Remember when President Obama promised to bring the country together? Ah yes, Obama, the great uniter who didn't believe in a red America or a blue America, just the United States of America. Those days are long gone, that is if they were ever here in the first place and American Crossroads just released a new ad to prove it.

David Limbaugh is also out with a new book today called The Great Destroyer, which details Obama's divide and conquer strategy throughout his first term.

Fox News host Neil Cavuto is in Wisconsin ahead of tomorrow's recall election and sat down with Governor Scott Walker to discuss how he's feeling about his position in the race. Walker finds it strange President Obama hasn't been campaigning for his opponent in a state that usually swings blue. Last week RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who is also from Wisconsin, told reporters, "courage is on the ballot and courage is right next to Scott Walker's name."

The White House wants to know, do you support equal pay for women?

Did You Know That Women Are Still Paid Less Than Men?

On average, full-time working women earn just 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. This substantial gap is more than a statistic -- it has real life consequences. When women, who make up nearly half the workforce, bring home less money each day, it means they have less for the everyday needs of their families, and over a lifetime of work, far less savings for retirement.

The gender wage gap puts women at a career-long disadvantage

President Obama supports passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which Congress puts to a vote on June 5. This comprehensive and commonsense bill updates and strengthens the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which made it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who perform substantially equal work.

I want to know, does the White House support equal pay for women? Funny, did you know that women working in the White House get paid less than men?

Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).

Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.

Hypocrisy at its best.

A new Rasmussen Report shows Mitt Romney beating President Obama by a four point margin.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows Mitt Romney picking up 47% of the vote, while President Obama attracts 44%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and five percent (5%) are undecided.

These figures include 40% who are certain they will vote for Romney. Another seven percent (7%) plan to vote for Romney but could change their minds. For Obama, the figures are 36% certain and eight percent (8%) likely. Eighty-six percent (86%) of seniors are certain of their choice, along with just 64% of those under 30.

Meanwhile, a new CNN poll shows Romney gaining steam when it comes to his favorability rating, but that Obama is still more popular.

According to a CNN/ORC International survey released Monday, Romney's favorable rating among Americans has jumped from 34% in February, during the heat of the divisive GOP presidential primaries, to 48% now. Forty-two percent say they see the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and former Massachusetts governor in a negative light.

While rising 14 points since February, Romney still trails the president, who currently has a 56% favorable rating, with 42% saying they hold an unfavorable opinion of Obama. The president's favorable and unfavorable ratings are unchanged from CNN polls in March and April.

“The biggest gap between Obama and Romney's favorable ratings is among younger Americans. More than two-thirds of those under 30 have a favorable view of Obama, compared to only four-in-ten who feel that way about Romney. Romney is much stronger among senior citizens, but the gap is not nearly as big," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Romney may have a small advantage among independent voters, but that is offset by his lower favorable rating among Republicans than Obama has among Democrats."

Last night in Racine, Wisconsin, while demanding jobs for the unemployed, Jesse Jackson decided to slam job creating gun dealers and called for a march on gun shops all over the country. h/t Katy Abram

"Guns out, jobs in."

Jackson wants to get rid of the very thing that has kept the economy afloat during Obama's presidency. The firearms industry has not only created jobs in the past three years but has also provided the government with a steady revenue stream.

NSSF today released a newly commissioned report detailing double-digit gains in jobs and other data showing the industry has been a leader in the nation’s economic recovery. The report can be viewed at http://nssf.org/impact.

Firearms industry members on Capitol Hill were briefed on such remarkable statistics as the 30.6 percent increase in jobs between 2008 and 2011, a 66.5 percent increase in economic impact and a 66.5 percent increase in federal taxes paid by industry companies.

Armed with the good news of the report and recognizing that jobs and the economy are of major importance in the November elections, industry executives are meeting today with elected officials during the NSSF-sponsored Congressional Fly-In.

“During difficult economic times and high unemployment rates nationally, our industry actually grew and created more than ten thousand new, well-paying jobs,” said NSSF President Steve Sanetti. “Our industry is proud to be one of the bright spots in this economy.”

More:

Companies in the United States that manufacture, distribute and sell firearms, ammunition and hunting equipment employ as many as 98,752 people in the country and generate an additional 110,998 jobs in supplier and ancillary industries. These include jobs in companies supplying goods and services to manufacturers, distributors and retailers, as well as those that depend on sales to workers in the firearms and ammunition industry. [1]

These are good jobs, paying an average of $46,858 in wages and benefits. And today, every job is important. In fact, in the United States the unemployment rate has reached 8.2 percent. This means that there are already 13,430,000 people trying to find jobs in the state and collecting unemployment benefits. [2]


Not only does the manufacture and sale of firearms and hunting supplies create good jobs in the United States but the industry also contributes to the economy as a whole. In fact, in 2012 the firearms and ammunition industry was responsible for as much as $31.84 billion in total economic activity in the country.

The Country Also Benefits from the Taxes Paid by the Industry

Not only does the firearms and ammunition industry create jobs, it also generates sizable tax revenues. In the United States the industry and its employees pay over $2.07 billion in taxes including property, income, and sales based levies. [3]

Hey Jackson, don't bite the hand that feeds you.

In yet another transparent move by the most transparent administration in history, the House Oversight Committee is being stonewalled by the Obama administration in it's investigation into the wasted $500 million taxpayer funded "green" Solyndra loan. Getting more information about the loan is being described at "pulling teeth."

“I’m not satisfied with the White House’s compliance with the subpoena for documents and records related to Solyndra,” Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, told POLITICO in a statement.

“The initial deadline for producing the requested documents was Feb. 21 and they are still withholding these records,” he added. “The subpoena is now 7 months old and President [Barack] Obama, who promised the most transparent administration in history, continues to thwart the subcommittee’s constitutional responsibility to provide oversight.”

The White House didn’t comment Thursday but it has said repeatedly that it has provided a wealth of information to the House in repeated document dumps — and that Republicans have little to show for their efforts.

“After a yearlong investigation that has produced no evidence to support their claims, we wish congressional Republicans showed as much interest in jobs and the economy as they do in investigating a loan from three years ago that was made on the merits,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said in a typical statement in February.

It's no surprise the White House isn't giving Congress the dirty details on Solyndra considering the Romney campaign has been using it successfully as an example of Obama's failed green agenda at the expense of taxpayers at a time when voters believe the economy will be the most important election issue.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is in Indiana today campaigning and fundraising for Tea Party backed Senate candidate Richard Mourdock, who beat out long time Republican Senator Richard Lugar in a heated primary race last month. Mourdock has received endorsements from former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and conservative Michelle Malkin. Mourdock winning the general election is crucial to Republican efforts to flip the Senate in November.

In New York City you can't buy a big gulp or vote Republican apparently. A group of Long Island police officers are claiming they were demoted for not falling in line with the typical New York Democratic machine.

Six Long Island cops claim their commissioner is putting politics before the badge.

The Long Beach crime fighters say they’ve been targeted by the seaside town’s Democratic machine for supporting GOP candidates in local elections last year.

Long Beach Police Commissioner Michael Tangney, a longtime Democrat, demoted the cops, cut their overtime, switched them to midnight tours and even filed false internal charges against them for “political payback,” the veteran officers claim in a $39 million lawsuit.

“It’s just the way politics work in this town,” Tangney allegedly told one of the officers while demoting him.

The city and the PBA have denied the allegations as "false" and "frivolous," and said they would aggressively defend themselves against the lawsuit.

Aren't liberals supposed to be the tolerant ones?

A simple way to help prevent voter fraud and election abuse is for states to purge voter rolls. What does this mean? Getting rid of names on voter rolls of people ineligible to vote such as illegal aliens, dead people, duplicates, etc. For nearly a year, Florida election officials have asked the Department of Homeland Security for access to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement database in order to take illegal aliens and non-citizens off Florida voter rolls. Not surprisingly, DHS has been dragging its feet and has yet to comply with the request and now, the Department of Justice is stepping into the purging process and ordering Florida, a vital swing state, to stop.

The Justice Department sent a letter to Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner Thursday evening demanding the state cease purging its voting rolls because the process it is using has not been cleared under the Voting Rights Act, TPM has learned.

DOJ also said that Florida’s voter roll purge violated the National Voter Registration Act, which stipulates that voter roll maintenance should have ceased 90 days before an election, which given Florida’s August 14 primary, meant May 16.

Five of Florida’s counties are subject to the Voting Rights Act, but the state never sought permission from either the Justice Department or a federal court to implement its voter roll maintenance program.

But who is really behind the letter? Mean radical DOJ attorney Elise Shore. Christian Adams has more:

What do we know about Elise Shore from the installment about the Voting Section?

    Elise Shore. Ms. Shore came to the Voting Section by way of the “Southern Coalition for Social Justice,” where she worked as a legal consultant focusing on “voting rights, immigrant rights, and other civil rights and social justice issues.” The far left-wing positions of this group are nicely summarized on its website. Ms. Shore also made a $1,000 contribution to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

    Before joining the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, she worked for more than two years as a Regional Counsel for MALDEF [Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund]. There, she was an outspoken critic of Georgia’s voter ID law and well as its proof of citizenship requirements for voter registration (which, incidentally, have been found to be non-discriminatory by a federal court) and described how heartened she was that the Civil Rights Division had objected to the registration law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. But her joy must have been fleeting: the Division later capitulated and withdrew its objection after Georgia filed a federal declaratory judgment action. It will be interesting to see if Shore can put her politics to the side in her role as the Voting Section’s point of contact for all redistricting submissions in the state of Florida.

FLASHBACK: Florida says at least 180,000 non-citizens sitting on voter rolls

Florida election authorities are examining about 180,000 people who they say may not be U.S. citizens but are registered to vote in the state, an official said on Friday.

State officials are updating Florida's voter rolls ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. Florida is home to a large Latino population and is expected to be a critical swing state in the contest between Democratic President Barack Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Officials in Florida have so far identified more than 2,600 potential voters who may not be U.S. citizens and sent their information to local election authorities, Cate said.

As Guy wrote earlier, former President Bill Clinton defended Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital last night on CNN, despite ongoing attacks from the Obama campaign against Romney's private sector experience. Now, Romney is showing appreciation for Clinton's factual support.

It is well known by now that the Mexican government and ATF officials working in Mexico from 2009-2011, were left completely in the dark about Operation Fast and Furious, the lethal program run mainly out of the Obama Justice Department. As a quick refresher, under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, ATF deliberately placed 2500 high powered AK-47s and .50 caliber rifles into the hands of ruthless Mexican drug cartels in order to push an unpopular, anti-Second Amendment regulation agenda around Congress and behind the backs of the American people.

Yesterday, Mexican Ambassador to the United States Arturo Sarukhan was on Capitol Hill participating in a forum hosted by the New Democrat Network, a liberal think tank, and confirmed that not only was Mexico left in the dark about the operation but that they have opened their own investigation. The Los Angeles Times has more:

"Mexico was never apprised how the operation would be designed and implemented," Sarukhan told officials at a forum hosted by the New Democrat Network, or NDN, a center-left think tank and advocacy organization, and the New Policy Institute, one of its sister organizations.

"Regardless of whether this was or was not the intent or the design of Fast and Furious," Sarukhan said, "the thinking that you can let guns walk across the border and maintain operational control of those weapons is really an outstanding lack of understanding of how these criminal organizations are operating on both sides of our common borders."

He added that the ill-conceived operation had "poisoned the wellsprings" of public opinion in Mexico, putting strains on the strides that had been achieved between the United States and Mexico in combating illegal gun trafficking.

Sarukhan's remarks come as contempt charges loom for Attorney General Eric Holder due to non-compliance with a Congressional subpoena.

Blogger and online radio host Ben Howe has produced an amazing video channeling the late Andrew Breitbart's "two paths." Are you in the bunker?

Hilarious

The job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are out and they don't look good. The unemployment rate has gone up from 8.1 percent to 8.2 percent with the economy adding just 69,000 jobs in May after economists predicted the economy would add at least 150,000 jobs. That's a significant shortfall. Not to mention, this percentage doesn't include those who have given up looking for work. The labor participation rate sits at 63.8 percent, meaning 36.2 percent are not participating or actively looking for work. Job growth has also been deemed as slowed and long term unemployment is still a major problem.

UPDATE: Romney reacts:

“Today’s weak jobs report is devastating news for American workers and American families. This week has seen a cascade of one bad piece of economic news after another. Slowing GDP growth, plunging consumer confidence, an increase in unemployment claims, and now another dismal jobs report all stand as a harsh indictment of the President’s handling of the economy. It is now clear to everyone that President Obama’s policies have failed to achieve their goals and that the Obama economy is crushing America’s middle class. The President's re-election slogan may be ‘forward,’ but it seems like we've been moving backward. We can do so much better in America. That's why I'm running for president.”

UPDATE II: RNC responds, are you better off?

We're just days away from the Supreme Court's decision about whether ObamaCare is constitutional and just a few months away from November. President Obama asked supporters for a second term so he can "re-do" health care, implying he thinks the bill will be struck down.

FLASHBACK: Obama 'confident' Supreme Court will uphold health care law

“I’d just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law,” Obama said during a Rose Garden news conference. “Well, this is a good example. And I’m pretty confident that this court will recognize that and not take that step.”

In case you're wondering, Americans still loathe ObamaCare with just 35 percent supporting it.

Amid a budget debate that will affect the health care of virtually every family, a new poll finds support for President Barack Obama's overhaul at its lowest level since passage last year.

But in a ringing defense of Obama's policies, Medicare chief Donald Berwick pleaded Tuesday for more time on the health care law, and branded a leading Republican plan "unfair and harmful" and "a form of withholding care."

The Associated Press-GfK poll showed that support for Obama's expansion of health insurance coverage has slipped to 35 percent, while opposition stands at 45 percent and another 17 percent are neutral. That nearly ties the previous low in September 2009, when after a summer of heated town hall meetings dominated by critics, only 34 percent supported Obama's approach.

Democrats in the House of Representatives have voted down a bill that would ban sex selective abortions after two videos surfaced this week showing Planned Parenthood employees advising women about how to abort their child should it be a girl instead of a boy. LifeNews has more:

The legislation needed a two-thirds vote and Democrats voted overwhelmingly against the legislation after President Barack Obama and Planned Parenthood came out in opposition.

With a 246-168 vote, the bill did not obtain the two-thirds majority necessary to pass. Republicans voted for the bill on a 226-7 margin while Democrats opposed banning sex-selection abortions on 161-20 vote margin.

Right, because a woman's "right to choose" includes aborting a child because it happens to be the wrong gender.....keeping it classy dems! And liberals claim to be the party for women.

President of Live Action, the group who exposed Planned Parenthood for encouraging sex selective abortions against baby girls, Lila Rose has issued a statement:

“We applaud the brave leaders in Congress such as Rep. Trent Franks for leading the charge against the abhorrent practice of sex-selective abortion.  The struggle to stop gendercide is a bipartisan issue--more Democrats voted in support of the ban than Republicans against—but the battle is far from over.
 
“We will continue to release the results of our national investigation into Planned Parenthood and other U.S. providers that are facilitating the brutal and lethal discrimination against girls in the womb. The public deserves to see the truth about how Planned Parenthood and their abortion industry allies, backed by the President, facilitate the late term targeting of girls, especially as we approach a historic election."

Two cups instead of one? It seems Mayor Bloomberg has forgotten what a refill is.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

In a very savvy political move, Mitt Romney made a surprise campaign stop at the bankrupt ($500 million at taxpayers expense) Solyndra plant today. The stop was kept secret until Romney's arrival, but he gave reporters a hint about the Solyndra appearance last night at a fundraiser.

At a fund-raiser in the San Francisco area Wednesday night, Mr. Romney again talk about the solar panel company, portraying the president as a failed venture capitalist who unsuccessfully tried to have government pick winners and losers.

“Have you seen the Solyndra corporation headquarters? You probably have,” Mr. Romney asked the crowd. “That’s what happens when government puts in hundreds of millions of dollars into an enterprise. And by the way, the president doesn’t understand when you invest like that in one solar energy company, it makes it harder for solar technology generally because the scores of other entrepreneurs in the solar field suddenly lost their opportunity to get capital. Who wants to put money into a solar company when the government puts half a billion into one of its choice? So instead of encouraging solar energy, he discouraged it.”

And in case you need a reminder about what Solyndra is:

A federal judge has ruled the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, setting up a battle over the law at the Supreme Court.

The three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston ruled that the provision defining marriage as between a man and woman is unconstitutional in that it denies gay couples the rights granted to heterosexual couples.

The unanimous decision once again brings the issue of gay marriage to the fore of the nation's political debate. It comes just a few weeks after President Obama announced his support for gay marriage -- in the wake of that announcement, some gay advocacy groups have stepped up pressure on Washington to fight DOMA.

The Obama Justice Department stopped enforcing DOMA more than a year ago.

Consequently, the Department will not defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of DOMA as applied to same-sex married couples in the two cases filed in the Second Circuit.   We will, however, remain parties to the cases and continue to represent the interests of the United States throughout the litigation.   I have informed Members of Congress of this decision, so Members who wish to defend the statute may pursue that option.   The Department will also work closely with the courts to ensure that Congress has a full and fair opportunity to participate in pending litigation.  

Furthermore, pursuant to the President ’ s instructions, and upon further notification to Congress, I will instruct Department attorneys to advise courts in other pending DOMA litigation of the President's and my conclusions that a heightened standard should apply, that Section 3 is unconstitutional under that standard and that the Department will cease defense of Section 3. 

Nancy Pelosi is certain ObamaCare will be upheld by the Supreme Court next month by a 6-3 vote because.....she knows the Constitution.

"Because I know the Constitution. This bill is iron clad, it is iron clad. Nobody was frivolous with the Constitution and the health of the American people when writing the bill [ObamaCare]."