Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

Rashida Tlaib Pulls An Obama, Parties Maskless While Pushing Mandates – The Federalist

Rep. Rashida Tlaib partied without a mask at an indoor wedding reception on Sunday, defying Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for the area.

The party was held in Wayne County, Michigan, on Sunday a CDC-classified substantial risk for community transmission county, in which the CDC recommends masking indoors regardless of vaccination status.

The congresswoman can be seen dancing, holding hands, and hugging other people, none of whom appear to be wearing masks, in video footage uploaded to Instagram by the band that performed at the wedding, Bassam Saleh.

The party occurred the same day that Tlaib attacked Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, for urging Americans to ignore the ever-changing CDC guidelines.

The KY Senator is throwing a tantrum as his state is being swallowed whole by this virus, again. People are getting sick and dying, Tlaib wrote. He needs to put politics aside, and put people first. Start resisting the virus.

Tlaibs masking hypocrisy, whereby the elite ruling class lives by a different set of rules than the ones they create for everyone else, came amid controversy over former President Barack Obamas maskless birthday party, which New York Times correspondent Annie Karni justified because the crowd was sophisticated.

Tlaib has also come under fire in recent months for promoting antisemitic movements and calling for the abolition of police.

Maggie Hroncich is an intern at The Federalist and a student at Hillsdale College.

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Rashida Tlaib Pulls An Obama, Parties Maskless While Pushing Mandates - The Federalist

Biden reverses Trump with tougher car pollution standards – Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON

President Biden unveiled plans Thursday to strengthen car pollution standards through 2026, putting the United States on a path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions though not as quickly as many environmentalists say is needed.

The proposed standards, written by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would replace significantly weaker Trump-era rules that essentially undid the nations biggest climate change initiative. In their place, the Biden administration is offering a compromise that it hopes progressives can live with and automakers can follow.

The president also signed an executive order that encourages automakers to produce more zero-emissions vehicles and sets a new goal of making half of all new cars and trucks emissions-free by 2030. This would include battery-electric, plug-in hybrid electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

The future is electric, Biden said to supporters gathered Thursday on the South Lawn of the White House, with several electric vehicles, including Fords F-150 Lightning, as a backdrop. Theres no turning back, he said. The question is whether well lead or fall behind in the race for the future.

After signing the order, the president took an electric Jeep Wrangler for a drive around the White House.

Bidens proposal would tighten pollution standards over a four-year period, beginning with cars coming off the production line in the fall of 2022.

His plan is not expected to cut emissions as significantly as the standards put in place by the Obama administration nearly a decade ago, which required automakers to increase fuel efficiency across their fleets by 5% a year, achieving an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by model year 2025.

But the new targets would greatly exceed those set under former President Trump, who weakened the standards to mandate annual fuel efficiency increases of 1.5%, a level that automakers had already shown they could achieve without regulation. Under his rules, automakers had to reach an average efficiency of about 40 miles per gallon by 2026.

Biden administration officials said the new rule would require car companies to manufacture vehicles with an average efficiency of 52 miles per gallon by model year 2026.

In the first year of the regulation, carmakers would have to cut their emissions by 10% more than the Trump rules required. They would then have to make 5% reductions each year thereafter.

Administration officials said the rule would save drivers money at the pump and would decrease gasoline consumption by about 200 billion gallons over the four years. They estimated the standards would prevent an additional 2 billion metric tons of climate-warming carbon pollution from being released into the atmosphere.

The proposal postpones battles over how much to restrict tailpipe pollution in 2027 and beyond. In the executive order the president signed Thursday, he directed agencies to begin work on the next set of standards.

It remains unclear whether the auto industry will support the newly proposed standards.

John Bozzella, chief executive of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry lobby group, said in a statement that automakers would work with the administration to evaluate its plan, and called on Congress and state legislatures to invest in the infrastructure needed for the increase in electric vehicles.

In a joint statement, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis the result of Januarys merger of Fiat Chrysler and the French carmaker PSA declared their shared aspiration to make 40% to 50% of new vehicle sales electric by the end of the decade.

Environmental advocates cheered the Biden administrations pledge to toss out the Trump regulations. But many of those same activists said the administrations proposed replacement doesnt go far enough.

In a letter to the president last month, they called for a 60% cut to vehicle emissions by 2030, a goal that would be extremely difficult to meet under the administrations proposed pollution rules.

Having watched as automakers lobbied Trump to relax the aggressive Obama-era targets, environmentalists are wary of car companies promises to gradually phase out the internal combustion engine.

Todays proposal relies on unenforceable voluntary commitments from unreliable carmakers to make up to 50% of their fleets electric by 2030, said Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversitys Safe Climate Transport Campaign.

Global warming is burning forests, roasting the West and worsening storms. Now is not the time to propose weak standards and promise strong ones later, he said.

Becker and others said that auto companies already have the technology to meet tougher standards than those being proposed by the Biden administration, but that they rarely use it in the United States. Automakers have pushed back, arguing that theyre unable to meet stricter standards because of American consumers preference for larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles.

In recent years, some automakers have been able to meet federal standards not by producing fleets of cleaner cars, but by cashing in credits earned by manufacturing a much smaller number of electric vehicles.

The proposed regulations, which have been developed quickly by federal government standards, are a piece of the administrations broader efforts to push Americans to buy more electric vehicles. Biden has asked Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars to make the vehicles more affordable through tax credits, to electrify 20% of the nations school buses and to build half a million chargers by 2030.

Yet the bipartisan infrastructure bill making its way through Congress accomplishes very little of that. The current deal includes $7.5 billion for charging stations, which would pay for only half as many as Biden has called for.

At stake in that bill is the presidents ability to deliver on his promise of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Calculating backward, most environmentalists say the only way to meet that goal is to mandate that all new cars be emissions-free by 2035.

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Biden reverses Trump with tougher car pollution standards - Los Angeles Times

Obama Significantly Scales Back 60th Birthday Party as …

WASHINGTON The party plans had been months in the making and many invitees had already arrived on Marthas Vineyard when former President Barack Obama belatedly announced he was canceling his huge 60th birthday bash scheduled for Saturday.

Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends, Hannah Hankins, a spokeswoman for the former president, said in a statement Wednesday morning. Hes appreciative of others sending their birthday wishes from afar and looks forward to seeing people soon.

Hundreds of former Obama administration officials, celebrities and Democratic donors had been planning to attend the party at Mr. Obamas island mansion, with many of them renting houses on the island. Many guests were already in transit and others were scheduling the required coronavirus tests whose results they had to submit to a medical coronavirus coordinator to gain entry to the Obama compound when they were informed Tuesday night that they were no longer invited. The New York Post had reported that George Clooney, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey were all expected to attend.

Theyve been concerned about the virus from the beginning, asking invited guests if they had been vaccinated, requesting that they get a test proximate to the event, said David Axelrod, a former top Obama adviser. But when this was planned, the situation was quite different. So they responded to the changing circumstances.

Mr. Axelrod said he was no longer attending. Rahm Emanuel, who served as Mr. Obamas first chief of staff, had also planned to attend the bash. But he said he got a call Tuesday night telling him that if he was not already on the island, he should not come.

Mr. Emanuel said he joked to Marty Nesbitt, the former presidents close friend and the chairman of the Obama Foundation, that the revoked invitation was an exercise in character building. I told him that we literally got voted off the island, Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Obamas change of plans came days after President Biden effectively conceded that the pandemic had come roaring back, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an internal document that the Delta variant was much more contagious and more likely to break through vaccine protections than all other known versions of the virus.

Mr. Obama, however, had at first appeared eager to carry on with his plans, displaying what some Democrats supportive of Mr. Obama said they viewed as a casual disregard for the optics of his birthday bash. Even as cities like Washington reimposed mask mandates indoors, a source involved in the planning of Mr. Obamas birthday party said the event would go on as planned, underscoring that it would be outdoors and all guests would be following C.D.C. public health protocols.

Some of Mr. Obamas former aides also defended his decision to carry on.

Guysbuy a map, Tommy Vietor, a former Obama spokesman, wrote on Twitter in response to a news article about the party proceeding amid growing concerns about the coronavirus after an outbreak in the vaccinated community of Provincetown, Mass. Marthas Vineyard is an island. Its not close to Provincetown.

Some supporters on the island were also quick to jump to his defense. Im thrilled hes celebrating his birthday out here, said Caroline Hunter, an activist and resident of the Oak Bluffs neighborhood. I think we should be much more concerned about unvaccinated people.

But other invitees had already decided it was best not to attend. Ronald A. Klain, the White House chief of staff, for instance, had changed his mind and opted not to attend. (White House colleagues clarified that Mr. Klain made the decision before last week to celebrate his own 60th birthday party at home in Washington, instead.)

Alan Dershowitz, a controversial Marthas Vineyard denizen who served on former President Donald J. Trumps defense team in his first impeachment trial, said the community in Chilmark was critical of the glitzy bash and said it was wise for Mr. Obama to cancel or postpone it rather than create a distraction for Mr. Bidens messaging on the pandemic.

Everyone is talking about it and no one is talking about it positively, Mr. Dershowitz said in an interview on Tuesday. Some people are making excuses for it. No one is saying its a good idea.

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Obama Significantly Scales Back 60th Birthday Party as ...

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