School Speech Uproar Shows Country Divided

At least 28 more plan to seek one

(NEWSER) - Ten of the first 11 states to apply for a waiver from the controversial No Child Left Behind law will be freed from the law's requirements by President Obama today, the AP reports. Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee received the waivers; New Mexico's application was not approved, but it is working with the White House to get the OK. Another 28 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, are expected to seek waivers in the future; the heavily populated states of California, Pennsylvania, and Texas are among those that have not yet signaled they will apply. More»

Chrysler ad a political football

(NEWSER) - God bless America ... and the Chrysler bailout ... seemed to be the message that left football fans misty-eyed after Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl Chrysler ad. It's "halftime" in America, and we're all pulling together for a brighter economic future, says the gravelly-voiced star. But Eastwood was opposed to the bailout that made the Chrysler turnaround possible, and now the ad has become a political football as Dems score points with it and the GOP tackles it, notes ABC News . “Saving the American Auto Industry: Something Eminem and Clint Eastwood can agree on," crowed White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer on Twitter, referring to Eminem’s Chrysler ad during last year's Super Bowl. "Powerful spot," chimed in Obama re-election strategist David Axelrod. But George Bush's political maven Karl Rove snapped that he was "offended" by the ad, which he argued was orchestrated by the administration to paint a rosy future. More»

Introduces plan to control tuition costs

(AP) - President Barack Obama today called for an overhaul of the higher education financial aid system, warning that colleges and universities that fail to control spiraling tuition costs could lose federal funds. Speaking to students at the University of Michigan, Obama said he was "putting colleges on notice" that the era of unabated tuition hikes is over. "You can't assume that you'll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can't stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down," Obama said on the final stop of a three-day post-State of the Union trip to promote components of his economic agenda. More»

'New Yorker' piece shows post-partisan hope giving way to reality

(NEWSER) - In a lengthy New Yorker piece culled from hundreds of pages of internal White House memos, Ryan Lizza paints a detailed picture of President Obama's fall from the idealistic candidate who promised to usher in an era of post-partisanship. A week before his inauguration, Obama enjoyed an amiable dinner with a host of right-leaning journalists, pointing out common ground they shared. Some of those journalists penned hopeful, even admiring pieces about Obama in those early days. Today, they're more likely to call him a "floundering naïf" (George Will, who hosted the dinner party) or "sanctimonious, demagogic, self-righteous, and arrogant" (Charles Krauthammer, one of the attendees). More»

Editorials largely take the president to task

(NEWSER) - Barack Obama's decision to reject TransCanada's Keystone XL oil pipeline has set a lot of tongues wagging, with some of the biggest papers in the country devoting today's editorials to it. Here's what they're saying:

• "We almost hope this was a political call," says the Washington Post , "because on substance, there should be no question." Without the pipeline, TransCanada will sell to China, and US refineries will import from the Middle East—resulting in a lot more oil crossing the ocean in tankers.