Two Sonoma State students who were among the thousands present for the inauguration of President Barack Obama share their impressions of the historic event.

A crowd of well over one million people flooded into the Capitol Mall to hear and perhaps see a glimpse of the inauguration. Some 240,000 free tickets to the event were officially distributed beforehand.

You can read the full text of President Obama's inauguration speech here.

Noreen Evans (D-Santa Rosa) chairs the Assembly Budget Committee, and believes the budget actions taken Thursday were at least technically legal. But because they employed a never-before-used strategem, that's open to debate. Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters explains the issues here .

The incoming Obama administration gives a Sonoma State sociologist hope that the 1996 federal welfare reform policy will itself get some overdue reforms.

Dr. Shelia Katz studies the ways in which women who are receiving federal assistance can access higher education, and how that affects their lives and incomes thereafter.

Katz is also advocating that provisions for job training be included in any large public works jobs legislation that the new Obama administration promotes.

Not one but two Project Censored stories this past year came from the work of Matt Rothschild, editor of The Progressive magazine.

 Matthew Rothschild (below) the Editor of The Progressive magazine spoke last night at Sonoma State University, as part of Project Censored's Modern Media Censorship lecture series. Rothschild had two of his own stories selected by Project Censored for their Top 25 of th4e past year, including one about a shadowy partnership between the FBI and American businesses called InfraGard. You can read it here.

President Elect Barak Obama is on the cover of the current edition of The Progressive, but editor Matt Rothschild is openly skeptical about the cabinet picks and other early moves by the new chief executive.

Newspapers across the country are struggling to reinvent themselves and survive in the Internet age, but Rothschild suggests that the situation for niche magazines such as The Progressive is not so dire.

Much of Rothschild's other recent reporting has addressed the erosion of civil rights in this country over the past eight years, stories he has compiled in his most recent book, You Have No Rights:  Stories of America in an Age of Repression.