Friday Obama Caption Contest

President Barack Obama looks over the shoulder of Hannah Wyman, 11, as she demonstrates her project in the Blue Room, Feb. 7, 2012, during the second annual White House Science Fair celebrating student winners of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) competitions from across the country. Wyman, who attends St. Anna's School in Leominster, Mass., won the grand prize in her age group (9-12) for her video game "Toxic," in Microsoft's first-ever U.S. Kodu Cup. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Use the comments to add your own caption to for this photo.

Since Obama continues to showcase younger science & math students, let me continue my campaign to get the White House to recognize more nerds. Obama did call IMO individual runner up Evan O'Dorney and the Obama Administration continues to host MATHCOUNTS winners at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but ARML powerhouse Lehigh Valley continues to be left out in the cold. Getting the 2012 ARML winners an appearance with the President would be change I could believe in.

Did All The Female Republicans Defect In The War On Women?

That's the best explanation I can think of for why Reince Preibus put himself out front to deny the existence of a GOP war on women (claiming that it was as unreal as a GOP war on caterpillars). This is the kind of issue where you get some female Republican operative to do your talking for you. Your top male figurehead is not the person who should be doing this.

The fact that he expressed himself in a way where an insect species was mentioned as a parallel to "women" didn't help. I get the point he's trying to make, that these things are equally unreal, but it would've been more apt to choose something nicer-sounding, or an actual human demographic group like redheads or electricians or Anabaptists. Well, nobody has any idea who the Anabaptists were anymore, but the other two would've been better.

The substantive problem, of course, is that having a talking head come out and say "it's not happening" isn't going to help very much when Republican state legislators all over the country are restricting access to abortion and Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke for supporting contraception.

Hillary 2016? Wait And See

At some point, I'm going to have to say something about the possibility of Hillary Clinton running to be Barack Obama's successor, should he get a second term. And why not say a little bit of that now?

It can only be a little bit, because we haven't seen the Hillary 2016 campaign yet, and we don't know what kind of situation we'll be in then. Will the Supreme Court go nuts and overturn the ACA, and Hillary be supporting Medicare for All, a carbon tax, and free universal pre-K education? Then I'm very likely to support her. Will Hillary rehire Mark Penn, take herself to have the primary in the bag, and run a cautious centrist campaign in preparation for the general election? Then I'm against her, as we'll certainly have better candidates. In any event, a whole lot more has to happen before reasonable people can make up their minds.

Just as the 2006 and 2008 elections left the Republican Party with a fairly weak presidential primary field, they left us with plenty of excellent young Democratic Senators whom I'd be happy to see in a presidential race. I like Hillary well enough, but it's far too early for people on the left to have their minds made up.

It is a good time to give an early endorsement to the "Texts from Hillary" tumblr, however.

Different Parties, Different Goals

I realize it's the job of politicians to project confidence, but when I see Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) confidently predicting that the Court will uphold the ACA 6-3, I can't help but think that Pelosi, Obama, and really everyone else trying to point out that the individual mandate originated with the Heritage foundation and represent a tremendous compromise, are all playing one game, in which the goal is to enact sound, centrist public policy, and craft a legal argument based on existing based on existing precedent (to which, it should be noted, the Court is not necessarily bound), while basically every elected Republican and the conservative Justices are playing another game, in which the goal is for the Red Team to beat the Blue Team and therefore nothing else matters.

When Guns Aren't Outlawed, Dirty F***ing Hippies Will Have Guns

Over at Balloon Juice, Betty Cracker flags the difficulty local governments in the Tampa area are having in preparing for the Republican convention, noting that all sorts of paraphernalia are banned from the protest zone, except for actual firearms, thanks to a ban on firearm bans courtesy of Rick Scott, the NRA, and the Florida Legislature.

Oops.

It's worth noting that the quickest way to enact restrictions on walking around while carrying a gun is probably for the "wrong" kinds of people to start carrying firearms, causing a freakout among the people who wrote the laws in the first place.