President Obama, Michelle and Sasha (Malia is away at camp) went on a vacation to Panama City Beach, Florida this weekend to encourage tourism to Gulf Coast beaches. “As a result of the clean up effort, beaches all along the Gulf Coast are clean, safe and open for business”, the president said.

To prove it, he took poor Sasha into the beach’s waters.

Generally, the official White House photostream only includes beautiful impeccable photos but in this photo Sasha doesn’t even have her eyes open, which leads me to believe the girl was in the water for 0.5 seconds. 

Readers, what do you think?

This page will be updated throughout the day.

ColorLines hit the streets in Los Angeles, Oakland and New York City to bring you images from demonstrations happening as on the first day of enforcement for the non-injoined sections of SB1070. You’ll also see photos from many organizational allies of our publisher, the Applied Research Center. Do you have video or pictures to share? Post links in the comments and we may feature them on this page, too.

New York

Photo by Naima Ramos-Chapman

Los Angeles

Photo by Jorge Rivas

Arizona

Protesters Block Sheriff Arpaio’s Jail Entrance (Photo by PuenteAZ/Anita Sarkeesian)

On Wednesday, protesters in Phoenix, Arizona scaled a downtown crane to display their message, “Stop hate, no 287g, no 1070,” linking the local racial profiling law with the federal policy of criminalization. The banner was unfurled at approximately 6:00 p.m. and remained on display for over an hour. The climbers released a statement that read, “Stopping the hate means not just stopping SB 1070 and Sheriff Arpaio in Arizona but stopping all the Arpaios that the President’s ICE access program is creating all across the country.” (Photo by PuenteAZ/Anita Sarkeesian)

San Francisco and Oakland

Golden Gate photo by jonathan mcintosh, Oakland photos: Hatty Lee

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Los Angeles

New York

Yesterday, in a segment titled “The Conversation: My Undocumented Life” ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed a young woman named Erika, an undocumented Arizona resident who has been in the U.S. since age 11. Sawyer produced a beautiful short interview where she put a face to those being affected by the harsh policies going in to affect today in Arizona.

It’s important to note Erika is identified as an “undocumented resident” and Sawyer never uses the term “illegal” and really develops a compelling narrative that illustrates the “collateral damage” of SB1070.

Since 2,000 NAACP delegates unanimously passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to condemn racism within its movement, everybody from Joe Biden to Sarah Palin has chimed in with opinions. Indeed, some Tea Partiers themselves have responded a bit too eagerly and proved the NAACP’s point in the process. The National Federation of Tea Parties had to expel both the Tea Party Express and its leader Mark Williams after Williams published a blog post in which he parodied the NAACP asking Abraham Lincoln to repeal emancipation:

How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society? 

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Meanwhile, NAACP offices across the country have received hate mail and death threats. The NAACP blog has posted an audio recording of a death threat left on the answering machine of its Hollywood bureau.

Still, debate over whether the NAACP was out of line with its resolution continues. The resolution charges that Tea Party supporters have engaged in “explicitly racist behavior” and have “displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically.” To wit, the organization compiled the slide show above. Judge for yourself.

Three weeks ago a “hot topics” discussion on ABC’s “The View” between host Sherri Shepherd and guest co-host D.L. Hughley stirred up controversy over an ongoing myth about the role gay men play in the HIV/AIDS epidemic among Blacks in the U.S.

D.L. Hughley presented his opinion as a fact: “When you look at the prevalence of HIV in the African-American community, it’s primarily young women getting it from men on the ‘down low.’ ” But as Centers for Disease Control and Prevention research has established, that’s just not true.

Since the original broadcast date on June 22nd, almost 3,500 people have written to ABC, according to organizers of the write-in campaign, asking that “The View” provide correct information to its audience. Wednesday, ABC finally responded.

After weeks of silence, ABC issued a statement–though certainly did nothing to clarify Hughley and Shepherd’s dangerous misinformation.

On June 22, during a discussion about blood donation and the transmission of HIV/AIDS, a guest moderator on the show expressed his interpretation of data about one way the virus can be transmitted. The topic of HIV/AIDS has been raised many times over the show’s 13 years, with many voices and opinions contributing to a conversation that we expect to continue as long as The View is on the air.

But the problem is Hughley and Shepherd’s comments weren’t presented as opinion, they were presented as fact. As an ad gay and AIDS activists placed in Variety noted, “When The View talks about these kinds of issues, people listen. And there’s a responsibility that comes with that.

GLAAD wants folks to continue to demand ABC and “The View” correct the show’s inaccurate claims.

Here’s CDC researcher and White House AIDS policy advisor Greg Millet explaining the truth about “down low” men and HIV at a White House briefing this spring: