White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday that President Obama is feeling the "Linsanity" - a term dubbed to describe fans' infatuation with New York Knicks overnight sensation Jeremy Lin.

Carney said aboard Air Force One that Mr. Obama is "very impressed and fully up to speed" on Lin's rise to superstardom.

Lin has captivated fans around the world with his play and his path to success. The Knicks guard went undrafted after graduating from Harvard University in 2010. The son of Taiwanese emigrants, Lin is the only active Asian American player in the NBA and was released twice before joining the Knicks in December.

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WASHINGTON -- During Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's much-anticipated speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), "Occupy" protestors conducted a silent protest that erupted into a chanting match between protestors and conservative conference attendees.

In an overflow room next door to the main ballroom broadcasting Romney's speech, about two dozen protestors stood in front of the monitors attempting to block the view, according to two conference attendees in the room.

Two college students from New Jersey, Matt Bowe and Kevin Spiley, gave Hotsheet the play-by-play.

"They weren't tall enough to block the screen, but it was still annoying," Spiley said.

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Conservatives are coming to Washington Thursday for their annual conference, but the folks at Occupy DC want to shake things up a bit for the convention goers.

The Occupy DC movement plans to protest the four-day Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in an attempt to "liberate discourse," the protestors said Tuesday.

"This event is another gathering of bigots, media mouthpieces, corrupt politicians, and their 1 percent elite puppet masters," the announcement said.

The annual conference is a chance for conservatives to gather to hear speeches from politicians and other influential members of their movement. Among those expected to speak are candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum. Former candidates Rick Perry, Herman Cain and are also scheduled to address the gathering.

In an interview with CBS News Political Hotsheet, Occupy DC media team member Justin Smith said no specific details of the demonstrations are set. However, they want to make clear that the movement will stand toe-to-toe with convention attendees all the way to November's election.

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South Carolina is fighting back against the federal government for blocking its new voter ID law.

The Palmetto state sued the Justice Department and Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday in Washington, D.C. federal court, seeking a declaratory judgment determining that the law does not violate civil rights.

"South Carolina's photo identification law does not bar anyone from voting, but merely imposes on voters a responsibility to obtain an approved photo identification card and to bring it to the polls," the state's complaint said.

Last year, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed a law passed by the state legislature requiring that registered voters produce a state-issued ID, or a federal substitute such as a passport, at the polls in order to cast a ballot.

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Planned Parenthood has raised an eye-popping $3 million since Tuesday to support its breast cancer preventive services, the organization said Friday -- a silver lining for the organization after controversy erupted surrounding some its funding from the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation.

The Komen Foundation announced on Tuesday that it was adopting a new policy that would have made Planned Parenthood ineligible for grants. But after facing a strong backlash against their decision, the cancer charity said Friday it was changing its policy so that Planned Parenthood is once again eligible for grants.

As Planned Parenthood supporters learned of the Komen's decision on Tuesday, they flooded the organization with donations and took to the Internet to express their outrage. The Komen Foundation has maintained the decision was not political, but Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards said Friday, "If there's any lesson in all of this, it's that women and people in this country want preventive care, and they don't want politics to get in the way."

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Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET

Three days after pulling its funding for cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation on Friday apologized for the decision and reversed course.

"Our only goal for our granting process is to support women and families in the fight against breast cancer," Nancy G. Brinker, founder and CEO of the foundation, said in a statement. "Amending our criteria will ensure that politics has no place in our grant process. We will continue to fund existing grants, including those of Planned Parenthood, and preserve their eligibility to apply for future grants, while maintaining the ability of our affiliates to make funding decisions that meet the needs of their communities."

The cancer charity initially announced it was pulling funding for the women's health organization because Planned Parenthood is the subject of investigations by Republican members of Congress for allegedly using federal dollars toward providing abortions. The Komen Foundation said its decision was not political, and in her statement today, Brinker maintained that it was not about politics.

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Hundreds of Occupy D.C. protesters stood in solidarity at Washington's McPherson Square Monday as U.S. Park Police began enforcement of its no-camping regulation.

The National Park Service released a statement Friday announcing that the U.S. Park Police would begin enforcement "on or about noon," stating that "[a]ny temporary structure used for camping will be subject to seizure."

When police arrived and were met by the hundreds of protesters and more than 100 media and spectators, however, they declined to take immediate action.

As a symbol of their message, occupiers placed a blue tarp over the statue of General McPherson emblazoned with the words "Tent of Dreams." They chanted, "Banks got bailed out, we got sold out."

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Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Monday blasted her Republican counterpart, Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Reince Priebus, for comparing President Obama to the captain of the Costa Concordia cruise liner, which ran aground off the coast of Tuscany earlier this month and resulted in the deaths of at least 17 people.

"Unbelievable comparison," Wasserman Schultz, who is also a Democratic congresswoman from Florida, said in an interview with Fox News. "The captain of the Costa Concordia has been charged with manslaughter and for the RNC chairman to compare the president of the United States to someone who has been charged with manslaughter shows a dramatic level of insensitivity to the families of those victims."

"I'm not going to give any credence to those incendiary remarks," she said.

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Updated 6:53 p.m. Eastern Time

As a candidate, Mitt Romney has long touted his business savvy and projected a kind of detached, intelligent calm, like President Obama, though one seeming to originate from different planet.

He avoided colorful or outrageous comments, preferring to maintain his image as a serious, sober leader and savvy negotiator whose career as a CEO prepared him to reform Washington and resolve the problems facing the U.S. economy and America abroad.

It's left Romney with what looks to many voters like a passion deficit, particularly when compared to a candidate like Newt Gingrich. Romney doesn't easily connect emotionally with voters, who choose candidates with their hearts as much as their heads. That's a big reason why the former Massachusetts governor went from the presumed GOP nominee to also-ran in the South Carolina primary.

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President Obama offered a preview of the foreign policy narrative that he will apply in the 2012 election debates versus his GOP opponent, who is likely to be Mitt Romney if he can win in South Carolina on Saturday. 

In an interview with Time's Fareed Zakaria, Mr. Obama defended his administration's foreign policy actions, calling Romney's attacks "primary posturing" that will wither under the glare of "a serious debate."

Romney has described Mr. Obama's foreign policy as an "an appeasement strategy" and has said the president "apologizes for America." In his New Hampshire primary victory speech earlier this month, Romney attacked the president's foreign policy: 

"Internationally, President Obama has adopted an appeasement strategy. He believes America's role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe a strong America must - and will - lead the future."

"He doesn't see the need for overwhelming American military superiority. I will insist on a military so powerful no one would think of challenging it."

"He chastises friends like Israel; I'll stand with our friends."

"He apologizes for America; I will never apologize for the greatest nation in the history of the Earth."

"Overall, I think it's going to be pretty hard to argue that we have not executed a strategy over the last three years that has put America in a stronger position than it was than when I came into office," Mr. Obama told Time.

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MANCHESTER, N.H. - A frontrunner looks to cement his status, a surging challenger is poised to give him a run, and a couple of former frontrunners are desperate to get back in. Here are five things to watch in what's shaping up to be the Melee in Manchester.

1. Will Romney lose an eye? Not to go all Biblical here, but Newt Gingrich has signaled all week that he's out for revenge and plans to exact it from Mitt Romney. Gingrich blames Romney for his precipitous decline in the polls, saying a slew of negative ads brought him down only weeks after he was confidently predicting he would be the Republican nominee.

There are a few problems with Gingrich's narrative: He's ignoring the fact that Ron Paul's attack ads against him were in many ways more effective than Romney's. Moreover, Romney and Paul weren't blanketing the airwaves in New Hampshire and South Carolina - the ads ran in Iowa - and yet Gingrich plummeted in the polls in those states, too. That suggests it was Gingrich who hurt himself in the rest of the country. He repeatedly whined about the ads in countless interviews and speeches, and he came across as an angry Washington politician. But why let the facts get in his way? Gingrich appears to be a man on a mission - or, as Chris Wallace told Sean Hannity, he's going to strap on the hockey mask and fire up the chain saw.

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HONOLULU - With a second-term at stake, President Obama's strategy for 2012 is aimed at avoiding the kind of cliffhanger showdowns with Congress that marked the year just ending.

He also plans to expand on his effort to be seen as a warrior for the middle class.

"As I've said before, we are at a make-or-break moment for the middle class," Mr. Obama said today in his weekly address on radio and the Internet.

Just hours before the start of the New Year, President Obama is promising to do everything he can "to make America a place where hard work and responsibility are rewarded: one where everyone has a fair shot and everyone does their fair share."

It's a reiteration of the ideological approach he unveiled December 6 in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas.

"We're going to be doubling-down on our commitment and our message in terms of fighting for the middle class," explains White House Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest, who briefed reporters here Thursday on the president's outlook for the New Year.

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The campaign of Newt Gingrich assailed a "failed system" for his failure to make it onto the ballot for the Virginia Republican primary.

The state GOP announced early Saturday morning that Gingrich's campaign had failed to submit the required number of signatures to qualify for the March 6 primary. On Friday it was announced that Texas Gov. Rick Perry had also failed to qualify.

Gingrich, Perry fail to make Va. Ballot

The state's election board requires candidates petitioning for inclusion in the primary to file 10,000 signatures from registered voters, including 400 from each of Virginia's 11 congressional districts.

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Since the 2008 elections, more than 2.5 million people have given up membership in the Democratic and Republican parties, according to a USA Today analysis of voter registration statistics.

The analysis found that the number of registered Democrats has declined in 25 of the 28 states that register voters by party, while the number of registered Republicans has declined in 21 of those states.

Many voters have expressed frustration with the major parties and the government as a whole. In the latest CBS News poll, 56 percent of Americans said they are dissatisfied with the federal government, and 26 percent said they were angry toward the government; Congress' job approval rating, meanwhile, was just 11 percent.

The frustration appears to be driving more Americans to become independents. In the eight swing states analyzed by USA Today, Democratic registration fell 800,000, and GOP registration fell 350,000, while the number if independents increased 325,000.

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