worst inaugural addresses ever?

The Worst Inaugural Addresses Ever | LiveScience:

A choice few inaugural speeches are remembered in the annals of history, some for particularly stirring turns of phrase and others for striking just the right note for the nation at the time.

Others are totally forgotten, or at best remembered for how bad they were.

These worst inaugural addresses in U.S. presidential history represent a laundry list of what not to do on your big day, from boring the crowd with administrative details to droning on for two hours in the bitter cold, ultimately killing yourself in the process.

oh good grief...

This may be a great day for America, but it is NOT "better than Christmas".

i feel a great disturbence...

as if a million voices cried out in terror, 'way to go, Roberts', and were suddenly laughing.

who'd have thought - they weren't destroyed in the fire!

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Missing White House Emails Suddenly Appear:

Those millions of mysteriously and conveniently missing emails -- you know, the ones that suddenly went missing as soon as Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to investigate the Valeria Plame leak -- have reappeared with just a few days left in the administration. What a coinkydink!

thank you Mr. Chief Justice.

No really.  Sincerely.  Thank you VERY MUCH for screwing up the pause points and then flubbing the oath in order to make the new President look like an idiot so that the Right Wing media machine has something more to talk about in order to avoid any actual items of substance or significance.

Seriously, I was really wondering if the radio stations would just go quiet today after it was all over, but now, you have given them a whole wealth of material to help them keep their ratings up in this dark economic time.

Thank you again,
Joe

p.s., is a public speaking class too much to ask?

Update: ok, a funny comment from Greg Laden's blog:

Regarding screwing up the oath . . .

Maybe the two of them should try it again . . . maybe in about 4 years or so.

words of wisdom the mainstream media wouldn't let you hear...

Pam's House Blend:: The invisible, inaudible Bishop Gene Robinson:

Bless us with tears - for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger - at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort - at the easy, simplistic "answers" we've preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience - and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be "fixed" anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility - open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance - replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity - remembering that every religion's God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

These were from Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson's invocation at the Lincoln Memorial concert, conveniently cut out of the mainstream media's coverage of the event as well as HBO's broadcast.

Maybe some of you know why...

followup to my earlier "translation"

Good Math, Bad Math : Apples vs Orchards: Comparing Inauguration Costs:

People keep sending me links to this, so I'll make a short post about it.

In the hubbub surrounding the Obama inauguration, there've been all sorts of incredulous press pieces discussing the supposed outrageousness of the costs of this inauguration compared to others. I've personally heard this reported on the BBC world service, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. In these reports, the cost of the Obama inauguration is generally reported as between 150 and 160 million dollars. When they provide a contrast, they talk about how Bush's second inauguration cost $40 million.

The problem is, this is a metric error. They're comparing apples to orchards.

When they cite the Bush inauguration cost as $40 million, they're talking about the cost of the inauguration parties - that is, the cost of the festivities themselves. That cost does not include security. It does not include the cost of paying police to shut down the city streets. It doesn't include the cost of cleaning up after the crowds. It's just the cost of the parties.

The Obama figure of $150-$160 million includes everything - police, security, setup, and cleanup.

A fair comparison? If you exclude the security costs, Bush's second inauguration cost $42 million; Obama's is expected to cost around $45 million. If you include the security costs, Bush's second inauguration cost somewhere around $155 million. (The exact figures are still not public knowledge; Bush and company treated it as a "national security matter" which did not need to be disclosed.)

Yet another fake controversy brought to you by the supposedly liberal-biased media.