Apple’s $46 billion in revenue last quarter vastly exceeded analysts expectations and was their largest quarter to date (in both revenue and profit). As this chart from Silicon Alley Insider highlights, iPhone sales were by far the biggest driver of Apple’s monster earnings.

As Mitt Romney’s atrocious record on job creation continues to draw attention, even from other Republicans, Democrats are starting to focus more of their energies on the Republican frontrunner’s more glaring vulnerability.

Today, for example, the former governor will campaign at a NASCAR race in Loudon, New Hampshire. The Democratic National Committee released a new video to honor the occasion.

In case there are any doubts, this has the benefit of being true. During Romney’s only service in public office, his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country.” Massachusetts really did rank 47th out of 50 states in jobs growth on Romney’s watch (and unlike President Obama, Romney didn’t inherit an economic crisis). There was a reason Romney served one term and then quit — he was not all popular with his constituents and probably would have lost a re-election bid.

And that’s just his public-sector record. In the private sector, Romney made a living slashing American jobs — a record that’s also starting to gain wider attention.

On the campaign trail, Romney keeps making this worse. He not only seems to find unemployment funny, he’s also arguing that jobless Americans have to bear a greater burden because corporations need another tax cut.

Oh and it hurts even more cause all of this is the truth. And it will be the painful truth for Romney.

The good news is, House Republicans unveiled a plan yesterday that’s intended to create jobs. The bad news is, the plan can charitably be described as a bad joke.

As we discussed yesterday, the jobs agenda, such as it is, is practically a conservative cliche: the GOP wants massive tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, more coastal oil drilling, and huge cuts to public investment. Republicans are confident this will work wonders, just as they were equally confident about the identical agenda in the last decade, and the decade before that, and the decade before that.

Indeed, the most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won’t work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it’s already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either haven’t heard the famous axiom about trying failure repeatedly and expecting a different result, or they don’t care.

The agenda is the agenda: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, cut public investments. Good times and bad, deficit or surplus, war or peace, it just doesn’t matter.

It’s as if someone bought an iPod, uploaded one song, and hit “shuffle.”

Ouch, yet true at the same time.

Popular Science has an amazing photo gallery of individuals fighting to save their homes from the recent flooding of the Mississippi River. Talking Points Memo also has a heart breaking photo gallery as well.

David Dayen argues it’s a mistake to play the game on GOP terms, but didn’t otherwise have a major problem with the speech:

This could have been a ton worse. Other than the fact that this speech is being given at all, I didn’t have a major problem with it.

Huffington Post led with the plan’s bottom-line:

In an effort to recast the debate over the nation’s fiscal future, President Barack Obama announced on Wednesday a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years.

Andrew Sullivan saw the speech as classic Obama:

it was classic Obama – a center left approach to a center-right conviction: that the debt is unsustainable; that we all have to make sacrifices; that defense-cutting, reducing the cost of healthcare; and tax reform are integral to this possibility.And it looks as if he will indeed use the debt ceiling moment to push some version of this through. I didn’t get the sense from this speech that he was only planning to do this in his second term. And surely, after the cold shock of the Ryan plan, his less draconian vision for the vulnerable will be popular in the middle. The least persuasive part of the GOP proposal is its refusal to ask anything from the top one percent in this crisis. Obama saw this, and went for it.

At Balloon Juice, John Cole enjoyed watching Obama hammer the GOP over the Ryan plan to abolish Medicare:

Obama Takes Ryan and the GOP to the Woodshed [....] He can barely suppress a laugh as he repeatedly points out how unserious it actually is.

Meanwhile, LA Times reports:

House Republicans appear to be all aboard the Ryan Express—and there ain’t no stopping it now.Even as President Obama laid out his own deficit reduction plan Wednesday, House Speaker John Boehner was forging ahead with plans for his caucus to vote on Rep. Paul Ryan’s sweeping blueprint to radically reshape Medicare and Medicaid—and he offered unswerving support for the proposal.

“I fully support Paul Ryan’s budget, including his efforts on Medicare,” Boehner told reporters after meeting with Obama at the White House.

Paul Krugman actually was pleasantly surprised but doesn’t want to see this as a starting point in negotiations:

Much better than many of us feared. Hardly any Bowles-Simpson—yay [....] I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no—better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.

Time Magazine sees taxes taking center stage:

President Obama didn’t offer a lot of specifics about how he intends to close the federal budget deficit in his speech at GW Wednesday, but he did make one thing clear: he intends to go head-to-head with Republicans over taxes.That makes political sense. If he’s going to go after $2 trillion in spending, as his aides say he will in coming negotiations, he’s going to have to give Democrats, for many of whom that spending is sacred, some red meat. That red meat is $1 trillion in tax hikes aimed at primarily at the rich.

The Republican taking point seems to be that Obama is campaigning:

An audience member behind Ryan tells me he while potus trashed his plan, Ryan shook his head and wrote in his notes “Campaigner-in-chief”

Daily Caller echoes the GOP line (imagine that):

The president’s budget deficit speech is a vague framework for saving $2,000 billion and taxing an extra $1,000 billion by 2023, but is also a brightly drawn blueprint for campaign-trail criticism of Republican candidates.

Jim DeMint is so bad at math that he thinks reducing excess spending and raising revenues will make us bankrupt:

The President made it absolutely clear today that Democrats will cling bitterly to deficit spending until our nation is bankrupt .

Fox thought Obama’s speech would split liberals:

The president is wading into a potential political thicket. Liberals fear he will propose cuts in prized Democratic programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the health care programs for older adults, the disabled and the poor, and in Social Security.

Steve Benen at Washington Monthly thought Obama did an effective job defending progressive values:

As heartening as it was to hear President Obama’s full-throated condemnation of the House Republican budget plan—he didn’t pull any punches—what made his remarks this afternoon especially satisfying was his defense of the progressive vision.

[Found via Apartment Therapy]

[Found via Kottke]