President Obama will become the first sitting president to visit a daytime TV talk show when he visits with the ladies of The View this week. It's part of the show's "Red, White & View" series (VP Biden was on in April) and ABC News reports, "The president will take the hot seat among the show's five female hosts, who represent a range of backgrounds and political views, at a time when his administration grapples with challenges from the economy to the BP oil spill." We also expect Shirley Sherrod to come up! Obama will tape the segment on Wednesday (expect motorcade action near Lincoln Center) and it'll air on Thursday. His last View appearance (video) was during the 2008 campaign. more ›

Pressured-to-resign USDA employee Shirley Sherrod was on the Today show this morning and declared, "I really would not want the president to apologize to me. I'd love to have a conversation with him, though ... You know, I'd like to talk to him a little bit about the experience of people like me. People at the grassroots level. People who live out there in rural America, people who live in the south." [Via Daily Intel, which points out, "President Obama wants to get involved in another racial controversy like he wants another giant oil spill."] more ›

The White House is dealing with fallout after Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack (by way of his underlings) allegedly pressured black USDA employee Shirley Sherrod to resign after a video clip surfaced. In the clip, Sherrod, speaking at a NAACP event in Georgia, said she didn't help a struggling farmer with the "the full force of what I could do." The NAACP first supported her resignation, saying, "We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers," but then actually reviewed the full video that showed Sherrod explaining she how realized it wasn't about being being white or black, "But you know, God will show you things. ... You realize that the struggle is really about poor people," and helped the farmer as much as she could (full video). more ›