Inauguration Day! January 20, 2021
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
Want to bid farewell to you know who? Starting at 5pm RTÉ will be broadcasting…
…this Wednesday, January 20th, Joe Biden will officially begin his term as the 46th president of the United States, and he’ll be happy if only a handful of people show up to his inauguration. Usually, the swearing-in of a new president would be the signal for a huge influx of people into Washington, DC, to witness the proceedings and party on the National Mall, but authorities are telling folk not to come into the capital on the day, but to celebrate/commiserate at home instead. In normal times, up to 200,000 tickets could be snapped up for the ceremony, but this year, only about 2,000 people are expected to be there in person for the 59th inauguration ceremony
And:
Both Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will take their oaths of office at 5pm Irish time (noon Washington, DC, time), on the steps of the Capitol.
And no end of political folk will be there, bar you know who…
Former presidents George W Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will attend the ceremony, along with former first ladies Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Outgoing vice-president Mike Pence will also be there, but his soon to be ex-boss has said he will not attend the ceremony – the first outgoing president in 152 years to snub his successor. So, a charmer right to the end.
Whatever the feelings about the Democrats and Biden – and for many they are very mixed indeed, there’s no disputing that this is an historic first with the first woman Vice President and that woman being a person of colour.
I’ll admit, even for a Presidency this bizarre, I wasn’t expecting much of the narrative around his final day in office to be about a attempted murder-for-hire/animal abusing convict not getting a pardon.
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It’s been an…unusual… four years… Got to say I’ll be happy when Air Force One is wheels up at Andrews. Or perhaps more happy when it has safely landed close to Mar-A-Lago and jettisoned its cargo.
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” President-elect Joe Biden plans to take 17 executive actions in the first hours of his presidency Wednesday, signing a flurry of executive orders, memoranda and directives to agencies implementing his first moves to address the coronavirus pandemic and undo some of Donald Trump’s signature policies….
Stops the United States’ withdrawal from the World Health Organization, with Dr. Anthony Fauci becoming the head of the delegation to the WHO….
Extends the existing nationwide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures until at least March 31…
Rejoins the Paris climate accord, a process that will take 30 days
Cancels the Keystone XL pipeline and directs agencies to review and reverse more than 100 Trump actions on the environment….”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/20/politics/executive-actions-biden/index.html
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Call me cynical, but it’s hard to imagine someone like Sanders starting his inauguration day with a religious service, a glitzy party with Hollywood celebrities (during a pandemic, no less) and lots of talk about returning to ‘normal’, pre-2016, politics. It looks like no lessons have been learned at all, but let’s see how this plays out over the next four years with those working-class folks Biden was so fond of during the campaign.
That said, I won’t miss having to brace myself while switching on the news each morning.
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Fingers crossed. I guess a religious service is no great harm if messages are being sent. parties with celebs… urggghhh…
Agree completely re the news. That alone is going to be an improvement. And a bit of sanity on health.
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Unfortunately if Sanders had run,Trump would still be president.
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Unfortunately, you’re right.
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Agree
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A long list of criminals pardoned by departing USA President Donald Trump –
Top of the list Stephen K Bannon :
“Stephen K. Bannon
Mr. Bannon, who was Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist and an architect of his 2016 presidential campaign, was charged in August of last year with defrauding contributors to a privately funded effort to build Mr. Trump’s wall along the Mexican border.
Mr. Bannon, working with a wounded Air Force veteran and a Florida venture capitalist, conspired to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors by falsely promising that their money had been set aside for new sections of wall, according to court documents.
The pardon of Mr. Bannon was notable because he had been charged with a crime but had yet to stand trial. An overwhelming majority of pardons and commutations granted by presidents have been for those convicted and sentenced.” https://www.nytimes.com/article/who-did-trump-pardon.html
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One correspondent is not impressed with many displays of forelock-tugging on Irish mainstream media outlets. Joe Biden is an Irish-American, who frequently quotes Irish poets and writers such as Séamus Heaney WB Yeats and James Joyce.
Joe Biden is an incubator of Trumpism.
“I wonder did he read any poems written by Black men in American prisons, seeing as he was the main architect of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 which enforced mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. Due to that and other ‘catch-all’ crime laws, Black men (also women) make up about 15% of the population but 40% of the prisoners.”
President Donald Trump sent QAnon-style goons on their way to Washington DC’s Capitol Hill on January 6 2021 trying and failing to overturn a convincing Joe Biden General Election victory in November 2020. Trump lost by a margin of over 8 million votes, a gap of more than 4.5 per cent, and turnout reached record levels. Many of the QAnon-style Trump-goons so far arrested and charged over the Capitol Hill assault on the US Senate and Congress are serving or retired staff in the state repressive forces – Army, Air Force, Police, National Guard and so on. What protection is the US state offering to the people attending the Joe Biden Presidential inauguration on January 20 2021? It is a version of putting the fox 🦊 in charge of the chicken 🐓 coop – 25,000 members of the National Guard occupy the city of Washington DC, whose population is overwhelmingly non-white, politically and socially hostile to Trumpism, and supportive of the magnificent Black Lives Matter Movement. No wonder the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had to desperately “vet” the repressive forces instructed to “protect” the Joe Biden inauguration. https://tomasoflatharta.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/joe-biden-president-of-usa-donald-trump-departs-extreme-right-criminals-celebrate/
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Just watched the inauguration ceremony there. For what it was I thought it struck the right note. I’m happy to get back to the criticism afterwards of course but right now it’s just a bit of a relief to see the back of the previous guy and to hope that the next few years will perhaps notch down some of the rhetoric at least and take some of the wind out of the sails of the far-right globally by refusing them legitimation from the highest political office on the planet.
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J-Lo sings Woody: you want to sneer, but there’s a kind of kitsch majesty there.
Still no match for Aretha and her hat 12 (!) years ago.
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And Garth Brooks!
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Ever since then, I’ve never been able to think of him as anything other than ‘Gareth Brooks’ as Christy Burke invariably called him
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I’ve never heard of him referred to as anything other than “Gareth” Brooks!
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