The White House has taken the novel step of starting a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help raise funds for Syrian refugees. In partnership with the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Prez has gone on Kickstarter with an appeal to the American people: please send money.

Back in February we told you that it had just become illegal, on a Federal (i.e national) level, to unlock a cell phone – yours or anyone else’s. This was owing to the Library of Congress’ inaction, specifically their failing to renew an exemption to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). The exemption is what made it legal to unlock a cell phone despite that otherwise the DMCA would prohibit it. Not only that, but starting next year, you could go to prison for five years for unlocking a cell phone without the carrier’s permission. Now President Obama is leaning on the FCC to make unlocking your cell phone legal.

Earlier this week President Obama paid a visit to Amazon’s immense distribution center in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The president praised, among other things, Amazon’s unique Career Choice tuition assistance program, which is available to all full-time Amazon employees, as well as Amazon’s job creation – Amazon had announced just a few days earlier plans to hire up to an additional 7000 workers across the country. But President Obama’s support for Amazon has brought howls of outrage from independent book stores and their trade organizations.

In an unprecedented presidential move, President Obama has called upon people to start using a Twitter hashtag: MY2K, in regards to the fiscal cliff. The MY2K (as in “my 2k” – the extra $2,000 that would come from the current tax cut extension being proposed) campaign calls upon Twitter users (and has crossed over to Facebook) to tweet what they would do with an extra $2,000 and use the hashtag MY2K.

Sometime in the past week somebody created and posted a poll on Facebook asking whether President Obama should be assassinated. The poll asked “Should Obama be killed?” The answer choices were “yes”, “no”, “maybe”, and “if he cuts my health care.”