President Obama stood in the first of his two inauguration events tonight and introduced his better half. In his introduction, the President repeated something he had said earlier in the day, that “some may dispute the quality of the president, but nobody disputes the quality of our First Lady.”
The crowd went wild. Then the President introduced the First Lady, who walked on stage looking stunning in a Jason Wu dress.
Singing Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together was Jennifer Hudson.
Barack Hussein Obama took the oath of office for the fourth time today, and then let the country know what it voted for and what it could look forward to in a second Obama administration. The speech hit all the right notes. The implementation, though, will take longer than the four years remaining in Obama’s term.
His calls for marriage equality and for legislation on climate change, while preserving entitlements, is a clarion call for progressives and proof that the country has turned a corner and moved away from the stultifying conservatism of the last 30 years. The United States will not be looking to become more religious, nor will it be demonizing gays and lesbians or attempting to make reproductive choices a matter of whimsy for the government instead of a collective decision made by people and their doctors. We will be paying attention to the world, but not trying to run it according to a naïve ideology that says we can bring our form of democracy to everyone. And for the first time in our history we will have a health care system where all citizens not only can have care, but must have care because it’s the right thing to do.
Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would never make a speech like this, and thank heaven they won’t have the opportunity to do so. They would take us backwards. We are now moving forwards.
Obama called out the conservatives by fighting back against labeling people who use government services as “takers,” a word the GOP used to little effect in the 2012 campaign. We need programs to help the poor and to try to educate every child. We need programs to make sure that the elderly get care when their resources have dwindled or disappeared. We need adjustments to the tax code and to close the dreaded loopholes in the code, and to use the revenue from those actions to strengthen the United States, not to reward the wealthy or corporations with more tax cuts or advantages.
During Obama’s first term, the right was fond of saying that the great liberal realignment never occurred and that the only reason Obama was elected was because of the recession or the weakness of the Republican candidates. The Tea Party revolt of 2010 was supposedly the end of the “mistake.”
Wrong.
What 2008 uncovered was cemented in 2012. The country’s experiment with smaller government, massive income and resource inequality and a sense that large corporations and institutions were going to swamp the middle class is over. Yes, big money does support Democrats and Republicans alike, but that will be remedied, as will all the issues that the GOP ignored for decades. We will have climate legislation, more revenue, marriage equality and immigration reform. It will take more than four years to accomplish these. The pace will ebb and flow. But they will be done.
And it all starts with today.
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WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.
“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”
The central place he gave to the subject seemed to answer the question of whether he considered it a realistic second-term priority. He devoted scant attention to it in the campaign and has delivered a mixed message about its importance since the election.
Whether at a trade show, convention, or even an amusement park, finding far-flung friends and colleagues can be a challenge. Sharon Vaknin shares some tips for tracking people in a crowd.
Graph Search is an entirely new way to explore people, places, photos, and interests. Sharon Vaknin shows you how to navigate the new feature — and maybe even land a date.
Okay, so you have a main computer, an all-in-one printer, a monitor, a power supply, and a shredder. What else do you need? That’s right: coffee. This office-ready brewer (call Tassimo Pro for prices), which uses cartridges called T-Discs to make the coffee, holds about a gallon of water. Flavors range from light to dark roasts, and you can also make lattes, specialty drinks, tea, and hot cocoa. Yum.
See more here.
And I was wondering what Romney was doing, until I saw this tweet.
Later today, Mitt Romney joins Sen. John McCain at Applebee’s for the traditional Blowing On Hot Soup ritual.
— Dave (@D_v_E) January 21, 2013
Now that’s right. 🙂
Don’t ask me why, but I think the FLOTUS just might wear something green to the Inaugural Ball tomorrow evening. Certainly the youthful, playfulness of her new ‘do’ suggests that she’s ready to relax and unwind after what must have been the most stressful period of her life: virtually putting her whole heart and soul into the successful re-election of her husband as the 44th President of the United States of America. Whew! Green relieves tension and eases fatigue, because its a color related to nature:
The color green is the color of balance and harmony. From a color psychology perspective, it is the great balancer of the heart and the emotions, creating equilibrium between the head and the heart.From a meaning of colors perspective, green is also the color of growth, the color of spring, of renewal and rebirth. It renews and restores depleted energy. It is the sanctuary away from the stresses of modern living, restoring us back to a sense of well being. This is why there is so much of this relaxing color on the earth, and why we need to keep it that way.Green is an emotionally positive color, giving us the ability to love and nurture ourselves and others unconditionally. ~ empower-yourself-with-color-psychology.com
Google will beef up security in the next release of its Chrome browser (version 25) by encrypting all search queries sent from the software. Currently, only queries sent by searchers logged into a Google account are encrypted by Chrome.
Starting with the next version of Chrome, now in the development and beta channel, searches by anyone will be encrypted using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), Google Software Engineer Adam Langley explained in The Chromium Blog.
When a browser is using SSL to encrypt information from a browser to a website, a green padlock appears beside the Web address in the address box. Google calls that box the “omnibox” because it does double duty as both a place to insert URLs and type in search terms.
“Serving content over SSL provides users with a more secure and private search experience,” Langley said in his blog. “It helps ensure that malicious actors who might intercept people’s Internet traffic can’t see their queries.”
And on January 21st, he will take that Oath of Office again for the fourth time, joining Franklin Roosevelt, who also took the Oath four times. The only difference is , Roosevelt was elected all four times.
A few hundred years ago, slavery began in this country. This simple Time-line shows the progression from the time the first slave ships arrived, to the election of the first black President. Today, January 20th, the Constitution requires Barack Obama to be sworn in for his second term. Now that’s progress.
Time-line:
Originally posted here.
