James Fallows of The Atlantic is one of the smartest guys writing today.

His blog is always worth cruising. And, as a former presidential speech writer, his take on President Obama’s latest State of the Reunion is full of original analysis — Fallows looks at a variety of facets of the speech; the political, the policy, the rhetorical, the partisan.

Few are better at sifting through these teas leaves and coming up with nuanced and clever observations. And, Fallows is unusually open about sharing other points of view.

What he does with this speech is especially good: he has highlighted key passages and when you scroll over, you get text boxes of his notes and insights. Simple use of the web. Great for us politics geeks. Just click on the title for this post to see what I mean.

Confession: Jim and I worked briefly together when I was at Audible. He, Karen Breslau (then at Newsweek) and I created an audio download that distilled the week’s political news (Jim took the DC perspective; Karen the interpretation from SF and Silicon Valley). Today, we would have called it a podcast. It was an utter failure with listeners but I learned a lot from both of them.