Obama portraits raise eyebrows
Former President Barack Obama's official portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was unveiled last week. Since then, the portrait and its artist, Kehinde Wiley, have, shall we say, started tongues wagging.
The portrait has a serious, handsome Obama seated in a chair that appears to be floating in a wall of greenery and flowers.
The former president, at the unveiling, noted that he and Wiley had American mothers and African fathers and that neither of their fathers was active in their lives.
Then he said, "what I was always struck by when I saw [Wiley's] portraits was the degree to which they challenged our ideas of power and privilege."
Indeed, they do. The artist is best known for his portraits of black women holding severed white heads. They are quite similar, in fact, to the photograph of comedian Kathy Griffin holding the severed facsimile head of President Donald Trump.
A New Yorker article described Wiley as "a glittering propagandist who catapults the common black man and the occasional black woman into historical environments of rearing equines and colonial fleur-de-lis tapestries."
Former first lady Michelle Obama's portrait was revealed at the same ceremony. It, too, was nontraditional, showing a stylized, charcoal-look version of the former first lady in a long, full dress.
The New Yorker article said paintings by its artist, Amy Sherald, "make the viewer speculate about the quieter wants and wishes of the black common men and women who have emerged ... like ghosts."
They look, one tweeter said of the portraits, "like an angry teenager's revenge photoshop."
Just a joke
"The View" co-host Joy Behar now says it was all a joke, but it was a very serious Behar who mocked the faith of Vice President Mike Pence on the ABC show last week.
"Like I said before," she said, "it's one thing to talk to Jesus. It's another thing when Jesus talks to you. That's called mental illness, if I'm not correct. Hearing voices."
Behar and the show's other co-hosts were discussing a comment by former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who said of Pence, "He's extreme. I'm Christian. I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things."
Of course, no one checked with Pence. But he rightly was offended.
"To have ABC maintain a broadcast forum that compared Christianity to mental illness is just wrong," he said. "And it's an insult not to me, but to the vast majority of the American people who, like me, cherish their faith."
The criticism for Behar mounted quickly, so she tried the joke excuse.
"I don't mean to offend people, but apparently I keep doing it," she said. "It was a joke."
Except, of course, it wasn't.
A losing hand
U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., is a freshman in the august body and, as such, hasn't been indoctrinated by the far left. So she took a step outside the fold last week and gave her fellow Democrats a piece of advice.
"We have to care about everyone," she said in a podcast for Politico. "We can't just care about minorities, or immigrants, or identity politics." The party won't have a successful mid-term, she said, "if we just focus on the left-wing side of the party, or the more conservative side of the party."
But at the moment, that is the Democrats' playbook. It's how they lost the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and the presidency in 2016. Now, they have no leader, little money and no message other than their hatred of President Trump. Unfortunately for them, the economy is sound, and they have few strongholds outside the Northeast, the West Coast and large cities.
Even the generic ballot, which had heavily favored the party, has shrunk to a lead of low single digits. The question is, are any Democrats listening?
You didn't earn that
For Columbia University students who pay full tuition and/or are graduating debt free, two students at the Ivy League school have just the thing. It's an upcoming workshop featuring a roundtable discussion on "learning about our obligation to redistribute our own wealth," Campus Reform reports.
Students who attend will spend half the time "mapping out how our families came into money and what communities that money is extracted from," then they'll "explore how to mobilize our financial privilege to support marginalized people."
In other words, no matter how hard you or your parents worked for the resources to send you to Columbia, if you've got it, you came by it through the blood, sweat and tears of someone else, or someone else must do without if you've got yours. However, it's the antithesis of the way the country was created by hard work and sacrifice.
"This starts with recognizing that our wealth comes from a fundamentally unequal and exploitative economy," Amy Wang and Claire Klinger said in their workshop description, adding that "people are denied basic needs like housing, food, and health care so that a small percent can hoard millions and billions of dollars."
But my no means, though, the leaders say, should the workshop be seen as "creating more guilt" but simply "an awareness and sense of responsibility."
The workshop is targeting upper-middle and upper class students but is open to all.