[JamesP]

Inauguration: Lifestyles of the Rich and Heartless
By Christy Harvey, Judd Legum and Jonathan Baskin with
Nico Pitney and Mipe Okunseinde
The Progress Report

Thursday 20 January 2005

Due to $17 million worth of inaugural security - paid for by the city of Washington, D.C. - the Progress Report is unable to access its office. Never fear - it takes a lot more than that to keep us down. We put this list together for you ahead of time. Your regularly scheduled Progress Report returns tomorrow.

A look at this week's festivities by the numbers:



$40 million: Cost of Bush inaugural ball festivities, not counting security costs.

$2,000: Amount FDR spent on the inaugural in 1945 - about $20,000 in today's dollars.

$20,000: Cost of yellow roses purchased for inaugural festivities by D.C.'s Ritz Carlton.

200: Number of Humvees outfitted with top-of-the-line armor for troops in Iraq that could have been purchased with the amount of money blown on the inauguration.

$10,000: Price of an inaugural package at the Fairmont Hotel, which includes a Beluga caviar and Dom Perignon reception, a chauffeured Rolls Royce and two actors posing as "faux" Secret Service agents, complete with black sunglasses and cufflink walkie-talkies.

400: Pounds of lobster provided for "inaugural feeding frenzy" at the exclusive Mandarin Oriental hotel.

3,000: Number of "Laura Bush Cowboy cookies" provided for "inaugural feeding frenzy" at the Mandarin hotel.

$1: Amount per guest President Carter spent on snacks for guests at his inaugural parties. To stick to a tight budget, he served pretzels, peanuts, crackers and cheese and had cash bars.

22 million: Number of children in regions devastated by the tsunami who could have received vaccinations and preventive health care with the amount of money spent on the inauguration.

1,160,000: Number of girls who could be sent to school for a year in Afghanistan with the amount of money lavished on the inauguration.

$15,000: The down payment to rent a fur coat paid by one gala attendee who didn't want the hassle of schlepping her own through the airport.

$200,500: Price of a room package at D.C.'s Mandarin Oriental, including presidential suite, chauffeured Mercedes limo and outfits from Neiman Marcus.

2,500: Number of U.S. troops used to stand guard as President Bush takes his oath of office

26,000: Number of Kevlar vests for U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan that could be purchased for $40 million.

$290: Bonus that could go to each American solider serving in Iraq, if inauguration funds were used for that purpose.

$6.3 million: Amount contributed by the finance and investment industry, which works out to be 25 percent of all the money collected.

$17 million: Amount of money the White House is forcing the cash-strapped city of Washington, D.C., to pony up for inauguration security.

9: Percentage of D.C. residents who voted for Bush in 2004.

66: Percentage of Americans who think this over-the-top inauguration should have been scaled back.

[Coven]

The man makes me physically ill.

[JamesP]

Coven: I, also. feel your nausea and marvel that so many don't.

From a letter to the editor of today's Arizona Republic:

Quote:
"As I switch back and forth between news clips of the war in Iraq and coverage of the innaugural ceremonies, just two words come to mind: "Hail Ceaser!"
Unquote

Oh, the glory of being a part of "Little Boy Bush's" America!

[anartgrey]

Anyone who attended that hideous display of callous excess is, in my considered opinion, a true psychopath with no compassion, no real human emotion and no idea that they did anything at all wrong.

I would elaborate on this, but I'd rather not have the Secret Service knock on my door any time soon.

[republicantx]

Almost all of the money for the inauguration celebration was donated. To say Bush should have given it to soldiers or the Tsunami aide is ridiculous. Every president in our countries history has had an inauguration celebration. Look at it from this view point. If John Kerry had won, he would have gotten the money for his celebration from the same place. Would you be on here writing about what he could have done with the money?

[JamesP]

Repub: If Kerry had held the same kind of lavish, obscene coronation, with either private or public funds, my criticism of him would be exactly the same.

[-V-]

Almost all of the money for the inauguration celebration was donatedfor one thing, I believe money was diverted from homeland security to pay for inauguration security and the thousands of cops.
Every president in our countries history has had an inauguration celebration are you including the President (Eisenhower?) who during wartime made a speech under 5 minutes and served sandwiches?

[JamesP]

Published on Friday, January 21, 2005 by the Sydney Morning
Herald (Australia) The Empire of Vulgarity by Mike Carlton

George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as
repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism
probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of
the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal
had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo,
that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank,
with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities
delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold
cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his
scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and
armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen
lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and
his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the
world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into
charcoal. Difficult to know what was more repellent: the
estimated $US40 million cost of this jamboree (most of it
stumped up by Republican fat-cats buying future presidential
favors), or the sheer crassness of its excess when American
boys are dying in the quagmire of Bush's very own Iraq war.

Other wartime presidents sought restraint. Abraham Lincoln's
second inaugural address in 1865 - "with malice toward none,
with charity for all" - is the shortest ever. And he had pretty
much won the Civil War by that time.

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his fourth-term
speech with the "wish that the form of this inauguration be
simple and its words brief". He spoke for a couple of eloquent
minutes, and then went off to a light lunch, his wartime
victory almost complete as well.

But restraint is not a Dubya word. Learning nothing, the
dumbest and nastiest president since the scandalous Warren
Harding died in 1923, Bush is now intent on expanding the Iraq
war to neighboring Iran.

[RedHeadLiberal]

Almost all of the money for the inauguration celebration was donated. To say Bush should have given it to soldiers or the Tsunami aide is ridiculous. Every president in our countries history has had an inauguration celebration. Look at it from this view point. If John Kerry had won, he would have gotten the money for his celebration from the same place. Would you be on here writing about what he could have done with the money?


I have to agree with JamesP - If Kerry had won and planned such a lavish party with such suffering going on in the world, I would be just as upset. The 'private donations' could have easily been diverted to Tsunami relief or even to better armour our soldiers. Even some of the money would have been great.

[sabot]

Every president in our countries history has had an inauguration celebration.

Hmmmm... So regardless of how often THIS prez [sic] professes to be unique, he really isn't - an interesting perspective, unfortunately, not unique or convincing.