(A Sprinkling of Things we Think you Ought to Know…)

Happy Birthday to FLOTUS – A Thursday afternoon email from Barack Obama is asking citizens to sign a virtual birthday card for his wife, Michelle. FLOTUS turns 48 years old on Tuesday. The email says, “This fall, Michelle and I will have been married 20 years. The next 10 months will be harder than any we’ve experienced together, and I couldn’t do it without her. I knwo she’d love to hear from you today.” Ok, fine, we signed the card..And then we were immediately directed to a donation page for the Obama re-election campaign. Really? Can’t I just re-gift the smoothie maker I got for Christmas?

Perhaps He Should Be on the Steer-ing Committee – Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) loves his beef. In a recent NYT profile, he admitted that when he travels to Washington, D.C. from his home state, he packs his luggage with “roasts, ribs, round steak and rib steak.” In Tester’s eyes, there’s no beef in D.C. quite like the beef he gets back home in Montana. Tester continues, “Taking meat with us is just something that we do,” Senator Tester, 55, said over a meal of beef stroganoff cooked by his wife, Sharla, in their Capitol Hill town house. “We like our own meat.” What’s the best way to eat meat of such high quality? According to the Tester’s, their favorite recipe is “smothered in canned cream-of-mushroom soup and a squirt of ketchup, cooked down in a slow cooker.”

Soledad Versus Jodi Kantor – Soledad O’Brien pulled no punches with NYT’s Jodi Kantor Friday morning on CNN. HuffPost reports that Kantor, out promoting her book, The Obamas, had to defend the portrait she painted of FLOTUS in the book. Michelle Obama has spoken out about how this isn’t the first time someone has tried to make her out to be the “angry black woman.” Check out the video of the two journos scrapping.