Brittany Cummings

Harold Blanco

FYS

State of the Union 2014

In order to compensate for my lack of interest the night that our President

gave the State of the Union Address, I researched the content of the address by

watching several recaps on several different websites, fully aware that each site

would in some way have incorporated biases into what they chose to consider

“important” to relay to people like me who are trying to get the gist of what the

president was focused on. 

The first video I watched was uploaded by WKYC, a news channel

covering mostly Ohio. All one minute and sixteen seconds of their video was of

Obama addressing the importance of women having equal opportunity within the

workplace, as he believes that “when women succeed, America succeeds”. I

then moved on to watching a video posted by the Huffington Post that recapped

Obama’s stance on gun-control where he pledges advancement of laws fighting

gun violence “with or without Congress”. He directly references the tragedies of

the Colorado movie theatre shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary, and shopping

malls.

After the Huffington Post, I finally found a site that had written coverage of

multiple topics addressed by the president. Boston.com begins by summarizing

Obama’s statements on increasing the minimum wage paid by federal

contractors to $10.10. What makes this a big deal is that this an executive order

that can only be overturned by the Supreme Court (if they were to find it

unconstitutional) or by the passing of a law made by Congress that opposes the

order. The site then moves on to explain what was said about climate and

energy. Obama wants to set fuel-efficiency standards for trucks, which I think is

an awesome idea. He also wants to bring a focus to working with states and

communities on cutting their pollution, which is a pretty broad and generic

statement.