"Did any of the leftoid glitterati press think to question how many starving children in the world could be saved with $21 million?"
Yes, and can you believe they wasted all that money on that ostentatious display when we had a war going on and a tsunami that just killed thousands of people?
Why didn't they just have a quiet little chicken sandwich lunch - it would have been so much less insensitive, and they could have invited the starving children, too.
As Anthony Weiner, who is running for mayor of NY said, "Precedent suggests that inaugural festivities should be muted -- if not canceled -- in wartime"
But then again, he was talking of the inauguration of the Republican president, not a bunch of 20 million dollar orange curtains set up for two weeks in NY.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/18/MNG49AS6N51.DTL