Some things that happened this week (besides the inauguration itself).

1) Righting one greivous wrong, George Bush commuted the sentences of two Border Patrol agents who had been given unjustly long sentences in shooting a drug smuggler in 2005.

2) In a slippery slope of grand proportions, The inauguration ceremony cost a staggering 150 million. Even some emergency FEMA funds were used and as Mark Steyn points out, an entirely inappropriate use. This is indeed "change", but not quite what most of us were hoping for. And a question - the media kept declaring that the amount of security at Obama's inauguration was "unprecedented". Is there some reason why we need to provide more security today, as opposed to 4/8/12/16 years ago?

3) Eric Boehlert, an Obama supporter at the leftist Salon.com wrote:

The D.C. press corps failed to ask hard questions about the inauguration's huge cost and its unprecedented security.

Sounds like he was trying to be objective? No, because he wrote that in 2005, about President Bush's inauguration when the bill was only between $40-70 million. Still a huge sum, but several times less than the current gala, which was thrown at a time of economic hardship, no less. John Henke at The Next Right points out the blatant hypocrisy of his complete about-face, now that his candidate is the one being inaugurated. Mr. Boehlert lamely tries to defend himself in a Media Matters article, by complaining that the 2005 estimates of Bush's inauguration didn't include security costs. First of all, he didn't include those costs back in 2005, and more importantly, he fails to address the fact that even if you do include them (about $70 million) it's still less than half the cost in 2009. Even adjusted for inflation, that's a hell of an increase. To be fair, Obama used some of his own funds, and others were provided by private contributors. But the taxpayers were still the primary bill-payer here.

Maybe it's human nature, but it's not terribly productive for every new President (of any party) to feel like he must always outdo the last one.

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