White House

"Sometimes I'm a journalist," Matt Kohn told me the day after the 2012 presidential election. "But I consider myself a filmmaker telling stories who uses journalism." The story Kohn tells in his documentary, Call It Democracy, is a sobering one. It's a narrative that meticulously examines the problems that were -- and are -- posed by the Electoral College. The film, which aired on the Documentary Channel last November, focuses primarily on the 2000 election debacle, and chronicles the measures that have been taken to prevent those problems from happening again. 

Despite Bloomberg Businnessweek's accusation that the Chinese army is spying on Americans, the report that led to the charges has serious flaws. These raise troubling questions about a repetition of  the "China spy syndrome." Beginning with The New York Times January 30 disclosure of Chinese hacking, every publication of note or of little note has since run one or more stories on cyber attacks emanating from China. 

As Bobby Jindal begins to lay seeds for a possible run for the White House, approval at home seems to be falling for the Louisiana Governor. The new survey finds Louisiana voters are as conservative as ever, backing the Governor’s refusal to implement the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare to critics, by a 13 point margin. However, in a bright sign for Democrats, it also shows that the local electorate has grown slightly critical of Jindal’s refusal of expanded Medicaid dollars.

About 60 percent of the 17 million Asian-Americans in the United States are foreign-born. Ninety percent of Asian immigrants come to the United States through family-based immigration visas, so backlogs in the system affect their everyday lives. In fact, nearly half of the 4.3 million people in the family backlog worldwide are in Asia. “What people often…frame as a Latino issue, it’s just not true,” Moua said. One in 11 undocumented immigrants in the United States is Asian-American; and one in 10 Dreamers is Asian-American.

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. 

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.

Even today, within a culture that is entrenched so fully in the lessons of modernism, it feels appropriate to commission a realist painter to render the presidential portrait. On May 31, the White House held an unveiling ceremony for the latest addition to its time-honored tradition of oil portraits – George W. Bush. The 43rd president, who has been conspicuously absent from the public eye since finishing his second term, was in good spirits for the festivities. 

From New America Media: A Latino radio host and blogger is calling for Cecilia Muñoz to resign from the White House for her defense of the administration’s deportation policies. Presente.org, the immigrant rights group that led the petition to get CNN’s Lou Dobbs off the air, is demanding that Muñoz denounce the Secure Communities program. In response, a group of some of the nation’s leading immigrant advocacy organizations released a statement [this week] in support of Muñoz.