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 43^rd 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.