Signs of another debt ceiling fight emerged Wednesday as President Obama hosted Congressional leaders at the White House. Press Secretary Jay Carney said the president warned against another last-minute deal to raise the debt limit, even as House Speaker John Boehner insisted this week on spending cuts equal to or higher than the amount the debt ceiling is raised. 

While his immediate audience was the 600-member Barnard College class of 2012, the commencement speech President Obama delivered on Monday was clearly aimed at an even bigger group –- all women voters, an essential voting bloc for his re-election bid.

The president empathized with the all-women class over their professional and personal challenges, including issues like fair pay and access to contraception. He also criticized Congress, spotlighting the ever-popular women in his life and sharing his own personal story.

“As young women, you're also going to grapple with some unique challenges like whether you’ll be able to earn equal pay for equal work. Whether you’ll be able to balance the demands of your job with your family. Whether you’ll be able to fully control decisions about your own health,” the president said.

He suggested that the lives of all Americans are improved when women are afforded those abilities.

“Indeed, we know we are better off when women are treated fairly and equally in every aspect of American life, whether it's the salary you earn or the health decisions you make.”

Obama said he had confidence in the graduates because, in a statement that seemed geared more towards his 2008 supporters, he’s seen them “engage and turn out in record numbers.”

“As tough as things have been, I am convinced that you are tougher,” he continued. “I've seen your passion and your service.”

Obama’s re-election chances could very well hinge on whether women turn out and vote for him in November. In 2008, according to the exit polls, the president beat John McCain by seven percentage points among all women. A recent NBC/WSJ poll showed Obama leading presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney among female voters by 12 points.

Obama’s three-pronged advice for the graduating women began with the entreaty to not just get involved but “fight for your seat at the table.”

Alluding to the recent congressional spats over women’s access to contraceptive care, the president suggested that the issue may have been nipped in the bud were more women seated in Capitol Hill offices.

“One reason we're actually re-fighting long-settled battles over women's rights is because women occupy fewer than one in five seats in Congress,” he said. “I'm not saying that the only way to achieve success is by climbing to the top of the corporate ladder or running for office, although -- let's face it -- Congress would get a lot more done if you did,” he continued, as the graduates chuckled.  

In urging the graduates to lead by example – his second piece of advice – the president highlighted the women in his life, especially his wife Michelle.

He praised her ability to keep up a career and family, as well as the ability to balance the latter with a political persona.

“The reason Michelle had the strength to juggle everything and put up with me and eventually the public spotlight was because she, too, came from a family of folks who didn't quit,” he said.

And the third bullet point of his advice – perseverance – gave the president an opportunity to relay his own personal story, to which so many voters were drawn during his last campaign.

He shared how his first meeting as a community organizer ended up with no attendees besides a few elderly women looking for the bingo game, and how his band of volunteers may have quit if it hadn’t been for his admonition to forge ahead.

“I said to the volunteers: Before you quit, answer one question. What will happen to those boys if you quit?” he asked, gesturing to some boys aimlessly throwing rocks outside. “Who will fight for them if we don't?  Who will give them a fair shot if we leave?”

He added that it was those “small victories” that continued to push him into the “bigger victories of my last three and a half years as president.”

Vice President Joe Biden apologized to President Barack Obama for saying he supported same-sex marriage last Sunday on Meet the Press, according to the Vice President's office.

The two spoke in the Oval Office shortly before the president sat down for an ABC News interview in which he also announced his support for same sex couples to marry.

"The President has been the leader on this issue from day one and the Vice President never intended to distract from that," the vice president's press secretary Kendra Barkoff said in a written statement. 

Vice President Joe Biden's comments on "Meet The Press" that he is "absolutely comfortable" with same sex couples getting married sparked a slew of questions from reporters at Monday's White House press briefing. Press Secretary Carney sought to explain that Biden's comments did not mean he supported the issue, nor did it mean President Obama's "evolving" position on the issue would change any time soon.

While that issue consumed most of the air in the briefing room, Carney also got a few questions on French president-elect Francois Hollande, and whether President Obama would try to convince the new leader not to remove his NATO troops from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

In his drop-out speech Wednesday, Newt Gingrich singled out one of the two primary states he won: South Carolina, whose 30-year streak of picking the eventual nominee Gingrich acknowledged he had officially ended.

“I have to thank the voters of South Carolina, and I have to apologize to them,” Gingrich said. “We will have broken their tradition of always picking the nominee. This will make me feel slightly guilty every time we go through South Carolina.”

But Palmetto State experts insist that the first-in-the-south primary state’s importance as an early presidential bellwether remains unchanged – even if the current Republican Party slogan -- “We Pick Presidents” -- is no longer completely accurate.

“Think of it as, if you’re a marketing director for a product, and you have all these slogans to sell your product,” Winthrop University political science professor Scott Huffmon pointed out. “You’ll drop that from your advertising but you’ll still stress everything else.”

He noted that South Carolina would remain the first test of candidates’ strength in the delegate-rich South.

“At last count we have something like 160 Electoral College votes, and you need 270 to win,” Huffmon said. “If you can find a Republican who can appeal to the entire South, and they’ve got almost 60 percent of all the Electoral College votes that they need to become president.”

South Carolina can still sell its primary, Huffmon added, as the place “where the presidential mettle gets tested… where you have to face the first fiery brands of Southern conservatism and see if candidates can stand up.”

State Republican Party Chairman Chad Connelly also said he didn’t think the state’s reputation would suffer as a result of its picking a candidate other than the party nominee.

“We might not have our same branding motto or whatever, but the fact that we’re an important part of the process, that hasn’t changed a bit,” Connelly said, noting that the state’s small size and relatively inexpensive media markets allow campaigns with varying amounts of resources to be competitive – something he suggested strengthens the eventual nominee.

“I think Gov. Romney will tell you that he’s a better candidate, he’s a better debater, he’s better with the people than he was before because of this whole process,” Connelly said. Romney lost South Carolina 40-28 percent to Gingrich. 

Connelly stressed that he’s not considering changing the state party’s motto any time soon, focusing more on raising money to send South Carolina volunteers to other swing states to help with Republican get-out-the-vote efforts.

And as far as Gingrich’s apology to the voters of South Carolina, at least one of his supporters says there are no hard feelings.

“He owes no one an apology,” said Allen Olsen, a former Columbia Tea Party leader and one of Gingrich’s earliest proponents in the state. “He just got beat, and I don’t think he owes South Carolina an apology. I’m just proud to support him.”

But, Olsen added, now that Romney has prevailed, he said he wished Gingrich “hadn’t come off sounding like a sore loser” in his speech Wednesday.

“I wish he would have come off and endorsed Romney and offered to work with Romney more,” Olsen said.

CHAPEL HILL, NC -- A recent NBC/WSJ poll found that young voters might not be as enthusiastic about the 2012 election as they were in 2008. Even at President Obama’s event at UNC Chapel Hill on Tuesday, where he kicked off his two-day tour talking about student loan interest rates, there were varying levels of excitement.

A grain-of-salt alert: These interviews were all conducted at the event, among students who waited in line for hours to see President Obama, so they may not be the most representative sample of all young North Carolina voters. They do, however, offer a glimpse into how some of Obama’s young 2008 supporters are feeling about the election today.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- Kicking off a two-day, swing-state tour focused on keeping student-loan rates from increasing, President Obama told an arena full of college students that he can relate to their struggles paying off loans because he has had his own tuition woes.

“I just want everybody to understand: I didn’t just read about this,” Obama said as the audience at the University of North Carolina crescendo from gradual applause to a full cheer. “I didn’t just get some talking points about this."

He continued, referring to himself and wife Michelle, “We didn’t come from wealthy families. We paid more in student loans than we paid on the mortgage when we finally did buy a condo.”

He noted the length it took for him to pay off his student loans, even though he now holds the nation’s highest office.

“We finished paying our student loans. And check this out -- I’m the President of the Untied States -- we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.”

Obama criticized Republicans, who he said pay “lip service” to the concepts of student aid, a day after presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney said he “fully support[s] the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans.”

“You’ll hear people say, yeah, education, it’s important,” he said. “That requires not just words but deeds.”

Romney spokesman Ryan Williams, who attended the event at UNC, responded to those remarks saying, “Governor Romney has made his position on this issue clear. He feels that we need to help college students during these tough economic times when they’re unable to find a job under this president.”

The House Republican budget, trumpeted by Wisconsin Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, would not increase funding for Pell Grants, and keep funding for them at current levels for the 10 years of the budget, Politifact notes. Romney has embraced the Ryan budget, saying the two are "on the same page."

The president was speaking to students and recent graduates here ostensibly to gin up awareness that student loans will double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent, unless Congress votes to extend the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, signed into law in September 2007.

As his administration has done frequently when it wants to generate buzz over a certain policy initiative, the president urged his audience to get involved through -- in addition to phone calls and email -- social media and in particular, Twitter.

“Call your member of Congress,” Obama urged. “Email them, write on their Facebook page, Tweet them… we have a hashtag.”

He introduced the hashtag as #dontdoublemyrate, and seemed to feed off the enthusiasm of the rally-like atmosphere by telling the audience to repeat the phrase after him.

“Everybody say it so you can remember it!” he urged.

With the national Holocaust Memorial Museum serving as a powerful backdrop, President Obama today announced new measures intended to crack down on human-rights atrocities in Syria and Iran, saying the United States has to do everything in its power to prevent those nations’ regimes from killing more of its people.

Speaking to an audience that included Holocaust survivors, Obama said that further sanctions against today’s authoritarian rulers is in part a recognition that the threat of genocide is a stark reality, even decades after the systematic killing of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany. The Holocaust later sparked an unofficial slogan: “Never again.”

“Remembrance without resolve is a hollow gesture. Awareness without action changes nothing,” Obama said shortly after touring the museum with survivor and author Elie Wiesel. “In this sense, ‘Never again’ is a challenge to us all -- to pause and to look within.”

The president said he would be authorizing U.S. officials to issue sanctions against leaders found to be using new technologies like cell phones and the Internet to commit abuses against their citizens. He said that one outcome of steps like this would be the fall of the Assad regime, although he did not put a timeline on when that would happen. 

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them. And it’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come -- the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people -- and allow the Syrian people to chart their own destiny.”

Obama added that such sanctions did not mean he believes the United States should always intervene “every time there’s an injustice in the world.”

“We cannot and should not,” he continued.

But, he added, the United States takes seriously the threats of genocide around the world.

“This is not an afterthought. This is not a sideline in our foreign policy,” he said, adding that his Atrocities Prevention Board, the formation of which he announced in August 2011, would meet at the White House for the first time today.

He also told of a private moment between himself and Wiesel during their museum tour as they “looked at the unhappy record of the State Department and so many officials in the United States during those years” -- an allusion to the United States’ failure to accept refugees from the Holocaust until 1944, years after the genocide had begun.

“He asked, ‘what would you do?’” Obama recounted of Wiesel. 

The author and Nobel Peace Prize winner, who introduced the president, warned against staying on the sidelines amid the current atrocities around the world, noting that the United States could have done much more to reduce the scope of the Holocaust.

“Why did America not open its doors to more of the doomed; it could have,” Wiesel said. “Why did not the allies bomb the railways going into Auschwitz?” 

And he seemed to question the current policy in Syria and Iran, bemoaning the fact that the leaders of those two countries were still in power.

“Have we learned anything from it? If so, how is it that Assad is still in power? How is it that the Holocaust's No. 1 denier is still a president?”

The firestorm ignited by a Democratic cable commentator's remarks about Ann Romney made its way to the White House briefing room yesterday, with press secretary Jay Carney fielding several questions about it.

He also talked about the president's continued use of the Buffett Rule and his decision not to sign an executive order banning workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation among federal contractors.

Speaking to a gathering of women brought to the White House to discuss economic issues, President Obama said he believed conversations about women’s issues have become “oversimplified” lately.

“There's been a lot of talk about women and women's issues lately as there should be, but I do think the conversation's been oversimplified," Obama said at the White House forum on women and the economy. "Women are not some monolithic bloc. Women are not an interest group. You shouldn't be treated that way."

The president noted the work his administration has done to advance women’s issues, including his signature of the Lilly Ledbetter anti-pay discrimination act and the increase of loans to small businesses, many of which go to women-owned companies.

“When it comes to our efforts on behalf of women and girls," he said, "I'm proud of our efforts."

He also warned against the policies Republicans seek to put in place which he said would set women back, alluding to recent debates over access to preventive care and funding of Planned Parenthood.

“What we can't do now is go back to the policies that got us into so many of the problems that we've been dealing with in the first place,” Obama said. “People say we should get rid of Planned Parenthood. They're not just talking about restricting a woman's ability to make her own health decision; they're talking about denying as a practical matter the preventive care like mammograms that millions of Americans rely on.”

The Planned Parenthood comment may have been in reference to Mitt Romney’s March 14^th statement in which he named several government programs he said he would cut.

“Planned Parenthood, we're going to get rid of that,” he said, in part, during an interview with a Missouri television station. His adviser Eric Fehrnstrom later said Romney was referring to cutting government funding for Planned Parenthood, not shutting down the program entirely.

At the women’s forum, Obama also took a dig at Congress’ inaction, he said he thought the legislative body would accomplish more if there were more women on Capitol Hill.

“Is it possible Congress will get more done if there are more women in Congress?” he said, grinning. “I think it's fair to say. That is almost guaranteed.”

At the beginning of his speech Obama also commented on the Labor Department’s March jobs report, which showed that the economy added 120,000 jobs, fewer than the 200,000 or more jobs that have been added every month so far this year, and a ticked-down unemployment rate of 8.2 percent.

While he said he “welcomed today’s news” of continued economic growth, he added that “it’s clear to every American that there will still be ups and downs along the way, and that we’ve got a lot more work to do.”

Republicans said the unemployment number was still far too high, with the Republican National Committee noting that “of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women.”

“President Obama and his fellow Democrats love to say they stand for women, but women can no longer stand the Obama economy.  Women deserve better, and in November we will hold him accountable,” RNC co-chair Sharon Day said in a statement.