President Obama welcomed the 1985 Chicago Bears to the White House on Friday afternoon for what he called a "well-deserved and long overdue recognition" of their Super Bowl Championship season.

"This is as much fun as I will have as president of the United States," said Mr. Obama, a Bears fan and former Chicago resident. "This is one of the perks of the job, right here."

He heaped praise on players including Gary Fencik, Richard Dent Willie Gault, Shaun Gayle, coaches Mike Ditka and then-defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan, and everyone involved with the "gritty, gutsy" squad he called the "greatest team in NFL history."

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The Republicans hoping to unseat President Obama have been on the campaign trail for months. Democrats have now stopped trying to pretend they are not.

Just hours after Mr. Obama called out the Senate's top Republican for trying to derail his jobs plan, the chamber's top Democrat took surpise action to prevent Republicans from offering endless amendments aimed at embarrassing the president.

The Senate late Thursday approved a rule change -- known in Washington as "the nuclear option" -- that prevents the minority party from forcing votes on amendments to a bill that has already worked its way through the legislative process and is about to get a final tally.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had planned to force such a vote on Mr. Obama's original $447 billion jobs proposal after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Democrats had signaled changes to the White House plan to make it more to their liking and the president had said he was comfortable with their changes.

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President Obama said Thursday that he plans to take his message that the economy is weakening because of Republican obstructionism straight to the American people over the next year, though he denied that strategy is based on Harry Truman's famous 1948 victory after blaming a Republican Congress for doing nothing.

"If Congress does nothing, then it's not a matter of me running against them; I think the American people will run them out of town, because they are frustrated, and they know we need to do something big and something bold," Mr Obama told reporters in the East Room during a White House news conference.

"I would love nothing more than to not have to be out there campaigning because we were seeing constructive action here in Congress," Mr. Obama said when he was asked by CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante if was willing to negotiate with Republicans on his $447 billion jobs bill.

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Updated 12:08 p.m. Eastern Time

President Obama called on Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs bill Monday, stating that "this is not a game."

"Our economy really needs a jolt right now," he said during a White House news conference.

Mr. Obama said the bill would guard against the economic threat posed by the European economic crisis and said independent economists overwhelmingly say it would help boost the struggling American economy. He said it was made up of proposals that both parties have traditionally supported.

"Any senator who is thinking about voting against this jobs bill when it comes up for a vote," he said, "needs to explain why they would oppose something that we know would improve our economic situation at such an urgent time for our families and for our businesses."

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The White House has released the following statement by the president on the passing of Steve Jobs:

Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.

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"Incivility in politics is reflective of a general incivility in society," said William Daley, President Obama's chief of staff, at the Third Annual Ideas Forum Wednesday. He pointed to reality TV -- where he said people treat each other in obnoxious ways -- as evidence, noting that one cannot separate society from politics and vice versa.

"There is not the engagement anymore that there used to be," Daley observed. The nation is divided, and the American people are "stressed out" and the political season is "extremely volatile," he added.

In conversation with CBS News White House correspondent Norah O'Donnell at the forum, Daley was also asked about the possibility of another recession.

"The general consensus is you won't have another recession, but what is going on in Europe is cause of great concern....The expectation is European leaders will take action to prevent serious negative results that would cause the world to slip back further than we are. The expectation now is we wont see a double dip," Daley said.

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President Obama said Monday he doesn't regret touting the energy company Solyndra as a model for jobs and clean energy - even as new evidence suggests that White House officials were worried about the company before Mr. Obama visited it in May 2010.

The president, addressing Solyndra's failure in a Monday interview with ABC News, said his administration knew that "not every single business is going to succeed in clean energy," but argued that "if we want to compete with other countries that are heavily subsidizing the industry's future, we've got to make sure that our guys here in the United States of America at least have a shot."

"Hindsight is always 20-20, it went through the regular review process, and people felt like this was a good bet," Mr. Obama told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. He argued that "if you look at the overall portfolio of loan guarantees that have been provided, overall it's doing well."

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President Obama thinks of himself as an underdog. A recent CBS News/New York Times poll has his approval rating at 43 percent. With some polls showing him lagging behind GOP candidates, and an ABC News poll with 55 percent of respondents saying he would be a one-term president, Mr.Obama acknowledged that the state of the economy has put a damper on his quest for another term.

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This commentary was written by CBSNews.com Editor-in-Chief Daniel Farber.

Chris Christie is deciding soon if he wants to enter the 2012 race for the presidency. This is after his weight became the talk of the town, driven by columns from the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson and Bloomberg View's Michael Kinsley, who wrote, "Look, I'm sorry, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie cannot be president: He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers' unions. But we shouldn't overlook it -- unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it."

Certainly the health of a candidate should be factored into a vote - but Christie's girth shouldn't be an issue. There have been plenty of portly presidents. President William Howard Taft, for example, wasn't exactly lean.

So what qualifies anyone to be president, other than getting elected? The United States is not a company, like IBM or GE, in which a small board of directors picks a CEO, based on their experience and track record, who can generate profits, shareholder value and manage a $100 billion-plus business and a few hundred-thousand employees.

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President Obama's campaign team is blaming the high-profile stand-off over the nation's debt with Republicans this summer for what it says may be a lackluster fundraising number for the president in the past three months.

Campaign Manager Jim Messina lowered the goal for the third quarter, which ends today, to $55 million, down from last quarter's goal of $60 million.

The Obama Victory Fund brought in $86 million in the three months through June, with more than $47 million for the campaign and more than $38 million for the Democratic National Committee. The third quarter figures are due to be released by October 15, though campaigns sometimes announce numbers before the deadline.

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President Obama said Thursday the United States "had gotten a little soft" before he took office and needs to regain its competitive edge in the global economy because opportunities for younger Americans are not as plentiful as they were for their parents.

Mr. Obama was asked if he was worried that today's recent college graduates do not have the same opportunities that the baby boom generation had when they were younger.

"Absolutely," Mr. Obama told Orlando's WESH-TV.

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In arguing for higher taxes on the wealthy, President Obama likes to say that it's people like him who can afford to pay a little bit more. Turns out, he's talking about several of the Republican contenders for his job as well.

In a speech earlier this week, Obama floated the idea of a "Buffett Rule," named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, which would create a minimum tax rate for individuals making more than $1 million a year. Though the White House has yet to announce a formal plan, a National Journal analysis of the financial disclosure filings of seven of the top Republican candidates show that at least half stand to be hit by the kind of tax the president is proposing.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and businessman Herman Cain both reported a minimum income of more than $1 million in 2010. (Candidates are required to report only ranges of income, not exact numbers.) Romney earned between $9.6 million and $43.2 million from a variety of sources: a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, profits from his book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, and speaking fees. He also earned tens of thousands of dollars from Bain Capital, the private equity firm he co-founded in the mid-1980s.

"I think the important point here is that Gov. Romney has put out his own plan targeted to providing relief for the middle class," said Andrea Saul, a spokesman for Romney. "As president, Gov. Romney will hold the line on individual income tax rates and eliminate taxes on interest, dividends, and capital gains for low- and middle-income taxpayers."

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UPDATED 12:15 p.m ET

President Obama unveiled the most significant changes to U.S. education policy in a decade, using his executive authority to give states more flexibility to opt out of some provisions of the controversial No Child Left Behind program that was a signature initiative of President George W. Bush.

"We can't let another generation of young people fall behind," Mr. Obama told an audience of education leaders in the East Room of the White House.

Mr. Obama expressed frustration with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have bickered about the best way to improve the increasingly unpopular program championed 10 years ago by Bush and liberal Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy. Mr. Bush signed the law in early 2002 at an Ohio high school in the congressional district of House Speaker John Boehner, who was then chairman of the House panel overseeing responsible for education.

"Our kids only get one shot at a decent education. They cannot afford to wait any longer. So, given that Congress cannot act, I am acting," Mr. Obama said.

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President Obama on Wednesday expressed some envy at the position of former President Bill Clinton - who, being safely out of political office, he surmised was able to deal with "people who are just reasonable all the time."

According to USA Today, Mr. Obama, speaking at the seventh annual gathering of the former president's Clinton Global Initiative in New York, spoke largely about economic issues, but touched on some of his frustrations with Washington - where, as he put it, "our politics right now is not doing us any favors."

At the conference, at which leaders from around the globe have participated in a series of panels and discussions over the last two days, the president praised Mr. Clinton - who he dubbed "the Do-Gooder-In-Chief" - for the Clinton Global Initiative's humanitarian efforts.

"It is so good to see so many do-gooders in one room."

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