(CBS News) Casting himself as a friend to the middle class, President Obama in his weekly address called on Republicans and Democrats to "at least agree to do what we all agree on" and extend the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for American families making less than $250,000 a year.

"That's what compromise is all about," Mr. Obama said, making a nearly four-minute case for his tax plan over the GOP's "trickle down" approach that, he said, operates from the belief that "if we spend trillions more on tax cuts for the wealthy, it'll somehow create jobs."

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(CBS News) Why rush Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. out of treatment for a "mood disorder" and back to Capitol Hill, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked Thursday, when Congress isn't getting any work done anyway?

In light of the news this week that Jackson was receiving "intensive medical treatment at a residential treatment facility for a mood disorder," Emanuel told WBBM Newsradio: "a lot of people are saying, 'When's he going to get back to work?'"

"He should get back to work," the mayor - formerly President Obama's chief of staff - continued. But, he asked, "Why would he go back to work at a Congress that does not work? Why rush it? I mean, they're all talking about him going back to work. Last time I checked, Congress had their second repeal of their healthcare bill - another symbolic victory. Why rush?"

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(CBS News) President Obama's biggest mistake during his first term, he told CBS News in an exclusive interview, has been putting policy over storytelling.

Mr. Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama sat down Thursday with "CBS This Morning" anchor Charlie Rose in the White House Blue Room, where they discussed the failures and successes of his administration as he heads into another election, among other things.

"When I think about what we've done well and what we haven't done well," the president said, "the mistake of my first term - couple of years - was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

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(CBS News) SILVER SPRING, Md. - Jorge Acuna's lifelong dream of becoming a neurosurgeon was always clear, but somehow he knew spending six days in a federal detention center wasn't the way to the operating table.

The 19-year-old Montgomery College student and his parents were detained in March, after living illegally in America for more than a decade. As a result of the family's undocumented status, deportation was imminent.

"Those first five nights we ended up being in a maximum security cell for some reason," Acuna told CBS. "I guess that was the worst part of it, because not only did we feel like we were criminals, we felt like the highest end criminals. We never committed any crime."

Uncertain about his future, Acuna feared his education may be lost.

"I was taking 18 credits and all of a sudden, one day I'm in jail," Acuna said. "I'm sitting here in jail, I'm worried about my tests and at one point, I realized, why am I even thinking about this?"

With fervent support from the surrounding community and the help of several prominent politicians, immigration officials granted the Acuna family a one year reprieve, with the understanding that deportation remained a possibility in 2013.

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(CBS News) After two days of Republican attacks slamming President Obama for being bad for small businesses, the White House unveiled 6 actions intended to help small business, including a tax break and easier access to capital.

Republicans pounced after the president's announcement Monday that he would push to extend only the Bush-era tax cuts for those making $250,000 or less, saying that move would harm small businesses and stunt job creation.

"Those that are job creators and small businesses are going to see a massive tax increase and that will kill jobs," Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in an interview with Radio Iowa. "It will kill jobs in this country and hurt the middle class. The right answer is to extend the tax rates as they currently exist indefinitely until we put in place an entirely new and reformed system."

House Speaker John Boehner added, "Why we would want to tax the people that we expect to create jobs in this country makes no economic sense."

Wednesday morning, the White House announced via a statement that the president is moving forward on several initiatives, most through executive action, which allow the provisions to take effect immediately without having to seek approval from Congress.

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(CBS News) Renae Chapman, the wife of the first American servicemember to be killed in the Afghanistan War, said the ten years since his death has been "really tough."

Chapman said she wishes "she could say it gets better, but it doesn't."

Her husband, Sergeant First Class Nathan Ross Chapman was a member of the special forces and was killed in Afghanistan less than three months after the official start of the war. His death is remembered as the 2000th American servicemember was killed Wednesday in the war that has been America's longest, lasting more than ten years.

Chapman began to cry as she recounted her late husband, with whom she has two children now aged 12 and 13.

"The hardest part is losing how funny he was. That's really the biggest part," Chapman said through tears.

"I miss him more. It's worse [now]. Much, much worse," Chapman said.

Nearly as long as Chapman, who attended President George W. Bush's State of the Union speech as a guest of First Lady Laura Bush in 2002, has been reeling from the loss of her husband, she has been facing another battle: the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

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(CBS News) Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs said the president is "100 percent committed" to allowing some Bush-era tax cuts to expire.

"He is 100 percent committed to it," Gibbs said on CNN's "State of the Union."

A series of tax cuts originally passed in 2001 and 2003 during George W. Bush's presidency, and later extended, are set to expire at the end of this year. In 2010, President Obama agreed to a two-year extension, but his adviser indicated the president would not allow for another extension for couples making more than $250,000.

"We should protect the tax cuts for the middle-class, and we should let tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires expire," Gibbs told host Candy Crowley. "We have tried these different philosophies before; we know what tax breaks and tax cuts for the wealthy and [taking] financial regulations off of Wall Street mean. They mean economic calamity, they mean what we are dealing with now, versus a vision where we add jobs and build out the middle-class.

"Let's make some progress on our spending by doing away with tax cuts for people who quite frankly don't need them . . . and have them pay their fair share."

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The Department of Education announced Friday that two more states - Washington and Wisconsin - have been granted waivers from the No Child Left Behind education law. That brings the total number of states that have been granted waivers from the program to 26, which means more than half of states have now been freed from having to meet the law's requirements.

Ten other states and the District of Columbia have also requested waivers; their applications are currently under review. Just 14 states have not sought waivers from the law, and they are eligible to do so in the future.

In a press release announcing the latest waivers, the Department of Education made clear the Obama administration's dim view of the law. The Department said that NCLB's "rigid, top-down prescriptions for reform, while well-intentioned, proved burdensome for many states."

No Child Left Behind, which was signed into law in 2002 by President George W. Bush, was designed to provide greater accountability in schools when it comes to student achievement. Its most controversial provision was requirements for annual testing of elementary, middle, and high school students in reading, math and science. States were required to make every student "proficient" in reading and math by the 2013-2014 school year. The law also mandated that schools get annual "report cards" of their progress.

Critics said the law led to a misguided focus on "teaching to the test" and deemed the requirement that all students be proficient by the 2013-2014 school year unrealistic. The also noted that nearly half of schools in the country were being branded as failures under the law for not meeting targets for achievement on standardized tests.

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Updated 11:00 a.m. ET

(CBS News/AP) President Obama on Thursday will use his bus tour through Ohio to announce the U.S. plans to file an unfair trade complaint against China, accusing the country of imposing illegal duties on over $3 billion worth of cars and sport utility vehicles, including Toledo-made Jeep Wranglers, the Toledo Blade reports.

The Obama administration will file the case with the World Trade Organization in Geneva, according to a senior administration official, on the grounds that the duties violate international trade rules. The announcement will come in Maumee, Ohio, outside Toledo, where Mr. Obama will kick off a two-day bus trip called "Betting on America."

Toledo mayor Michael Bell, an independent, told CBS News that the administration's move "would be beneficial to us. Anything that would be beneficial to Toledo and northwest Ohio I'm going to love."

The campaign of Mr. Obama's Republican rival, Mitt Romney, said that he supports the president's effort but, not surprisingly, uses this development to take a shot at him

"[T]his action is necessary only because China imposed a tariff in response to President Obama's extraordinary decision to bail out and subsidize certain US automakers," the campaign said in a statement. "Because President Obama has failed to promote the principles of free enterprise here at home, he is left playing defense over America's own behavior instead of playing offense and demanding that other countries play by the rules."

China has at times become a focal point in the presidential campaign. Presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney has accused the president of being too soft on China, while the Obama campaign has accused Romney of outsourcing jobs to China when he ran the private equity firm Bain Capital.

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(CBS News) Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida told CBS News Correspondent Peter King in an interview Monday that he believes the Democrats are more interested in using the immigration debate for political gain than they are finding a solution.

"I think there are many in the Democratic Party that want immigration to be unsolved issue at least for the time being, because it's more useful as a campaign issue than it is as a solved issue," Rubio said.

According to Rubio, the first step in bringing both sides together for a real immigration discussion is to agree to not use the controversial issue against one another during the election season.

"I think it starts with making a commitment to not continue to use it as a political tool. I mean the president can give whatever speech he wants but the truth is that he and his party continuously use immigration as a bat to beat Republicans over the head with," said the first-term senator.

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(CBS News) Following one of the most politically controversial weeks in recent history, President Obama in his weekly address chose to steer clear from talking about his health care law, opting instead to discuss American responsibility at the scene of the Colorado wildfires.

"I know this is a little bit unusual - we don't usually do weekly addresses like this," the President acknowledged from in front of several fire trucks just south of Denver. "But I thought it was a good opportunity for us to actually focus attention on a problem that's going on here in Colorado Springs.

"We never know when it might be our community that's threatened and it's important that we're there for them."

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(CBS News) Some of the nation's most prominent governors are starting to fight the newest battle in the war of the Affordable Care Act: Is the individual mandate a penalty or a tax?

That was the subject of debate on competing press calls on Friday, in which GOP Govs. Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana echoed the Republican line that the law represented an enormous tax hike on middle-class Americans, and Democratic Govs. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Martin O'Malley of Maryland, on a separate call, said it was a penalty.

But Jindal, who along with the other governors has been mentioned as either a vice presidential candidate or possibility for 2016, committed what appeared to be a gaffe in briefly conflating the health care law with Mitt Romney's earlier effort in Massachusetts. "There's only one candidate, Gov. Romney, who's committed that he will repeal the Obamney - the Obamacare -- tax increase," Jindal said, echoing former GOP candidate Tim Pawlenty's pejorative phrase during his short-lived presidential bid.

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(CBS News) WASHINGTON, D.C. - Partisanship wasn't left at the door - or more aptly, the diamond edge - Thursday night as dozens of members of Congress capped off one of the most politically charged days in recent history with a final showdown between Republicans and Democrats at the 51st annual CQ-Roll Call congressional baseball game, held at Nationals Park.

The Democrats trounced the Republicans, 18-5, despite Republicans having won more games in the past. But even several hours of playing America's favorite pastime for charity weren't enough to nurse the fresh wounds from a day that began and ended with controversial and unprecedented government actions.

In the Democrats' fan section, 17 posters spelled out "MVP Justice Roberts," homage from the left to their newfound hero, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., whose opinion earlier in the day largely upheld President Obama's health care law as constitutional. Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Baca, D-Calif., lamented wasted time due to the second big news of the day, the House's vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress over matters relating to operation Fast and Furious.

Watch highlights from the game in the video to the left.

Asked whether the timing of this year's game made Democrats' win particularly satisfying, Baca, who had just accepted a large trophy cup with his teammates, gave a lukewarm response.

"Well, yeah, in one sense it does, but this is only off of the Capitol," he said. "So once we get back there, back in trenches - it's too bad what we're going through, what we went through today. We should have never gone through what they put us through."

Still, he added, "it's sort of nice to rub it in a little bit."

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(CBS News) The "vegetable argument" used by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., to strike down the commerce clause as a means for Congress to force Americans to buy health insurance is just as applicable to the taxation powers which upheld the Affordable Care Act, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, argued Thursday.

Addressing the court's ruling, which deemed the individual mandate in President Obama's signature health care law constitutional only as a tax, Boehner said he "respects" Roberts' decision but disagrees and will work to repeal it.

Roberts wrote in his opinion that that the price for not buying insurance acted effectively as a tax, and thus the law would survive as such. But Roberts disagreed with the Obama administration's interpretation of the commerce clause as granting Congress power to require customers to buy a market's product, arguing that "under the government's theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables."

Boehner agreed, but said the broccoli scenario also applies to the individual mandate as a tax.

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