First of all, he has taken the oath of office twice already. The first time, in front of just fewer than two million people at his inauguration, was unfortunately flubbed when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts mistakenly misspoke part of the presidential oath of office. President Obama ended up misspeaking his part of the oath, which was painful to watch. Can you imagine how awful Chief Justice Roberts must feel, messing up the most important moment of both their lives? Anyway, conspiracy theories abound and in an effort to quash any legal challenges to the presidency, President Obama and Chief Justice Roberts met again, this time at the White House, to re-administer the oath of office, swearing in Obama, twice. The notable thing about the second swearing-in ceremony was that President Obama did not place his hand on a Bible during the oath. After all the hoopla surrounding his use of the Lincoln Bible at his inauguration, at his second swearing in, apparently the official one, not a single holy book could be found. I also found it remarkable that even though Obama felt the need to have his swearing-in repeated, he didn’t feel it necessary to re-issue all of the executive orders he signed beforehand.

At the end of the day, none of those things really matters. But President Obama has made some big decisions in his first 100 hours in office that do not bode well for our future. Beginning with his executive order to shut down the terrorist detention camp at our Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; as it turns out former President Bush had already inquired about the logistics involved with shutting Gitmo down. It would be a safe bet to say that most Americans, including myself, would prefer not to have a prison camp at Gitmo. But I also think it would be a safe bet that, if asked, most Americans do not want the detainees currently being held in Guantanamo Bay moved to their state pens. Therein lays the problem. According to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, he looked into shutting down Gitmo when he was first appointed by then-President Bush. The obstacle he repeatedly came back to was what to do with the detainees if we shut the prison down. Many of the home countries of the detainees do not want them back, and it would be a logistical disaster for our legal and penal systems if we allowed these men into prisons on US soil, so that doesn’t leave us with many other options. President Obama cannot just wave some kind of magic wand to deal with this problem, so I am very interested in what he is going to do over the next year to get this done. My prediction is that either the detainees will be moved to US prisons, granting them full access to all of our rights, or the best case scenario, Guantanamo Bay will still be around at the end of Obama’s first term, handing the new President his first failure.