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Barack Obama Sworn In As 44th President of the US
Just before noon today, Eastern time, Barack Obama was sworn in before the US Capitol building as the 44th President of the United States (Whitehouse.gov has already been updated to reflect the new President), and offered an inaugural address which outlined some of the challenges that the country currently faces, both within the country's borders and abroad. Obama's election has been called "a civil rights triumph," and his candidacy has inspired perhaps the most visible political involvement of young voters of any candidate since John Kennedy. Here's your chance to discuss the newest occupant of the White House and what you'd like to see happen over the course of his presidency.
Having set up the streaming watching at a university, I can tell you that Foxnews.com had the best quality stream by a mile. Of course they probably had significantly better demand. I ended up having to use 3g cards on laptops because the internal network collapsed. And we have dark fiber...60000 users trying to stream at their desks is a bad thing.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
I didn't say I didn't question it. I don't believe a word any politician says but I have *never* witness the number of people following along with the campaign promises of a candidate/president like they are with Obama. Even people I would normally believe to be levelheaded are acting like 13 year old girls after their first kiss.
I don't know what to be more frightened of, Bush's right-wing, conservative, religion wackos or the mass of people that Obama has mobilized into believing that something will be vastly different with him in charge.
Well, his cabinet doesn't exactly give me warm fuzzies. But I am neither optimist or pessimist, only pragmatist. The Obama administration, like any before it, has a lot of people shouting lots of contradictory things at it and within it, monied interests expecting favors and grassroots movements struggling for recognition, and a whole mess of problems to which maybe no one actually yet has the right answer.
Time will tell if the new executive can sort all these out better than the last one did. Although the odds do look better this time.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
... of hearing "black this" and "Afro-American that" and he just became President. I just hope that the media (and America) can finally get over this whole "race" thing and let the guy do his job. For an election that wasn't supposed to be about race, we sure do hear a lot about it. To Obama: America and the world is watching - MAKE US PROUD!
I disagree with your view. Why let people hype it all up, and let people 'believe', when all that's going to happen is a huge disappointment. Speculation is what gets the markets in huge trouble, because eventually a correction comes and reality hits, and hits hard. So by your very logic, we shouldn't have tried to do anything with all those speculators on the market, we should have let them keep dreaming of limitless profits... NOTHING BAD HAPPENED, right??? But I guess my example is flawed, since giving people who are drowning in debt, with shitty job prospects at best, a fantasy of everything changing for the better will not end up in even more heartache and suffering in the long run when reality sets back in...
Making Obama into some saviour is just asking for trouble. He can't deliver, not for lack of trying, I'll give you that, but he cannot deliver, the system can't let him. And when he doesn't, and Americans realize that there isn't some magical new president that's gonna make all their problems go away, there's gonna be major backlash.
Of course, please, don't take my word for it... just go to google, or wiki, and look up what happend to other countries who went through similar leadership changes, where the populous believed the new leader would fix all. Scary shit. So letting the delusions of idealism flourish without a reality check is simply going to result in way more sting when reality finally hits home... and it always hits home.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
To anyone not overly familiar with Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the Constitution, it looked like Obama was confused- or stumbled, but he was just in shock to hear Roberts put things out of order.
Don't worry. I certainly don't have the oath memorized, but it was clear to me that it was Roberts who had messed up.
I hope Obama is a faithful to the wording of the rest of the Constitution as he is to that one section. It would be nice to have a Democrat who believes in following the law rather than claiming that a "living breathing constitution" gives him an excuse to do whatever seems convenient at the time.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Looks like they've already got a Technology Agenda posted. This is change I can stand behind. Believe in? When I see it in action. Don't let this make us any less vigilant in protecting our freedom to share information in an open and uninhibited manner.
Mod +1 Inspirational
Mod +4 Correct
That is how our system is supposed to work. We may never get perfection but we can always strive for it.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I found the religious overtones of the ceremony quite disturbing. If he really wanted to reaffirm the separation of church and state he could have started there and then by doing away with the bibles, the preachers and the 'so help me Gods'.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
Which is the greater benefit: saving 340 homes at $500,000 each, or giving 2 million attendees hope for the future with a big ceremony? Given the degree to which consumer spending props up American GDP, the inauguration may actually MAKE money.
The real one seems lame. Now the Lego one though was what should have made slashdot.
Lego Obama Presidential Inauguration Brings Hope to Bricks Too
http://i.gizmodo.com/photogallery/legoobamainauguration/1006247332
And it should be clear *why* taking office should be time-based, not oath-based when you consider what might happen during wartime. Like, what if serious military shit was hitting the fan on the day of the inauguration? Under an oath-based system, the incoming president would probably have more pressing things to do then swear an oath on a bible. With a time-based system like we now have, it is very clear who is in power at all times. Oath-based, not so much.
Before that amendment was passed, the incoming president would have to drop everything and get sworn in before deal with whatever. Lets not even forget that if he or she did something requiring executive privilege and wasn't technically sworn in. During the aftermath, without the amendment, everything the new president did prior to taking the oath would fall into question (i.e. were they technically president)?
No, taking the the oath is more for show then a requirement. As it should be.
I think that's twice in as many days I've seen mis-application of the broken window fallacy.
The broken window fallacy assumes that resources are fully employed. The argument would be that, were it not used to wage war, U.S. industrial capacity would've been doing something else -- something more productive. The problem is, it wasn't being used for something more productive during the depression.
There are perfectly good arguments for why war is not the cure-all for a national economy that many cynics claim. In the context of the Great Depression, the broken window fallacy is not one of them.
Left-wingers might have an irrational fear that a police officer will shoot them dead
There are more arrests for marijuana possession in this country than there are arrests for violent crimes. It is a fact that the police victimize more people than they protect. Fearing the police is not irrational at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But do you want a government who will make sure there's a hospital to fix your broken skull? And a government who will make sure there's quick transportation and trained EMTs?
Hard to say. Some argue that such services wouldn't exist if the government weren't providing them, but that's not necessarily true. Firefighting services in the unincorporated county lands where my father lives in Arizona are largely subscription funded. You call the fire department because your house is on fire and you haven't paid for the service, they do show up... but only to make sure everyone's out of the house and your service-paying neighbor's house doesn't burn down. You can beg and throw cash at them, but they'll watch your house burn down. Hard to say to what degree this approach could be applied to emergency medical services. Actually, it already is that way, to some degree. Here in Los Angeles they'll haul you to the closest hospital, but if they find out you have no insurance, you'll be given the minimum medical attention necessary to stabilize you, then you'll be thrown in an ambulance and driven up to forty miles to County-USC hospital--- the only remaining public hospital--- to wait for hours in line next to all the other poor folks waiting to have their stabs, gunshots, and assorted poor-folk injuries taken care of on the county's dime.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Government run healthcare systems seem to work well enough for Britain, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Japan, Taiwan Switzerland, et cetera, et cetera. Government run power is why France gets 80% of its energy from nuclear plants and can tell the Middle East to get bent. Do you think a private corporation is ever going to invest in a nuclear plant, given the length of construction time and delay of ROI, when you can slap up a coal-burner and start raking in the bucks immediately? And airlines? FedGov has been bailing them out for decades - they might as well be nationalized, it's not like they could get any worse.
As an American I've come to the conclusion that the reason that these socialized programs work in other countries and not in the U.S. is not due to some fundamental problem of ideology, but that a majority of the American _people_ in both the public and private sector are myopic, mentally defective and terminally incompetent.