Obama, Palin, Sputnik and Spudnut

I'm going to wade ever-so-delicately into the political realm here, just because I enjoyed this story so much.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama declared, "this is our generation's Sputnik moment" as he made the case for greater government investment in biomedical research, information technology, and clean energy technology.

Sarah Palin was quick to respond to the president's speech, saying his proposal was misguided, and would lead to the kind of excessive centralized spending that doomed the Soviet Union. Instead, she told Fox News' Greta Van Susteren, what the country needed was a "Spudnut Moment."

Palin was referring to the Spudnut Shop in Richland, Wash. "It's a bakery, it's a little coffee shop that's so successful, 60-some years, generation to generation, a family-owned business not looking for government to bail them out and to make their decisions for them," she said.

But a reader of Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog says Palin may have missed the bigger picture: "The Spudnut shop Palin speaks of is half a mile from my house in Richland, WA and it's really good (the secret is potato flour in the batter). She may not realize that the federal government buys most of those doughnuts: the annual budget for cleanup of the nearby Hanford Nuclear Reservation is more than $2 billion, employing about 11,000 workers, and spudnuts are the pastry of choice at meetings there."