President Obama and Vice President Biden sat down for a beer at the White House with a top African-American professor and the police officer who arrested him earlier this month.  After the meeting, Obama said in a statement he was thankful to Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley for joining him for “a friendly, thoughtful conversation.”  (CNN)

However, the meeting could have turned out another way:

From xkcd: A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language

From a National Review editorial:

President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu.  The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. 

Baby Barack’s birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.

Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. … Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.

In April, Slate came up with a highly original way to recap Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office: a parody Facebook feed marking key events in his early presidency.

See the rest of Obama’s Facebook page

President Obama sure knows how to use a teleprompter and cue cards!

He certainly has a smile that can light up a room.

Your tax dollars at work:  Our U.S. government has no problem spending a trillion dollars on an optional war in Iraq.  Or spending many trillions bailing out rich Wall Street bankers to reward their greed and avarice.  But when it comes to deploying a FREE, open-source Web browser on government computers?  Now you’ve really gone too far, man!

The U.S. State Department currently uses Microsoft Internet Explorer as its one and only Web browser.  At a town hall meeting led by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, a new State Department employee asked Clinton to “please let the staff use” the Mozilla Firefox browser.  The employee pointed out that Firefox had been “approved for the entire intelligence community,” and that it’s a “much safer program.”  The rookie’s question was met with a chorus of applause from the audience.

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A lichen found in the Channel Island National Park in California is the first species to be named after President Barack Obama.  It looks like orange moss and grows very slowly.  Lichen are the result of fungi and algae living together, and there are about 17,000 species of lichen in the world.

Kerry Knudsen, lichen curator of the University of California, Riverside Herbarium, discovered the species in 2007 while doing a lichen survey on Santa Rosa Island in California.  “I named it Caloplaca obamae to show my appreciation for the president’s support of science and science education,” he said.  “I made the final collections of C. obamae during the suspenseful final weeks of President Obama’s campaign for the United States presidency.”

Caloplaca obamae is the first organism to be named in honor of President Obama.  Note that former president George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney were also honored with species named after them.  Appropriately, both had slime-mold beetles named in their honor.

Story at LiveScience
More National Park News

What, Congress hasn’t plunged us deep enough in debt?  They won’t be happy until our future is completely mortgaged and the Chinese own America?

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he would consider supporting a second economic stimulus bill, but that people need to give the first package more time to work.  There have been many complaints that the $800 billion stimulus bill passed in February (without a single Republican vote) has failed to boost the U.S. economy.

While promoting the stimulus bill, the Obama administration said money would be paid out quickly and would save or create 750,000 jobs by early August.  Without the bill, administration officials argued that unemployment could top 9 percent by 2010.

Well, here we are in July 2009, and less than 10% of the stimulus funds have been allocated thus far, and over 2.3 million jobs have been lost since the bill was passed, resulting in a 9.5% unemployment rate.  Thus, the bill has failed terribly on both counts.  Does that mean the money was wasted?

“Certainly, I don’t think we can make a determination as to whether or not that’s been successful — certainly as successful as we want it to be, certainly not as quickly as we want it to be,” Hoyer said.  But he added that job losses have “substantially decreased” in recent months, and that the stimulus bill has prevented many people from being laid off from their jobs.  “In fact, we believe it is working,” he said.

Where’s the proof?

Story at CNN

Walt Handelsman has produced a catchy musical animation that describes the global recession and government bailouts in a parody of West Side Story.

Wor$t $lide $tory: A Musical Revue