I LOVE this website! A new celebrity contributor each day adding an essay on why we should re-elect President Obama. TOday is Ben StillerHave a look at the last 68 days – they’re inspirational and informative, and a lot of the information I’d forgotten about, so I know others have too!

For the remaining 24 days until the election, BWFO will post each day’s new reason – today is day number 69:

REASON 69: President Obama has improved conditions for our active and retired military. 

I am not in the military. I have never been in the military. In fact, the closest I have come to serving was making a movie about actors making a war movie. Which, by the way, was a really hard shoot. We shot in Hawaii for like three months. And it was really muddy. And there were mosquitoes. It was hell.

Suzanne Gamboa

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Deidra Reese isn’t waiting for people to come to her to find out whether they are registered to vote.

With iPad in hand, Reese is going to community centers, homes and churches in nine Ohio cities, looking up registrations to make sure voters have proper ID and everything else they need to cast ballots on Election Day.

“We are not going to give back one single inch. We have fought too long and too hard,” said Reese, 45, coordinator of the Columbus-based Ohio Unity Coalition, an affiliate of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation.

Reese is part of a cadre of black women engaged in a revived wave of voting rights advocacy four years after the historic election of the nation’s first black president. Provoked by voting law changes in various states, they have decided to help voters navigate the system — a fitting role, they say, given that black women had the highest turnout of any group of voters in 2008.

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By Patricia Wilson-Smith

As the 2012 Presidential Election makes its way towards the ever-important party nominating conventions, African Americans in this country are busy waging a quiet war within over its continued support of President Obama.

The issue? His personal stance on same sex marriage.

Just this week, a group calling itself The Coalition of African American Pastors (CAAP) announced that they will actively oppose President Obama’s re-election bid on the basis of his evolved opinion of same sex-unions. As a “…grass roots movement of African American Christians who believe in family values”, they apparently liken gay marriage to something so heinous that they’re willing to cede the election to a party whose policies have done more to wreck the American family than anything else in this country ever could.

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In 2008, they were motivated, optimistic, and ultimately elated. Black women here and around the country weren’t just behind President Obama, they made history: among all racial, ethnic and gender groups, African-American women had the highest voter turnout rate, the first time that has ever happened. About 69 percent of voting-age black women cast ballots, nearly all for Obama.

Four years later, the mood has changed. The ground troops here haven’t lost their enthusiasm, but they admit the road ahead will be tougher. They see “doom and gloom” among some fellow Obama supporters that worries them.

“It’s hard to re-create the kind of excitement and energy of a first-in-history kind of scenario, but I think that support exists nonetheless,” said 47-year-old Valaida Fullwood of Charlotte, who volunteered extensively for Obama’s campaign in 2008.

Fullwood, a writer and consultant in philanthropy, added, “I don’t have the disposable income to commit in the ways I did before, taking off days and weekends and renting vans.” But she said she is still committed to the get out the vote in the general election. “Because of the emotional roller coaster that the last campaign brought, I know how to pace myself a little better. . I’m saving up for some endurance to help out in the final stretch.”

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On Saturday, July 7th, Judy Jones, State Chapter Director for Georgia and Donna McLeod, the National Director of Voter Outreach were featured on “Press Pause”, on WAEC 860 AM in Atlanta, the local talk show hosted by our Executive Director, Patricia Wilson-Smith. The topic was voter apathy, and the work our organization is doing to get out the vote. You can listen to the entire show by clicking below! Great job Judy and Donna!!!

By Patricia Wilson-Smith

It’s easy I suppose to get lost in the political theater of the recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld most major tenets of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) if you let yourself. I know I did. The photo attached to this particular post is making its way around the web, supposedly having caught the exact moment that both Speaker Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi found out about the court’s ruling. What red-blooded progressive worth anything wouldn’t relish the look on Boehner’s face, if in fact it is a snapshot of that very moment? Heck, there’s comedy here whatever the context!

Yes – it would be very easy for Progressives to slap each other on the back, and laugh out loud about “winning”, as if we were Charlie Sheen doing an interview while in a drug-induced stupor, but if you’re like me, once the reality of what the Supreme Court left in place hits you, you’d sober up pretty quickly, and start thinking about how very close we may have come to going back to a truly unacceptable state in this country. A state in which everything that the President and Democrats in Congress have spent the last three-plus years fighting for could have become a political pile of rubble, requiring a brand new round of sorting through to try and put some semblance of the original bill back together.  A state where meanwhile, elderly Americans would continue to be  forced into bankruptcy over the cost of their medications, and where 45,000 would continue to die each year from lack of insurance. That state.

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(Source: Elise Foley, HuffingtonPost.com)

The Obama administration responded to years of pressure from immigrants rights groups on Friday with an announcement that it will stop deportations and begin granting work permits for some Dream Act-eligible students.

“They pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,” President Barack Obama said of those young people in a press conference announcing the policy change.

Some 800,000 people are expected to come forward to receive deferred action from deportation, as first reported by the Associated Press on Friday morning. The policy change will apply to young undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, along the same lines as the Dream Act, a decade-old bill that passed in the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate in 2010.
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In April of this year, a rally was held on the steps of the Georgia State Capitol to protest the War on Women – a conservative operative videotaped portions of a speech given by the Executive Director of Black Women for Obama, Patricia Wilson-Smith. Her speech energized the crowd gathered there, and apparently made Conservatives a little nervous.