Luke Ravenstahl became the youngest Pittsburgh mayor at 26, taking over after the death of incumbent Mayor Bob O'Connor.

Dubbed the “Boy Mayor” by his critics, Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, 29, has finally managed to upset many of the college age youth who are his Facebook friends, many of whom supported him less than a week ago when he won his first full term in office.  Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s “fair share” college tax, a post-secondary education privilege tax that would require students to pay a one percent tax per year on all education after high school, has been met with both shock and criticism.

“I think that’s ridiculous,” says Maria Walters, a community college student. “We shouldn’t have to pay a tax to be able to go to school.” With regard to Pittsburgh’s local colleges, a Carnegie Mellon University student would pay $403, an in-state Pitt student would pay $135, and a Community College student would pay $27 per year under the new tax. Basically, as the tuition goes up, so does the tax burden.

“Two years from now I’ll be diagnosed with Leukemia and I’ll die, because we couldn’t afford healthcare,” pleads a young girl standing in the playground during one of the videos submitted to Organizing for America, part of Team Obama and the DNC’s campaign arm. The organization is holding a “Health Reform Video Contest” and they’ve chosen twenty finalists. It’s no surprise that many of the videos unabashedly exploit children to achieve their message.

Schoolchildren from the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta sung a health care reform song on the CNN set this week.  The song was set to the beat of Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA."  This comes on the heels of the praise Obama song video that landed on YouTube last month, which features school children performing an Obama rap song.  Not surprisingly, searching CNN's web site for the health care song video reveals nothing.

At a time when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in schools has faced significant scrutiny, several adults at B. Bernice Young Elementary in Burlington Township, NJ thought nothing of coaching a group of school kids in their performance of an Obama rap song.  The woman who videotaped the students is Charisse Carney-Nunes, author of the children's book I Am Barack Obama.  The book's cover is displayed on the easel to the left of the students in the video. The footage landed on YouTube earlier this month.  Due to the quality of the audio, certain portions of the Obama rap song video are hard to hear.  We deciphered the lyrics and posted them in transcript format below.

During a summer seminar, The Tucson Unified School District unveiled a race-based disciplinary system in an effort to balance out the discrepancies between minority students and their fellow classmates.  The plan, titled the "Post-Unitary Status Plan", would specifically focus on "improving" the academic status of TUSD's Black and Hispanic students, with the goal of creating a "restorative school culture and climate" that conveys a "sense of belonging to all students."  To accomplish this, the board is insisting that its schools reduce the number of suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students so that the data reflects "no ethnic/racial disparities."