Last year, President Obama issued an executive order to remove “limitations on scientific inquiry” affecting human embryonic and non-embryonic stem cell research. Yesterday, a federal judge named Royce C.  Lamberth may have slapped those limitations back on when he ruled against Obama’s order, saying that it violated a law first passed in 1996 and renewed each year since that bans “research in which a human embryo or embryos are destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death.”

Judge Lamberth issued a temporary injunction that returns federal policy to the “status quo” — only nobody knows what that means, and the distinction is not a trivial one for many scientists whose work involves embryonic stem cells:

How mirthful! During a recent speech on relations between the U.S. and Russia, President Obama accidentally referred to popular social media service Twitter as “Twitters.”

Obama: “[I have valued] very much the opportunity to hear president Medvedev’s vision for modernization in Russia, especially high tech innovation. It is a personal passion of the president. During his visit to Silicon Valley this week, he visited the headquarters of Twitters, where he opened his own account. I have one as well, so we may be able to finally throw away those red phones that have been sitting around for so long.”

This morning, former president George W. Bush jumped into the social media fray by joining Facebook. And his page is exploding in popularity: Whereas just an hour and a half ago, the Huffington Post reported that Bush had 560 ‘Likes,’ as of press, he’s got more than 12,000, with his count increasing by a few hundred after every few minutes’ refresh.

But if you’re expecting a joky, unbuttoned, Will Ferrell-style Facebook presence from #43, you may be disappointed:

Update: Bush has also joined Twitter as @George_WBush. Why the confusing underscore?

Update2: It’s not actually him, sry.

This is not an Onion headline: a geometry teacher in Alabama taught his students about parallel lines and angles using the charming example of assassinating President Obama.

The geometry teacher, who has not been named, was investigated by the Secret Service after word of his lesson got out, but the superintendent at the school where the teacher works, Corner High School, says that while the Obama assassination example showed “extremely poor judgment” on the teacher’s part, there are no plans to fire him.

President Obama delivered the commencement address at Hampton University in Virginia yesterday, and in a weirdly out-of-touch moment for a President who fought to keep his Blackberry, told the crowd of graduates that “with iPods and iPads and XBoxes and PlayStations…information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”

Kids today!

You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,” Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.

“With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,” Obama said.

Read on...

A Facebook group implicitly calling for the death of President Barack Obama now has more than 1 million members who ‘like’ it, and there’s no ban yet in sight, though there’s a rival group petitioning Facebook to remove the anti-Obama group as offensive speech.

The anti-Obama group is called “DEAR LORD, THIS YEAR YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTOR, PATRICK SWAYZIE. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE ACTRESS, FARAH FAWCETT. YOU TOOK MY FAVORITE SINGER, MICHAEL JACKSON. I JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW, MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS BARACK OBAMA. AMEN.” This is likely a riff on a letter circulating New Jersey teachers’ unions earlier this month that employed similar language with respect to (Republican) governor Chris Christie. The president of the New Jersey Education Association went on to issue a formal apology for the email.

While the members of the group might see it as a ‘joke,’ it seems to be calling for the death of a public figure in a pretty inflammatory way. Why hasn’t Facebook taken action?

ABC News is reporting that the Obama White House, in response to the SEC‘s suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, bought an ad for the Google search terms “Goldman Sachs SEC“ as part of an online ad campaign for financial reform. A simple search for those terms led to a page titled Organizing America that serves as a call to action for people frustrated with Wall Street.

According to Phil Noble, founder of Politics Online:

A keyword search for advertising is nothing new, but they have incorporated keyword searches into their daily war room activities. These guys are reacting to what’s in the news and creating a minute-by-minute strategy.

Goldman Sachs’ people weren’t slouches about it either:

President Obama is your new bicycle, or at least he was when that one particular example of many Barack-focused memes came to fruition. When it comes to revving up cool new memes, President Barack Obama is the name of the game, so it should come as no surprise that, aside from his feigning interest in mundane things, he also looks at awesome things like superhero gear (lots and lots of superhero gear). Blogger Dean Trippe has documented the details:

See Urlesque’s curated gallery of awesome things that Barack Obama is looking at.

Not even the White House can ignore the power of the Google. TechPresident picked up on this subtle use of phrasing by the White House blog to optimize the SEO of their posts … in this instance, how to cause them show up higher on Google search results.

Which was something the White House was extra interested in last week when the Internet was afire with health care reform:

Barack Obama – the same president who is a huge Spider-Man fan, casually drops references to dilithium crystals, and may or may not have made an “All Your Base Are Belong to Us” reference — further fortified his geek cred yesterday, when he bought Matt Reinhart‘s Star Wars: a Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy as a gift for his press secretary’s son.