SOTU: The Show Finally Closes. For eight years the State of the Union address has put me in exactly the mood Bialystock and Bloom expected their theatrical horrorshow to engender. The last few years, I've skipped actually watching it and just read the next day's news coverage, sparing myself the fits of apoplexy that an hour-long stretch of 43's orations would inevitably bring on. (Others cope similarly, or by seeking solace in the bottle.)

The verdict on the 2008 edition speech from the environmental community? More lip service, mostly. David Roberts at Grist brought his usual edgy wit to posts before, during, and after the speech. And Climate Progress's Joe Romm worked overtime on this one -- see here, here, and here.

An interesting sidebar to last night's address was the explosion of real-time observations (and venting) that viewers shared with each other through Twitter, the "microblogging" service that's increasingly becoming a mainstream communications tool. (For me personally, Twitter has been indispensable since late '06 -- it's the "virtual watercooler" that each day allows me to feel tangibly connected to friends and fellow travelers all round the world doing nonprofit communications work.) To read through some of the stream of patter that flowed through this back-channel as the president spoke, go here and search for "sotu."

Courtroom Battles. A recent series of regulatory moves belie any notion that the administration will soften its environmental agenda this year:

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing to remove the gray wolf population in the Rocky Mountains from the endangered species list, and to allow states and Indian reservations to kill more of them. Conservation groups have filed a lawsuit to block the agency's action, saying that that as many as 600 of the region's 1,500 wolves could be killed. Commentary from NRDC's Louisa Willcox, Outside Magazine's Damon Tabor, Andrew Revkin at Dot Earth, Ralph Maugham, and -- for a different point of view -- Field and Stream's Field Notes blog. (Update: Louisa's really, really angry about this.)
• As has been written about here before, earlier this month the Bush administration overruled a federal judge's carefully prepared rules on active-sonar use during naval maneuvers off the California coast, which are now underway. Good editorial this morning in the Washington Post, and check out posts from Plenty and Deep Sea News
• Federal agencies are attempting to open huge areas of Tongass National Forest to logging and the Chukchi Sea (off Alaska's northwest coast) to offshore oil development. NRDC and other groups have sued to block the Chuckchi lease sale, and there's action in Congress as well. And see this hard-hitting column from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Joe Connelly regarding both of these situations.

Rethinking The Meat-Guzzler. Mark Bittman's powerful consideration Sunday's New York Times of the costs of industrialized meat production has been lighting up the blogosphere for several days. Blogrunner -- the excellent Times-owned service that tracks blog conversation engendered by the paper's articles -- has all the links; I especially liked posts in Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, Portfolio's Market Movers blog, Ezra Klein's blog over at The American Prospect, Philosophy, Et Cetera, and Jezebel.