President Barack Obama will meet China’s President Xi Jinping in an informal setting in Southern California on June 7-8, an added stop for President Xi en route back to China from state visits in the Caribbean. This more or less impromptu meeting has aroused a lot of interest on both sides of the Pacific. Some pundits do not expect the meeting to move the needle on bilateral relations. Others hope for an outcome that’s more than status quo.

“Poems like this are called occasional poems and are difficult to write,” says acclaimed poet Laurel Ann Bogen, who also teaches poetry at UCLA.  “Of course, in this type of circumstance expectations are high and as a writer you are constrained by time and subject.” Writing inspiring and healing poetry is familiar to Bogen, who won the esteemed American Academy of Poets College Prize while attending the University of Southern California at only age 17 in the late 1960s.  

The state legislative session is now in full swing, and lobbyists and advocates are descending on Sacramento to talk health care coverage – who should be eligible and how they should get it. It's a debate you might have expected Obamacare to end. But though California and millions in our state will benefit when the president's plan kicks in next January, about 3 million to 4 million Californians, the majority of whom are legal residents, will remain uninsured.

Reaffirming his commitment to protect current and future generations who depend on Social Security, President Obama declared in Tuesday’s State of the Union address, “Our government shouldn’t make promises we cannot keep -- but we must keep the promises we’ve already made.”  Indeed, we must keep the promise of old-age security that Americans have earned through hard work. The nation’s politicians should be held accountable to keep their word that they will not cut the Social Security benefits of older workers, retirees, people with disabilities and the children of deceased and disabled parents.

Current member of the House Paul Ryan offered this theory regarding the current economic battles facing our country: "Look, if we had a [Hillary] Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles as chief of staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now," Ryan said. "[But] that's not the kind of presidency we're dealing with right now." Both pronouncements raise questions that have been pondered by some political watchers since the conclusion of the 2008 presidential election: Would African Americans have fared better under a Hillary Clinton presidency than under Obama (and will they if she runs and wins in 2016)?

Obama has called tougher gun control laws “common sense.” This signals that if there is enough public outcry and push that one or more of the gun control measures could finally make it out of a house or senate committee. Obama is not running for re-election and does not have to look nervously over his shoulder and worry about enraged gun owners raking him over the coals for putting his White House muscle behind one of the bills. That and the eventual passage of fresh gun restrictions would at least send the right signal that the gun lobby is not invincible and that millions of Americans want and demand anything that will at least potentially head off the next rampage.

This past week might very well mark the beginning of the end of the war on drugs as we know it, with recreational use of marijuana becoming legal in the state of Washington as a result of its citizens' vote. Coloradoans approved a similar measure and established an exchange in which citizens can grow and purchase the drug for medicinal use. A recent Quinnipiac poll shows that 54 percent of Americans support legalizing the drug, while 44 percent oppose it. As states slowly begin to decriminalize marijuana, it remains to be seen whether President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will continue to enforce federal oversight to arrest and prosecute offenders, no matter a state's laws. 

President Barack Obama is expected to nominate a new Secretary of State soon, as Hillary Clinton intends to step down after the Presidential Inauguration in January. Clinton was a prolific traveler during her four years as Secretary of State, visiting Latin America and the Caribbean fourteen times, but never in a particularly transformative manner. The extent to which her successor emphasizes Western Hemispheric affairs could have far-reaching consequences for interregional cooperation and competition. Senator John Kerry and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice are the two most likely candidates for the position. 

The first sign that things were going wrong was the stream of locals coming into the office and asking if this was where they were supposed to vote. Scores of people didn’t know their polling places, either because they had forgotten or no one had told them in the first place, so they just found the nearest building with an Obama sign and assumed they had found it. Feeling remarkably less bilingual than I’d hoped, I explained to all of them that we were a campaign office and immediately got to work looking up each one’s polling place. 

But on November 4, 2008, Friday spoke up loud and clear and eloquently, and declared himself an equal. And his voice is reaffirmed on November 6, 2012. He tells us to dare to dream big, for change has already come and the world forever changed. He tells us to dare to dream big, even this once considered impossible dream: Son of Africa becomes the new patriarch of America.The old curse ends.