Remarkably flat inaugural

Given the pre-hype and the expectations, I thought the inaugural itself was rather flat. DiFi was a good MC, but it went downhill from there. Poor Aretha, who used to be so marvelous, shouldn't sing in public anymore unless this was a fluke. And that poet was just lame -- that's a recent tradition worthy of abandonment. The Perlman-Ma-etc. quartet was excellent, however. And Pres. Obama's speech was more workmanlike than eloquent. And while he invokes some nice values, he clearly thinks that government is the engine of the economy rather than the other way around. Here's the Register's editorial, in which we politely take exception to his idea of a government-centric society, and some other reporting.