After the GOP-legislature gerrymandered the North Carolina map to make Rep. Brad Miller’s (D) 13th Congressional District solidly Republican territory, he decided not to seek re-election. The open seat has drawn several Republican candidates including former U.S. Attorney George Holding and Wake County Board of Commissioners Chair Paul Coble. Coble, a former mayor of Raleigh, is the nephew of the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) and his campaign YouTube account features a video of the late Senator’s widow telling voters that if they want somebody like her late husband in Congress, they should vote for Coble — who is “just like Jesse.”

While the race is between two far-right, anti-gay extremist candidates, their primary fight has already become quite nasty. Coble’s campaign has launched a “George Holding Exposed” website and Holding’s has created a “Paul Coble Exposed” site. Each accused the other of being secretly not as reactionary as he claims to be.

What makes this race noteworthy is that it is one of the first House races to feature an active Super PAC backing one of the candidates. On February 28, the American Foundations Committee, Inc. filed its statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission. Like all Super PACs, it included a statement announcing that it intended to raise unlimited contributions and would not donate to or coordinate its communications with any federal candidate or committee. Though the group’s website makes no mention of either candidate, all $366,715 of its reported expenditures to date have been in support of Holding and against Coble.

That total is larger than either the Holding or Coble campaigns have expended. And excluding groups aligned with presidential candidates, the American Foundations Committee ranks among top ten highest-spending Super PACs of this campaign cycle.

The Coble campaign, unsurprisingly, has bashed the pro-Holding Super PAC, calling it “a shadowy group” with “dirty money,” from “special interest” “trial lawyers.”

Holding’s dismisses the criticisms, noting that the Super PAC discloses its donors, most of whom are Holding relatives and close friends. Indeed, of the fourteen donors listed on the American Foundations Committee website, six are Holdings and three are Bells (members of his mother’s family). The average contribution, to date, is more than $26,000.

Much like with presidential Super PACs — which allow the richest supporters of candidates to completely evade federal contribution limits and potentially earn special access and influence — the post-Citizens United and SpeechNow.org campaign finance world will undoubtedly mean a lot more House and Senate Super PACs like this one.

Voters around the country, already fed up with Super PACs, should expect to see a lot more of them in the coming months.

Mitt Romney gave a keynote speech at the National Rifle Association (NRA) this afternoon, but you wouldn’t know it by listening to his speech, as his remarks had almost nothing to do with guns.

In fact, he mentioned the word “gun” just once — the same number of times he referenced the Second Amendment. The only other time he mentioned firearms was when he read the full name of the NRA. Instead, Romney delivered a speech of platitudes on economic and religious “freedom” (a word he mentioned 31 times).

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Romney doesn’t have much to say to gun-rights activists, as his record should be anathema to them. As with virtually every other conceivable policy, Romney’s conservatism on gun rights is new.

In 2002 he said, “We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts — I support them. I won’t chip away at them. I believe they help protect us, and provide for our safety.” The NRA has fought many of those laws.

As governor of in 2005, he signed into law a permanent ban on assault riffles, saying, “Deadly assault weapons have no place in Massachusetts.” “They are instruments of destruction with the sole purpose of hunting down and killing people.” The NRA opposes similar legislation on the federal level.

When he ran for president for the first time in 2007, Romney said, “I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself. I’m a member of the NRA and believe firmly in the right to bear arms.” That turned out to not be true. A few days later he said he did not, in fact, own guns, but his son did and he had used them “from time to time.”

That year, he also infamously said, “I’ve made it very clear, I’ve always been a, if you will, rodent and rabbit hunter all right. Small, small varmints, if you will. … More than two times.”

Romney has since bought two shotguns, not to repeat the same mistake.

When running for the Senate in 1990s, he supported a bill that imposed a five-day wait for people buying guns. “That’s not going to make me the hero of the NRA,” he told the Boston Herald. Indeed.

At a campaign event yesterday, former GOP congressman and current Senate candidate Pete Hoekstra said the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 should not be law because it interferes with job creation. The law has been in the news lately after presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney hedged on his support for it earlier this week. But Hoekstra, who is running against Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), was clear.

When an attendee asked Hoekstra if he would “work to repeal” the law — which empowers women to hold employers accountable for pay discrimination — Hoekstra replied, “It shouldn’t be the law“:

“Will, you know, will repealing it be a priority? If you came back and said, you know, that’s really the thing that’s hurting my business the most. My guess is there are other things that we can do that have a higher priority in terms of what I, what I believe might need to be done. I think you know we need to create — that thing is a nuisance. It shouldn’t be the law,” replied Hoekstra.

Listen to it:

Hoekstra joined most of the rest of his party in voting against the Ledbetter act in 2009, and also in 2007 when Republicans killed it. (HT: Amanda Terkel)

While the Romney campaign has been working furiously to boost the presumed GOP nominee’s support among women, one of his advisers suggested that the gender gap will remain no matter what. Kerry Healey, one of Romney’s oldest aides who served as lieutenant governor under Romney and is now a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, told Newsmax TV that Democrats will “always” get more support from women.

Asked about poll numbers that show Romney trailing way behind Obama among women, Healy said the campaign would try to “win a few of those over, but there’s always going to be a gender gap:”

HEALY: There is always a gender gap between women voters between the Republican and the Democratic Party. There are more women in the Democratic Party to begin with. They are Democrats and they are always going to vote Democratic. We’re hoping to win a few of those over, but there’s always going to be a gender gap between Republicans and Democrats. And we’ll try to close that gap.

Watch it:

The central piece of evidence in Mitt Romney’s charge that President Obama is waging a “war on women” is that “92 percent of the jobs lost under this president where lost by women,” as he said this week. The figure is highly misleading and has been debunked as “mostly false” by Politifact (twice), the Washington Post’s fact checker, the AP, and even the rabidly conservative Daily Caller.

As ThinkProgress noted, this charge may backfire on Romney as most of the jobs lost by women during the recession were in the public sector, where women are over-represented and Republicans across the country are seeking to make cuts.

Now, the Atlantic’s Jordan Weissmann brings some more data from the Roosevelt Institute to flush this out. Sixty-four percent of the jobs lost by women in the recession came from the public sector, and over 70 percent of public sector losses came from Republican-controlled states pushing austerity budgets:

40.5 percent of all state and local government job losses occurred in places where Republicans won control of the legislature in 2010. … Meanwhile, another 31 percent of those government jobs vanished in Texas. … All other states combined accounted for just 28 percent of state and local layoffs.

Many of these Republican governors slashing their workforces are among Romney’s biggest supporters, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), who has campaigned for Romney. Christie has cut tens of thousands of government jobs during his tenure and women make up 56 percent of the state workforce, and probably an even higher percentage of local government employees. So Christie’s layoffs likely disproportionately impacted women. Indeed, the percentage and number of women in state government has fallen under Christie.

And Romney himself supports austerity budgeting that slashes government jobs, praising Christie’s layoffs and vowing to slice government jobs if elected president. “We’ve got too many of them, and they’re paid too much,” he said of government employees last year.

Since becoming the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney has abandoned his message that President Obama is waging a “war on religion” in favor of Obama’s supposed “war on women.” To drive this message home, the Romney campaign spent all day Thursday accusing Democrats of not valuing the work of stay-at-home moms after CNN contributor Hilary Rosen (who is not an Obama adviser, but is a CAPAF board member) said that Ann Romney hadn’t worked.

Romney’s apoplectic response to Rosen’s comments contrasts starkly with his reaction following Rush Limbaugh’s sexist attacks on Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke.

Within an hour of Rosen’s remarks, Romney’s wife Ann joined Twitter and personally condemned Rosen. The following day, the campaign deployed a series of surrogates to slam the pundit in conference calls with reporters and press releases, while Ann appeared on Fox News. The campaign and its conservative allies demanded — and won — public condemnations of Rosen from the Obama campaign, the DNC, prominent Democrats, and even President Obama himself.

Conversely, it took Romney almost three days, about 52 hours, to speak out against Limbaugh’s unquestionably more offensive message, despite being repeatedly asked about it on the campaign trail. Rather than lead the charge against Limbaugh, as he demanded Obama do against Rosen, Romney offered only tepid comments after most leading conservatives had already spoken out.

ThinkProgess made this chart illustrating the difference:

Following his soft remarks on March 2 — Romney merely said, “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.” Those were his strongest words on Limbaugh’s attacks, and he refused to speak about it after that. “I’m not going to weigh in on that particular controversy,” he said at a victory party on Super Tuesday.

Perhaps it’s not fair to expect public figures to respond to every offensive thing said by a supporter, as Romney suggested just last month, but his silence then undercuts his feigned outrage now.

*Limbaugh made his initial slut comments before 3:00pm on Feb. 29 and Romney did not speak out against him until a March 2 Rally with Gov. Chris Christie in Cleveland, OH after 7:00pm. Hilary Rosen appeared on CNN before 9:00pm on April 11 and Ann Romney sent her response Tweet at 10:00pm.