The presumptive nominee for President of the United States exploded upon the scene and captured the imagination of swooning masses of the young, leftist, black and liberal. Who is he? What are his accomplishments? What are his true goals and ambitions? What will happen to America and the world if he becomes the most powerful man in the world?

Barack's book "Dreams From My Father" is primarily about his rejection of his supportive white maternal extended family in favor of his unknown black paternal extended family.

(There is no record of his throwing her under the bus)


At the end of a dusty, dirt road lined with mango and mimosa trees, Barack Obama's Kenyan relatives sat outside on plastic chairs surrounded by chickens and drying corn kernels, listening to radio reports from New Hampshire.

Kogelo, the western Kenyan home village of Barack Obama's father, has been spared the political and ethnic violence that has erupted elsewhere in this country following a disputed presidential election. But it was just 90 minutes' drive from a town where torched, ransacked and looted buildings bear testimony to the clashes, and the turmoil in Kenya, as well as his nephew's success in the U.S., was on Said Obama's mind.


Watch CNN video of Obama's Kenyan grandmother discussing Barack's chances for winning and what she thinks about Hillary:

Click Here


Mama Sarah: Barack Obama's grandmother
Sarah said that Barack came to Kenya last year but was too busy to spend much time with her.

The Kenyan grandmother of US democratic nominee Barack Obama has told Outlook that she believes that he can make it both to the democratic nomination and to the Presidency.

With Barack's uncle Said Hussein Obama acting as a translator, Sarah Obama told the BBC's Telewa Muliro that it was a bit like a football match.



"When there is a football match, you look at the foot of those who are playing," she said, "In this case Barack is determined and the rest is God who can determine.

"But I believe Barack can make it."

Barack Obama was born in 1961, the son of a Kenyan father and American mother who had met at a university in Hawaii.

They split up when Barack was only two. His father returned to Kenya where he became a civil servant in Jomo Kenyatta's independence administration while his mother settled with Barack and a new partner in Indonesia.

Barack had little contact with his father's family - but this hasn't stopped people in his father's district from getting excited by his Presidential bid.

When he was elected to Congress in 2004 a local beer called Senator was nicknamed "Obama" in honour of the Illinois politician.

And "Mama Sarah", as she is known locally, told Telewa that she has followed her grandson's political career with interest - although she herself didn't go to school and had to teach herself to read.

Nowadays she said that her eyesight is failing because of her age so she can only make out the bold type of the headlines and the photographs.

Her grandson - in the headlines most days now due to the primaries in the United States - had visited Kenya virtually unnoticed in 1982 - after his father had died in a car crash - and in 1992 to introduce his wife to his Kenyan family.

Last year, however, he had plenty of attention when he visited in an official capacity - but this meant that he had had little time with the family.

Previous to that, Sarah had visited the States for his inauguration as Senator for Illinois in 2004.

Diplomatically, she said that she could not remember meeting fellow democratic nominee Hilary Clinton when she was in the States, but she could recall being introduced to another significant American political figure.

"The only person she remembers well was George Bush president of US who came over and greeted her," said Said Hussein Obama.

George Bush of course would have understood Mama Sarah's football analogy - though he is more into American football than 'soccer' and stands down at the forthcoming election.

And if Mama Sarah had observed that he had two left feet, then she certainly wasn't saying so.

Click here

we will get bush blowback

we'll see what BO can do

Oh god, what hath he created?

Obama met his Kenyan grandmother only recently. She was never a factor in his upbringing.

On the other hand, where is an AP news story surrounding Madelyn Dunham, Obama’s grandmother who reared him for eight years and steadfastly supported him, for all we know.

Barack had a very close relationship with his grandfather Stanley Dunham. We can assume his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who cared for him also was close to him. Pictures and stories indicate this is true.

Obama’s Kenyan “grandmother” may not be his biological grandmother at all. I don’t know. His grandfather was married to her, but I’ve read he was married to several other women, Sarah being one of them.

Barack Obama’s parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. His father went to Harvard University to pursue Ph.D. studies, then returned to Kenya, where he died in an auto accident when the younger Obama was twenty-one years old. Obama never had any relationship with his father or Kenyan relatives when he was growing up.

Barack lived with his maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, while attending Punahou School in Honolulu from 5th grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.

Barack Obama’s mother died of ovarian cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Barack’s knowledge about his absent Luo father and his Kenyan relatives came mainly through family stories and photographs.

Obama has a remarkable capacity for bringing people together despite the fact the two elements affecting his early years were separate, diverse and generally incompatible.

Why does the white side of his family seem neglected in his political agenda? I don’t intend this as a racial comment, just as a matter of inquiry. He traveled to Kenya to see a woman he hardly knew who may or may not be his biological “grandmother” whom he met for the first time in early 1980.

There is a woman we know to be his grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who from outside appearances seems to be locked away in Hawaii, alive and well and living in the same apartment she has for years. He never seems to visit or mention her in press releases. She would be in her mid-80s. In his youth, his grandmother and grandfather Dunham were his caretakers for 8 years and they were close to him all through his formative years. Click Here

Barack Obama threw his ailing grandmother who raised him under the bus.
Obama equated her with the racist anti-Semitic "G-Damning America"
preacher he chose for himself and his family- Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama's grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, a bank vice president, and grandfather, Stanley Dunham, a salesman, lived in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Honolulu and helped raise their grandson along with his white mother until he graduated from high school. (Washington Post)

Both Dunhams were upset when their daughter Ann married Barack Obama Senior, particularly after receiving a long, angry letter from the graduate student's father in Kenya who "didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman." Madelyn Dunham took care of Barack's mother Ann in Hawaii in her last months before Ann died of cancer at age 53.

Today Obama's grandmother continues to live in what CBS News has described as the same "non-descript highrise" in Honolulu, Hawaii where she raised Barack Obama (then known as "Barry"), with the same telephone number now as then. Madelyn Dunham's last interview was in 2004, on the occasion of Barack Obama's keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention- Wiki.

On March 18, 2008, in his speech on race and the controversy surrounding comments from his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, Obama stated that his grandmother confessed to him about "her fear of black men who passed by her on the street," and he would cringe at her use of "racial or ethnic stereotypes."

Madelyn Dunham told a reporter who phoned in March 2008

** In over a year of speeches, I don't recall Obama talking about his grandmother who raised him and that she was ill- not once. I don't recall any special trips over to Hawaii to see her. That doesn't say much about the young senator.

Barack's "Typical White Person" Grandma



Stanley Ann Dunham, Stanley Dunham, Madelyn Dunham
(Barack's mother was named Stanley after her father)

By Dan Nakaso, USA TODAY

HONOLULU — Barack Obama's trailblazing effort to become the nation's first black president has a family precedent.

Madelyn Dunham, Obama's grandmother, blazed a feminist trail in Hawaii banking circles in the late 1960s and early 1970s and rose to become one of the Bank of Hawaii's first female vice presidents.

Durham, now 85 and living in Honolulu along with her granddaughter and Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, had two obstacles to overcome in Hawaii at the time — being a woman and being part of the state's white minority.

"Was she ambitious? She had to be to become a vice president," said Clifford Y.J. Kong, 82, who was a senior credit officer at the bank at the time. "She was a top-notch executive to get appointed. It was a tough world."

Obama and Soetoro-Ng lived with their grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and later with their mother, Ann Dunham, in 1970s Honolulu, where white people were routinely the target of discrimination.

Sam Slom, a Bank of Hawaii economist then, who is now a Republican state senator in Hawaii, recalls that as a part of the white — or "haole" — minority in Hawaii, he would regularly see housing ads that made no effort to hide racial preferences. He says he remembers ads that read, "No haoles" or "AJAs (Americans of Japanese ancestry) Only" or "No Japanese."

"That's the way it was," Slom said. "Did people talk about race? We had local jokes … like that 'pake' (Chinese) guy or the 'yobo' (Korean) who did this or that. I certainly got my share of haole jokes."


Dunham was born Madelyn Payne in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922. When she was 3 years old, Payne's family moved to Augusta, Kan., where young Madelyn was raised, Soetoro-Ng said. She married Stanley Armour Dunham in 1940. Madelyn Dunham attended college at the University of Washington before becoming an aircraft inspector for Boeing during World War II.

After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley, worked various jobs, then came to the Islands, where she joined the Bank of Hawaii in 1960.

There's no upside to being white in the democrat party anymore. Obama knew it and positioned himself according quite a ways back. Now the PC left can defend him from any attack on the basis of racism, even against Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Barack's loving grandparents at his high school graduation

Barack Obama's Idenity Crisis

From the age of ten onward, though, Obama desperately wants to be black: Honolulu's paucity of African-Americans means he has to learn to be black from the media:

He cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says heeven though he surely realizes that his media-sensation status stems from how much white people love highly accomplished blacks who speak with white accents. He wouldn't be a serious candidate for president at age 45 if he weren't part black.

Obama's teenage self-consciousness is perpetually crucified by contact with stereotypes about blacks. When his grandmother wants a ride to work because the day before, while awaiting the bus, she was threatened by a black panhandler, he is outraged—at his grandparents. "And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears." In high school, he gets upset when "a white girl mentioned in the middle of conversation how much she liked Stevie Wonder; or when a woman in the supermarket asked me if I played basketball; or when the school principal told me I was cool."

The great irony of the book is that so many of the stereotypes about African-Americans and Africans turn out, in his troubling experience, to be true—which doesn't make Obama happy at all: "I did like Stevie Wonder, I did love basketball, and I tried my best to be cool at all times. So why did such comments always set me on edge?" (When he moves to the South Side of Chicago, he eventually discovers that, like his grandmother, he's sometimes scared of black males on the street, too.)

Even the seemingly unique marriage of Obama's parents turns out to be a stereotype, one that was eerily paralleled in John Updike's 1978 novel about a hyper-intellectual African dictator, The Coup.

The year before Obama's birth in 1961, his Kansas-born mother Stanley Ann Dunham, an 18-year-old student at the University of Hawaii, may have wed fellow student Barack Hussein Obama Sr. Just like Updike's narrator, Felix Ellellou, who bigamously marries a white Midwestern co-ed at their American college in 1959, the senior Obama already had a wife back home in an African village. Obama writes, "In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I've never had the courage to explore."

Upon graduation, his father was offered a generous scholarship by the New School for Social Research in New York City that would have paid for his family to come with him. Instead, wanting the most famous diploma, he chose Harvard's scholarship offer, even though it provided only for him. And so he abandoned the little boy who would grow up idolizing him from afar.

Just as Updike's Ellellou returned from America to embark on a governmental career in Africa, where he added two more wives to his collection, Obama's polygamous pop went back to Kenya. Obama Sr. took up again with his first wife, married another white American woman, and added a mistress, eventually siring approximately eight children by four women. (The precise number of his offspring remains uncertain as some of his potential heirs long litigated each other's true paternity in probate court.)

Obama's mother married an Indonesian student, and when he was six, they moved to Jakarta. In his account, she was shocked to discover how her new husband reverted to chauvinist Indonesian ways as soon as he left America and that Indonesia was a nasty right-wing dictatorship (although the latter doesn't jibe with her spending much of the rest of her life in that country). She divorced and sent 10-year-old Barack to live with her parents in Honolulu, while she and his half-sister stayed, off-and-on, in Indonesia.

Despite Obama's relentless efforts to mold himself into an African-American, his overwhelmingly white upbringing is apparent in his coolly analytical depiction of his mother, a portrait that most black men would find disrespectful. To Obama, his mother is a Kumbaya-era liberal. I suspect he feels that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries and Third World men; but if she had been wiser, where would he be? This is one of life's conundrums that's hopeless but not serious, and yet Obama can't help being serious about himself. Source



BARRY OBAMA'S HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK

I think it is much more complex than just his political ambitions.

Here's information about Barack and his mother:

Years later, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959 Brazilian art-house classic “Black Orpheus.” He belatedly realizes that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men. He pompously intones,
Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:




Harry Belefonte


Sidney Poiter
ibid

You've certainly done a lot of homework. I don't know what Obama's motivations are, but he came up in the perfect time to find his black roots and still had some white family to fall back on. It's too bad he isn't equally proud of and supportive of both sides, but dad taking off can have long lasting effects on the way people think. Positive and negative.

Let us all hope so. If mom just liked black guys and he wants to be what mom liked it beats manipulating everything based on race.

His motivations are to be president.

The "An American Expat in Southeast Asia" blog reports that Obama's Indonesian schooling began when he was entered into the Roman Catholic, Franciscus Assisi Primary School, in Jakarta, Indonesia, on January 1, 1968 and sat in class 1B.

He was registered under the name of Barry Soetoro, serial number 203. School documents list Barry Soetoro as an Indonesian citizen and his religion was listed as Islam.

Born on August 4, 1961, Obama would have been 7 years and 5 months old. That's late to start school.

Obama may have started Kindergarten in Hawaii but was whisked off to Indonesia as a result of his mother's second marriage. There are 5 missing years in Anna's CV between Obama Sr. abandoning the family and her emigration to Indonesia with Lolo.

Obama will complete the first 3 grades at Assisi.

Obama entered the Besuki Primary School, a state school, in 1971. He was enrolled as Barry Soetoro, Muslim. He would attend Besuki for two years.


Iis Darmawan, 63, Obama's teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. " the teacher said.

His third grade teacher, Fermina Katarina Sinaga, now 67, asked her class to write an essay titled "My dream: What I want to be in the future." Obama wrote "I want to be a President," she said.

All Indonesian students are required to study religion at school and a young Barry Soetoro, being a Muslim, would have been required to study Islam daily in school.

He would have been taught to read and write Arabic, to recite his prayers properly, to read and recite from the Quran and to study the laws of Islam.

In his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father," Obama mentions studying the Quran and describes the public school as "a Muslim school."

"In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies."

According to Tine Hahiyary, one of Obama's teachers and the principal from 1971 through 1989, Barry actively took part in the Islamic religious lessons during his time at the school. His teacher was named Maimunah and she lived in the Puncak area, the Cianjur Regency.

Tine said.

Our guy in Jakarta writes:

"The actual usage of the word 'mengaji' in Indonesian and Malaysian societies means the study of learning to recite the Quran in the Arabic language rather than the native tongue. "Mengagi" is a word and a term that is accorded the highest value and status in the mindset of fundamentalist societies here in Southeast Asia. To put it quite simply, 'mengaji classes' are not something that a non practicing or so-called moderate Muslim family would ever send their child to. To put this in a Christian context, this is something above and beyond simply enrolling your child in Sunday school classes."






Obama's half-sister, Maya, recalled that the family attended the mosque "for big communal events," and "Obama occasionally followed his stepfather to the mosque for Friday prayers."

On January 24, 2007, the Obama campaign released the following statement, "To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Then, on March 14th, 2007, the Obama Campaign told the LA Times he wasn’t a "practicing Muslim."

But his official website says: "Obama Has Never Been A Muslim, And Is a Committed Christian" (dated: 11/12/2007, and still up as of 5/5/2008)

This is the basic problem with Obama -- his dissimulation -- some would call it outright lying -- but read what his classmates say:

In 2007, classmate Rony Amiris described young Barry as enjoying football and playing marbles and of being a very devout Muslim. Amir said,
said Rony.

Amiris now the manager of the Bank Mandiri, Jakarta, recently said,

Rony extrapolates further, that Obama at one point had to change his religion if he ever intended later to run for the office of President of the United States because America would never elect a Muslim to the be President of the United States.

Mates
Also in 2007, Emirsyah Satar, CEO of Garuda Indonesia, was quoted as saying,


Divorce

When the Soetoros divorced, Anna took Obama to live with her parents, the Dunhams, in Honolulu. Anna and Obama's half-sister, Maya, returned to Indonesia.

In 1972, the Dunhams enrolled Barry Soetoro in the prestigious Punahou School. Here -- Obama begins his transformation to Barack Hussein Obama.

Punahou
Obama's classmate and friend, Keith "Ray" Kakugawa, said,

QUOTE

"Barry's biggest struggles then were missing his parents. His biggest struggles were his feelings of abandonment.

While at Punahou School, Obama turns into a disenchanted teenage rebel, experimenting with cocaine and marijuana. Obama admits in "Dreams" that during high school he frequently smoked marijuana, drank alcohol, even used cocaine occasionally.

In his book, Obama recalls that he had
Obama, told a group of students in New Hampshire that his drug use had caused him to

Bryon Leong, a former classmate, remembers, "

"It wasn't like guys were smoking dope on campus and coming to school high," said Eric Kusunoki, 57, Obama's teacher from age 15 to 18. "If they did, it would have been pretty obvious. If he did dabble with drugs or alcohol, I didn't see it."

Other schoolmates also remember his time at school rather differently. He was a spoiled high-achiever, they recall.

One of his former classmates, Alan Lum, said: "

Wysard recalled.

Goldie-

Please click on your own link above and notice that the result is an error message. You are making this same error consistently when you try to imbed links, but I can't figure out exactly where you are going wrong.

My favorite way to handle links is just to copy the url and paste it directly into the reply box without using the icons to supply additional code. These Plain links are detected and activated as clickable by the board software automatically, like this-

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9...=1&catnum=0

I like to see the address I will be going to if I click, so I personally prefer that method.

OTOH, you can use the green "Insert Link" Icon to insert and label your link.

First, copy the URL you want to link to.

Next, click on the area of the post where you want the link to appear to set your cursor in that spot.

Next, Move your cursor to the green "Insert Link" icon and click.

In the drop down box, set your cursor in the text box, right click to see your menu and choose "paste".

Click OK, then proceed to the next text box, where you can enter the title for the link.

Click OK, and you have -

Breitbart Link Example

I hope that helps. it's the best I can do for now.

Wow, I think I'll save this post and try that later. I get confused on all the features so I usually stick to basics, but this might make it all a lot easier.

I don't know why, but since I saw him at that pickup game he played in I've been thinking it would be fun to play him one-on-one.

I bet he could charge 500k a game and make his campaign rich. The NBA is just full of rich dudes.

Thanks.... I thought that's what I did... (sigh)

Sometimes it's just TMI

That's why I say in my PMs the best way to learn the board intricacies is to ask in a post to the assembled multitudes. Somebody here knows how to do almost anything. Me, I don't know much of nuthin'.

It's more than I know how to do. You're doing great. I'm hoping to send out a re-invitation when the slow season heads into the election. Maybe get some folks back in. In the meantime everyone is welcome so invite anyone interested. There's room for more moderators if you ever feel the need or desire to be in control of your own area. (though most folks just use the Political Soapbox)

Having a president who is a Christian but has studied Islam might be a huge advantage in a world with religious struggles. Obama doesn't have to embrace Islam just because in his younger days he was required to study the Quran due to foreign requirements. Wider experiences make a broader candidate, and we could use one more broad minded than George Bush. A man who prides himself on being rather narrow and average.

Pay per view would probably pay a lot more... it would be fun to watch. But he sure can't bowl!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtBBgn0I34E

Obama versus Hillary would have been a good match. First one to a hundred. Probably would have taken them about 40-50 frames. Or they could use the blowup alley cushions so that you can't bowl a gutter ball. That might make it a little shorter.

Why doesn't anyone talk about Barack's Brother?



Arguably the most colorful presidential sibling of my lifetime, Billy Carter became well known to the American public as Jimmy Carter’s beer-drinking brother. In similar fashion, Roger Clinton gained notoriety as Bill Clinton’s drug-abusing, ex-con brother. Now, another politician’s sibling stands on the verge of capturing the nation’s attention.

Unlike Billy Carter or Roger Clinton, Abongo “Roy” Obama will likely attract attention as First Brother for reasons other than his personal addictions if Barack Hussein Obama wins election in 2008 as the nation’s 44th president.

According to Investor’s Business Daily reports, the older half-brother of the upstart Democrat presidential candidate is a militant Muslim activist in Kenya who has urged his younger brother to embrace his African heritage and supports implementation of Sharia law in a country that, until recently, has been regarded as among the most pro-Western and modern African nations.

Paying attention to two critical details reported by IBD, one might surmise that Roy has succeeded in convincing his brother to embrace his African heritage. Those details are as follows:

In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks.

and

In short, Obama’s “unashamedly black” church preaches the politics of black nationalism. And its dashiki-wearing preacher — who married Obama and his wife and now acts as his personal spiritual adviser — is militantly Afrocentric. “We are an African people,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reminds his flock, “and remain true to our native land, the mother continent.”


While beer drinking and illicit drug use is frowned upon by many, Abongo “Roy” Obama’s vices — the Black Value System, militant Afrocentric views and radical Islamic beliefs — pose far greater dangers to the American way of life. That in mind, I hope all Americans recognize these dangers before they have impact decisions made in the Oval Office.

http://www.nowpublic.com/politics/obama-s-...ion-s-attention

Maybe mud wrestling would be even more entertaining to watch. We could team up Bill and Barry with each other and Michelle with Hillary.

Half brother. A very important distinction. Growing up and living in a completely different country and system.

Half-brother. That he didn't grow up with?

Because he's immaterial?

Like the sheit you've posted in this folder.

Yes We Did

03 Jun 2008 09:03 pm

As we absorb the news that an African-American is now the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for the presidency of the United States, a few words. No one should allow the tortuous end of this primary journey to obscure the passion and insurrection that made it possible. That passion came from a simple place, the way it often does in politics. It came from the gut instinct that we have lost our way, that the United States needs to start again after the debt, depravity, and destruction of the Bush years. It came from hope that the future need not be as bleak as it seemed not too long ago. It came from a sense that the deepest divisions were not as deep as the political class needed them to be and wanted them to be. And it came from the astonishing nostrum that a liberal, black first-term senator could overturn the biggest machine, the biggest name and the biggest dynasty in Democratic party politics.

He did it, because we did it. Because many of us refused to accept the choices we were being offered and looked to a new direction and new way worthy of the next generation. And this song is still part of the history we just made. Yes We Can:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_...elebrate-3.html

Barack says that Jeremiah Wright led him to Christ. But he never elaborated just how that happened. That pastor stood in the pulpit and took the name of God in vain and damned America. Barack never did criticize the church for its separatist and racist teachings. He said they were not worthy of that. I wish Barack could explain his Christian theology and beliefs. I think a lot of people would be interested in knowing his thought processes and his idenity as a Christian.

That was the whole premise. Why has Barack Obama embraced his Kenyan family which he didn't know or see and identify with them? Why does he hate his white family? He wrote a book: "Dreams from My Father". Unless it was written by a ghost, we have to assume that they are his own thoughts. He selected a black wife, an Afrocentric separatist church and Jeremiah Wright and Fr.Michael Pfleger as his spiritual mentors. He is seeking an idenity. The American people need to know what it is.

Do you ever have an original thought or have anything worthwhile to contribute? Until you do, perhaps you can keep your criticism to yourself.

Heh, bugger-off, apologist.

Obama will crush McSame.

Christian or not I can live with, the liberation theology stuff is troubling. If you listen to the crowd when Wright was ranting or Pflegler was attacking whitey Clinton they are eating it up. Makes me think Obama knows all too well how radical his church was. It's almost impossible to hide.

I don't care about Wright or the black liberation theology. I'm not sure if that strategy will be very effective. Obama is not John Kerry.

With old McSame as candidate, it will be highly ineffective methinks.

Stale innuendo.

GOTTA CHANGE THIS

Back in Hawaii, Obama’s grandparents enrolled the fifth grader in the famous Punahou prep school (current tuition $14,725). With 3,750 students from K-12, it enrolls a high proportion of all the young elites in Hawaii. Illustrative of its financial resources, Sports Illustrated ranks it as having the fourth-best high-school sports program in America.

In Obama’s book, Punahou was a nightmare of racial insensitivity, with one of his fellow students even asking to touch his hair. What he doesn’t reveal is that Punahou was quite possibly the most racially diverse prep school in America. It officially opened its doors to all races in 1851. Sun Yat-sen, the first president of China, attended it in the 1880s.

In Obama’s eighth grade class picture, at least seven and perhaps as many as ten of the 21 students are non-white. Brian Charlton of the AP threw some cold water on Obama’s adolescent alienation fantasies: “He was known as Barry Obama, and with his dark complexion and mini-Afro, he was one of the few blacks at the privileged Hawaiian school overlooking the Pacific. Yet that hardly made him stand out. Diversity was the norm at the Punahou School, one of the state’s top private schools.” His classmates say he was a popular and cheerful figure, the opposite of the tortured personality described in Dreams, in which he rationalizes his teenage drug use as “something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind . . .”

When Barack was in high school in the later 1970s, no whites held Hawaii’s top elected jobs as U.S. senator or governor. Indeed, as his father pointed out in a 1963 newspaper interview, whites were sometimes the victims of discrimination in Hawaii. Obama also fails to note the charming local custom of calling the last day of school “Kill Haole Day.”

Like Obama, many Hawaiian residents are the products of mixed marriages: in 1956-57, interracial marriage rates ranged from 22.0 percent for professionals to 43.5 percent for farm workers. There’s not much of a one-drop-of-blood rule for defining racial membership in Hawaii that mandated that Obama call himself black and only black.

Why was Obama so insistent upon rejecting the white race?

Perhaps because we all (especially young men) want to belong to something we see as bigger and stronger than us, a winning team. And conquest, who rules whom, is the ultimate team sport.

From adolescence onward, Obama wanted a race to belong to, a team whose accomplishments would reflect well upon him. Of course, it was unthinkable in his liberal white family to take pride in the achievements of his mother’s race, so Obama gloried in being part of his absent father’s race.

Obama was accepted into posh Occidental College in Los Angeles, which then had a black mayor, Tom Bradley. But Oxy wasn’t black enough, so in search of a community to belong to, he transferred to Harlem … well, to be precise, to that prestigious university on the edge of Harlem, Columbia. (A recurrent theme in Obama’s career is Power to the People gestures and Ivy League results.)

After graduation, he moved to Chicago in 1983, finally finding a home where at least some whites reciprocated his antagonism. He worked as an ethnic activist, helping the impoverished black community wring more money and services from the government. That government money was wrecking the morals of the housing-project residents seems obvious from his book, but Obama never comes out and says it. Numerous white moderates assume that a man of Obama’s superlative intelligence must be kidding when he espouses his cast-iron liberalism on race-related policies, but they don’t understand the emotional imperative of racial loyalty to him.

Even his one triumph, mau-mauing lazy Chicago Housing Authority bureaucrats into removing asbestos from Altgeld Gardens, is tinged with irony. The timeservers at the CHA are all black, and asbestos would fall comically low on any list of problems plaguing inner city African-Americans.

After four years there, the South Side is worse than ever, with youth violence ratcheting upwards. Obama applies to Harvard Law School (and eventually becomes a discrimination lawyer). Upon acceptance, he makes his first visit to Kenya, where Dreams from My Father finally achieves a frankness worthy of its artistry.

Obama immediately appreciates the sweetness of African life in the bosom of his newfound family—“For family seemed to be everywhere … all of them fussing and fretting over Obama’s long-lost son”—but soon discovers its discontents, including how polygamy generates convoluted conflicts too intricate for even the longest-running soap opera. The rival families of his late father—who died in a drunken car crash a half decade before—are still suing each other over his meager estate.

He begins to notice that the intense family ties he’d longed for are not an unmixed blessing for Kenya since they corrupt its culture. Updike makes the same point when the dictator Ellellou visits the French colonial villa that his most traditional wife had seized and which was now populated by an entire village of his extended family from the Salu tribe:

Nephews, daughters-in-law, totem brothers, sisters by second wives of half-uncles greeted Ellellou, and all in that ironical jubilant voice implying what a fine rich joke, he, a Salu, had imposed upon the alien tribes in becoming the chief of this nation imagined by the white men, and thereby potentially appropriating all its spoils to their family use. For there lay no doubt, in the faces of these his relatives … that nothing the world could offer Ellellou to drink, no nectar nor elixir, would compare with the love he had siphoned from their pool of common blood.

Most authors who write about African-Americans’ social problems appear to know nothing—and don’t seem to want to learn anything—about Africans. Our pundits and academics assume that the social history of black Americans traces to that day in 1619 when the first slaves were herded on to that dock in Virginia, but no farther back. We could call it the Black Blank Slate theory.

In refreshing contrast, in Obama’s account of race and inheritance, the continuities between Africa and African-America are clear. Kenya seems like an incipient Chicago housing project, preserved only by its inability to afford the welfare state that has ruined the inner city. His aunt’s Nairobi home is “just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. … The same absence of men.”

Unless they can bribe their way into a prestigious office job, most of Obama’s male relatives work as little as possible, relying on their womenfolk for food and shelter. And the women are looking for what the author’s grandfather and uncle Sayid both call a “big man” to ease their burdens with funds extracted from the government. Obama’s father, it turns out, had grabbed for the brass ring but wound up a failed Big Man, undone by President Jomo Kenyatta’s discrimination against his Luo tribe and by his own alcoholism. Even when impoverished, Obama Sr. pathetically kept playing the Big Man, dispensing gifts he couldn’t afford to his relatives and hangers-on.

Now, Obama Jr. is running for the biggest job of all.

On his trip to Kenya last year, he began by lecturing the frustrated audiences not to expect his prominence in Washington to change their lives—“My time is not my own. Don’t expect me to come back here very often.” But in the slum of Kibera, the crowd’s adulation overcame his intellectual defenses and he began shouting joyously, “You are all my brothers and sisters!”

In his head, Obama surely knows that his becoming the world’s biggest man would be bad for the work ethic of Kenyans, some of whom would assume America would support them. But in his heart, none of that matters.

For Americans wondering about his fitness to be president, his latest Kenyan trip symbolizes the inner duality beneath his dapper exterior. He possesses one of the finest minds of any politician, but his personal passions routinely war against his acknowledging unwelcome truths, even to himself.

Whether his head or heart would prove stronger in the White House remains unknown, perhaps even to Barack Obama.

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_03_12/feature.html

Nor will most of the Dem base, but a few in the middle may jump ship, and some of those Hillary backers, and a few of the outright racists. Dems usually complain the Rep is too far right, this election that's mostly been taken away from them. McCain is exactly the guy Dems should fear most this go around.

Conservative Reps may hate him, but they can't win this election alone regardless.

American's aren't wondering about his fitness. Imaginary thinking.

Kenya trip is a non-issue. Not even a blip.

Racists are worrying tho.

$$$$$good thing for him George Soros has lots of money$$$$

The money thing is no problem anymore. That's nothing compared to the advantage of having the media swooning over every speech and tingles running up legs and other appendages.

It's funny to hear Bill Clinton complaining about media bias. It's a bitch when it cuts the other way.

Unlike McSame, he's been raking it in from small donors.

That said, McSame hasn't even been doing that well with his big donors.

Do you think Chris Mathews is still getting those tingles??

http://chrismatthewsleg.wordpress.com/about/

AND GUNS!!

CARTER ENDORSES OBAMA



ATLANTA (AP) - Former President Carter says he'll endorse Democrat Barack Obama after the polls close on the final primaries.
Carter told The Associated Press on Tuesday: "The fact is the Obama people already know they have my vote when the polls close tonight." Carter spoke to the AP after addressing the Georgia World Congress Center.

Carter, a superdelegate, has remained officially neutral in the race but has offered high praise to Obama. Carter has noted that his children, grandchildren and their spouses back the Illinois senator.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9...;show_article=1

I'm sure that Carter can round up his buddies Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and Hamas to support Obama.

That's going out on a limb Jimmy. Like betting Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby.


Don't forget little Danny Ortega.

It pains me that the first vote I ever cast was for Jimmy, though I wasn't very sure about it. I was a lot like those kids now, didn't know squat about economics and figured Jimmy would make things a lot more fair, through "change". Which mostly meant higher taxes and more government. It didn't work very well then, and I don't see anything has changed since. (outside of the USSR collapsing, no thanks to Jimmy)