the world.” To insure jobs come to Americans, he said, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The president also, again focused on job creation through the development of clean energy industries and called for an end to billions of dollars in tax subsidies for oil companies, saying, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own.”  Well put!

Obama also called for a cut in America’s corporate tax rate to support economic growth.

A lot of the job creation envisioned by the president would come from rebuilding America’s crumbling infrastructure by investmenting not only in roads and bridges, but also in high-speed rail and the Internet.

Clean Energy

The president asked Congress to help him set a new goal of producing 80 percent of America’s electricity from clean energy by 2035. He includes wind, solar, nuclear, clean coal and natural gas as all playing a part.

But House Republicans are unlikely to embrace any plan that would force a switch from coal.

Earmarks

“And because the American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects, both parties in Congress should know this: If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it,” President Obama said.

Obama has good reason to oppose earmarks as he prefers having his own federal agencies decide how best to spend money and by taking that stance, the president is making common cause with congressional Republicans as House Republicans have supposedly sworn off all earmarks.

Iraq And Afghanistan

Obama’s discussion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was pretty brief and as positive as possible, and there was a renewed commitment to withdrawing U.S. troops! “The war in Iraq is coming to an end,” Obama said.

Casualties in Iraq have declined, both for U.S. troops (60 killed in 2010 versus 904 in 2007) and for Iraqi civilians (4,036 in 2010, down from 24,677 in 2007, according to the independent Iraq Body Count project) but in Afghanistan, the situation is less clear.  So we’ll have to wait and see if the President can stick to this one.

Transportation

The president’s wishes to modernize the nation’s transportation infrastructure especially, its railways and highways.  President Obama also said he wants 80 percent of the population to have access to high speed rail within 25 years. Building such railways costs about $45 million per mile, and it’s money the private sector is unlikely to invest.

Guns

Were surprisingly absent from the speech.  The president who campaigned promising to reinstate the ban on assault weapons remained quiet on arms restrictions, even as he recognized those who’d been shot in Tucson.

Education

President Obama said the United States must “out-educate, out-innovate and out-build” the rest of the world. I

He underscored the U.S. Education Department findings that show just how much American students have slipped in science.

“To compete, higher education must be within reach of every American,” the president said.

The President has gained a lot of Republican support is in his effort to improve teacher quality and in his wish to take on the teachers’ unions on issues like merit pay.

“We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” the president said.

Immigration

The president made a call to Congress to “take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration.”

But with Republicans I doubt until unemployment levels drop significantly, that allowing undocumented foreigners to gain legal status is going to be a damn near impossible sell in Congress.

Electric Cars

The president’s goal of a million electric cars on the road by 2015 seems like a huge stretch.  A nice dream.  But a huge stretch.

Despite high price tags, demand for electric vehicles has been strong. Nissan has 20,000 people on a waiting list for its Leaf and GM is prepping the Volt, but even with strong sales on those two vehicles we’ll be closer to the tens of thousands of electric cars in 4 years than anywhere near the millions.