As he unveils his 2013 budget request Monday, President Obama will highlight a proposal to invest $8 billion in community colleges to help them train workers in high-growth industries, the White House said.

The plan would support Obama’s State of the Union goal of training 2 million unemployed Americans with new skills that would help them find a job.

Under his proposal, Obama hopes to create a new Community College to Career Fund that provides grants to schools to partner with businesses and deliver training in fields such as health care, advanced manufacturing, clean energy and information technology.

The fund, administered jointly by the Labor and Education departments, would also support paid internships for low-income students and financial assistance to small business entrepreneurs. The president is set to announce the package at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, where he will make remarks about his 2013 spending plan.

President Obama on Thursday said the American public has proved remarkably supportive of his administration’s policies on gay rights as the “right thing to do.”

Appearing at a campaign fundraiser at a private residence in Northwest Washington, Obama hailed the end of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward gay and lesbian service members as an example of how attitudes are becoming more tolerant.

“The perception was somehow that this would be this huge, ugly issue,” Obama told the crowd of 40 supporters at the home of Karen Dixon and Nan Schaffer.

But, he added, since his administration ended the policy “nothing’s happened” and there “hasn’t been any notion of erosion and unit cohesion.”

“In some ways,” Obama said, “what’s been remarkable is how readily the public recognizes this is the right thing to do.”

Obama called his work on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues “profoundly American” and declared what he “could not be prouder” of his administration’s track record.

Yet Obama has faced renewed questions in recent days about his own position on gay marriage in the wake of a federal appeals court ruling Tuesday that struck down California’s Prop 8 law that banned same-sex marriage.

Gabrielle Giffords has resigned from Congress, but her impact goes on.

The former Democratic lawmaker from Arizona, who is recovering from wounds suffered in the Tucson shooting spree last year, will join President Obama on Friday when he signs into law the last bill she sponsored in Congress.

The Ultralight Aircraft Smuggling Prevention Act of 2012 gives law enforcement greater authority to combat illicit drug trafficking on the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.

Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, will join Obama in the Oval Office for the signing ceremony, the White House announced.

Giffords, whose remarkable recovery after being shot above her eye by Jared Lee Loughner has inspired supporters, received a standing ovation when she returned to the House of Representatives chamber for Obama’s State of the Union address Jan. 24. And Obama gave her a warm hug before he began speaking.

President Obama said Sunday that he deserves to be reelected because his administration has made progress on the economy, but he acknowledged there is much more work to do.

“I deserve a second term, but we’re not done,” Obama said during a
President Obama talks about the economy during an event at Fire Station #5 in Arlington, Va., Friday. Fire Station No. 5 was one of the first stations to respond to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack at the Pentagon. (Susan Walsh - AP) pre-Super Bowl interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer.

Lauer had asked Obama about an interview they did before the 2009 Super Bowl, when Obama had said that if the economy was not fixed in three years he did not deserve another term.

“When you and I sat down, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month. . . now we’re creating 250,000 jobs,” Obama said, referring to Friday’s jobs report which showed unemployment falling from 8.5 percent to 8.3 percent. “We’ve made progress. The key now is to make sure we don’t start turning in the wrong direction.”

Obama also addressed escalating concerns about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, after Israeli leaders warned last week of possible airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites.

The sluggish state of the economic recovery has been at the heart of Republican attacks on President Obama, as he begins to make his case for reelection. Over the past several months, though unemployment began to decline, the White House has maintained a cautious optimism, noting each time that although economic signs were improving, much more work remained to be done.

More recently, however, Obama sounded more confident, even confrontational, in his economic message, signified by his State of the Union declaration that “America is back.” On Friday, he seized on the Labor Department’s January jobs report as proof that the nation’s economic recovery “is speeding up,”with the economy creating 243,000 new jobs and unemployment falling from 8.5 percent to 8.3 percent.

He also took the offensive with Congress, demanding that lawmakers extend the payroll tax cut and long-term unemployment insurance, both of which expire at the end of the month.

“Do it without drama, without delay, without linking it to ideological side issues,” Obama said at an Arlington firehouse, where he proposed creating a Veterans Job Corps to put 20,000 veterans to work over the next five years. “Now is not the time for self-inflicted wounds. I want to send a clear message to Congress: Don’t slow down the economic recovery we’re on. Do not muck it up. Keep it moving in the right direction.”

The job numbers helped bolster the Obama campaign’s narrative that the economy has shown a consistent trend upward since the president took office. On its Web site, the campaign posted a chart that illustrated 23 consecutive months of private-sector job growth and encouraged supporters to e-mail it to friends “to make sure people know the good news about President Obama’s record on jobs.”