Inaugural Bits Of Tid

The Sun Shines on America Edition

So many others have summed up their thoughts on the inauguration, and I don't know how much I can add to what they have said. So I'll leave you with this.

• How appropriate. The Sun shined both in DC and in Mount Pleasant on Inauguration Day. Random chance? I don't think so.
  
• Barack Obama - yes, Barack Obama - is now President of the United States. I'm just trying to let that sink in. So far, it hasn't.
• It's amazing to think of what has transpired over the last eight years. When Bush became President, I was in middle school, three of my four grandparents were alive, John Paul II was Pope; Facebook, Daily Kos, and YouTube hadn't existed; and so many people whom I now call my friends weren't part of my imagination. And that's just for starters.
  
• I'm also noticing those times when I do something for the first time since Obama became President. Until Tuesday, every memory I ever made at CMU occurred during the Presidency of George W. Bush. "The last time I was at The Cabin, Bush was president," etc.
  
• I have known the Presidential Oath of Office by memory since I was 11 years old (Clinton was President at the time). How the hell did the Chief Justice of the United States screw that up?
  
• Former President George W. Bush (I love saying that) declined to pardon anyone at the end, even Scooter Libby, though he did commute the sentences of two border guards yesterday. Bush's decision not to pardon Libby
  

  leaves a long line of rejected pardon applicants, many of whom have retained politically well-connected Washington lawyers, to make their case for presidential mercy in Bush's final days in the White House. Among them were junk-bond king Michael Milken, media mogul Conrad Black, former Illinois GOP governor George Ryan and former Louisiana Democratic governor Edwin Edwards. Bush also apparently turned down a last-minute plea from Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to pardon her former GOP colleague Ted Stevens for his recent political corruption conviction.

• And finally, some eye candy.