TODAY'S BREAKING NEWS HEADLINES

• An Emotional Gauntlet: Tornado Survivors Start Picking Up The Pieces
• How could so many have survived Okla. monster tornado?
• Deadliest attacks in Iraq since US troop pullout
• The Braver, Better Movie That Star Trek Into Darkness Could Have Been
• Sharon Osbourne to Rejoin U.K. ‘X Factor’ as Judge
• Brad Pitt: ‘I Have Very Few Friends’
• From Green Light to Boot-Up: Behind the Scenes of Xbox One’s Development
• Google Glass, What’s Not To Like? Quite A Lot Actually
• The new Flickr’s great, but is it enough to change habits?
• US Stocks Seen Higher Ahead of Bernanke’s Speech
• Massachusetts Employees Will Keep Their Health Plans
• Disgraced Ex-congressman Weiner Announces Candidacy for NYC Mayor
• TENSE: Mariners-Angels Preview
• Mysterious respiratory illness kills 2, leaves 5 others hospitalized in Alabama
• IRS investigation: Who knew what, and when
• Issa Warns Hillary: If she’s called to testify again, she’d better be ready.
• Senate panel approves immigration bill.
• SURVEY: Zero conservatives selected to deliver 2013 commencement speeches at Ivy Leagues
• Coumo To State Sheriffs: Shut Up About Gun Law Or Risk Termination
• Obama wanted DOJ To Go After Conservative orgs BEFORE He Was Elected
• Bombshell: Govt Official Says Hillary Spearheaded Benghazi Review, Not Independent Board
• The News Isn’t Buying What Carney’s Selling
• Your Pictures: The Oklahoma Tornado
• TV Ad: Hold Obama Accountable for Benghazi Scandal
• 60 percent think Obama administration is trying to cover up Benghazi attack: poll
• Dishes of olive oil to be banned from restaurants? The EU’s gone mad
• In AP, Rosen investigations, government makes criminals of reporters

Martin Luther King, Jr. began his education at the Yonge Street Elementary School in Atlanta, Georgia. Following Yonge School, he was enrolled in David T. Howard Elementary School. He also attended the Atlanta University Laboratory School and Booker T. Washington High School. Because of his high score on the college entrance examinations in his junior year of high school, he advanced to Morehouse College without formal graduation from Booker T. Washington. Having skipped both the ninth and twelfth grades, Dr. King entered Morehouse at the age of fifteen.

In 1948, he graduated from Morehouse College with a B.A. degree in Sociology. That fall, he enrolled in Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. While attending Crozer, he also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. He was elected president of the senior class and delivered the valedictory address; he won the Pearl Plafker Award for the most outstanding student; and he received the J. Lewis Crozer fellowship for graduate study at a university of his choice. He was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer in 1951. SOURCE: Louisiana State University Library.

Personally, I think it is ironic that this President should be addressing the students of Morehouse, a college rich in the tradition of great African-American leadership. For a black man to have achieved the highest elected office in the land and to have hardly impacted the lives of black Americans for good should be a national embarrassment. Perhaps one of these fine graduates will actually make a difference and be a positive influence and role model.

President Barack Obama told graduates at a historically black university that they had “responsibilities” to help others rise above joblessness, depressed wages and widespread violence in their communities. “If we’re being honest with ourselves, too few of our brothers and sisters have the opportunities you’ve had here,” Obama said a commencement addresses at Morehouse College in Atlanta. “In troubled neighborhoods all across the country – many of them heavily African-American – too few of our citizens have role models to guide them.”

This mid-60s era photo shows a young Mitt Romney who would go on to develop leadership skills as a Mormon missionary, ultimately leading to his quest for the presidency.

It was a rare reflection by Mitt Romney on his life as a young Mormon, offered as proof to struggling Americans that despite being born into privilege and amassing a $250 million fortune, he too had known hard times. A day after being labelled “out of touch” for casually offering a $10,000 bet to a rival candidate, Mr Romney told supporters he had experienced austerity as a missionary in France, using a bucket for a lavatory and a hose for a shower. “You’re not living high on the hog at that kind of level,” he said. But the Republican presidential hopeful spent a significant portion of his 30-month mission in a Paris mansion described by fellow American missionaries to The Daily Telegraph as “palace”. … “It was a house built by and for rich people,” said Richard Anderson, the son of the mission president at the time of Mr Romney’s stay. “I would describe it as a palace”. Tearful as he described the house, Mr Anderson, 70, of Kaysville, Utah, said Romney aides had asked him not to speak publicly about their time together there.

Related articles

• Mitt Romney ‘lived in a Mormon palace with chef and houseboy’ during 1960s France mission (dailymail.co.uk)
• Romney’s Life in France: Posh in Paris, Austere Elsewhere (blogs.wsj.com)
• Romney’s ‘Impoverished’ Home In Paris Was Really A Palace (crooksandliars.com)
• Mitt Romney Talks About Being Mormon Missionary And French Toilets (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• How can you help missionaries (wiki.answers.com)
• Romney’s Experience Of Poverty: Living In A Parisian Mansion (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• US Election 2012: Mitt Romney’s life of privilege and success (telegraph.co.uk)
• Romney claimed he lived impoverished existence in France, in fact he lived in a “palace” in Paris (americablog.com)
• Stories about faith and family help Romney open up (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

In an interview yesterday, Newt Gingrich put some reality into the surreal discussion of the Middle East conflict and (as he put it) the delusional nature of the current “peace process.” The Palestinians are indeed an “invented people” — invented by the Nasser dictatorship and KGB by the way — and the Hitlerian lie that Israel occupies one square inch of “Arab” let alone “Palestinian” land needs to be buried for any clarity on what the conflict is about, let alone progress towards peace. Of course there is no peace in the Middle East and can be no peace so long as the Muslim Arabs want to kill the Jews and destroy the Jewish state. That is the explicit goal of the enemies of Israel in the terrorist entities of Gaza and the West Bank, and also of Israel’s principal enemy the Islamic Republic of Iran. Newt Gingrich’s gutsy statements — if will hold to them — could change the nature of the debate not only about how to deal with the Islamic terrorists of the Middle East but with the Islamic jihad itself. For the campaign to destroy Israel is at bottom a campaign to restore the Muslim (not Arab) ummah — as it was under the Turkish empire and the caliphate.

“The only class warfare I’ve seen,” Obama said in September, “is the battle that’s been waged against the middle class in this country for a decade.” For too many, Obama suggests, the American Dream is dead or dying. (And to coin a famous TV quote … "Did I do that?")

America, in the view of President Barack Obama, is not a happy place. It is a dark region where people cheat each other; corporations brutalize the public, and opportunity is out of reach. Obama’s relentless reelection focus on America’s demons is a communications error that could haunt his bid for a second term. Americans want to be told the truth. They don’t want their president to pretend that the economy is thriving. But what they probably won’t abide is a message that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nation that Obama, like some prophet preaching through Gomorrah, was sent to fix. The last Democratic president to win reelection, Bill Clinton, mimicked Ronald Reagan’s feel-good “Morning in America” theme to coast to a second term. But Obama is trying out a reelection model that posits a broken country which needs him to “finish the job” he started. America, in Obama’s view, is an unfair place, where “our school system” is working “for just some children;” where immigrants live “in second-class status.”

Related articles

• Desperate Obama Campaign Secretly Asking Bill Clinton How To Get Reelected (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• For Obama, A Problem With The Foreboding Four? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Romney: Obama Doesn’t Understand America (thepage.time.com)
• Obama Wrong on ‘Lazy’ America–As Are Class Warfare Conservatives (usnews.com)
• Obama says reelection odds are better now than 2008 (politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)