It’s an all girl baby names issue of Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel’s Nameberry 9 newsiest names this week.

Did you hear?  Barack Obama declined to offer baby name advice.

The president hosted a fireside chat on Google+ last week.  He tackled complex, divisive topics like the environment and the economy.

But baby names?

When writer and vlogger John Green introduced his wife, Sarah, and asked Obama if he’d help them choose a name for their second child, the president passed.

Had Green asked that question on the Nameberry forums, we would have all dived in fearlessly.  What’s your firstborn’s name?  Do you have any middles picked out?

Giving baby name advice is tough.  It means sorting names into the good and the bad, or maybe the good and the less good.  Explaining why we like a name is nearly impossible sometimes, isn’t it?  Explaining what we dislike can be too easy.

This week’s news was filled with gorgeous girls’ names representing every possible style and trend, from imports to underused classics to modern discoveries.

The nine most newsworthy baby names are:

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Click here for newest popular baby names.

Baby names 2012 are already proving themselves to be very different from last year’s choices, with The Hunger Games taking over from Twilight as the primary cultural influence on names, the hottest boys’ names taking a cue from the girls, and musical names trumping Hollywood for inspiration.

In an analysis of nearly 3 million views of Nameberry’s individual name pages in the first quarter of 2012 compared with the same period last year, these names are enjoying the biggest jumps in attention.  Here, our picks for the top baby names 2012:

Rue – Credit The Hunger Games, which has turned the spotlight on a range of exotic botanical names for girls, from the heroine’s name Katniss to gentle Primrose to Posy and Clove.  But the hottest choice for babies, according to the Nameberry statistics, is sleek, simple, if somewhat mournful Rue, the name of the agile young girl who meets a tragic end in the series.  In real life, however, we see Rue as having a bright future.

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