Supporters fill the bleachers and take photographs as U.S. President Barack Obama’s motorcade travels from the White House to the U.S. Captiol along Pennsylvania Avenue Jan. 21, 2013, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
HERE’S THE SCHEDULE FOR THE UPCOMING PARADES AND BALLS: Watch them live here, here, and here.
POTUS, FLOTUS, VP Biden & Dr. Jill visit the King Memorial.
2:40: Inaugural Parade – Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues to the White House
3:45: Parade Review, White House
8:45: Commander-in-Chief’s Inaugural Ball
9:10: The Inaugural Ball
*Photos and Videos as available*
Good Night, Everyone :)
THANK YOU for this fabulous day. Thank you for letting me share this with you.
G’night, Rik. It’s a pleasure sharing this historic day and night with you too!
Rik, try this link: http://www.headlinespot.com/
Just putting in this request for tomorrow…looking for the link to that post that someone always does showing the papers from around the world.
http://www.headlinespot.com/
Tuskegee airmen honored guests at inaugural
WASHINGTON (AP) — They sat in wheelchairs as honored guests at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural, attended to almost minute-by-minute by active duty members of the military. For these Tuskegee Airmen, members of the famed all-black unit of World War II and several years beyond, the tables surely turned.
From the terrace of the Capitol, they watched an African-American president being sworn in for his second term. And they were cared for reverently by many whites in uniform, who more than six decades ago would have had no contact with these two dozen veterans now sitting with green Army blankets across their laps. Several of them said they were at Obama’s first inaugural but were just as excited to attend his second.
The tables certainly were turned for Homer Hogues, 85, who marched with his segregated unit in President Harry Truman’s inaugural parade in 1949.
The black troops were quartered in a hangar with little heat, while the white military marchers were in a barracks.
http://thegrio.com/2013/01/21/tuskegee-airmen-honored-guests-at-inaugural/
POTUS took the military and all that it stands for and turned it on its head. The GOP can’t lay claim to being in support of our military anytime soon.
Joey B is rubbing all up and down Dr. Jill’s back….
LOL
I saw him. LOL!
Go, Joe!
WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 21: U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama wave after dancing during the Commander-In-Chief’s Inaugural Ball January 21, 2013 in Washington, DC. Obama was sworn in today for his second term in a public ceremonial swearing in..
—–Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
http://youtu.be/sr2E4dQzFuw
Jamie Fox is crazy …..talented but crazy
Which channel are you watching?
cspan- he sang at the ball where Joey B and Dr. Jill were
GORGEOUS. SG2’s whippin’ up the gallery as I type. BANK.IT.
how he’s holding her…..sigh
our First Couple looked so happy and so in love. :)
Love; the TIES THAT BIND.
The First Lady wears inaugural gown by Jason Wu http://on.today.com/VNlsGM
The Speech — A Primer
By Charles P. Pierce
at 3:35PM
I stopped wondering when the president threw out casually a very barbed passage, which seemed to be directed at everyone who hadn’t gotten the point in the first week of November. After threatening to render the nation comatose by briefly mentioning The Deficit, the president let fly a steel-tipped reminder of who got elected and who didn’t.
We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn. We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss or a sudden illness or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative. They strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers. They free us to take the risks that make this country great.
They do not make us a nation of takers.
Sitting amid the congressional delegations, which is where unusually fortunate failed vice-presidential candidates occasionally can be found on inauguration day, Paul Ryan suddenly found himself having some very bad flashbacks and an authentically terrible afternoon.
The president’s second inaugural address was as clear a statement of progressive principles as a president has given since LBJ got up there and shoved the Voting Rights Act and the words “We shall overcome” right up old Richard Russell’s ass in 1965. I will grant you that it was draped early on in some completely predictable boilerplate about “outworn programs” and about how we shouldn’t think “all society’s ills” can be cured through government action. But that was only a little deke to get Brokaw looking the other way. The president then went top-shelf on his audience.
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword (Ed. Note: Lincolnosity!), we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together. Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.Together, we discovered that a free market only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together, we resolved that a great nation must care for the vulnerable, and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune … we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.
The speech was a bold refutation of almost everything the Republican party has stood for over the past 40 years. It was a loud — and, for this president, damned near derisive — denouncement of all the mindless, reactionary bunkum that the Republicans have come to stand for in 2013; you could hear the sound of the punch he landed on the subject of global warming halfway to Annapolis. But the meat of the speech was a brave assertion of the power of government, not as an alien entity, but as an instrument of the collective will and desires of a self-governing people.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Why_The_Speech_Was_Important#ixzz2IfNbDLPI
The EMOPROGS can go to HELL. This address is the most PROGRESSIVE ever!
The President waiting for the First Lady at the Commander-in-Chief Ball
The gown… JASON WU.
PBO & FLOTUS the HOTTEST couple on the planet right now. FLOTUS looks amazing in RED GOWN
the military personnel look so happy to be dancing with the First Couple
they’re singing to one another….just so romantic…they look fabulous together…awe….sigh.
FLOTUS IN RED!!
LET’S STAY TOGETHER!!
On The Mall — Gold Section
By Charles P. Pierce
at 2:30PM
Down in the Gold section was where it was plain and obvious that, last November, somebody won something and somebody lost something. It is now more cliche than it is insight that this country’s re-electing a black president, and in the teeth of eight-percent unemployment and a political opposition dedicated to not allowing him to do much of anything about it, in many ways was more remarkable than having elected him in the first place. That is a fine talking-point to bat around in the green room, but it was down in the Gold section where it was absolutely real, and part of the great underground river that flows beneath the polite American history that is taught in schools and that was celebrated so enthusiastically yesterday. It was down in the Gold section where they felt that river burst so powerfully to the surface at one point in the president’s speech.
We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.
This was an altogether revolutionary rhetorical passage from an American president — an attempt to link in a common thread the three great movements for human rights in the country’s recent history, and to do so in the correct historical order, and to assert by implication that they were all part of the same historical continuum. This has not always been the case. (To mention an uncomfortable example, many of the men involved with Selma weren’t altogether comfortable reckoning with the demands of the granddaughters of Seneca Falls, and many of them were deeply prejudiced against the sons of Stonewall.) What was equally revolutionary was what the president demanded of a nation’s honest memory — that all three movements fought not only against the entrenched bigotry and prejudices of their fellow citizens, but also against the forces of the various governments through which that entrenched bigotry found violent expression. Force-feeding suffragettes. Dogs and fire hoses. Tear gas and billyclubs. Too much of the violence was official. Too much of it was under color of law. All three movements the president cited were aimed in part at shaming the governments over which too many of his predecessors presided. And, by prefacing his remarks with “we, the people,’ the president was saying, implicitly, that he knew this, too, and he rescued for the moment all three of those moments from the numbing anesthetic of conventional American history, which prizes their outcomes, but declines too often to talk about their struggles. Down in the Gold section, nobody needed this wink and a nod. Stonewall got cheered as loudly as Selma did.
Twenty years ago, I stood in a driveway at 2332 Guynes Street in Jackson, Mississippi. It was a white concrete driveway. In the middle of the white concrete was a dark stain that had been put there on June 12, 1963, when a man named Medgar Evers had been shot in the back in front of his children by a racist coward named Byron De La Beckwith. The stain was from Medgar Evers’s blood, and it was still there two decades later. It took 30 years to convict Beckwith of the crime because the entrenched bigotry and prejudices of the people of Mississippi found expression in the Mississippi courts. (To be entirely fair, it also was a Mississippi court that finally convicted him in 1994.) Yesterday, at the beginning of the 50th anniversary of her husband’s murder, Myrlie Evers-Williams delivered the invocation at the inauguration of the first African American to be re-elected president of the United States. At one point, she prayed:
And that the vision of those that came before us and dreamed of this day, that we recognize that their visions still inspire us. They are a great cloud of witnesses unseen by the naked eye but all around us thankful that their living was not in vain. For every mountain you gave us the strength to climb. Your grace is pleaded to continue that climb for America and the world.
Down in the Gold section, everybody was quiet, and you could hear that great river moving again under everything, a history that this country too often resists, but that is irresistable because of the great contradictions within which this country was born. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first person ever to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration who wasn’t a preacher. Didn’t matter. Down in the Gold section, they knew who had won and who had lost, and what had triumphed, and what had been defeated. They knew grace when it fell on them
Read more: Daily Politics Blog – Charles P. Pierce – Political Blogging – Esquire http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/#ixzz2IfK23Uia
where are you guys?
he’s at the Commander -in Chief Ball!!
VP Biden is one daper dude!
he’s in WHITE TIE!!!!
Joey B’s looking good!
http://youtu.be/w5rb833WnOQ
The Two Most Powerful Allusions in Obama’s Speech Today
By James Fallows
Jan 21 2013, 6:30 PM ET
On reading it through after hearing it, this is another carefully crafted speech. More so, I would say, than Obama’s first inaugural address. But these two parts got my attention the instant I heard them:
1) Lash and sword. This inaugural address, like nearly all previous ones, began with an emphasis on the importance of democratic transfer-of-power. For instance, the first words of JFK’s address in 1961 were, “We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom.” But Obama introduced the familiar theme with this twist:
Today we continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of [our founding] words with the realities of our time. [Note: this preceding sentence is the one-sentence summary of the speech as a whole.] For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they’ve never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.
And for more than two hundred years, we have.
Through blood drawn by lash and blood drawn by sword, we learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together
I like the precise logical concision of contrasting “self-evident” with “self-executing” truths. But “blood drawn by the lash” is an impressive and confident touch. It was of course an allusion to a closing passage in what is generally considered history’s only great second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln’s in 1865 (right):
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/the-two-most-powerful-allusions-in-obamas-speech-today/267374/
Obama’s Startling Second Inaugural
By James Fallows
Jan 21 2013, 12:25 PM ET
This was the most sustainedly “progressive” statement Barack Obama has made in his decade on the national stage.
I was expecting an anodyne tone-poem about healing national wounds, surmounting partisanship, and so on. As has often been the case, Obama confounded expectations — mine, at least. Four years ago, when people were expecting a barn-burner, the newly inaugurated president Obama gave a deliberately downbeat, sober-toned presentation about the long challenges ahead. Now — well, it’s almost as if he has won re-election and knows he will never have to run again and hears the clock ticking on his last chance to use the power of the presidency on the causes he cares about. If anyone were wondering whether Obama wanted to lower expectations for his second term … no, he apparently does not.
Of course Obama established the second half of the speech, about voting rights and climate change and “not a nation of takers” and “Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall” [!] etc, with careful allusions through the first half of the speech to to our founding faiths — and why doing things “together,” the dominant word of the speech, has always been the American way.
More detailed parsing later, but this speech made news and alters politics in a way I had not anticipated.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/01/obamas-startling-second-inaugural/267365/
I totally love the pomp and circumstance. I loved POTUS reviewing the troops.
yes…yes…yes..
May the right-wing heads explode:
I hope their heads split WIDE.OPEN.
bwa ha ha ha ha ha
LMBAO
Alright; let’s get these parties started! Anyone watching the balls tonight?
LOL FLOTUS at the Inaugural Luncheon
I kNEW that it wasn’t my imagination! Wonder what he did?
The crowd is wild. They’re loving our Potus & Flotus! It’s so incredibly exciting!
loved it that POTUS & FLOTUS got out of the BEAST and waved to the crowd. VP Joe said PBO has NO FEAR.
And they’re out walking! The Crowd goes NUTS!!!!!!
I think that the crowd is much larger than expected during the swearings-in.
LOL Eugene Robinson: THE PRESIDENT CAN DANCE, RACHEL.
Uh oh! Eugene Robinson is taking up for Potus. He says Potus CAN dance! :)
LOL Set’em straight, Eugene!
The President, VP, FLOTUS & Dr. Jill honoring our military and they’re off to the parade!
Sirens are blasting all over the city.
Folks are hoping to see POTUS & FLOTUS get out of the car.
I believe that they are supposed to get out for a minute.
Yes; he is; he and FLOTUS. Cops are swarming the city.