The Preznit of These United States spoke to Teh Gays yesterday, and he’s making a few Provisionally Happy Noises. Let’s listen in!

My attitudes are evolving on this. I have always firmly believed in having a robust civil union that provides the rights and benefits under the law that marriage does. I’ve wrestled with the fact that marriage traditionally has had a different connotation. But I also have a lot of very close friends who are married gay or lesbian couples.

Some of My Best Friends is rarely the best line to trot out, but we knew Obama’s take going in.

And, in fairness, by the way, that is true of every single group of supporters that I have. I mean, there’s not a single constituency that doesn’t think we could be doing more.

Hello, Mr. President!

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Happy Birthday President Obama [via “Michelle Obama” email]

Wingnut blogs are having a feeding frenzy today, as the National Enquirer re-breaks an old rumor from 2008:

Reports out of Washington, DC: PRESIDENT OBAMA in a shocking cheating scandal after being caught in a Washington, DC Hotel with a former campaign aide.

A confidential investigation has learned that Obama first became close to gorgeous 35 year-old VERA BAKER in 2004 when she worked tirelessly to get him elected to the US Senate, raising millions in campaign contributions.

While Baker has insisted in the past that “nothing happened” between them, reports reveal that top anti-Obama operatives are offering more than $1 million to witnesses to reveal what they know about the alleged hush-hush affair.

Among those being offered money is a limo driver who says in 2004 that he took Vera to a secret hotel rendezvous in where Obama was staying.

An ENQUIRER reporter has confirmed the limo driver’s account of the secret 2004 rendezvous.

As we’ve learned from John Edwards’ tryst with the alien baby momma, you can’t dismiss Enquirer reports out of hand — even when dealing with a fair-game elected politician, you figure they’ve run every syllable past the lawyers.

So what are they actually reporting?

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Obama to Indonesian media: “We have to acknowledge that those past human-rights abuses existed. We can’t go forward without looking backwards.” Their abuses, silly, not ours. [Greenwald]

Another Day, Another Billboard — this one in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, home of the Fightin’ Overalls. But soon as it went up, the guys who signed the deal started backing away from the responsibility:

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So they’re replaying the Brawl in Baltimore on the C-SPAN right now.  Post-jump, a blow-by-blow of what everyone was all excited about this afternoon, as it happened:

2000 (ET) — They’re setting it up now with some NYT hack.  Boring.  Which is what C-SPAN does best, naturally.

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We’re not fans of the Obama Teleprompter Meme, although we have to admit that setting up a pair in a classroom last week skews the optics. Of course, Administration flacks quickly corrected perceptions that Barry was talking to students — no, this was for the media, before the prompterless Q&A.

Which we like even better. It’s very easy to imagine this as the White House press room, which makes more sense of the level of intelligence on display there. And, for present purposes, it’s also quite easy to imagine this as Congress, with Joe Wilson heckling Teach from the back of the class.

So we’ll go with that, since we need some excuse to launch our State of the Union Open Thread/Cold Lunch. We swear we had something else prepared, but Bo ate our homework.