Note: I am only posting now, but I wrote this brief post in the early German morning hours before President Obama gave his inauguration speech. Having listened to parts of the speech now and having read the transcript I feel slightly more positive than the post itself might suggest.

This week’s blog posts will likely be rather short as I am traveling in Europe (in Munich for DLD today, then off to London, Eindhoven and Geneva). I feel encouraged about Obama’s second term based on the administration’s firm approach to gun control. I would love to see similarly strong leadership on climate change where I believe that we are running out of time. Beyond that I don’t want to get my hopes up too high as there are too many areas that need fixing and Obama is on the wrong side of several of those including the drone war, the erosion of civil liberties, and our oversized banks. Most fundamentally though I don’t expect that we will see the kind of radical rethinking of government that I believe we need in order to make progress. Instead of counting on the administration there, I will continue to support the efforts of United Republic to get money out of politics. And I will continue to write about my own vision for what that change could look like.