President Obama's jobs plan centers on: 1) putting millions of people directly back to work to rebuild America’s tattered infrastructure and 2) providing money to states to rehire over 450,000 teachers.  If the Republicans had enacted the president’s employment legislation when he proposed it in 2011, rather than declaring it dead-on-arrival, the economy could have churned out 227,000 jobs last month rather than the anemic 69,000. This is the point that Obama was making when he tripped over himself on June 8: Americans need quick action on jobs.

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican whose agenda of union-busting and gutting public services outraged many in the state, became the only governor to have survived a recall election in American history on Tuesday as he prevailed over his Democratic opponent. His victory foreshadows the rise to power of politicians more likely to bow to a rising oligarchy than heed the interests of their constituents -- a disturbing sign given Social Security and Medicare are on the federal chopping block.

Willard Mitt Romney has emerged as the most winsome debutante of this season’s corporate cotillion, a quadrennial bash sponsored by Wall Street tycoons, right-wing entrepreneurs, K Street lobbyists, golfers, and industrial polluters. Every four years since 1928, the big bucks boys of amalgamated power rally around some beau of the ball who agrees to insist that business acumen is the paramount qualification for election to the office of president.  

Asian-Americans represent the fastest-growing demographic segment in this country and a critical voting bloc. But, according to a new first-of-its-kind poll, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to be taking note. The Lake Research Partners poll is the first to gauge political attitudes among Asian-American voters, who are largely aligned with the Democratic Party – by a margin of three to one. 

Lee Atwater, the late Republican operative, is described by his numerous detractors as the godfather of contemporary xenophobic dog whistles to the baser instincts of a vastly Caucasian political party.  Atwater made his professional bones as chief dirty trickster for the 1978 U.S. Senate candidacy of his own godfather——fellow South Carolinian Strom Thurmond , a white supremacist who secretly fathered a child with a  black housekeeper.

As President Obama and his campaign team know, the Buffett Rule -- officially the Paying a Fair Share Act -- is a powerful symbol of many Americans' desire for economic justice and reprisal against the richest 1 percent that has arguably cached the country's wealth for itself.  So it's only rational that Obama would bring it into focus as the primaries shift to the two-man  race for the presidency. 

The real wedge issue in the election will be Obama himself. This campaign will be more explicitly racialized than the last one. In spite of the economic difficulties that Blacks face – an unemployment rate almost twice the norm - Blacks nevertheless feel better about the economy than Whites. This is simply racial solidarity. There is still a great deal of support for Obama in the African-American community. Even people who are critical, in the end, say he’s doing the best he can.

While some say health care reform may not have gone far enough, the “three big things” it delivers are greater protection for consumers against insurance companies through the new health Patient’s Bill of Rights, expansions in health care coverage and control of health care costs.

Prepping for another run for the White House, President Barack Obama recently launched an "African-Americans for Obama" campaign to target Black voters. It is expected that the Democrats would work to shore up their Black base right before the president's bid for re-election. The dampened enthusiasm among Black voters who are facing 15.8 percent unemployment and rapidly declining wealth levels is also expected. The Black unemployment number is more than double that of White Americans, which stands at 7.5 percent. Throughout the Obama presidency, White unemployment has improved, while Black unemployment has gotten markedly worse.

The great fear a year ago when President Obama unveiled his budget for 2012 was that he caved to the GOP and Tea Party hardliners, and axed dozens of vital programs and agencies. The screams were long and loud from liberal Democrats that the budget slashes would tar Obama as the first Democratic president to do what no Democrat or GOP president had dared do and that was to slash and restructure Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The fears have mostly proved groundless.