In January, 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s bicep kiss started a new trend on Twitter. Now, “Kaepernicking,” as it’s called, has reached all the way to the White House.

Kaepernick this week tweeted out that he was lucky enough to meet the First Lady of the United States. It turns out Michelle Obama might be a football fan, as she posed with the quarterback in the infamous “Kaepernicking” pose:

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Colin Kaepernick
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I got the opportunity to meet one of the greatest women in the world, the first lady first_obama and… http://t.co/58kxGmmBkR

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This week, BuzzFeed is reporting that the NRA has asked Zombie Industries to remove a specific mannequin target from its booth at the NRA Annual Meeting last weekend. A booth-worker for the company told the publication that an NRA representative asked them to remove the mannequin because it looks too much like President Barack Obama.

Zombie Industries sells mannequin targets styled to look like zombies. The targets are life-sized and “bleed” pink goo when shot. The questionable mannequin is dubbed the “Rocky Zombie,” and does resemble the current U.S. president, despite being a bright shade of green.

Zombie Industries sells over a dozen different zombie mannequin target models, including a boar, a wolf, a kangaroo, a clown, a “nazi,” and a “terrorist” that greatly resembles Osama bin Laden.

The company’s zombies were featured last year in an episode of the Discovery Channel reality TV show Sons of Guns:

Zombie Industries has also posted some demonstration videos to YouTube:

(Image courtesy Zombie Industries)

The president apparently isn’t a fan of tattoos–at least not on his kids’ behalf–and says that if they ever come home with one, he and their mother will get the exact same design in the same spot on their bodies before showing it off on YouTube as a “family tattoo”. Of course, for two girls whose parents are the most famous and recognizable people in the country, one would think their embarrassment tolerance is a bit more elevated than that.

“Our thinking is that might dissuade them from thinking that somehow that’s a good way to rebel,” Obama said.

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According to an Associated Press report, a man in Bloomfield, Connecticut pulled out a rifle-sized BB gun on Monday as the presidential motorcade passed by. President Obama had just given a speech about gun control at the University of Hartford, and was on the way back to Bradley International Airport to board Air Force One.

The man was reportedly pacing back and forth while acting suspicious. He was arrested by police as soon as he pulled out the gun. The man’s name has not been released, though he was scheduled for a court hearing in Hartford on Tuesday.

Hartford is less than 50 miles from the site of the Newtown mass shooting that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School last December.

This year, congress delayed budget measures until the recent sequester resulted. That means that now even government employees will begin to be affected by the economic situation. If the government cuts laid out by the sequester are not covered in the near future, some government employees may be forced to take furloughs, less politely known as extended unpaid leave.

According to an Associated Press report, The White House this week has announced that President Obama will be making a gesture to show his solidarity with government employees who are facing the prospect of furloughs. The president will be returning 5% of his yearly salary to the U.S. Treasury.

Since 2001, U.S. Presidents have been paid an annual salary of $400,000. President Obama‘s symbolic contribution to the treasury amounts to $20,000.

Other U.S. politicians are also announcing that they will be giving up money in response to the sequester. According to the AP report, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will return 14 days’ worth of salary to the U.S. Treasury, which is symbolic of the two-week cut in pay Defense Department employees could end up taking. Alaska Senator Mark Begich has also announced he will return part of his salary to the treasury.

Fox Business News anchor Neil Cavuto brought Boone on his program recently to help critisize President Obama for some economic promises that didn’t pan out. Instead, Boone brought a copy of Rules For Radicals and stated that the book, written by Saul Alinsky, trained the president “to be a community organizer, a Marxist, a socialist, a progressive.” It was unclear exactly whether Boone was accusing Obama of being trained to be all of those things or if he was simply stating that they were qualities of the book’s author, but his message about the president was clear either way.

Even Cavuto couldn’t go as far as Boone, and ended up defending the president against Boone’s accusations. Cavuto tried to get Boone back on track by insinuating that such wild theories aren’t needed to criticize the president, but Boone powered through, and even made it personal by claiming Obama had placed him on some sort of “enemies list.”

“Well, I am a target,” said Boone. “I was on his enemies list in the first year of his presidency.”

Should news sites, bloggers and other sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google pay for the privilege of including snippets and links to news stories? Also, should YouTube or sites that include embedded videos of movie/TV clips pay every time somebody views them?

Give us your thoughts on this important topic that goes to the heart of the internet in the comments below.

Weinstein said, “Journalists don’t benefit when their stories are taken, and given a link. It would be like me launching a newspaper–call it Link—where I can have the greatest journalists in the world working for me without paying them. It’s inconceivable. If BMI and ASCAP can monitor the music business, we need a BMI and an ASCAP to monitor these businesses. This will be the one legislation for our industry that I’ll press.”

This would be part of a broader law that where a monitoring organization would also monitor the web for video clips and require websites like YouTube to pay this organization a fee for each view of a clip of a movie or television show.

As the publisher of WebProNews and a long-time advocate of the right to link, in my opinion Weinstein’s idea would destroy the internet as we know it today. The internet is based on the idea of linking, that’s why it was originally referred to as the World Wide Web! If you make publications, blogs, Google, Twitter and Facebook pay for linking to a news story, how many of them would still do it. The answer is none.

Weinstein may think he’s only talking about making news linking giants like Google News pay, but laws against free linking could not just apply to them. His proposed legislation would also have to apply to Reddit, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter and news publishers and bloggers who routinely republish snippets of news articles with links to the original. Many of these sites also inbed video clips as well.

Weinstein challenges the assertion by publishers that linking and taking small snippets of articles is not stealing content but is actually promoting the content. Weinstein equates linking and publishing as one and the same. Weinstein also told Deadline, “When it comes to journalists and journalism, I’m with you. It is important they get paid for good work, and wrong that others just take it, with a link.”.

Since most articles have numerous social buttons encouraging “sharing” their articles via social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, you would think it would be obvious to Weinstein that publishers and journalists want their stories to be linked to. The definition of going viral is mass sharing on social media sites which pushes huge numbers of people to a journalist article if he is so lucky. Linking drives traffic to an article which theoretically can then be monitized by the publisher. If the publisher doesn’t want the traffic he can put up a firewall login and charge visitors to read the sites content.

If a news site like Deadline doesn’t want its articles linked to then it shouldn’t publish them on a linking platform called the Web. Weinstein may be surprised to learn that Deadline and most news sites are quite happy that their articles get free traffic driven by links!

Just like the music industry, which has in the past sued the parents of kids who downloaded music without paying for it, Weinstein proposes that those linking to content should also have to pay up. He wants to do it a bit more tactifully than the RIAA, but still wants to collect nonetheless. His idea I presume is to first change the definition of fair use which is permitted per U.S. and many international copyright laws, where a website can take snippets of content and reuse it to a certain extent.

Theoretically, considering Weinstein’s personal connection with Obama, he could persuade the President to tighten this definition via some minor changes in regulations and rules and bypass Congress. The definition of fair use as written in U.S. copyright laws is vague and could easily be redefined via regulation. This is a scary proposition considering that linking and discussing news articles is integral to free speech.

Once fair use is redefined to allow copyright holders the ability to charge websites a retroactive fee for each time a visitor viewed a news summary and link, that’s when a new organization similar to BMI would emerge to ensure that journalists are paid for their work. BMI has people going into businesses, such as bars and restaurants, all around the country looking to see if music is being played without their license. When it catches a business playing unauthorized music it forces them to pay based on a variety of factors such as number of seats in a restaurant and number of songs played.

If a bar doesn’t join BMI and agree to pay a monthly fee up front, then often BMI will sue for huge amounts. For instance, one restaurant in North Carolina was order by a court to pay the BMI $30,450 for playing just four unauthorized songs.

This is what Weinstein wants for publishers and writers of news content! If you are a blogger that makes a small amount of money from ads and you include a snippet from a news article in your story you could be sued if you didn’t already agree to a monthly payment.

For Facebook, Google and Twitter the ramifications of this kind of heavy handed legislation could be huge. They are the YouTube of written content since so many of us share snippets and links via them. If sites like these need to license links with a BMI type organization, it’s likely that they would just eliminate news links and snippets altogether which would change the web forever… don’t you think?

“Last night, millions of Americans tuned into President Obama’s State of the Union address – and Bing stood alone in giving people a rare opportunity to give real-time feedback and access live social data at Bing.com/Politics,” says Mark Penn, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft. “Powered by Bing search technology and its unique social search experience, Bing’s State of the Union experience featured the breakthrough Bing Pulse – what turned out to be the largest live online poll in history.”

Bing partnered with FOX News on the site, offering what Bing described as a “non-partisan online destination designed to meet” the “growing need for up-to-the-minute political information and second-screen experiences”.

The Bing Pulse receieved 12.9 million votes, according to Bing, allowing people to join the conversation by “voting” every five seconds on their reactions to President Obama’s speech. Live results from the feature were shown on FOX News.

The search engine released the following infographic looking at real-time reactions to the speech:

Here’s a look at some findings from Twitter.

The gunman was taken into custody and police say they are investigating a motive, but for now it appears the shootings were completely random. The incidents occurred near a Rainbow Foods store in a suburb. It’s been reported that the man taken into custody–a 33-year old whose name has not been released–lives in the neighborhood.

Residents are stunned and saddened today as news of the child’s death spreads; in the last several weeks, following the horrendous shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, the media has been inundated with stories of tragic shootings that are getting national attention because of the ever-present conversation on gun control. President Obama has promised to make changes to gun control laws, but is coming against opposition from many sides. The president is expected to focus primarily on the economy in his State Of The Union address tonight, but many believe he will at least touch on the issue of gun control, especially since several victims of gun violence will be attending the speech–including former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

“When the president talks about guns, he’s going to have enormous support in the gallery and in the country. Ultimately we think he’ll have it in the Congress too,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

The hangout will come two days after Obama delivers the State of the Union address on Tuesday, when he will discuss the agenda for his second term in office.

Recently, Vice President Joe Biden participated in a Hangout, discussing gun violence. More recently, Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz discussed immigration reform.

“Much like the Fireside Hangouts held by Vice President Biden and Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz over the past few weeks, the President’s Fireside Hangout will include a group of people who regularly discuss important issues of the day online,” explains Google+ Politics’ Ramya Raghavan. “During the conversation, the selected participants will ask the President their own questions—but we’d also like to hear from you before the Hangout.”

Submit questions here.

The State of the Union address will be streamed live on YouTube, as will the Republican response from Senator Marco Rubio.