Supporting Mothers

I love these #MothersDay cards drawn by students in the @GirlsAlliance community. Send one to your mom to thank her for supporting you—and if you can, donate to girls' education projects in her honor through the Girls Opportunity Alliance Fund. https://t.co/DqrrJE7GWh pic.twitter.com/YVLouTJ6zV

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) May 7, 2021

Happy Mother’s Day to @MichelleObama and all the moms celebrating today. I hope you take a moment to thank the women who love you in that special way that mothers do, and remember those who are no longer with us. pic.twitter.com/Uky8xMqHRl

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 9, 2021

I hope you take today to let all the mother figures in your life know how much you love them. I know I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for my mom. She's always been that guiding light in my life. Wishing her and all the moms out there a wonderful #MothersDay! 💖 pic.twitter.com/Qa1ePhSpOE

— Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) May 9, 2021

“When Women Succeed, America Succeeds”

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President Barack Obama speaks during his visit to Valencia College in Orlando, Florida

President Barack Obama talks to Valencia College student Carolyn Verno after she introduced him

President Barack Obama is greeted upon his arrival at the Orlando International Airport in Orlando, Florida

President Barack Obama announces new U.S. sanctions on the Russian economy following Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula

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President Obama Modernizes Overtime Protections

President Barack Obama signs a Presidential Memorandum directing Labor Secretary Tom Perez to modernize overtime protections. He is bypassing Congress and ordering changes in overtime rules so employers would required to pay millions more for extra time they put in on the job.

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A Year Of Action

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Sweet dreams and wake up tomorrow ready to continue the march for a more equal and just world. 😀

“Opportunity Is Who We Are”

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Frank Bruni: Obama’s Magic Three

First President Obama recognized Mary Barra, who was in the audience, noting that her childhood wasn’t a gilded one—she wasn’t born into corporate royalty. No, she got there by dint of toil and talent, a factory worker’s daughter rising to become the first female chief executive officer of General Motors. She’s the American dream personified. Then Obama recognized John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, as “the son of a barkeep.” He, too, landed far from where he began. He, too, took the kind of journey that we like to believe is uniquely possible in this country, the fabled land of opportunity.

But it was also a lens through which the rest of the speech could be heard, and it was the lens through which all of us should be evaluating the policies and direction of our country right now. In paying tribute to Barra, Boehner and Barack Obama, the president was paying tribute to social mobility, and he was correctly defining the chance to better oneself—to travel from the circumstances of one’s birth to the circumstances of one’s merit and labor—as this country’s central and sustaining promise. It’s essential to our national identity. It’s vital to our sense of honor and purpose. It’s the foundation of an optimism that seems to be fading fast. If we let “the American dream” become a storybook phrase, a quaint and saccharine anachronism, no longer broadly evident and no longer widely believed, then we’re in desperate trouble.

Over the next year and the ones after that, we as a country somehow need to make sure that decades from now, a president delivering his or her State of the Union can survey the spectators and see someone like Barra; can glance back and see someone like Boehner; and can look in the mirror and see someone like the man who bridged Kenya, Kansas and the White House.

More here

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Opportunity For All

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President Barack Obama arrives with PG&E apprentice electrician Erick Varela, a U.S. Army combat infantryman in Iraq who was previously homeless and unemployed after leaving the military and Vice President Joe Biden, to the East Room of the White House, to speak about helping the long-term unemployed.

President Barack Obama signs a memorandum directing the federal government not to discriminate against those long-term unemployed workers in its own hiring practices

Don Thompson, President and CEO, McDonald’s Corporation, Greg Brown, Chairman and CEO, Motorola Solutions, Inc., Vice President Joe Biden, President Barack Obama, Anne Zimmerman, President, Zimmerman & Co., CPAs, Inc. & Zimcom Internet Solutions, Gene Sperling, and Joe Echevarria, CEO, Deloitte LLP, gather in the State Dining Room of the White House