Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

Former Obama official calls for unvaccinated to be put on ‘no-fly list’ – Fox News

A former Obama administration official is calling for a federal "no-fly list" for Americans who are not vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"The White House has rejected a nationwide vaccine mandatea sweeping suggestion that the Biden administration could not easily enact if it wanted tobut a no-fly list for unvaccinated adults is an obvious step that the federal government should take," former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Juliette Kayyem wrote in an op-ed for The Atlantic this week.

MCENANY: BIDEN TIPTOEING TOWARDS ORWELLIAN AND RIDICULOUS' VACCINE MANDATES LIKE NYC

In the piece, originally titled "Unvaccinated people belong on the no-fly list" and then updated to say "Unvaccinated People Need to Bear the Burden," Kayyem argued that existing TSA regulations already set the precedent that rules can be enforced to determine who flies.

"When you go to the airport, you see two kinds of security rules. Some apply equally to everyone; no one can carry weapons through the TSA checkpoint," Kayyem wrote. "But other protocols divide passengers into categories according to how much of a threat the government thinks they pose. If you submit to heightened scrutiny in advance, TSA PreCheck lets you go through security without taking off your shoes; a no-fly list keeps certain people off the plane entirely. Not everyone poses an equal threat. Rifling through the bags of every business traveler and patting down every preschooler and octogenarian would waste the TSAs time and needlessly burden many passengers."

Kayyem says that the "same principle" justifies limiting the spread of the coronavirus by preventing the unvaccinated from flying.

WHO CALLS FOR MORATORIUM ON VACCINE BOOSTER SHOTS

"Flying is not a right," Kayyem explains, adding that "the federal government is the sole entity that can regulate the terms and conditions of airline safety."

Kayyem added that requiring passengers to show proof of vaccination would be a "minor inconvenience."

"For the privilege of flying, Americans already give up a lot: We disclose our personal information, toss our water bottles, extinguish our cigarette butts, and lock our guns in checked luggage. For vaccinated people, having to show proof of vaccination when flying would be a minor inconvenience," she wrote.

Kayyems article comes as the Biden administration has increased pressure on states and businesses to require proof of vaccination for employees, while also pushing a vaccine mandate for federal workers.

This week, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is expected to announce that all active-duty military personnel must be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

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President Biden has often referred to getting vaccinated as a "patriotic duty," as many Republicans object to the idea of a vaccine mandated by the government.

Officials in New York City recently announced that both workers and customers in many indoor locations such as restaurants and gyms will be required to show proof of vaccination.

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Former Obama official calls for unvaccinated to be put on 'no-fly list' - Fox News

Portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama are coming to the Brooklyn Museum this month – 6Sqft

(L) Barack Obama by Kehinde Wiley, oil on canvas, 2019. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; (R) Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama by Amy Sherald, oil on linen, 2018. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

The famous portraits of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are coming to theBrooklyn Museumin Prospect Heights this month. At the beginning of 2020, the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery announced a five-city tour for the two popular paintings, which kicked off in June in the Obamas hometown of Chicago. Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sheraldare the first African American artists selected by the Portrait Gallery forthe museums official portraits of a president or first lady.

Since the unveiling of these two portraits of the Obamas, the Portrait Gallery has experienced a record number of visitors, not only to view these works in person, but to be part of the communal experience of a particular moment in time, Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, said. This tour is an opportunity for audiences in different parts of the country to witness how portraiture can engage people in the beauty of dialogue and shared experiences.

This is not the first time portraits from the Washington, D.C. museum have hit the road. The exhibition Theodore Roosevelt: Icon of the American Century traveled the country between 1998 and 2000, as did Portraits of the Presidents from the National Portrait Gallery, from 2000 to 2005. The Portrait Gallerys Lansdowne portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart alsowas displayed at seven venues between 2002 and 2004.

The tour kickedoffwith a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 18 to Aug. 15, followed by the Brooklyn Museum from Aug. 27 to Oct. 24, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from Nov. 5 to Jan. 2, 2022, Atlantas High Museum of Art from Jan. 14, 2022 to March 13, 2022, and Houstons Museum of Fine Arts from March 25, 2022 to May 30, 2022.

Member previews at the Brooklyn Museum are taking place on August 26, while the exhibit opens to the public on August 27.The exhibit is not included with general admission; tickets are $16 for adults. You can reserve a spot here >>

The Brooklyn Museum will also host related events, including an Opening Celebration on August 28 that featuresmusic by Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, art-making, and poetry; Brooklyn Talks: The Sartorial Vision of Michelle Obama on September 2 that will be a conversation with her stylist, Meredith Koop, and fashion historian Kimberly M. Jenkins; and aDrink and Draw on September 16.

Editors Note: This story was originally published on January 24, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

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Tags : Amy Sherald, barack obama, brooklyn museum, kehinde wiley

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Portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama are coming to the Brooklyn Museum this month - 6Sqft

Review: ‘The Sweetness Of Water,’ By Nathan Harris – NPR

Little, Brown and Company

Evocative and accessible, Nathan Harris's debut novel The Sweetness of Water is a historical page-turner about social friction so powerful it ignites a whole town.

Old Ox, Georgia, is a community attempting to right itself after tectonic upheaval. Focusing on the period just after Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox and the enforcement of emancipation in the South through the presence of Union troops, Harris asks a question Americans have yet to figure out: How does a community make peace in the wake of civil war? I'm not sure the novel comes close to finding an answer. But posing the question and following through the work undertaken felt incredibly worthwhile nonetheless.

Between Oprah's Book Club, President Obama's summer reading list and the Booker Prize long list, The Sweetness of Water is having a moment that goes beyond topicality. There are several reasons for that: First, its question feels urgent and familiar, because politics now feels like war. Between the January insurrection, the threat of Texas secession, and the daily rhetoric of combat and revolution, the battles are ongoing, not just along party but also regional lines. Second, the peacemaking project attempted on these pages is still clearly unfinished. Like a fictional companion to Clint's Smith's history How the Word is Passed, The Sweetness of Water joins the national conversation on race and reckoning with history already in progress. In struggles over flags, monuments, textbooks, and university tenure, we're still fighting over how to frame this event in public memory, so those old wounds feel particularly fresh. Nathan Harris makes those extraordinary, still contested times comprehensible through an immersive, incredibly humane storytelling about the lives of ordinary people.

'The Sweetness of Water' is having a moment that goes beyond topicality. There are several reasons for that.

And third, right now, we desperately need to believe in our better angels, that we too can come together and rise above, like Harris's protagonists (and as President Obama famously urged). That hope is the driving force in The Sweetness of Water. It takes flight when three men meet by chance in the woods two Black, one white. George Walker, an aging white landowner, has spent too long out there hunting an elusive prey when he comes across Landry and Prentiss, two young Black freedmen who've been secretly living in the forest on George's property because they have nowhere else to go, and lack the resources to move on. They only know they'd rather be anywhere than back at their old plantation, where the owner is in complete denial about Emancipation and still considers both men his rightful property.

Despite mutual trepidation, the three decide to treat each other with care. Slightly disoriented and in pain, George asks for help getting back to his cabin and his wife, and he offers the two brothers food and shelter in the barn. It doesn't sound like much but in that context, cooperation is an act of kindness and trust. Plus, there's more to Geoge's wandering that day; he'd just gotten the (erroneous) news that his son, Caleb, a Confederate soldier, was killed in action and dreaded sharing that with his wife.

Harris spins an increasingly complex tale about the postwar South, and he tells it in a humane and intimate way, by exploring the interpersonal relationships of all kinds in and around this rural Georgia town.

In the days that follow, a connection takes root. Bereft himself, George doesn't know how to help his grieving wife, but he needs to do something. So though he's always avoided industry, with Landry and Prentiss's help, he decides to start farming his land. It's a mutually beneficial arrangement, a requirement on both sides: Landry and Prentiss won't accept a new master-slave type arrangement of the kind that's proliferating in the area, and that's fine, because George has no desire to be a master. He's always lived apart from Old Ox, in geography and attitudes. To his mind, this is no different. So he'll pay them a fair wage, the same as any other (white) workers. The brothers agree to work until they can save money to move north, and George gets help getting his new venture off the ground.

Emancipation or not, this agreement represents a breach of centuries-old social arrangements. And so even though their business doesn't directly affect any other person in Old Ox, every white person in proximity has an opinion on it, as though Landry and Prentiss's mere existence is yet another affront and attack on their lives. From there, Harris spins an increasingly complex tale about the postwar South, and he tells it in a humane and intimate way, by exploring the interpersonal relationships of all kinds in and around this rural Georgia town.

In small moments, Harris convincingly captures the thoughts and actions of ordinary people trying to push through extraordinary times.

They're all connected and interdependent; a fracture or ripple in one inevitably affects the others. The Walkers treating Landry and Prentiss with respect causes not just a ripple in those relationships more like a revolt. The petty viciousness of the reactions to the Walkers' arrangement with Landry and Prentiss can be maddening, and yet it rings true: American history is littered with events that began with a breach of racial etiquette. In small moments, Harris convincingly captures the thoughts and actions of ordinary people trying to push through extraordinary times. And even though the story focuses on hope and unexpected kinship, it doesn't diminish the horrors of slavery or the struggle in its wake. The events of their former lives are never far from memory whipping, beating, disfiguring physical abuse, family separation, near starvation, dehumanization. None of that is denied. None of it is minimized. Like the brothers, Harris tries to train the focus elsewhere for a time.

As an act of pure storytelling, it soars. On a deeper level, however, some aspects of the novel feel unsettled and incomplete. The Sweetness of Water taps into America's longstanding and profound thirst for fantasies of racial reconciliation stories in which Black people and white people find salvation together, bonding in the face of the egregious extreme racism of others. As appealing as they are, these narratives tend to reproduce certain problematic patterns. First, while seeming to focus on crucial issues, these narratives actually highlight individual exceptions to systemic problems that need real examination. Second, even in stories where Black people should naturally be the focus (as in The Help and Green Book) they tend to marginalize Black characters in order to center and affirm the virtue of good whites. And third, they can provide easy absolution without deeper reflection (again see The Help, Green Book).

I felt those tensions keenly reading this novel, but while it flirts with the edge, it doesn't quite fall into the abyss. The difference is that The Sweetness of Water isn't a story about what happened to the enslaved after slavery's end, coopted to focus on a white family. It's a soapy and riveting drama-filled exploration of a fracture and a healing. The focus on an interracial cast is an necessity, feature rather than a flaw.

I only wish the ensemble was a little more interested in the fullness of its Black characters; I yearned to spend more than snippets of time with Landry, Prentiss, and George's confidante Clementine. It's easy to love George and Isabelle and Caleb, eventually but I don't think they're inherently more worthy of our focus and nuance, or even more essential to the redemption story being told. The novel seems to follow the logic that it's the white inhabitants of Old Ox whose adjustments to life post war are most worthy of our attention. But if Landry and Prentiss are worthy of driving the action, if they are worthy of risk and saving, then they are worthy of depth. They're beautiful characters I wish I'd gotten to know better.

They're not the only ones neglected. The Sweetness of Water is highly selective about where it casts its lens. It's a story at once set in history, yet removed from it. In the emphasis on the Walkers and what they do for Landry and Prentiss, there's also a glaring omission of the realities of post war life elsewhere in Old Ox. Though Harris is generous to these select few white Southerners, he shuts out facts that are essential to understanding the world they inhabit, even if at a remove.

Harris captures white anger and resentment at loss of white livelihood, lifestyle and status. The novel briefly references the rough reentry to society of white men who returned from a lost war lacking jobs and money and the restoration of pride. But in this period the losses were not merely symbolic or even material. There was also tremendous loss of life in the Civil War, one in five young men, according to some estimates. But there's an eerie silence about those who didn't return the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the war and how their absence shaped the lives of those they left behind. Where were those widows and fathers and mothers and friends? As much as I was captivated by Harris's storytelling while I was in the thick of everything, in the end, I felt his omissions and oversights just as acutely.

The Sweetness of Water left a lasting and multifaceted impression: It's warm and absorbing, thought provoking and humane. But ultimately uneven in its ideas a book whose resonance ever so slightly exceeds its art.

A slow runner and fast reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication scholar focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @BellCV.

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Review: 'The Sweetness Of Water,' By Nathan Harris - NPR

Read the Obamas’ Condolence Letter Sent to Biz Markie’s Widow – TMZ

Biz Markie held a special place in Barack and Michelle Obama's hearts, as evidenced by the words they shared with his widow ... which touched on a long-forgotten moment they shared in the run-up to the 2008 election.

Mrs. Biz ... Tara Hall herself, provided this copy of the letter the Obamas sent ... and it's way more personal than perhaps people might've expected. The poignant correspondence -- on the Obamas' new official letterhead -- begins, "We want to extend our heartfelt condolences to you as you reflect on Biz Markie's life."

Check out the letter for yourself -- BO and MO say that although they didn't know Biz as well as Tara did, he'd left a great impression on the couple as "one of rap's most innovative stylists and as a great man."

They added, "Biz Markie brightened every room he was in, and we will always appreciate him for his early support in 2008, bringing people together to 'Party With a Purpose' and get out the vote." Looks like Barack actually posed with Biz at one of those events.

The former first couple finished by saying Biz's legacy in hip hop will span generations, just like it had for 4 decades prior to his passing.

Michelle and Barack told Tara, "We hope you take comfort in all the fond memories you have with him. Please know that we are holding you, Averi, and your entire family in our thoughts and prayers."

Tara tells us she was stunned when she received the letter, unsolicited, last week ... and plans to have it framed in her home. She's also starting a fund in Biz's name -- the Biz Markie's Just a Friend Charity Fund -- to raise money to support orgs Biz was already helping ... like food banks in Maryland, Bread for the City (in D.C.), Soles4Souls and more.

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Read the Obamas' Condolence Letter Sent to Biz Markie's Widow - TMZ

How Rich Are Barack Obama, Joe Biden and All the Other Living US Presidents? – Yahoo Finance

The current presidential salary is not too shabby at $400,000 a year -- and for commanders in chief, retirement comes with a six-figure pension. For most presidents, the real money comes after they leave office through speaking engagements and book deals. The big exception is Donald Trump, who was already a very rich man when he entered the Oval Office.

Check Out: How the Stock Market Performed Under Each PresidentWhoa: Crazy Financial Perks of Being President

But, is he the richest president still alive? Take a look at the current net worths of all living U.S. presidents.

Last updated: Aug. 4, 2021

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President Joe Biden spent decades in politics, but he didn't make any real money until his time off between White House stints when Donald Trump was in office. His net worth skyrocketed after he finished his VP term thanks to lucrative book deals and speaking engagements, Forbes reported. That includes a 2017 book deal worth a reported $8 million, according to Publisher's Weekly.

According to Forbes, Joe and Jill Biden earned $11.1 million by the end of 2017, then $4.6 million in 2018, $1 million in 2019 and $630,000 in 2020. Although he earned $17.3 million in total during his four years out of office, the president's net worth is much lower, mostly because of taxes and charity.

Click through to see how much Biden is worth now.

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Donald Trump was the first billionaire president and remains the only billionaire to have held office today. As always, the majority of his fortune resides in his New York City real estate portfolio, but his winery, golf courses and global branding and licensing operation all chip in, as well.

Click through to see just how rich his prime real estate and other business ventures have made Trump.

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Post-presidential life has been lucrative for Barack Obama. He's commanded $400,000 speaking fees and signed book deals worth $65 million, Newsweek reported. Obama, along with his wife Michelle, also signed a production deal with Netflix in 2018 for an undisclosed amount, Variety reported -- though based on previous deals the streaming giant had made, it's likely worth north of $100 million. His 2020 memoir "A Promised Land" sold nearly 890,000 copies in 24 hours, according to the AP.

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Click through to see just how rich all of these deals have made Obama.

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Like Trump, George W. Bush was already wealthy when he took office. He earned millions as the founder and CEO of an oil and gas exploration firm and as part-owner of Major League Baseball's Texas Rangers, Fox Business reported. He continued to add to his wealth after his presidency was over through book deals and speaking fees.

Click through to see how much Bush is worth now.

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Bill Clinton left the White House poorer than when he went into it. Because of defense attorneys fees for scandal investigations, impeachment proceedings and an action to suspend his Arkansas law license, Clinton ended his term as president with $16 million in debt, CNBC reported. However, he was able to turn things around with income from speeches and book deals.

In his first year out of the Oval Office, Clinton earned $13.7 million in speaking and writing fees, according to his tax return. And by 2016, Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had racked up $153 million in speaking fees, CNN reported. In total, Forbes reported that the Clintons had raked in $240 million during their first 15 post-White House years.

Click through to find out how much Clinton is worth today.

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Unlike many other former presidents, Jimmy Carter eschewed the big-money speeches and corporate board invitations after leaving the White House, choosing instead to return to his simple life in Plains, Georgia, The Washington Post reported. According to The Post, "Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full time to the house he lived in before he entered politics a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside." Still, he has added to his post-presidency wealth with book deals, plus the over-$200,000 annual pension all ex-presidents receive.

The oldest living president in history, the 96-year-old Nobel Peace Prize Winner has outlived all other occupants of the Oval Office who came before, according to CNN. The No. 2 oldest president in history, George H.W. Bush, died at the age of 94 in 2018.

Click through to see how much this modest former president is worth.

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Andrew Lisa contributed to the reporting for this article.

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: How Rich Are Barack Obama, Joe Biden and All the Other Living US Presidents?

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How Rich Are Barack Obama, Joe Biden and All the Other Living US Presidents? - Yahoo Finance