The mixed seating arrangement at the State of the Union Address was a nice public relations move. But placing U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., next to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, isn’t the same as producing bipartisan agreements forged in trust.

To do that, members of Congress are going to have to get acquainted. It’s easier to trust people you know. By the same token, it’s easier to demonize strangers. The short workweeks in Congress contribute to the latter.

Before the advent of jet travel, members of Congress moved their families to the District of Columbia or thereabouts. Nowadays, they routinely fly back to their districts on the weekends, and congressional leaders clear Mondays and Fridays off the calendar to make this possible. In addition, Congress gives itself a lot of vacation days.

The current Congress is scheduled for 32 workweeks covering 123 days. That’s 20 weeks off. March will be the busiest month, with 14 workdays. There is just one five-day workweek, in the middle of July. But tired members can recover in August, when they will have four weeks off. I know that members often work when they’re not in D.C., but all of those absences mean fewer opportunities to build the relationships needed for compromise and bipartisanship.

Congress doesn’t need to change seating arrangements; it needs to increase attendance.

Haunting statistic. Murray was named the new chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. That’s good news, because she has been a strong advocate for veterans for many years. But I don’t envy the task ahead. The two current wars have taken a heavy toll on troops and their families.

Even when troops are withdrawn, the challenges will be daunting. According to John Donnelly of Congressional Quarterly, the U.S. military lost more troops to suicide than to combat in the past two years.

The Spudnut Project. How does one get from Sputnik to spudnuts after listening to the State of the Union address? By being a highly paid TV news analyst with a one-of-a-kind take on history. This moment was brought to us by Sarah Palin, and don’t be surprised if it causes the University of Idaho or North Idaho College to downplay her attendance at those institutions of higher learning.

President Barack Obama invoked the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik as an example of a rallying point for breakthroughs in science and technology in the United States. He’d like to see a modern-day revival, and he is on firm ground when noting the government’s involvement in innovation. Fred Kaplan laid this out in a recent Slate article.

When the first computer chips were produced, the only customer was the federal government, namely the National Aeronautic and Space Administration. Buoyed by this investment and publicly funded research, private enterprise went on to produce hand-held calculators, personal computers and GPS technology. In its infancy, the Internet was solely a U.S. Defense Department tool.

But as Palin explained on Fox News, Sputnik represented the beginning of the end of the Evil Empire, which ended up being crushed by its own government debt some 30 years later. To her, that should be the real lesson. She went on to explain that the true American spirit was reflected in the Spudnut Shop in Richland, which has been baking doughnuts from potato flour for decades without government bailouts.

So when she thinks of the Tri-Cites she thinks of doughnuts, not Hanford. Government spending is bad, even if it does create the city that created the customers for all of those crullers.

Try this Diet. The libertarian-leaning Reason magazine has dubbed Alaska “The Subsidy State” because it depends on government spending more than any other state in the union. Alaska ranked first in federal spending per capita in 18 of the 25 years from 1981 through 2005, according to the Tax Foundation. For every dollar it sends to Washington, D.C., it gets about $1.85 back.

Perhaps the state’s delegation, cheered on by Sarah Palin, could extricate itself from the crushing weight of Uncle Sam’s wallet by asking Congress to send the money elsewhere.

Dollars to doughnuts, this will never happen.