Yesterday was an eventful day. The Pope resigned, the President gave the first State of the Union address of his second term, and, here in California, the manhunt for former LAPD Police Officer Christopher Dorner appears to have ended in conflagration and Dorner’s death, presumably at Dorner’s own hand.
Tags: President Obama, Revel World Revel Life, State of the Union, The Vision
Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, and mark the second Inauguration of President Barack Hussein Obama. I was moved to tears writing this sentence, just as I have been moved to tears again and again throughout this day, which more than any in recent memory captures the long and beautiful arc of history.
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Tags: Inauguration 2013, Martin Luther King, MLK Day, President Obama, Presidential Inauguration 2013, The Declaration of Independence
Hendrik Hertzberg published a piece in The New Yorker called “Calmly, Obama Fights” in which he quoted these words from President Obama’s gun violence announcement of Wednesday, in which he referenced The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, about the rights Americans have other than the right to bear arms:
“The right to worship freely and safely: that right was denied to Sikhs in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. The right to assemble peaceably: that right was denied shoppers in Clackamas, Oregon, and moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado. That most fundamental set of rights: to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness—fundamental rights that were denied to college students at Virginia Tech and high school students at Columbine and elementary school students in Newtown, and kids on street corners in Chicago on too frequent a basis to tolerate, and all the families who’d never imagined that they’d lose a loved one to a bullet—those rights are at stake.”
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Tags: Gun Control, President Obama, Revel World Revel Life, The Constitution, The Declaration of Independence, The Vision
Over here at my house (and at the home of the friends whom we celebrated with last night), we are dancing in the streets. I expected President Obama would be re-elected (just as I suspected he’d be elected the history-making first go-round), but there’s nothing like having the bird actually in hand. There was a lot at stake in this year’s election, and though I can generally respect opinions from all sides of the political spectrum, in recent years, the far right has led the Republican party off the solid path of things I don’t agree with but respect, into the wilderness of things that simply have no factual basis and must be rejected out of hand — such as the idea that Creationism is a science, that a woman who gets pregnant can’t have been raped, or Mr. Ryan’s idea that religion should shape policy — an idea expressly rejected by the way by, oh, I don’t know, the 1st Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
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Tags: Barack Obama, Election Results, President Obama, Second Term
236 years ago, our Founding Fathers penned a document that began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” In so doing, they spoke a high vision for humanity — and for the United States of America — that we’ve been living into ever since.
In founding our nation on the principles of equality, the Founding Fathers set in motion the Great American Experiment in which people of all races, religions and creeds would come together under one roof that we might remember our common humanity, and embrace the fundamental truth that there is nation, one community, one fellowship of man. This — equality, justice and fraternity — are what America means. Now, the sacred trust that our Founding Fathers created 236 years ago has been handed to us.
Tags: Barack Obama, President Obama, Presidential Election 2012, Rousseau, The Founding Fathers, The Great American Experiment, The Social Contract