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Michelle Obama: ‘We Want to Honor and Embrace All…Faith Traditions’

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Photo Credit: APAt a White House Diwali celebration on Tuesday afternoon, First Lady Michelle Obama said that she and her husband wanted to celebrate all the faith and culture traditions ‘that make us who we are as Americans.”

Even as she was saying this, there were 200 plaintiffs pursuing 77 lawsuits asking federal courts to protect their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion from a regulation issued by the administration under Obamacare that requires health insurance plans to cover sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion inducing drugs and devices.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty maintains a website that tracks the lawsuits.

The plaintiffs range from the Hobby Lobby stores to the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. In September, the Department of Justice appealed the Hobby Lobby case to the Supreme Court, asking the court to force the family that owns Hobby Lobby to act against their Christian faith by making them buy insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

“As you may know, we’ve celebrated this holiday here at the White House every year since Barack took office,” Mrs. Obama said at the Diwali celebration.

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Obamacare Site Designer CGI Federal Executive Spent ‘Christmas with the Obamas’

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Photo Credit: Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton, facebook.com/tonitwhitley
Michelle Obama’s relationship with Princeton classmate Toni McCall Townes-Whitley, whose company earned the no-bid contract to design the disastrous Healthcare.Gov Obamacare website, continued after the Obamas moved into the White House.

Townes-Whitley and her husband even enjoyed “Christmas with the Obamas” at the White House in December 2010, according to a Facebook album created by Townes-Whitley.

Although neither Michelle Obama nor Townes-Whitley has discussed their relationship, the Christmas event took place just seven months after Townes-Whitley joined CGI Federal as a senior vice president.

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Michelle Obama’s Princeton Classmate is Executive at Company that Built Obamacare Website

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Townes-Whitley and her Princeton classmate Michelle Obama are both members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998.

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Michelle Obama’s ‘Just Move!’-Inspired Stamps Halted Due to Safety Concerns

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Photo Credit: Letsmove.govThe U.S. Postal Service halts its Michelle Obama-inspired “Just Move!” stamp series because many of the children depicted in the stamps aren’t wearing safety gear, The Daily Caller reported.

“The stamps are on hold with the printer and we have not made a decision at this point, right now, with respect to how we are going to move forward,” a USPS spokesman told the website.

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Michelle Obama has Nearly 2 Million Fake Twitter Followers

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

…According to the Twitter analytics application Status People, 37 percent of Michelle Obama’s 5,290, 506 Twitter followers — or approximately 1,957,487 followers — are considered fake. Thirty-five percent of her followers are inactive, and 28 percent are considered “good,” or real…

Percentage-wise, she still fared better than President Barack Obama. Over half of Obama’s Twitter followers, according to a Sept. 20 Daily Caller report, are fake – 55 percent, or 20.2 million out of 36.8 million followers, to be more exact.

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Obama: Even Michelle’s Answer on War ‘is No’

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michelle-obama-photo1President Obama acknowledged Monday that even his wife, Michelle, is skeptical of having the U.S. become embroiled in another overseas military conflict.

Obama, in a number of television interviews taped Monday, used his wife to drive home the point that he understands most Americans remain skeptical of his proposal for a limited strike in Syria.

“If you ask somebody, if you ask Michelle, ‘Do we – do we want to be involved in another war? The answer is no,” Obama told NBC. “People are wary about it, understandably.”

The administration has consistently made the point that any action would be limited in scope, and it has denied that it would constitute a war.

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After Eating Burgers, Ribs Throughout America, Obama Claims to Child that Broccoli is his Favorite Food

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Photo Credit: ReutersPresident Barack Obama likes burgers, hot dogs and such, but when it came time to answer a kid journalist’s question about his favorite food, broccoli was the first word that sprang from his lips.

This revelation came on Tuesday at a White House event that recognized children who won a healthy recipe contest, as part of first lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.

Having fun with the children, Obama agreed to take two questions from the journalists among them. The first asked what was Obama’s favorite food. Broccoli was the presidential reply, according to a White House aide.

This from a politician who has literally eaten his way across the country: Burgers in a Washington suburb with Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev; ribs in Asheville, North Carolina; hot dogs at a basketball game in Dayton, Ohio; and a tasty pastry called a kringle in Wisconsin.

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Officer Cleared of Threatening Michelle Obama But Guilty of Calling Barack a Commie

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Photo Credit: Carolyn Kaster/APA District police officer accused of threatening Michelle Obama has been cleared of administrative charges related to the first lady but was found guilty of posting a derogatory job description on social media and depicting the president as a communist, his attorney said Monday.

Members of a departmental review board ruled that Christopher Picciano, a 17-year veteran who was a member of the elite presidential motorcade detail, should be suspended without pay for 40 days for conduct unbecoming an officer. His attorney, James W. Pressler, said his client is weighing an appeal. The city had sought to have Picciano fired.

“We’re pleased that he was exonerated of all allegations that he made threats against the first lady,” Pressler said. “He has maintained from the beginning that it was an off-the-cuff remark, a joke.”

The U.S. attorney’s office had declined to file charges against the officer, agreeing with the Secret Service that Picciano was not serious with his comment about Michelle Obama. But during the investigation, detectives found troubling though unrelated postings on the officer’s LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

Those included a communist emblem — a hammer and sickle — superimposed over a campaign poster of President Obama and Picciano’s self-described job description as “zoo keeper of the MPD.”

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Michelle Obama: Being First Lady is Like Living in a ‘Really Nice Prison’

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

First Lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday described living in the White House as like being in a “really nice prison.”

Obama’s comment came during her discussion with former First Lady Laura Bush at the African First Ladies Summit in Tanzania during an interview moderated by journalist Cokie Roberts…

Obama said she loved her job and found it liberating in some respects, but confining in others.

“There are some prison elements to it,” she joked. “But it’s a really nice prison.”

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Michelle Obama Compares Her Upbringing to that of an African Child’s

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Photo Credit: Getty

Photo Credit: Getty

In Dakar, Senegal, speaking at the Martin Luther King Middle School, First Lady Michelle Obama likened her upbringing to the upbringing of the Senegalese children at the school. Obama told the children of her “experience,” and how it was similar to theirs.

“I know that what you all are doing here isn’t always easy,” the first lady said to applause. “I know that some of you may be the first in your families to attend a school like Martin Luther King, so there might be people at home who don’t quite understand what you’re going through as you work to succeed here. And I know that for some of you, just sitting in these classrooms each day requires great sacrifices by your families.”

“I know a little bit about this from my own experience. See, like many of you, I didn’t grow up in a family with a lot of money. My parents had to work hard every day to support us, so they never had the chance to get the kind of education they wanted for themselves. But they had big dreams for me. And more than anything in the world, they wanted me to graduate from secondary school and attend a university. So they, too, made tremendous sacrifices to make that dream come true,” the first lady continued.

My father worked at the city water plant nearly every day of his life — a job made more difficult because of his illness called Multiple Sclerosis, which damaged his muscles and made it harder for him to walk as he got older. But no matter how tired he was, no matter how much pain he was in, every morning, my father would pull himself out of bed would go to work to support our family. (Applause.)

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