After his feisty debate performance, Joe Biden hit the campaign trail today, hammering Republicans on their controlling, cynical, sexist attitudes toward women.

He didn't pull any punches, either. He called them out for imposing their private views on women, and was very specific about the shape of the U.S. Supreme Court if Romney wins this election. This, by the way, is what should give every progressive, Democrat, liberal or independent a reason to vote for Obama -- the idea of having Mitt Romney nominate the next two Supreme Court justices is the kind of nightmare we really don't need to have.

At the end, he really gets passionate about his anger over VAWA being held hostage, too. It's like Biden took all his energy and anger out and is putting it where it can do the most good. More like this, please.

Transcript below the fold.

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As the gender gap threatened to undermine their crusade for a one-term Obama, the GOP turned to Twitter to un-sink the Titanic. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about our party’s mandated transvaginal rapes and birth control bans, a host of Republicans shrieked. It is President Obama who is waging the war against women by sentencing two of them to life…on the Supreme Court.

FullofMitt: There’s no war on women coming from me. I’m so committed to protecting equality that I promise to lock Lilly Ledbetter in an airtight kennel. #TheDogLovedThat

JohnMcMaverick: War, you say? Well, we must bomb Womanistan before they force us to swallow their nuclear pill. #AlsoBombSyria #AndIran #AndCanada

ReinceStag: Who cares what the marketplace pays women? I need my wife to stay home to wage war on all these damn caterpillars clogging up my tax loopholes. #1%TopRateForThe1%

GovNikki: Women don’t care about birth control. They care about the rising cost of a decent mani-pedi & a vacuum that doesn’t lose suction.

Limpbaugh: Quit having so much sex! Or else send me your sex tapes. See, we stand for choice even more than them. #SoMuchViagraSoLittleCatholicBabePorn

GreatStateOfArizany: You can get the pill from your doctor only if you obtain permission from your boss. Also be sure to ask your boss whether your lunchtime BLT offends his faith.

FullofMitt: Contraceptions are people, my friends.

VomiSantorium: We’ll get the sluts next time. #Theocracy2016

MrsMitt: It’s grueling work managing five kids, five houses, a herd of dressage horses…not to mention all those nannies, undocumented gardeners & accounts in the Caymans.

FullofMitt: But Moms without $100 million IRAs must learn the dignity of minimum wage work. Also, let’s get rid of the minimum wage. #AndPlannedParenthood

VirginiaGOP: If a woman is pregnant, she’s ipso facto been penetrated before. So why would she object if the state shoves this transvaginal stick up in there too? #DoesntSheLoveHerHomeState?

GovofPenn: If a woman doesn’t want to look at the ultrasound screen, she can just close her eyes. It’s worked for my wife in our bedroom for nearly 40 years.

Dubya: The people of the United States will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with IUDs. #HeMustHaveHidThemInASecretWomb!

UndisclosedDick: The vaginas will treat us as liberators.

[h/t Heather at Video Cafe]

Mitt Romney is not hitting his general election campaign with much aplomb this week. While it's true that he's wildly unpopular with women, that is not entirely Mittens' fault. After all, the whole GOP is wildly unpopular with women, and he's one of them. The leader, in fact. No matter how he tries to pander to women, he'll fail because he hasn't got the first clue what he's talking about.

Take this simple question put to the Romney campaign spokesmen this morning by Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post. It's easy enough: Does Mitt Romney support the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?

Their answer? Silence. And then..."Um, we'll get back to you on that."

Really, guys? That's just pathetic. There's no other word for it, but then this campaign is pathetic so far. If they can't answer a simple question like that they should just give up on women altogether and soon, because here's the thing. We women have brains, and we don't need to be told what to think or shoved into some weird alternate reality where up is down.

It's pretty straightforward: Women don't like Mitt because Republicans hate women. Doesn't really get any clearer than that, and the only people who have set women back over the past few years happen to have the letter (R) behind their names.

Besides Romney's GOP-ness and his choice of advisors, who I view as being as evil as their Dear Leader Rove himself, there's another reason I loathe him and his campaign. Bob Cesca put it into focus quite nicely earlier this week when he awarded Mitt Romney and his campaign the Most Cynical Ever Award:

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Barack Obama today signed his first bill into law, and boy was it a good one. Is it just me or has this man done more good in eight days than George Bush did in eight years?

Washington Post:

The bill is a response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that said a person must file a claim of discrimination within 180 days of a company's initial decision to pay a worker less than it pays another worker doing the same job. Under the bill, every new discriminatory paycheck would extend the statute of limitations for another 180 days.

The plaintiff in the case, Lilly Ledbetter, argued that she did not become aware of the pay discrepancy until near the end of her 19-year career at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden, Ala.

The Bush White House and Senate Republicans blocked the legislation in the last session of Congress, but Obama strongly supports it and the Democratic-controlled Congress moved it to the top of the agenda for the new session that opened this month.

Full remarks below the fold

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Well they are still here and more seem to be on the way. The new head of the PFAW, Kathryn Kolbert, wrote a great piece about the Senate confirming more of the same---extreme right wing judges that are coming into the judicary.

President Bush is in the twilight of his presidency and his approval ratings are scraping bottom. So what did the Senate do last week? It confirmed yet another of Bush's controversial judicial nominees. And Senators are sending signs that they might cave on yet more nominees in the near future.

Let’s stop for a second and think about what happens when Bush nominees get on the courts. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s destructive Ledbetter ruling. Lilly Ledbetter suffered pay discrimination for years at an Alabama Goodyear plant...read on

There were quite a few offensive Supreme Court rulings this year, but one of the more surprising decisions was in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, in which the court ruled 5 to 4 (natch) that workers who face wage discrimination only have 180 days to challenge the initial discrimination in court. (Slate’s Richard Thompson Ford explained the case quite well a couple of months ago.)

Goodyear Tire intentionally shortchanged Lilly Ledbetter, a female employee, for two decades. The court majority (Justices Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) said if Ledbetter wanted to challenge the discrimination, she needed to sue within 180 days of her first unfair paycheck — even though she continued to receive unfair paychecks for 20 years.

Today, the House took up legislation — the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — that would put into law a clarification — wage disparity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, and disability is not a one-time occurrence. Every discriminatory paycheck represents an ongoing violation. Employees would still have 180 days to challenge the discrimination, but from the last check, not the first.

The good news is the House passed the measure. The bad news is Bush plans to veto.

We've discussed this before, but PfAW wants to energize the campaign as Sen. Kennedy is introducing legislation this week.

The decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear involved the interpretation of a federal statute-not the Constitution. That's why Congress has the authority, and the responsibility, to correct the Court's error and strengthen Americans' ability to recover wages that they have been unfairly denied. Will you join the petition calling on congressional leaders to support legislation to correct Ledbetter v. Goodyear?

The Ledbetter legislation, the "Fair Pay Restoration Act," will be introduced in the Senate as early as tomorrow by Sen. Kennedy. The House legislation, the "Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act," was passed by the Education and Labor committee at the end of June.