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Whether he was breaking into an emotional rendition of Amazing Grace or bending over to let a five-year-old touch his hair, theres no doubt that Barack Obama was the coolest president well ever have. And while we know he has excellent taste in partners, every year Obama likes to remind us that his taste in film and TV is also impeccable. The former president has had much more time on his hands since leaving The White House, and hes taken it upon himself to flex his cinephile leanings. This year he expanded his annual top ten list to include film and television, even including a diplomatically worded explanation about the changing nature of the industry.

Like everyone else, we were stuck inside a lot this year, and with streaming further blurring the lines between theatrical movies and television features, Ive expanded the list to include visual storytelling that Ive enjoyed this year, regardless of format, Obama tweeted.

His list included one project from Higher Ground, the production company started by Barack and Michelle Obama in 2018. That was James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnhams Crip Camp, a moving documentary about a summer camp for teens with disabilities, which appeared with an asterisk lest he be accused of favoritism.

On the narrative side, Obama singled out Chlo Zhaos Frances McDormand-starrer Nomadland, David Finchers Mank, and the August Wilson adaptation Ma Raineys Black Bottom. Venerated indie distributor Kino Lorber was quick to follow-up with a Tweet thanking the former President for choosing three of its films Beanpole, Bacurau, and Martin Eden all foreign-language features that have landed on many film critics top ten lists.

Obamas TV picks are just as on point, with Michaela Coels groundbreaking I May Destroy You getting some much-deserved love. Obama also enjoys some old standbys like Better Call Saul and The Good Place. Unsurprisingly for a basketball fan, ESPNs Michael Jordan docu-series The Last Dance also made the list.

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Barack Obamas Favorite Films of the Year Include Nomadland, Mank, and Time - IndieWire

In the hours between Trumps exit from the White House and Bidens entrance, a team of cleaners will wipe down every surface and mist the air with disinfectant. After that, masks will be mandatory and testing will be constant. POLITICOs Alice Miranda Ollstein breaks down how Biden and his team are working to transform the White House from hotspot to bubble.

Heres what I know, Obama said. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also believe that every child should get a good education, and that requires changes in how we teach that go beyond just money."

Biden, a self-described "union guy" whose wife is a community college professor, may soon find that it is far easier to be the compassionate vice president than it is to make the tough political calls on education policy himself. While its unifying to rally Democrats around their shared hatred for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her anti-union agenda, the work of reviving a U.S. education system upended by the pandemic will be difficult and often unpopular.

I know it's going to be controversial with some of you, Biden warned governors in a call Wednesday to detail his plans to reopen most U.S. schools within his first 100 days in office.

The president-elect benefits from witnessing the union blowback against Obama, who enraged educators when he publicly supported the firing of teachers at an underperforming Rhode Island school in 2010. The National Education Association Jill Biden's union even called on Obamas first Education Secretary Arne Duncan to resign amid fights over academic standards, public charter schools and testing, though tension faded when Obama in 2015 signed bipartisan legislation to overhaul No Child Left Behind.

By contrast, Biden is starting off with a plan that his wife, while pointing to herself, likes to say is teacher-approved. He has pledged to nominate a former teacher as his education secretary and told union members, You will never find in American history a president who is more teacher-centric and more supportive of teachers than me.

But within the Democratic party, the spectrum of ideology on education issues is far more complex than pro-teacher.

Biden will need the support of teachers and Congress as he tries to meet his goal of safely reopening most schools in the first days of his administration. But he will also need to navigate sharp divisions that remain within the Democratic party on charter schools and student assessments both flashpoints during the Obama administration as well.

The president-elect has been critical of charter schools. And the Democratic Party platform written with input from teachers unions argues against education reforms that hinge on standardized test scores, stating that high-stakes testing doesnt improve outcomes enough and can lead to discrimination.

But its an open and pressing question whether Bidens education secretary will waive federal standardized testing requirements this spring for K-12 schools for a second year or to carry on, despite the pandemic. Teachers unions say it isnt the time, but a host of education and civil rights groups say statewide testing will be important to gauge how much students have fallen behind during the pandemic.

This early decision for Biden will be telling, said Charles Barone, vice president of K-12 policy at Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is among groups that support carrying on with testing, but Barone said the pressure on Biden, being union aligned is to take a different direction.

How does he resolve that political tension? he asked.

While the nation's two major teachers unions endorsed Biden late during the Democratic primary, the unions didnt back Obama in the 2008 primary. The National Education Association sat out the contest and the American Federation of Teachers backed Hillary Clinton, though both unions endorsed Obama during the general election.

Clashes with the Obama administration followed over initiatives such as Race to the Top, a competitive grant program used to encourage states to, among other things, adopt rigorous academic standards and teacher evaluation systems based in part on student performance and growth.

Obama told New York Magazine that the initiative attempted to give schools an incentive to come up with accountability measures that work and not necessarily through standardized testing. I think a lot of the unions, all they heard was accountability equals more testing, he said. And that continues to be a challenge, I think, for nationally engineered education reform.

Weingarten said Obama administration officials believed in public education but initially had a different view on how to strengthen it. At the start, it was a top-down approach that relied heavily on using standardized test data as an accountability hammer, she said.

They had people that they listened to who thought you could reduce teachers to an algorithm and kids to test score, she said. We thought that you needed to focus on well-being of kids, on great teaching and learning, on real engagement.

Weingarten noted that the Obama administration shifted considerably on education, eventually working with educators to replace No Child Left Behind and moving away from high-stakes testing as it became clear that there was too much fixation on that approach. When Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the main federal law governing K-12 education, the legislation gave more power to states on assessments and accountability.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, said she does not expect the Biden administration to recycle the education policies of the Obama years.

Biden has called for tripling federal spending on low-income school districts, boosting funding for special education, increasing teacher salaries, helping states establish universal preschool and modernizing school buildings. His education plan also calls for creating more community schools, with expanded "wraparound" support for students a big priority for unions.

The Biden administration is going to support public schools, which means not only turning away from the policies of Betsy DeVos thats a given but also turning away from Race to the Top, she told POLITICO before the election. Its going to be very different.

Burris said she still expects a lot of resistance against Biden's efforts to scrutinize charter schools, considered part of Obamas legacy. Obama is credited with launching the first federal program to replicate and expand high-performing charters, which are publicly funded but independently run. But the schools have always been a flashpoint, particularly with teachers unions, which argue charters siphon funds from traditional public schools.

Biden has called for banning federal funding to for-profit charter school operators but has vowed to impose tighter standards on charter schools in general. The administration will require all charter schools to be authorized and held accountable by democratically elected bodies like school boards and also held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as all public schools, Stef Feldman, the Biden campaigns national policy director, told the Education Writers Association in October.

Barone, whose group supports charter schools and public school choice, said that policy is problematic, because the model of the charter is to have autonomy. Telling parents that the same school district they fled will now be running the charter school they sought as an alternative is even a little cruel," he said.

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Biden breaks the Obama mold on teachers union strife - POLITICO

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Barack Obama, a man who once expressed adoration of a show where the protagonist masturbates to his speeches, is back again to share his culture recommendations for our hellish year of 2020. In his annual year-end list for his favorite television shows and films (if you missed his book drop, here you go), the former Chicago resident was keen to recommend titles such as The Good Place, Soul, Lovers Rock, and the sexy chess show, as well as the gruesomely fun The Boys and the politically minded Mrs. America. Take a guess at which of these recs features a scene where a bunch of peoples heads explode during a congressional hearing airing live on C-SPAN! And a man is literally banged to death! Like everyone else, we were stuck inside a lot thisyear, and with streaming further blurring the lines between theatrical movies and television features, Obama explained in a tweet, Ive expanded thelistto include visual storytelling that Ive enjoyed thisyear, regardlessofformat. His entire list, most of which is pretty family-friendly, can be read below.

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Barack Obama Had a Good Time Watching Congressional Heads Explode on The Boys - Vulture

When former President Barack Obama warned Democrats against using a snappy slogan like defund the police, the backlash from progressives was swift.

If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system so that its not biased and treats everybody fairly, I guess you can use a snappy slogan, like defund the police, but, you know, you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that youre actually going to get the changes you want done, Obama told Peter Hamby on Snapchats Good Luck America earlier this month.

Cori Bush, who made history last month by becoming the first Black woman to represent Missouri in Congress, tweeted, Its not a slogan. Its a mandate for keeping our people alive.

Jamaal Bowman, the newly elected U.S. representative for New York, wrote, In 2014, #BlackLivesMatter was too much. In 2016, Kaepernick was too much. Today, discussing police budgets is too much. The problem is Americas comfort with Black death not discomfort with slogans.

Its been 12 years since Obama was first elected, and the misguided hope ushered in by that event that America had become a post-racial society soon gave way to reality. The movement for racial justice took root during Obamas second term as thousands of Americans protested the police killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Aura Rosser, Tamir Rice and others, reaching a fever pitch this summer after another string of highly publicized incidents of police brutality.

While African Americans have consistently supported the Democratic Party in large numbers throughout this time, theres a growing segment of young Black folks and progressives from all backgrounds who have become increasingly skeptical of the piecemeal and narrow approach to addressing police brutality that characterized much of the Obama era.

Theres good reason for people to question the former presidents approach. Despite the task force Obama put together on policing in 2014, and the adoption of reforms, including anti-bias training and the expanded use of body cameras, the number of police killings has remained largely the same each year.

It has not helped that President Donald Trump rolled back the effort to reform policing when he entered office. And a study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health based on a Washington Post database that shows the number of fatal police shootings has remained relatively constant each year from 2015 and 2020 said they indicated a public health emergency. During this period, researchers found that Americans lost an annual average of 31,960 years of life, due to fatal police shootings. The study also found that while African Americans make up 14% of the U.S. population, they accounted for 27% of shooting deaths.

To make matters worse, Trump has also stoked racism, sided with white nationalists and militias, and showed a willingness to escalate police violence against demonstrators. When the pandemic hit, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Black and Latinx Americans were twice as likely to die from the novel coronavirus as white people. Racial disparities in employment also mean Black Americans are less likely to have health insurance.

Taken together with the continued police killings of Black Americans, its no wonder that a growing constituency is calling for a bolder approach to tackle the political morass and the interlocking crises of the coronavirus, structural racism and economic inequality.

After a cell phone video of George Floyds death spread around the world, millions of people took to the streets in hundreds of cities this summer prompting many journalists, scholars, politicians and activists to call it a reckoning on race. Corporations issued statements proclaiming their support for social justice. Mayors commissioned Black Lives Matter street murals. Members of both political parties appeared receptive to change during this massive uprising.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in June, which restricted the use of force to effectively ban chokeholds and eliminated legal protections for officers. However, the measure did not seek to reduce contact between police and citizens, which some activists believe leads to brutal encounters. Republicans, on the other hand, trumpeted their own bill that would seek to educate police departments on racism, even though it did not mandate any anti-bias measures. Both of these bills were ultimately stalled.

We are six months out from the protests and momentum has slowed. Where do we go from here? First, it is important to recognize that a true reckoning not only requires a deep, collective introspection about our history of structural racism, but also a revolution of values, described by activists such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Grace Lee Boggs as a shift in our principles towards a more fair and just society for everyone, especially the most marginalized. A true reckoning with racism should inspire us to seek new and transformative ways of performing justice that are grounded in more non-violent and community-based approaches to public safety.

Transformative justice is a core value that underpins the Breathe Act a piece of legislation authored by the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project, which seeks to mobilize voters to support their legislation and like-minded candidates. The Breathe Act tackles the multifaceted problems such as militarization of police forces and surveillance programs that plague policing that plague policing by seeking to divest federal resources from incarceration and law enforcement initiatives. It also seeks to repeal federal laws that have disproportionately criminalized Black women, youth and families and calls for an end to federal agencies like Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) that perpetuate harm.

The Breathe Act illustrates how the policing problem is racial and economic. Obama even appeared to acknowledge this in the discussion of defunding the police earlier this month. He said, But if you instead say, Lets reform the police department so that everybodys being treated fairly, you know, divert you people from getting into crime, and if there was a homeless guy, can maybe we send a mental health worker there instead of an armed unit that could end up resulting in a tragedy? Suddenly, a whole bunch of folks who might not otherwise listen to you are listening to you.

When it comes to policing, we should take Kings approach to addressing poverty. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, he said in his Beyond Vietnam speech in 1967. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. The Breathe Act would be a first step in restructuring the way we approach justice in this country. Instead of locking people up, it seeks to minimize crime and overpolicing by establishing jobs programs, ensuring equitable education funding, investigating reparations and expanding Medicaid and universal childcare.

Instead of criticizing the slogan defund the police, or casting progressive policies as unrealistic, Democrats should focus on common ground: Police killings are a problem and we expect law enforcement to solve too wide a range of problems.

Weve tried making reforms. But the problem of police brutality is an urgent and persistent one that requires a bold vision of structural change. And the strategy must match our vision and values. If political budgets are moral documents, then divesting heavily from institutions that have the capacity to perpetuate harms is the moral thing to do.

We must join in solidarity with and support organizations across the country that already do this work like Minneapoliss Black Visions Collective, the Detroit Justice Center, Project Nia, Study and Struggle and Survived + Punished. We can protest and push for the Breathe Act. We can engage each other in political education, have tough conversations about public safety and envision alternatives to our current system of policing. And none of this should turn off those who think incremental changes are the best we can do.

Trumps political ascendance following the election of the first African-American president proved its all too easy to roll back reforms. While calls for body cameras or bias training might have seemed fitting five years ago, we need to forge a new and more humane approach to public safety. This is a long-term mission that transcends four-year election cycles. We will face serious opposition as long as Trumpism runs rampant. But the abolitionists of the 19th century and the civil rights activists also faced serious roadblocks in their efforts to destroy slavery, stop lynching and overturn Jim Crow.

The groundswell of support we saw this summer showed us a glimmer of what is possible when Americans acknowledge racism and police brutality as existential threats to our country. Complaining about protest demands will not get us closer to transforming public safety. Organizing, mobilizing into power and encouraging people to imagine more humane and community-based ways to ensure public safety can.

Austin McCoy is an assistant professor of history at Auburn University. CNN

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What Obama gets wrong on 'defund the police' - The Philadelphia Tribune

Barack Obama responded to criticism of his remark that political candidates risk losing support when they turn to "snappy slogans" like "defund the police" during an appearance on The Daily Show with host Trevor Noah on Tuesday.

The former president qualified that he made the comment, uttered during an appearance on the Snapchat show Good Luck America in early December, amid a book tour where he praised 2020's social activism: "Nothing made me more optimistic in the past year than the activism in the wake of George Floyd's murder," he told Noah on Tuesday, saying that activists had "shifted the conversation in ways that I would not even imagine a couple of years ago." He added that, unlike some Democrats, he didn't believe the "defund the police" slogan had anything to do with the Democrats' 2020 election results in Congress.

Instead, he said that he was concerned that the ideas behind "defund the police" weren't getting adequately translated not just to "white folks" but also to "Michelle [Obama]'s mom." He said he wasn't advocating for obscuring the truth with language, or providing an easily digestible form of the idea: "The issue to me is not making [listeners feel] comfortable, it's can we be precise in our language enough" to persuade people who may be persuadable.

He added, "Part of this is also everyone has different roles to play: an activist, a movement leader is going to provide a prophetic voice and speak certain truths that somebody who is going to be elected into office will not be able to say."

Earlier in the conversation, Obama and Noah talked about frustrations that young people feel with structural problems in the U.S. The former president encouraged younger generations not to take an all-or-nothing approach. He added that "a certain impatience, a certain anger" is warranted in confronting injustice: "I welcome them feeling frustrated and impatient because that's how I got started, and then they'll get their own knocks on the head and things won't work out the way they want... it's that constant striving and wanting things to be better" that create change, he said.

The pair also touched on lighter topics during the nearly hour-long interview. Noah jokingly asked whether Obama was going to be more careful about who he "roasted" given that two people he had spoken critically of President Trump and Kanye West both subsequently ran for president. "Well, I should roast people I admire more. I'll start roasting you, man. Who knows? although you weren't born here, but look, I was able to get away with it apparently," he said, referring to the baseless Obama birther conspiracy theory.

What was it like to transition to private life in 2017 after spending two terms as president, Noah further asked? "The truth is that I did not have those kinds of withdrawals" that others have when they leave public life, he said. "Michelle and I, that's something we share. We feel good about the work we did. We don't feel anxiety about not being the center of attention."

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Late Night Lately: Closing Out the Year With Obama, Biden and Taylor Swift - Hollywood Reporter