President Obama addressed several key issues in his 2014 State of the Union address, as summarized through news reports. He focused on advancing equal opportunities for women in the workplace. Obama also pledged to advance gun control laws to address gun violence, referencing recent mass shootings. Additionally, he issued an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 per hour, which could be overturned by Congress or the Supreme Court. Obama further called for increasing fuel efficiency standards for trucks and working with states to reduce pollution.

1. 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

2. 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.