Oooh, Shiny!

Stephon stood just a few feet away from Barack Obama. The president, busy shaking hands, looked right at him. “It was like he was waiting for me to say something,” he said later.

So the 26-year-old Prince George’s Community College student took his cue and spoke to President Obama in his first language: American Sign Language.

“I am proud of you,” Stephon signed. The president, almost involuntary, instinctively, immediately signed back.

“Thank you,” Obama replied.

(via amiry)

thunderthor:

Winning the Birth Control Battle: How Obama just pwned The GOP with “one hell of a chess maneuver.”

thesoapboxschtick:

Obama’s plan in a nutshell:

 STEP #1: Mandate that all female employees have a right to free birth control through their employer’s insurance company (including females who work for religious organizations).

 STEP #2: Sit back for two weeks as religious right-wing conservatives go nuts condemning birth control as evil. Even though 99% of sexually active women (a lot of whom can vote) use birth control. 

 STEP #3: Watch as the Republican candidates, including front-runner Mitt Romney, are provoked in to attacking the popular birth control rule as “an assault on religious freedom.”

 STEP #4:Let the angry politicians go on all the major news networks to talk about your free birth control plan in front of millions of viewers, accidentally making you more popular and ensuring that you get all the credit for giving women greater access to contraception.

 STEP #5: Save the tapes from steps 2, 3, and 4!! Those will make wonderful campaign ads a few months from now when you’re running against that party. “I expect to see some ads in the fall showing Romney saying hostile things about contraception and health care reform, with the message that free birth control is going away if he’s elected.”

 STEP #6: Offer republicans a “compromise.” In which you exempt religious institutions from the law (as you were planning to all along) and, instead, require that the insurance company gives the free birth control directly to the female (instead of the company she works for). This does two things:

• Increases the likelihood that women will get birth control (because the insurance company must reach out to them, decreasing the chance that women out there will be unaware of the free converge).   
• Makes insurance companies happy by saving them money (because providing free birth control is much, much, much cheaper than providing coverage for abortion and childbirth procedures).

It’s a win win for Obama: Either the GOP accepts his “compromise” and agrees to expand birth control access to women (WIN!) or they continue to fight a losing battle in an election year (WIN!)…. Did I mention that female voters outnumber male voters at an average of 7 million per election?

(via amiry)