Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category

Barack Obamas Grandmother Dies at 99, Family in Mourning – Black Enterprise

Sarah Obama, step-grandmother of former US President Barack Obama, died at the age of 99. Authoritiesreported that Mama Sarah Onyango Obama died in Kenya, while receiving treatment at a Kisumu hospital. The public message of comfort provided by President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, partially stated that the Obama family matriarch has been an icon of family values, in addition to a philanthropist who contributed to the progress of the Kenyan nation. Her death was described as a big blow.

Religion News reported that Obamas beloved grandmother supported groups of women and children orphaned by HIV and AIDS, through a non-governmental organization known as the Safeguard Orphans and Widows Organization (SAWO). Additionally, the philanthropist also took care of widows through the California-headquartered Mama Sarah Obama Foundation.

The website further explained that grandparents who are raising orphans in many sub-Saharan communities has become common place. For this reason, Mama Sarah Obama started with feeding programs to assist orphans in her community. According to religion news, she even adopted several orphans, then later established the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation. The foundations mission is said to improve the education and welfare of disenfranchised children, to help them successfully achieve their goals, while enabling them to have a better future. The Obama family matriarch had a strong legacy of community work and benevolence.

She was a loving and celebrated philanthropist who graciously shared the little she had with the less fortunate in her community, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya said in a statement.

Former president Obama mentioned the loss of his familys matriarch on Twitter.

My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as Mama Sarah but known to us as Dani or Granny. We will miss her dearly, but well celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life. pic.twitter.com/avDY4f1PVu

Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 29, 2021

My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as Mama Sarah but known to us as Dani or Granny. We will miss her dearly, but well celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life, Obama said in a tweet.

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Barack Obamas Grandmother Dies at 99, Family in Mourning - Black Enterprise

Michelle Obamas Lesson to Kids: You Are What You Watch – The New Yorker

Listen to your vegetables and eat your parents! So ends the earworm theme song of Waffles+Mochi, a food-travelogue series for kids, sprung from the cosmopolitan minds at Netflix and Higher Ground, Michelle and Barack Obamas production company. To the young viewer, a Roald Dahl-esque jingle like this one pinkie-promises a trippy, macabre world of adult order undone, an imaginative expanse where edible monsters roam free. Our protagonists are cute puppet monsters for sureWaffles is the child of a waffle father and a yeti mother, and Mochi is an emotive but nonverbal Japanese dessertand they are sensualists, but they are not free. Really, they are the least willful characters Ive seen on television in some time.

The strength of Waffles+Mochi, which was created by Erika Thormahlen and Jeremy Konner, is its awareness that the children of the twenty-first century have been watching screens possibly since birth, and are conscious agents, emboldened by the ease of the iPad, who are able to distinguish bad childrens media from the quality stuff. The series is good educational television, comparable to the best of PBS. Its eclectic formanimated musical interludes featuring Maiya Sykes and Sia as singing fruits; live-action cooking demos starring famous chefs and well-cast kids; stunningly deft explanations of non-American food traditionsmirrors the experience of scrolling through YouTube Kids. Many caretakers will be pleased to find a sophisticated mini-me version of Anthony Bourdains Parts Unknown, or Drunk History. (The latter show was also produced by Konner.)

At the beginning of the series, a mysterious van rescues Waffles and Mochi from their home, a bleak, monochromatic tundra called the Land of Frozen Food. There, with no other options, they had subsisted on meals of ice. Sounding pained, a narrator explains the ups and downs of the habitat: Ice cream never melts, and dreams, well, they get frozen, too. This origin story, one of Dickensian misery, casts a pall that the show quickly dissolves. The van drops our creatures off at an exciting and sophisticated supermarket, where the abundance of fresh food lights up their lives. They bump into a talking shelf, named Shelfie, who introduces them to a mustachioed mop. You must be Moppy, Waffles says, eager to ingratiate herself in the new place. No! Its just Steve, the mop retorts. This kind of snappy satirical humor is present throughout the series; later in the season, Tan France, of Queer Eye, guest-stars, and tries to make a potatowhich some elementary-school-aged talking heads refer to as uglyfashion-forward, only to realize that the vegetable is beautiful just as it is. Such kid-friendly sendups of adult programs (including Finding Your Roots, in an episode where Mochi travels to Los Angeles and Japan in search of his ancestry) are genuinely funny.

Waffles and Mochi get jobs at the market, where the owner asks them to run errands, which, in turn, teach them about nutrition. The puppets have a lot of fun at work. Boarding a talking magic cart, they circle the globe, meeting experts who share their knowledge of tomatoes, rice, and corn. In Peru, a local chef and her son teach the puppets how to roast potatoes in a huatia, an outdoor oven made of rocks and soil. At the home of Bricia Lopez, the co-owner of a Oaxacan restaurant in Los Angeles, Waffles and Mochi learn about the potency of salt. Waffles, tasked with putting the finishing touches on a salted-chocolate-chip cookie, had been screwing up the assignment, because she had no one to teach her the virtue of moderation.

The puppets travel as far as Mars to get their work done. They enjoy learning what it means to eat properly, and also pleasing their boss, who, at the end of each episode, rewards the duo with a badge. The owner of the supermarket, by the way, is Mrs. OMichelle Obama, who is not only an executive producer of the show but one of its stars. Mrs. O, a benevolent mentor figure, stays largely above the fray. While her workers scour the planet for eggs to bring to the chef Massimo Bottura, in Italy, for his special tortellini recipe, she hangs out in a garden atop the supermarket and is aided by a stuffy bureaucrat bee called Busy, who cant be bothered to remember Waffless name. Im not sure how a child might metabolize these details, but, to me, Obamas performanceespecially compared with those of some of the celebrity guestsis rather opaque, overly dependent on her esteem outside the boundaries of the show.

Mrs. O punctuates the episodes with truisms, spun from the subject of the days adventure. In the episode about pickling, she explains the importance of restraint: It takes a lot to exercise patience, especially when you want something to happen right away. Obama delivered platitudes on Sesame Street a decade ago, but, now that she owns the block, her sermonizing feels a bit different.

Waffles+Mochi, which clearly descends from Obamas somewhat polarizing anti-obesity campaign, Lets Move!, promotes the broader and more widely accepted philosophies of the liberal parenting Zeitgeist. In her post-White House life, the former First Lady has pivoted from lecturing on healthy eating to talking about moral living, but a trace of litism lingers. You are what you eat, and Waffles+Mochi believes that you are also what you watchwhat a child consumes, in all senses, will dictate her character. In order to be good, you have to absorb other good, organic things: mushrooms freshly pulled from the earth, and politically astute kids programming. Waffles seems to be motivated by an unspoken shame regarding her pre-epicurean daysa shame that some kids know before they have the language to express the feeling. The show celebrates Waffless frantic willingness to conform to the mores of a diverse and foreign world. But are there other puppets languishing back in the Land of Frozen Foods? Who will save them?

Counteracting the suavity of Waffles+Mochi is City of Ghosts, also on Netflix, a documentary-style animated series that overflows with soul and cool. Here is an un-Western ghost story, set in the American WestL.A.that invites viewers of all ages to sit still, be quiet, and listen to the past over the din of the technocratic present. Four young Angelenos have formed the Ghost Club, a film crew that provides a ghost-whispering service to adults who believe that they are being haunted by unsettled spirits. By the sheer force of their bigheartedness, the club coaxes these spirits out of hiding, and the spirits then sit for charming interviews, in which they convey the particularities of pre-gentrification life. Zelda, a little girl whose microphone is a hairbrush, is our host; her older brother, Jordan, provides the camerawork.

Elizabeth Ito, the creator, an alum of Adventure Time and Phineas and Ferb, has put together an uncanny palette. A couple of times, I had to hit Pause; Ito blurs animation and photography, prompting viewers to mistake partially illustrated images for the real thing. The story lines, too, blend the texture of true biography with the conceit of the show. The characters are often voiced not by actors but by ordinary people with a connection to whatever neighborhood the intrepid researchers are visiting. (I just wanna show you how much more free you can be, the ghost of a jazz musician, named Jam Messenger Divine, tells the Ghost Club, in the historically Black neighborhood of Leimert Park.) The series breaks down the mammoth notion of cultural history in ingeniously discrete and carefully considered parts.

City of Ghosts respects the crush of the city, its noise, its smell, its unpredictability. It also respects the intelligence of children, their ability to process complex and painful truths. Many of the adults in City of Ghosts are initially unable to understand the spirits in their midst, and are frightened. The Ghost Club explains to Chef Jo, who has just opened, in her words, an Asian-inspired restaurant in Boyle Heights, that the missing chili flakes and the overturned fryer at her eatery are expressions of valid frustration, not evil. Subtly, Ito presents adulthood as a state of perpetual disconnect. One elder, Mr. Craig, has not lost touch with his roots. Rather, his face is lined with the burden of remembering. His episode is a remarkably dignified tribute to the Tongva, the indigenous people who once inhabited the Los Angeles Basin. With the guidance of Mr. Craig and a Tongva poet, the children meet an ancestor, in the form of a crow, who sings to them through the wind.

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Michelle Obamas Lesson to Kids: You Are What You Watch - The New Yorker

Former US President Obamas Kenyan step-grandmother passes away – The Siasat Daily

Washington:Former US President Barack Obamas Kenyan step-grandmother and the familys matriarch, Sarah Obama, has passed away aged 99 years old.

Taking to Twitter on Monday, the former President said: My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as Mama Sarah but known to us as Dani or Granny.

We will miss her dearly, but well celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.

Sarah Obama, who passed away early Monday morning, had been admitted with undisclosed illness at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga teaching and referral hospital located in the western Kenyan county of Kisumu.

Born in 1922 in a village on the shores of Lake Victoria, Sarah Obama was the third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, the former Presidents grandfather.

Sarah rose to global fame when her step-grandson was elected the first African-American US President, and her modest homestead in western Kenyan county of Siaya has been a prized destination for local and foreign tourists.

The Obama matriarch, who will be buried on Tuesday in line with Islamic traditions, was eulogised by Kenyan leaders as a patriot and gallant fighter for the rights of women and girls.

In a condolence message, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said: She was a loving and celebrated philanthropist who graciously shared the little she had with the less fortunate in her community.

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Former US President Obamas Kenyan step-grandmother passes away - The Siasat Daily

Breaking News – Michelle Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Matthew Mcconaughey to Appear on NBC’s "Roll Up Your Sleeves"…

MEDIA ALERT: ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES

MICHELLE OBAMA, DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA AND MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY TO APPEAR ON NBC'S "ROLL UP YOUR SLEEVES" VACCINATION SPECIAL-- PRODUCED BY ATTN: -- AIRING ON SUNDAY, APRIL 18

NBC will televise "Roll Up Your Sleeves" on Sunday, April 18 at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Presented by Walgreens and created by ATTN:, the hour long special aims to raise awareness and encourage the American public to get vaccinated to put an end to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama, alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda and a few additional friends, will appear to educate and empower audiences to make this important decision to help put the pandemic behind us.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Adviser to the President, will be interviewed by Matthew McConaughey. Viewers will hear from Dr. Fauci on separating fact from fiction about the vaccines and urging all Americans to do their part in getting the vaccine when eligible.

Audiences will be treated to comedy acts, informative packages, captivating real-life stories and heartwarming surprises.

"We are honored to present an hour of television devoted to increasing vaccinations in America and help end a cataclysmic pandemic," said Jen Neal, Executive Vice President, Live Events, Specials and E! News. "The entertainment, comedic and music communities, along with First Lady Michelle Obama, have come together for the special, which will be inspirational, poignant and, at times, humorous. The overriding message: get vaccinated, end the pandemic and get your life and the life of the country back on track."

"The ability to get people back to work and kids back in school, getting us reunited with family and friends and attending concerts, sporting events and many other activities we hold dear is contingent upon people getting vaccinated," said Matthew Segal, the Co-Founder of ATTN:. "At ATTN: we believe in the power of entertainment to inform audiences, and we're thrilled to partner with NBC, Civic Nation, Walgreens and many great public figures and performers to get out this critical message."

"Walgreens is proud to be the presenting sponsor of Roll Up Your Sleeves, as we continue our critical role helping our customers, patients and communities during the pandemic and beyond," said Roz Brewer, CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance. "Bringing together trusted voices, including celebrities, community leaders and our pharmacists, we can help answer questions and dispel myths surrounding vaccinations and ensure that the U.S. emerges from this very challenging time as quickly as possible."

Developed in partnership with Civic Nation and leading health care professionals, "Roll Up Your Sleeves" is produced by ATTN:, Civic Nation and Deviants Media. It is executive produced by Tom Werner, Valerie Jarrett, Matthew Segal, Jarrett Moreno, Taye Shuayb, Jessie Surovell, Mike Vainisi, Audrey Morrissey, Ivan Dudynsky and Chad Hines.

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Breaking News - Michelle Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Matthew Mcconaughey to Appear on NBC's "Roll Up Your Sleeves"...

Biden Wants 5 Times The Climate Spending Obama Won. Thats Still 5 Times Too Small. – HuffPost

By any measure, the $2 trillion infrastructure package President Joe Biden unveiled Wednesday marks the most significant federal climate investment to date.

The American Jobs Plan, outlined in a nearly 12,000-word fact sheet, earmarks $500 billion for clean energy investments and research, including $174 billion for electric vehicles and charging networks, $165 billion for public transit and trains, and $100 billion for renewable electricity and new transmission lines. There are billions more for repairing water systems, relocating whole communities threatened by climate disaster and plugging abandoned oil wells and mines.

In all, the plan represents more than five times the climate spendingthe Obama administration secured in the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Yet its still about five times too small to bring the U.S. economys planet-heating emissions down to zero, the level scientists say we need to keep warming in a relatively safe range.

On a private call with activist groups Tuesday evening that HuffPost listened to, White House climate policy czar Gina McCarthy acknowledged that the spending package may disappoint climate advocates hoping to see a more ambitious budget, but said it marked only one area of the administrations decarbonization plans.

I dont know if were going to meet your expectations on size, but its certainly going to be transformational to our economy, she said.

The proposal would stretch funding over eight years and amount to spending roughly 1% of the countrys gross domestic product per year. Most estimates say it would take more like 4-5% of GDP, or nearly $1 trillion per year over 10 years, to fully decarbonize the U.S. economy.

Proponents of setting a much higher funding level span the ideological spectrum. The left-leaning Roosevelt Institutes 80-page plan to eliminate climate-changing pollution from the U.S. economy used 5% of GDP as its north star. Thats roughly the same figure in the 2016 Risky Business Project report co-chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush-era treasury secretary. British clean energy consultant Michael Liebreich called for roughly $980 billion per year over 10 years in 2019.

Even University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Robert Pollins more conservative estimate of 2% of GDP per year a figure he came with in part by stretching out the investments over a longer period of time was double what Biden has proposed.

Progressives led by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) announced a $10 trillion counterproposal to the White House plan on Monday called the THRIVE Act, which would pump $1 trillion per year into green infrastructure and care-economy work.

Absent large tax increases and steep cuts to the militarys budget, the Biden administration would need to borrow money to fund that kind of package, just as it increased the federal deficit to pay for its $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill.

Instead, the White House plan aims to offset its infrastructure spending with relatively modest new taxes in what appears to be a bid to win support from moderate Democrats for whom fiscal discipline is a key political theme.

Deficit politics are getting in the way of building a more sustainable and resilient economy that works for all, said Mark Paul, an economist who co-authored the Roosevelt Institutes paper on U.S. climate spending. This is not a New Deal for America. This is not Johnsons Great Society. I wish it were.

Joe Raedle via Getty ImagesElectric power lines run through a neighborhood in Austin, Texas, where blackouts caused by a freak cold snap underpinned the need for new infrastructure.

Once a powerful cudgel Republicans used to paint Democrats as wasteful profligates, public understanding of how the federal deficit works has shifted in recent years. Because the federal government unlike a state government, a business, or a household issues the currency it spends, Congress can authorize as much spending as is needed, particularly when interest rates are low, according to newer macroeconomic research that helped undergird both the Trump and Biden administrations relief spending packages.

That research shows that the biggest risk of putting too much money into the system is inflation. Taxes, far from providing the cash the federal government needs to justify its spending, instead help control inflation by taking money out of circulation and keeping buyers bidding up prices.

Yet the old way of thinking about the deficit still holds sway with Biden. During transition talks, according to one source familiar with the presidents approach, Biden repeatedly indicated he supported deficit spending for emergency relief, but not for proactive federal investment.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to HuffPosts email requesting comment.

The worst mistake we could make right now would be to let concerns about the state of the economy overheating, inflation, the deficit convince people to do less than what Biden is proposing, said J.W. Mason, an associate professor economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. That would be a disaster, a terrible mistake.

Earlier this month, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the key swing vote in a Senate split 50-50 along partisan lines, told reporters he wanted an enormous infrastructure bill, but said Congress should do everything we possibly can to pay for it, including making tax adjustments.

The wealth tax Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) proposed this month would tax households and trusts worth between $50 million and $1 billion at 2%, and add another 1% surtax on those exceeding $1 billion. The tax would affect just 100,000 U.S. households and raise $3 trillion over the course of a decade, according to analysis by University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.

The White House infrastructure proposal does not include a wealth tax. But it does call for reversing some of the 2017 tax cut law Republicans passed and raising taxes on corporations from 21% to 28%. It also takes steps to discourage companies from listing tax havens as their addresses and writing off expenses to offshore entities. Zucman called it an ambitious first step.

This is an inflection point and hopefully the beginning of a longer-term cycle of government investment and increases in tax progressivity, he said in an email.

Wall Street analysts saw the package less as a climate bill than an infrastructure overhaul that included some green provisions.

This is really rebuilding aging infrastructure, though he has also said that advancing environmental policy and getting to a net-zero power sector by 2035 is also a priority, said Scott Levine, a senior energy and industrial analyst at the investment research firm Bloomberg Intelligence. But those are different objectives.

The proposed spending on housing offered one of the starkest examples of where advocates say the package falls short of whats needed.

While U.S. Energy Information Administration data showthat one-third of Americans cant afford their utility bills, the plan pledges toproduce, preserve, and retrofit more than a million affordable, resilient, accessible, energy efficient, and electrified housing units less than 1% of the housing stock. The proposal also offers $20 billion worth of tax credits over the next five years to build or rehabilitate about 500,000 homes, a line item thats significantly smaller than the over $30 billion per year the federal government spends subsidizing mortgages.

Bidens housing plan has nice rhetoric but its lack of ambition is catastrophicsquandering a once-in-a-generation moment, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist and climate policy expert at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a series of tweets. This plan is a drop in the bucket.

On the Tuesday conference call, McCarthy urged advocates to hype the infrastructure package, warning that criticism may splinter support in Congress and pare down the ambition of what it does include. One advocate responded by stating: I dont feel hyped up.

Lets be really smart and lets just talk about how great it is to have a president that goes out as far as this, McCarthy said. Then well argue and fight and debate and push amongst ourselves. But all of us will see our ideas in this. You will see what you proposed.

McCarthys deputy Ali Zaidi also said the package was just the beginning of the race.

Among the more far-reaching provisions in the presidents proposal was a call for Congress to pass a clean energy standard mandating the country produce all its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035. It also calls for targeting 40% of the benefits of clean energy and climate investments toward some of the poorest and worst-polluted parts of the country, in communities disproportionately populated by Black, Latino, and other nonwhite Americans.

Evergreen Action, the climate policy group formed by former staffers on Washington Gov. Jay Inslees climate-focused presidential bid, said it was thrilled to see the clean energy standard and environmental justice provisions.

Today in Pittsburgh, President Biden will tell America its time to go big and bold on building a new economy run on 100% clean energy, Jamal Raad, the executive director of Evergreen Action, said in a statement. This is just the tip-off, and now the ball is in Congress court.

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Biden Wants 5 Times The Climate Spending Obama Won. Thats Still 5 Times Too Small. - HuffPost