The 44th Presidential Inauguration
 

Wow! No matter how you voted (or in the case of foreigners, might have voted), you've got to admit that the incumbent is an impressive man and the world is watching.

I had a dental appointment at 1:30 my time (12:30 DC time) and I called ahead to say I'd be 5 minutes late because I wanted to watch the inauguration speech. When I arrived, the entire staff of the clinic were just filing out of the waiting room where they'd been watching the speech during their lunch break.

Think about that for a moment -- not one of them would have done the same for any Canadian politician and yet here we all were watching President Obama start his term. I'll be interested to hear what the estimated viewing audience actually was. Must have been in the billions.

Oh... did Obama win?...... I hadn't noticed..... it doesn't seem to have been reported very much:)

good luck to the guy... but he's got one hell of a mess to sort out... he's got to try and fix the mess that the 43rd guy made!

Say what you like about Obama... he's not as charismatic as Gordon Brown :)

Finally, I no longer need to tell people I'm Canadian when traveling abroad. :D

I wish I could have seen the inauguration, but I'll catch it on a torrent later tonight.

I missed it, too. It would appear that such a large percentage of AT&T's TV network customers tuned in that it overloaded the system. Whole net... TV, phone, internet... shut down for over an hour. :mad:

no one else notice the sutter he made? when taking the oath? i lol'd

My wife asked me last night who the English Prime Minister was and for the life of me I couldn't remember. It just wasn't on file.

join the club!.. me too... :)

the futures bright... the futures brown!

Word is that it was Justice Roberts that messed up the oath - the departure from the rehearsed script is what confused Obama.

the teachers were nice enough to tune on the TVs to the inauguration during class & lunch

we weren't doing much anyway, we have midterms for the rest of the week :(

it was kinda of sad that half of the students didn't really care

The story goes that Obama had memorized the oath of office, but that Renquist (the Chief Justice) had decided to do it without notes and he misquoted what Obama expected to hear and was primed to say. :-)

ah ok, well it sounded like they both messed up, and the speech is up on youtube incase anyone missed it, i'll get a link later, youtube isnt working right now

It's good to be proud to be a US citizen again.

And they way I heard it was that Renquist messed up and Obama got a little chuckle out of it. I didn't see it though.


Edit: I just saw it on CNN. It was John Roberts who messed up the oath, and Obama who smiled and paused, giving Roberts a chance to correct himself. Very amusing. ;)

My daughter's kindergarten class was delayed an hour so the kids wouldn't miss the inauguration. She popped right to her feet when she heard "please rise".

Oh yeah. I raised an eyebrow during the awkwardly long pause at "I will execute............" :eek:

I'm happy that he's President, I voted for him. But I won't be excited until I see those words turned into action.

I noticed, but he has a right to be nervous. And the man giving the oath messed up as well. I watched it, luckily I was off school today. My father even came home for his lunch break to catch it, before heading back to work. It was memorable. I wish I still lived in DC and was able to go stand in the crowds to watch. It would have been worth the 20 degree weather.

I am most optimistic about the new President and his policies. Expecting things to be a lot better by Friday. I must admit, though, that after checking the President's stimulus plan, I didn't see any money for industrial strength Prozac (heard on TV that Prozac is the best treatment for depression).

I read a piece the other day (can't recall where) positing that the reason that banks were hoarding money was because they were holding so much toxic paper that they were trying delay the inevitable write downs they would have to take. His advice was that before granting any new money to them they should be forced to write down that toxic paper now, take their losses, and either be allowed to fail, or show serious cause for why they should get further funding to save them. Made sense to me.

It was nice that my kid's grade-school had them all watch it.

It's also nice that C-SPAN has posted a TON of presidential inaugural speeches on YouTube.

You know, sometime soon they are going to have to come out with "bank" strength Prozac or possibly even "financial center" strength Prozac. They really seem like they ought to be depressed :D.

Ha! If throwing money and Prozac at the problem doesn't work, we are doomed. Nothing left but hard work and doing business honestly. Tough adjustment for the Wall Street crowd.:)

I have to say, the one thing that annoyed me in his speech was that he referred to the unity of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus (for some reason Hindus made it into the list), and non-believers'. don't know where that puts all the Buddhists, Wiccans, Zoroastrians, and etc...

minor point, but still... :o

if only that guy BROWN had heard about this. he seems determined to sink the ship rather than admit that he hasnt understood whats going on, and then have the guts to face up to the banks and do the job he has been entrusted with. this is to look after the country, rather than kowtow to a bunch of greedy bankers.

I thought the Zoroastrians were gone with the ancient Persians :D
But yeah, that part felt really awkward....

I know a Zoroastrian, originally from Mumbai (Bombay), India. They were driven out of Persia (now Iran) eons ago and settled in Bombay where there is still a thriving community.

I think he named off the religions for which there is a substantial US presence. No one could name all the religions that flourish in the world today.

They are generally known as Parsis or Parsees for that reason, and I dare say that Felix has heard of them under that name.

They are few in number, but not altogether obscure. The Tata industrialist family you will have heard of; the conductor Zubin Mehta; Indira Gandhi's husband; the founder of India's nuclear programme; the actress who played Lt. Ilia in the Star Trek movie; all of Britain's three first Asian MPs; and Freddie Mercury. Salman Rushdie puts Parsis in his books.

... and which have political significance. Though I agree, I'm not sure why Hindus, in the US, though Hindu-Muslim friction within India is a big issue. Moreover, rhetoric usually uses threes, not fours.

Quite!!! Even if there were, say, only thirteen religions on Earth, then naming them all would have wrecked the cadences of the speech. Naming a religion of which not everyone had heard, even more so; you don't want a "Come again?" in an inaugural. :)

My American friends who are atheists, which is practically all of them, were thrilled to bits over the "non-believers" bit.

Eh, I'd have been happy with an 'and other faiths' line slipped in before the non-believers bit - I just object to the implication that non-Christian, non-Jew, non-Muslim, non-Hindu people are equivalent to non-believers. I'm sure he had something like that in his original draft, but then Justice Stevens got him tangled up again. somehow... :rolleyes:

I would have gone, "Christians, Jews, Muslims; people of all faiths and of none". Better cadence too, I think.