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BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA: FAMILY HISTORY 2008

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Posted by Israel Insider on November 2, 2008 at 7:00pm
View Israel Insider's blog

If Barack Hussein Obama II is Malcolm X's biological son, it would explain the mystery of why he was so generously helped by so many Arab and communist "friends in high places" long before he was a "somebody." Just as Malcolm X adopted Islam, his secret son would also need to learn its ways, and learn the ways of revolution, not just assume an Islamic name. He would need to be groomed and educated to organize the community called the United States of America.

by Reuven Koret, Israel Insider Publisher

In August I received a curious email. As a magazine that covers international politics, with a focus on Mideast affairs, Israel Insider gets more from its fair share of baseless tips and phony rumors. I ignore most and delete them unread. This one was a bit different. It came from a national security lawyer with extensive credentials and intelligence connections that checked out, and a phone number.

Israel Insider had been running a series of articles exploring the vagaries of Barack Obama's birth, and his concealed documentation, and this was the jumping off point of the email, which confirmed the claim that Obama was not born in Hawaii, that "Mossad are going with Mombasa" but "Proving Mombasa is not so easy, as NSIS in Nairobi are clamming up tight, as are MI6 in London, who have the original Mombasa file and full details of the birth."

He said that "Disproving Honolulu is child's play. You've already shown that the birth certificate put forward by Obama (whose people privately are not denying Mombasa, by the way) is a fake. Why fake it? If he was born in Honolulu he could obtain a genuine one. Hawaii Dept of Health would hardly denounce a potential presidential candidate's birth certificate as fraudulent without cross-checking birth records for August 1961. No birth was registered in the name of Obama in Honolulu in August 1961."

(This last detail may explain why Hawaiian officials last Friday confirmed that a birth certificate does indeed exist but conspicuously refused to release any details or even confirm that the details conform to those on the computer-generated Certification of Live Birth. The name on the "original" certificate may in fact not be Obama nor the birthplace Honolulu. But Obama's recent visit "to his grandmother" may well have had less to do with her health than eliciting this vague and inconclusive statement from the Hawaiian Health Department.)

(SITE NOTE: The COLB on the Obama site has been discredited by one graphics expert and one forensic expert. However, Obama refuses to release the vault copy of the birth certificate. Thus far up to 2009 Obama has spent over a $800,000 for three law firms to block any release of information on himself.)

The source continues: "There is no evidence Ann Dunham had even met Obama Senior in or around November 1960, the alleged time of conception, indeed it is not even clear Obama was in Honolulu at that time, although he may have been. Ann Dunham was only 17 and although she might have been in Honolulu the timing is tight." "More to the point, she was in neither of the medical centers put forward by the Obama campaign (question: why do they not know in which hospital he was born?) on August 4th, nor are there medical records to back up the claimed birth, nor has an attending physician been named. I've heard of births with the father absent, births with the mother absent a bit trickier."

(SITE NOTE: The Certification of Live Birth does NOT state a hospital or doctor. The Certificate of Live Birth (vault copy of birth certificate) does. The Obama campaign stated one hospital and his half-sister Maya quoted another. This kicked off the controversy. Later Philip Berg entered more garbage in the game when he claimed that Obama's grandmother Sarah Onyango Obama had claimed that she was in the same room in Kenya with his half-sister Auma when Obama was born. Berg claims to have affidavits, but the sources are not considered reliable.)

"There are said to be photos of Ann Dunham on Waikiki Beach taken in or about July 1961, when she is supposed to have been in her third trimester, in a bikini, taken by a fellow female student. AD is clearly not pregnant. Media have not yet talked to fellow students, but it can't be long. There are bound to be other photos of AD in existence taken during the alleged 2nd and 3rd trimesters. Obama campaign are terrified some one will press for her medical records, which have been accessed by CIA."

(SITE NOTE: This is the only source where I have encountered this claim. No one has mentioned it nor has anyone produced the alleged photos.)

"Moving to Indonesia the Obama campaign are also suppressing the Indonesian immigration and passport records, which I believe show him as a Kenyan citizen, and the naturalisation records. They have not denied Internet claims he was naturalised in Indonesia. If he was a US citizen there should be a visa record to back that up."

(SITE NOTE: It is not Obama, but the Indonesian government that sealed all his records as soon as he became President-elect. Previously they had stated that the records would be accessible AFTER the 4 Nov 2008 election. We hold that he was adopted in Indonesia by Lolo Soetoro -- and NOT in Hawaii. From this we build the case that he obtained an Indonesian passport for his return in 1971 along with an F-1 student visa as "Barry Soetoro." However, he was enrolled in the 5th Grade at Punahou School as "Barry Dunham" -- which gives us cause to believe that he was using his mother's maiden name -- and he was fatherless on his birth certificate. We further propose that Ann Dunham returned from Indonesia just before Obama Sr. returned from Kenya in Dec 1971. Obama Sr. remained in Hawaii for one month and we hypothesize that it was at this point that Obama was legally entered as "Barack Hussein Obama II" on the birth certificate. After this was done, Obama was registered at Punahou as "Barack Hussein Obama" but went by the name "Barry Obama".)

"Obama Senior was murdered in Kenya in 1982 to silence him. Interesting story re his sister Auma as well -- she appears to be a full sister, not a half-sister as he is claiming, i.e. they share the same mother. She was ordered back to Kenya in 2007 to prevent DNA testing .... CIA did a DNA test on the grandparents, using saliva from glasses, which conclusively rules out any relationship between Obama and the Dunhams."

(SITE NOTE: These would be the off-the-wall fringe theories. This is the only source that has claimed that Auma, older half-sister by Obama Sr. and Kezia, that she was his FULL sister. This assertion would be that he was born to Obama Sr. and Kezia in Kenya -- and that Obama Sr. somehow convinced Ann Dunham and the senior Dunhams that a 17-year old girl was old enough to raise a child ... and sacrificing the rest of her life for a total stranger. We think not!!! The idea of the CIA having DNA test results proving that there is no relationship is equally out there. The idea that Obama Sr. was murdered is unbelievable. There is no corroboration for any of these stories.)

"The source said that the Dunham family became involved because Stanley Dunham, Sr. was suspected of espionage. Boeing, he said, has "a 1944 security file on Stanley Dunham in connection with suspected sabotage of B-17G aircraft at their Wichita Kansas plant and the theft of B-29 blueprints, a full set of which were passed to the German Abwehr via Lisbon by June 1944. Ann Dunham appears to have been chosen as the surrogate mother in 1963 because of the family connection to German Intelligence. German assets in the US, including Rezko, who is connected to the Syrian Mukhabarat and the German DVD, sponsored his career.

(SITE NOTE: This is another of the off-the-wall fringe theories -- promulgated by the Jewish anti-Obama groups. This is the only source that we have read that has claimed that Madelyn Dunham working as a riveter on the assembly line was a spy. Just thinking how Madelyn obtained the blueprints as an assembly-line worker starts to make this story ridiculous. The rest -- even including Antoin "Tony" Rezko in this fiasco -- is too far out to be even reasonably believable. There is no corroboration for these stories.)

"Effectively," the source concludes, "Obama is a German sleeper agent."

Well, this is a lot to take in, and on first reading it struck me that the source had been reading too many Le Carre novels or Bond movies. I mean, really: "The Manchurian Candidate" meets "The Boy from Mombassa"?

It seemed completely preposterous, and indeed I initially dismissed it as preposterous. Obama a "German sleeper agent"? Of course, in those days the East Germans were a Soviet satellite, and the DDR was perhaps the most feared and ideological of the communist states, with more than a sprinkling of rehabilitated Nazis uncured of their genetic fantasies and experiments. 1961-1963 were the peak years of the Cold War, with Berlin playing a central role in East-West hostilities.

But what made no sense to me was why anyone in the spy business, or anyone in East Germany for that matter, would give a damn to find a foster parent for a newborn illegitimate offspring of mixed black- white parentage. What made him so special that the Syrians and the German would go to all the trouble or see some potential in grooming him? What could possibly make intelligence agencies groom from infancy a sleeper agent.

The source didn't answer this, nor could I, over the succeeding months of the campaign. We exchanged a few more emails, but the nagging question of "why" anyone would bother with this baby would not leave me. What did come out in the ensuing weeks, however, was a litany of unexplained facts in Obama's youthful history, of help from strangers in high places all along the way, benefactors who had either Arab- Muslim or Communist-Social connections. There was his Islamic education in Indonesia. There was the fact that in Hawaii the boy was tutored in the ways of revolution by leading black activists, Muslim activists, and Communist activists. Influentia black nationalist and Communist Frank Marshall Davis would become a huge influence in the young Obama's life.

But things really got strange with the revelation that Khalid al- Mansour, close adviser to a Saudi billionaire and royal family helped Obama get into Harvard Law School (and reportedly Columbia before that) and financed his education and advancement.

(SITE NOTE: There is some plausibility into this theory that he might have been "groomed" by a Saudi-Syrian financial connection. As Harvard-trained lawyer backed by their finances and shuttled into politics -- he would be a politician in their hip-pocket. All of this may have some merit as as his campaign debts were always covered and untold funds flowed from overseas into the Obama presidential campaign. Chicago politics are noted for its corruption -- and if one looks at Obama's "debt" it is suspicious as to how it was paid off.

Mixed in with this is the Bill Ayers connection that complicates the equation. We hypothesize that Obama was playing TWO sides to his advantage. From the Ayers-Dohrn connection he got connected to the academic roots and "thinkers" that a mediocre student needed to surround himself with. From the "black" roots of Michelle Obama, he associated himself with the "black community" of the Trinity Unitarian Church of Christ (TUCC) and his black mentors to give him credibility with the black community that incidentally rejected him in 2000 because he was NOT black. From Rezko and Khalid al-Mansour he got the financing to make his upward political growth possible.

Each worked their own separate schemes. Ayers-Dohrn saw a way to promote the Socialist agenda through a rising politician. Khalid Al-Mansour and Rezko had a politician in their pocket. What did Obama gain? High-paid positions on boards for himself and his wife -- until his political career took off. However, this theory is one that is too complex for us to even try to sort out. At this point, most blogs are only looking at one facet of the story. One blog that is trying to draw this theory together is Citizen Wells -- who has spearheaded a drive to indict Obama for corruption.)

It was al-Mansour who asked Percy Sutton, a high profile black lawyer active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, to help Obama get into Harvard. Sutton described Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world s richest men. He told me about Obama and asked him to "write a letter in support of Obama's application to Harvard Law School, Sutton recalled. "And his introduction was there is a young man that has applied to Harvard. I know that you have a few friends up there because you used to go up there to speak. Would you please write a letter in support of him?" Sutton obliged: "I wrote a letter of support of him to my friends at Harvard, saying to them I thought there was a genius that was going to be available and I certainly hoped they would treat him kindly." How in the world would Percy Sutton know that Obama, a young man he had never met, was a "genius"? It turns out that Sutton was among the lawyers for Malcolm X. (SEE VIDEO: Interview with Sutton.)

And why would a big wheel like al-Mansour take such an interest in a drug-taking party boy from a second-rate college? While helping Obama get into Harvard, he was representing top members of the Saudi Royal family, Saudi billionaires Abdul Aziz and Khalid al-Ibrahim, and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, nephew if King Abdallah of Saudi Arabia. So there was, early on, a direct connection between Obama and Saudi royalty and an aggressive effort by a Saudi agent to make Obama's way in the world. (SITE NOTE: The connection is the politician in ones pocket. In 2005, Obama purchased a new home in Kenwoood District of Chicago for $1.65 million. On the same day Rezko's wife, Rita, purchased the adjoining empty lot for full price. The London Times reported that Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born Billionaire loaned Rezko $3.5 million three weeks before Obama's new home was purchased. Obama met Nadhmi Auchi many times with Rezko -- though Obama claims that "he can't remember." Now Obama becomes President -- and whose pocket is he in? (SEE Nadhmi Auchi for Obama-Auchi connection.))

It was this connection to Saudi wealth that has led to Obama being dubbed the "Mansourian candidate".

Then there were the revelations about Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn -- unrepentant terrorists and communists both -- who helped launch Obama's political career from their home. Ayers, indeed, may well have ghost-written Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father, creating the impression that Obama was also skilled in writing as well as "community organizing."

(SITE NOTE: THERE IS A DEFINITE CONNECTION!!! The Obama story claims that they are a casual acquaintance who happen to live in the same neighborhood. The trouble is the relationship dates back to 1988 when Michelle Robinson (Obama) was working at the same legal firm as Bernadine Dohrn when Obama got there for summer work.

Others claim the Obama-Ayers relationship dates back to 1981-1983 when Williaml Ayers was just down the street from Columbia getting a Masters in Education while Barack Obama was at Columbia -- but this is pure speculation. In 1987 William Ayers links up with Barack Obama in Chicago. In 1988 Ayers solicits Khalid Al-Mansour to raise money for Obama's Harvard law School education. In 1989 Tom Ayers and William Ayers get Obama a summer job at Sidley & Austin (where he meets Michelle Obama); Ayers' wife Bernadine Dohrn also worked at Sidley at about the same time as Barack and Michelle. In 993 Ayers places Obama on Woods Foundation. In 1995 Ayers makes Obama Chairman of Annenberg Challenge.

In 1995 Ayers hosts a coffee klatch for Obama's political debut. Obama falsely claims this is when he first met Ayers. It can be proved that they were on the same discussion panel together well before this meeting.

In 2007-2008 the structure of Obama's presidential campaign increasingly comes to resemble an Ayers-designed national "community organizer matrix" straight out of Maoist theory. This is not merely a presidential "campaign." Obama's organization is the first installment of an ongoing movement being paid for with tax-exempt contributions to his campaign, approaching half a billion dollars. In 2008 in response to ABC News, Obama tells a national TV audience he was "six years old" when Ayers bombed federal buildings, and they are only casual neighborhood acquaintances. A lie.)

Cashill blog is pressing the case of Obama NOT writing Dreams of My Father -- or should we say completing it professionally. The ghost-writing theory needs more tests to validate the hypothesis though subjected to many computerized authoring "tests". It is still a theory but it is plausible if one compares the known writings of Obama before. Presently Obama has hired on a large speech-writing staff and simply reads off of a teleprompter. Though he has claimed to have written some high-profile speeches by himself, there is no one that was present when it was done. The jury is still out on the ghost-writing theory. (SEE Bill Ayers.))

More substantially, there was Antoin "Tony" Rezko, the Syrian born real estate wheeler-dealer and convicted racketeer, who helped Obama raise his first campaign funds and assisted him financially.

There were influential Palestinian scholars and propagandists Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said, colleagues and personal friends of Obama, despite his unconvincing efforts to distance himself from them and squelch his praise for their anti-Israel ideologies.

There was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's spiritual mentor, who conducted his marriage, baptized their children, and gave Obama's campaign manifesto "Audacity of Hope" its title before being distanced (at least for the duration of the campaign) when their close twenty year relationship came to light.

(SITE NOTE: Obama was advised to join the Trinity Unitarian Church of Christ by his political mentor at the start of his political career. The church was to provide useful contacts. Note that there is still suspicion whether Obama really is a Christian -- with many claiming he wasn't even baptized. When Rev Wright got into hot water over his fire-breathing "god-damn" speeches, Obama distanced himself from the minister -- claiming that he wasn't listening to the sermons every Sunday for twenty years. A politician dumping his friends ... Our personal opinion is that Obama only uses "Christian" membership as a political tool. Though many claim he is a Muslim, we simply state we don't know on the topic -- but we do know that he became a member of the TUCC because of Michelle Obama in 1992.)

And, of course, there is neighbor Louis Farrakhan, current leader of the Nation of Islam, who recently spoke of Obama as the "Messiah" and -- as a report from Ken Timmerman, citing an insider, today confirms -- enjoys an "open channel" of communication with him.

Why did all of these important scholars and ideologues, fundraiser and networkers, these millionaires and billionaires - especially from the Arab and Islamic world, and extreme socialist and communist party activists -- reach out to help this unknown, undereducated young man, many before Obama was anybody of known importance? Was it just that he was tall and handsome and bright, with a silver tongue?

(SITE NOTE: This is the big question. Even his teachers at Occidental College stated he was just an ordinary student -- not someone who would become the Secretary of State or something. What happened? Where did he get the spark? By the time he got to Chicago and started into politics in 1995, he had mastered his speaking skills enough to impress the black elite of Chicago into backing him financially.)

Or was there some other factor - a genetic factor, a secret legacy of heredity -- that mysteriously opened the doors and wallets and elicited the kindness of strangers?

Last week, a long and rambling post attributed to one Rudy Schultz was made to the Atlas Shrugs blog of Pamela Geller. The starting point for the post was revelation of school records that show that the supposed mother of Barack Obama enrolled in the University of Washington just a few weeks after her son was purportedly born in Hawaii. But the intention of the poster was apparently to imply that Obama's father was unlikely to have been Barack Hussein Obama, Senior (photo at left).

(SITE NOTE: We discovered this fact from other sources and using interviews with friends came to the conclusion that Ann Dunham went to Seattle, WA in Aug 1961 and settled in Capitol Hill as a "single mother" while attending the University of Washington starting in the Autumn of 1961.)

The post provides photos and a video of Malcolm X, with a notation that he and Obama had the same and striking physical resemblances: identical hairline, jawline, and other distinctive facial features, similarities not shared by Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. or other members of the Luo tribe bloodline.

(SITE NOTE: This theory of Malcolm X being the biological father of Obama by Ann Dunham is too far-fetched -- and timelines simply don't match. No matter how many similarities between the two people, it just cannot reasonably be possible. Some people have gone to great lengths to show the linkages, but again the timelines for Ann Dunham and Malcolm X show it is impossible. Ann Dunham was in Hawaii -- NOT Washington -- when the time of conception occurred. Just count back from when Obama was born -- and the impossiblity is obvious.)

The post noted striking similarities in speaking cadence and style, not to mention a bright flashing smile and a wry sense of humor. The man born in Nebraska as Malcolm Little also was a light shade of brown, the product of a mother from Grenada who, he said, "looked like a white woman" and a black father. (See more striking similarities from insider Octaman here. .)

The post also traced the path of Malcolm X in the late 1950's and early 1960's, a journey that took him to Africa and the young leadership circle to which Barack Hussein Obama Sr. also belonged, including the activist Tom Mboya who was behind the program which airlifted, with US funding, young African leaders to Hawaii to study at the university, a cohort to which Obama senior belonged.


Obama-Malcolm X Similarity (Polarik)

But Schultz concludes his post by pulling his punches a bit: "While Malcolm X may not be Obama's biological father, Malcolm X is demonstrably Barack Hussein Obama's philosophical father, and the lineage is undeniable! Obama Jr. was sired in the social soup stirred by Malcolm X."

While Schultz backed away from claiming that Obama's biological father may in fact be Malcolm X, the hereditary claim cannot be discounted. If he was indeed the illegitimate offspring of Malcolm - the closest that one can get to "royalty" in the messianic broth of black radical Islamic and Communistic politics - that would explain the otherwise inexplicable:

Why this "illegitimate" baby, and later this young man - a druggie and underachiever -- would have had paved for him the royal road to privilege and power, paid for his Ivy League education, got him jobs and a home, raised millions of dollars for his political career, got him selected to address the DNC in 2004, got him into the senate in 2006, and led him straight to where he is today, just two years hence, on the verge of the US presidency, powered by hundreds of millions of untraceable overseas contributions.

In the minds of the leftist and Islamic leaders, he is the heir to the throne of "freedom fighters", the revolutionary prodigal son - heir to legacy of black powers and black Islam -- come home to rule.

Nothing short of a DNA test is going to prove who Obama Jr.'s father really is, or, indeed who is real mother is, or is not. His long- suppressed birth certificate, which he wrote about possessing in Dreams from my Father and which Hawaii now admits is on file, could help solve the mystery.

No one to my knowledge has explored the possibility that Stanley Ann may not be the birth-mother. That would explain the lack of hospital records in Honolulu and the fact that no one can remember seeing her pregnant. Suddenly she just appeared in Washington state with a little baby boy.

(SITE NOTE: This is an interesting theory, but we ask in return: Why would a 17-year old and her parents agree to accept the burden of a bastard child from an unspecified famous person -- that will ruin the life of the daughter and turn the lives of the grandparents into a living hell. There is no logic to this theory.)

There is, too, a curious comment that Stanley Ann Dunham reportedly made after high school, remembered by a friend, that "I don't need to get married or date to have a baby." And the fact that in June 1960 her family - who were reportedly highly sympathetic with left-wing causes -- suddenly left Washington state for Hawaii, where they continued to be involved with socialist-communist causes and personalities, such as Frank Marshall Davis (identified by Obama only as "Frank" in Obama's Dreams from my Father), who proved so influential in his upbringing.

There is also new information, published in Atlas Shrugs and confirmed elsewhere, from the University of Hawaii that she was only enrolled only in the fall of 1960, and that from the Fall of 1961 (weeks after Barack Jr. was reportedly born) and through the following spring, she was enrolled at the University of Washington.

There is the fact that she abandoned this baby on repeated occasions, and the fact that Obama returned the favored when he refused to visit her as she sickened and died. If she was merely his foster mother, then she was just a means to an end, to be discarded when she had outlived her usefulness.

(SITE NOTE: This unfortunately becomes obvious when viewed on the time line. Ann Dunham deserts Obama on numerous occassions -- though taking Maya along -- and in the last stretch doesn't see him for 14 years. Obama has attempted to create a myth surrounding his mother -- and her passion for anthropology. However, if one looks at the facts, Ann Dunham was NOT a good mother to Obama. Even when living in Hawaii, Obama simply came and went from the apartment where she lived with Maya. The image that there was a caring family unit is a myth.)

If Barack Hussein Obama II is Malcolm X's biological son, it would explain the mystery of why he was so generously helped by so many Arab and communist "friends in high places" long before he was a "somebody." Just as Malcolm X adopted Islam, his secret son would also need to learn its ways, and learn the ways of revolution, not just assume an Islamic name. He would need to be groomed and educated to organize the community called the United States of America.

Malcolm broke with Elijah Muhammad in large measure because the then- leader of the Nation of Islam had conducted illicit affairs and sired illegitimate children. If Malcolm himself had sired a boy, it is not something he would have wanted to advertise, or to bring along with him in his hectic and dangerous revolutionary path. But he may well have arranged to give the boy a first-class upbringing and education, free from the burden of his own violent legacy, his history as a convicted felon, his likely fate as a martyr, to realize the legacy he never could. He knew he was "a walking dead man," marked for death -- how could he perpetuate his principles beyond the grave?

Malcolm X was marginalized even from the black leadership after he said, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that the "chickens had come home to roost." That term would be resurrected by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, much to Obama's chagrin, in a sermon discussing the reasons for the Islamic attacks on the United States, reasons that Obama echoed in his own post-9/11 statements, in somewhat less inflammatory terms.

Malcolm himself was assassinated in 1965, reportedly by agents from the Nation of Islam. (SEE VIDEO: Malcom X.)

If indeed Obama is not just Malcolm's spiritual son but his biological one as well, it would represent the realization of a lifelong preparation to seize power, not by guns but by genes, and the genius of Obama's handlers, mentors and assistants along the way who prepared his path to power.

(SITE NOTE: We refuse to believe this theory of Malcolm X being the biological father of Obama. It is so massive and insidious in its scope that one would say that it would be impossible to hide. The plot would be something out of a movie horror film -- sort of like Rosemary's Baby. We do, however, agree that Obama has accepted many of Malcolm X's -- and the Nation of Islam's -- beliefs about the frightening concept of "social justice." We also feel that there are enough facts to point that Obama is a member of the New Party -- an arm of the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).)

According to this scenario, the sleeper agent is now wide awake, although it is also conceivable that Obama himself may not be fully aware of the role he was programmed to play. Nor is it clear who has supplanted his initial handlers -- which my source identified as East German and Syrian -- although the Saudis and their allies, including those within the US government and not just the Democratic side of the aisle, clearly seem implicated with pulling some of the strings and pouring some of the huge funding that has brought him to where he is today.

Those who have helped him reach to the threshold of power -- some knowingly and some "useful idiots" -- have been working in concert to fulfill the revolutionary goals of Malcolm's by putting his boy in power, using the system to destroy the system. Early voting. ACORN. Untraceable online funds. Brilliant. But that, of course, is just the means to the end.

Barack Obama wrote, in Dreams from My Father, of the huge impact this black revolutionary hero's memoir had on him, as none others did: "Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me." Self-creation indeed.

If Malcolm X secretly sired Barack Obama, then the title Dreams from My Father would indeed take on a whole new meaning, with Obama Sr. revealed as a kind of paternal proxy, a stand-in for a revolutionary of a higher spiritual and political order whose identity the self- creating son could never reveal if his own ambitions, and his real father's ambitions for him, were to be realized.

In 1964, the year before his death, Malcolm gave an address, "Ballots or Bullets" (audio available here) in which he urged African Americans to turn away from violence and create revolutionary change through the US electoral system.

If the O is in fact an X, and wins the red, white and blue tic-tac-toe on Tuesday to become the President and Command in Chief of the United States then, truly, America's chickens will have come home to roost.

Red States may soon take on a whole new meaning. (Source: Omgli: Post by John Lemke and Oil for Immigration: Israel Insider.)

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Michelle LaVaughn Obama (Wife)

Michelle LaVaughn Obama (née Robinson, born January 17, 1964) is an American lawyer and the wife of Barack Obama. Michelle Obama, a formidable daughter of the South Side who is an alumna both of the Ivy League and Chicago's rough-and-tumble City Hall. She may not be in on all the conference calls or offer her own health plan in the style of former First Lady Hillary Clinton but no one else in the inner circle denies that she would be a driving force in any presidential campaign.

Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago, Illinois to Frasier Robinson (who died in 1990 after battling with multiple sclerosis), a city pump operator and Democratic precinct captain, and Marian Robinson, a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store; she grew up in the South Shore community area of Chicago. Unlike her husband, she was raised in a conventional two-parent home where the family convened around the dinner table nightly.

Michelle was raised in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a classic Chicago brick bungalow, now surrounded by a chain link fence, in South Shore. Her mother still lives there, behind burglar-proof wrought iron doors and secured windows, poised above a hedge of clipped yews. Michelle may live today in a $1.65 million Georgian revival Kenwood mansion, surrounded by a tall wrought iron fence, but Patterson remembers playing Barbie with her in "the smallest room I had ever seen. It was like a closet.'' Her bedroom was actually the apartment's living room, which had been converted with a divider down the middle, allowing her to share it with her brother until an addition was built.

"As far back as any of us can remember, she was very bright,'' said her brother, Craig Robinson, who is 16 months older and preceded his sister at Princeton to become its fourth highest-scoring basketball player. Both Michelle and Craig, now head basketball coach at Brown University, learned to read at home by the age of 4. Both skipped second grade (both their parents also skipped a grade). By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at what is now Bouchet Elementary, at 73rd and Jeffery. The gifted program exposed Michelle to three years of French before she graduated as class salutatorian, and, for two years, to special biology classes at Kennedy King College. There, the gifted class studied photosynthesis, worked in a laboratory and identified the muscles of dissected rat specimens, recalled childhood friend Chiaka Davis Patterson. "This is not what normal seventh-graders were getting,'' Patterson said.

Later, at Princeton, Michelle was one of four roommates, all on financial aid, who shared a sparsely decorated common room and had to walk down three floors to the bathroom, said Princeton roommate Angela Acree. "We were not rich,'' Acree said. "A lot of kids had TVs and sofas and furniture. We didn't." For her work study assignment, Michelle coordinated an after school center, caring for children of Princeton's lunchroom and maintenance people. She survived among high achievers by not only being smart, but being organized – a trait colleagues cite today. "She was not a procrastinator,'' Acree said. "Michelle would always get her work done in advance so she was not sitting there facing some deadline the next day.'' In their common room, to unwind, Michelle and her roommates played Stevie Wonder records, swapped stories and "giggled and laughed hysterically,'' Acree recalls.

But Michelle's senior thesis reveals the sociology major was acutely aware of being among the few blacks then at Princeton. "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'Blackness' than ever before,'' Michelle wrote in a 1985 thesis entitled "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community.'' "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my White professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don't belong. "Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with Whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be Black first and a student second.'' Early on at Princeton, Michelle wrote, she was determined to "utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit [the black] community first and foremost.'' Yet she now realized attending a launching pad like Princeton would "likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure . . . "As I enter my final year at Princeton, I find myself striving for many of the same goals as my White classmates -- acceptance to a prestigious graduate or professional school or a high-paying position in a successful corporation. Thus, my goals are not as clear as before.'' (Source: Sun Times.) (SITE NOTE: Detractors state that she is "racist" -- or at least "race obsessed". Anti-Obama groups picked up on this theme and created hoaxes and bombarded her with racist innuendoes throughout the Presidential campaign. (Source: Lynn Sweet.)

Michelle, who is 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m) tall, graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981 and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an Artium Baccalaureus in 1985. She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988…


Michelle Graduation from Princeton

Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin where she first met her husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property. Subsequently, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor and Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies.

In 1996, Obama served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center. In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May, 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs… (SITE NOTE: Critics sneer at her "day-jobs" that seem to be attached to her husband's rise in politics. She got the job when her husband was the Chairman of the Illinois Senate Health committee. She was promoted to the VP job when her husband entered the US Senate. They compare her to Ms. Hillary Rodham Clinton who was hired by the Rose firm after husband Bill became the attorney general in Arkansas, and then making partner once her husband bill was elected governor.)

Michelle's impressive resume includes: Former associate dean at the University of Chicago; a member of six boards of directors including the prestigious Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and Tree House Foods; and Vice President, Community and External Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In this position she was responsible for all programs and initiatives that involve the relationships between the hospitals and the community as well as management of the hospitals' business diversity program.

Michelle R. Obama, age 43, was elected as a Director on June 6, 2005. Since March 2005, Ms. Obama has served as the Vice President for Community and External Affairs for the University of Chicago Hospitals. From September 2001 to March 2005, Ms. Obama served as Executive Director of Community Affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals. In addition, Ms. Obama served as Associate Dean of Students and Director of Community Service for the University of Chicago from September 1997 to March 2005. Ms. Obama also has held numerous positions in the public and non-profit sectors, including Executive Director of the Chicago Office of Public Allies, Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development for the City of Chicago and Assistant to the Mayor of the City of Chicago. Ms. Obama holds a B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Ms. Obama is a member of the Audit Committee and the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of our Board of Directors. (Source: Tree House Foods.)

In Jan 2007, TreeHouse Foods, Inc. announced the appointment of Diana S. Ferguson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Merisant Worldwide, Inc., to the company's board of directors. Ms. Ferguson, 44, filled the vacancy created by the resignation of Michelle R. Obama in May 2007. Ms. Ferguson fulfilled the term of Ms. Obama that was to expire in conjunction with the annual meeting of stockholders in 2010. (Source: Reuters.)

Michelle's professional relationships were helpful when her husband in 2004, then a state senator, ran for the United States Senate, where he faced a primary dominated by some of the Democratic Party's most powerful political families. In this 2004 race, Obama had the support of influential black business leaders, some of whom had closer ties to his wife than they did to him. According to Newsweek, a former boss of Michelle Obama's, a powerful black woman Valerie Jarrett, chair of the Chicago Stock Exchange, served as finance chair of Barack Obama's U.S. Senate campaign. (SITE NOTE: Valerie Jarrett, a black single mother with political clout, was part of the inner circle to place Obama in the White House as well.)

According to the couple's 2006 income tax return, Michelle's salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while he had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The total Obama income, however, was $991,296 including $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, plus investments and royalties from his books. (Source: Wikipedia.)

She met Barack when he went to work for Sidley Austin in 1988. (SITE NOTE: The "coincidence" of the Obama-Ayers connections keeps cropping up!!! Bernardine Dohrn was at Sidley Austin a law firm in Chicago from 1984 to 1988. She was hired by Howard Trienens, the head of the firm at that time, who knew Thomas G. Ayers, the father of Dohrn's husband. "We often hire friends," Trienens told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. However, Dohrn has not been admitted to the New York or Illinois bar. She passed the New York bar exam but has not submitted an application to the New York Supreme Court's Committee on Character and Fitness. She also passed the Illinois bar, but was turned down by the Illinois ethics committee because of her criminal record. Trienen said of the Illinois rejection, "Dohrn didn't get a [law] license because she's stubborn. She wouldn't say she's sorry." (Source: Wikipedia and Grossman, Ron. Family ties proved Ayers' point, Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2008.)

After Michelle's law school graduation, she joined the kind of "successful corporation'' -- Chicago's Sidley & Austin -- she wrote about at Princeton. Her specialty: marketing and intellectual property. If she had stayed longer, "she would have been a superstar,'' said Sidley senior counsel Newton Minow. "We were all crazy about her.'' Her first year, in walked Obama. Michelle was tapped as the young summer associate's advisor. "I remember that she was tall – almost my 1992, when the couple walked down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ. Michelle's childhood friend, Santita Jackson, daughter of the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., sang at the wedding. "We all cried. It was so beautiful,'' said Valerie Jarrett, CEO of Habitat Co. but at the time Michelle's boss. "It's clear they were in love and each other's best friends.''

By then, Michelle had grown restless with corporate law. In 1991, before her marriage, she had joined the crew of energetic young people surrounding Mayor Daley in his early years in office. Jarrett, then deputy chief of staff, remembers interviewing Michelle for an assistant's job in the chief of staff's office. "The moment I met her I knew immediately we would be lucky to have her,'' said Jarrett, who has since vacationed with the Obamas in Martha's Vineyard. "I was instantly impressed. I think I offered her a job at the end of the first meeting.'' Before she signed up, Michelle told Jarrett her fiance wanted to meet her "so he could figure out if he was comfortable with her going to work for Mayor Daley.'' Obama had "some trepidation'' about Michelle working in politics, Jarrett said. (Michelle later was not thrilled with the idea of Obama running for state senator.) "I can remember sitting in [a restaurant] booth, with Barack on the other side, interrogating me in the nicest possible way,'' Jarrett said. "I can't think of many people you hire who say, `I'd like you to meet my fiancé,' but I would have done just about anything to get Michelle.'' At City Hall, Michelle confronted issues head-on. "I've been in so many settings or meetings with Michelle where people are talking all around an issue and she has a way of succinctly getting to the issue and putting it on the table. She's willing to say what other people dance around,'' said Jarrett.

In 1993, Michelle grabbed an offer to be the founding executive director of the Chicago office of Public Allies, part of President Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps effort. The position brought her closer to the community work she longed for; it meant helping promising young people enter public service. Public Allies found them, trained them and matched them up with internships -- all of which Michelle had to organize. She created an office, a board of directors and a pot of money from scratch, setting a "template'' for 11 offices that would follow, said Paul Schmitz, national Public Allies CEO. Displaying fundraising and strategizing skills, Michelle put together a board of people who could help Public Allies raise money and "left it with about a one-year reserve, which none of our sites since have had. She built it to last,'' Schmitz said.

By 1996, the University of Chicago offered a job as associate dean of students that extended Michelle's work with volunteerism. As director of the University Community Service Center, she located and supported the volunteer work of students. Hearing of her work, then U. of C. Hospitals president Michael Riordan offered Michelle a job in 2002 as the hospital's executive director of community affairs, serving as liaison between the institution and its surrounding community of rich and poor. In "probably the most unique interview I've ever had,'' Riordan said, Michelle brought her younger daughter with her in a "little car-seat carrier.''

Two months after Obama's January 2005 swearing-in as U.S. senator, Michelle was promoted to vice president of external affairs and community relations. Tax returns showed her total compensation that year went from $122,000 to $317,000, though hospital officials say some of the latter figure includes a one-time pension payout and a bonus. By then, among other things, Michelle had expanded a two-person part-time office to a staff of 17, grown the number of volunteers into the hospital from 200 to nearly 1,000, and quadrupled the number of hospital employees who volunteered outside the hospital to 800, officials said.

Even so, some have questioned if Obama's new status triggered Michelle's promotion. Riordan insists the position had been discussed well before Obama became U.S. senator. "I wanted to send a strong message to our community that I was committed to it, so I wanted to make this a vice presidential position,'' Riordan said. "Michelle is the real deal and . . . really earned every bit of her promotion on her own."

Web sites and Crain's Chicago Business have noted Michelle's June 2005 election to the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods -- a post that earned her $45,000 in 2005 and stock options that by the end of 2006, if claimed, would have reaped her $60,000. "She got on the corporate board of someplace where she could make money, and make money quickly,'' said political consultant Joe Novak, who operates a Web site that has criticized Michelle's new TreeHouse role.

Michelle was on the TreeHouse board in November 2005, when one of its divisions announced plans to close its pickle and relish plant in La Junta, Colo., displacing 150 "mainly Hispanic'' workers, Novak said. A year later, her husband criticized Wal-Mart's treatment of its workers. "How can she defend TreeHouse while her husband is attacking Wal-Mart?'' Novak said.

Obama spokesman Julian Green, in a prepared statement, said Michelle applied for the TreeHouse job after a family friend who consults for companies seeking to increase the minorities on their boards alerted her to the opening. The friend thought Michelle would be an excellent candidate for a corporate board, given her experience in both the public and private sectors, Green said. "Michelle has performed her duties diligently and her compensation is commensurate with the company's other board members,'' Green's statement said. She's proud of her service on several boards, including Facing History and Ourselves, Muntu Dance Theatre and Sprague Memorial Institute, Green said. Some people sweat under the floodlights, but Michelle's background as a lawyer, community liaison, fundraiser and strategist should come in handy if her husband runs for president.

The toughest part may be juggling the demands of a campaign with work, marriage and motherhood -- something Michelle has been able to do so far, in part due to babysitting and other help from her mother and close female friends. Whatever happens, Michelle will find a way to make it all work, said Craig Robinson. "There's nothing too hard for her to do,'' he said. (Source: Sun Times.)

According to reports, Michelle has mastered being a mother, career woman and the wife of a politician. When Newsweek magazine trailed her in 2004, the reporter could not help but notice a to-do list for her two daughters Malia and Natasha that included time for "play." She is in bed most nights by 9:30 and rises each morning at 4:30 to run on a treadmill. This level of discipline and organization helps her manage her public and private pressures with poise. In New Yorker magazine Michelle noted that the life of a political wife is "hard and that's why Barack is such a grateful man." But there's more to it. "Barack didn't pledge riches" Michelle explains to Newsweek. "Only a life that would be interesting. On that promise he's delivered."

Interestingly Barack and Michelle waited almost seven years before having children. Their first daughter name Malia Ann Obama was born in 1999 with Natasha (often called "sasha") following two years later in 2001. When asked about what made her fall in love with him she replied "for the same reason many other people respect him; his connection with people."

Even though her husband is the center of attention, Michelle has zero concerns about fidelity in their marriage. She told Ebony magazine in March 2006, "I never worry about things I can't affect, and with fidelity . . . that is between Barack and me, and if somebody can come between us, we didn't have much to begin with."

After Barack was elected to the U.S. Senate, Barack and Michelle choose to keep their children in Chicago, where Michelle continued her career as well. "We made a good decision to stay in Chicago so that has kept our family stable," Michelle Obama told the Chicago Tribune. Every Sunday the family attends services at the Trinity United Church of Christ. (Source: Bio, Popmatters.)

Michelle Obama is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University.



The Obamas live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C. (SITE NOTE: The $1.6 mansion continued to be embroiled in the Rezko corruption scandal because of a strip of adjacent land that the Obama's bought from Rezko's wife. By buying that strip, it rendered the adjacent property undevelopable -- due to easement problems and lack of area to build a suitable structure. In effect, the Obama's gained the use of the adjacent land without purchasing it. The circumstances of the purchase and sale are still a part of a federal investigation.)

She is highly regarded for her style, demeanor, and fashion sense. She has made several appearances on various best-dressed lists and draws frequent comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy.


Obama and Michelle on Ebony Magazine

Barack Obama married Michelle Robinson in 18 Oct 1992. (SITE NOTE: Some reports say 3 Aug 1992; others say 3 Oct 1992 -- and the photos below were dated 18 Oct 1992.)


Obama and Michelle marriage (18 Oct 1992)


Obama and Michelle marriage (18 Oct 1992)


Obama and Michelle in Hawaii (1992)


Obama and Michelle in Kiberia, Kenya -- a slum in Nairobi in 1990s (Auma Obama) (SITE NOTE: Date of visit uncertain as not publicized in any other report but after 1992 by wedding band on Obama's finger. Notice Michelle's hair is short as in the days of her wedding and still youthful appearance. Unsubstantiated theory: Possible BEFORE 1995 when Obama on an Indonesian passport. If so, not something Obama would want known.)

First daughter, Malia Ann, was born in 1998, followed by a second daughter, Natasha ("Sasha"), in 2001. (Source: Wiki answers.com.) (See YouTube.com for family.) In July 2008, Barack Obama said that he regretted allowing his two young daughters to be interviewed by a showbusiness reporter and promised that they would now be kept away from the media spotlight. The Democratic presidential nominee has pleaded for his family's privacy to be respected, saying that they should be declared "off limits" during the presidential election. (SITE NOTE: When Democrats started attacking Palin for her family history -- daughter pregnant -- Obama stated that children were off-limits and he would fire anyone in his campaign who made this an issue. However, he did not stop any of the blogs from attempting to wreck havoc on this point. In the end, it was an ineffectual smear campaign.)

Michelle Obama does not have a Law License in Illinois. Michelle Robinson "voluntarily" gave up her law license in 1993, just five years after she got the license. A check of the State of Illinois Bar Association website shows no bar license for "Michelle LaVaughn Robinson" or "Michelle Obama". (Source: James 4 America.)

Michelle Obama is on COURT ORDERED INACTIVE STATUS -- order said since she has been placed INACTIVE that "no malpractice record required." This is listed in the ARDC which is the agency of the Supreme Court of Illinois which registers attorneys and investigates complaints of misconduct filed against attorneys holding a license to practice law in Illinois. The principal purpose is to assist the Supreme Court to determine a lawyer's fitness to practice law in Illinois. If a complaint is made that an attorney, licensed to practice law in Illinois, has engaged in illegal, unethical or dishonest conduct, we will investigate and, if warranted, bring formal disciplinary charges. The Supreme Court of Illinois will then ultimately decide if a lawyer should be censured (publicly rebuked), suspended (having the law license to practice either taken away for a certain period of time or placed on a probationary period) or disbarred (having the law license taken away indefinitely). (SITE NOTE: It seems very unusual that a lawyer that graduated from a prestigious university and took the bar exams twice to pass, would decide to give up her license. At her law firm her biography reveals that she was "discontented" -- wanting a fast-track to fulfill her ambitions. It remains unusual to give it up after five years. An unsubstantiated report circulating on the internet said that she had to given up her license as a result of a court order in 1993, but we have not found substantiating articles.)

The ARDC Page states "Voluntarily inactive and not authorized to practice law." This action could have been strictly voluntary on the part of Michelle Obama to choose to not pay her registration fees or take continuing education of the bar and therefore go on suspension or inactive status with the Illinois BAR. However, there was a lot of supposition by critics as she seemed to have taken another course to prominence in 1993 by becoming the Executive Director of Public Allies . (Source: Atlas Shrugs.)


ARDC - Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois



"Nowhere but in America would my story be possible." Both Barack and Michelle Obama have taken the liberty to use this phrase, in interviews and in their speeches. In actuality, it is the same for all of us, for this country offers more opportunities than perhaps any other nation.

Michelle Obama's childhood home in Chicago: a few silver spoons, she would quip! Michelle Obama does have that "American fabric" story, as a descendant of slaves from the Civil War era, she is the daughter of two hard working Black Americans who raised their son and daughter during the tumultous civil rights movement era. Her father worked and struggled, even when he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. She once remarked that they had "silver spoons" - one for each of them– which was obviously a comment meant to stress that she and Barack had come from simple roots.

Both Michelle and her brother, Craig (now the Head Basketball Coach at the University of Oregon) went on from high school. Michelle Robinson attended Princeton, and then law school at Harvard. Michelle took the Bar exam in Illinois, and while she did not pass it the first time, she did pass the Bar exam and got her license from the State of Illinois. A check of the State of Illinois Bar Association website shows no bar license for "Michelle Robinson" or "Michelle Obama". It has been reported that Michelle Obama "voluntarily" gave up her law license in 1993, just five years after she got the license.

Why would a black woman who worked at a prestigious law firm in Chicago, who had graduated from one of the most prestigious law schools in the country, and who had endured the grueling task of sitting for the bar exam TWICE, then voluntarily give up her law license? Many who have been admitted to the Bar go on to pursue other careers, but because of the process to get the law license, they usually maintain it in good standing. Barack Obama has placed his law license into "inactive" status since his campaign began. While it has no bearing on Barack Obama, per se, it makes one very curious as to why this educated woman "voluntarily" gave up her law license!! (Source: James 4 America.)

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Michelle Obama book tells of her discontent at Chicago law firm

–The title of a new biography of Michelle Obama is simply "Michelle" by Washington Post Magazine writer Liza Mundy, and an excerpt running in the Sunday edition tells of her discontent as an associate at the Chicago law firm of Sidley, Austin, a "challenge to manage."

Barack Obama met Michelle at the firm Michelle joined after Harvard Law School. She was part of the marketing group one of the "fun" practices at the firm–dealing with entertainment, after all, but there still was routine second year associate work Michelle Obama was not crazy about.

"But Michelle could also frustrate her supervisors. Quincy White, the partner who helped recruit Michelle and who headed the marketing group, remembers finding her a challenge to manage. White, who is now retired from the firm, says he gave her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.

She was, White recalls, "quite possibly the most ambitious associate that I've ever seen." She wanted significant responsibility right away and was not afraid to object if she wasn't getting what she felt she deserved, he says.

At big firms, much of the work that falls to young associates involves detail and tedium. There were all sorts of arcane but important rules about what could and could not be said or done in product advertisements, and in the marketing group, all the associates, not just the new ones, reviewed scripts for TV commercials to make sure they conformed. As far as associate work goes, it could have been worse — "Advertising is a little sexier than spending a full year reading depositions in an antitrust law suit or reviewing documents for a big merger," says White — but it was monotonous and relatively low-level.

Too monotonous for Michelle, who, White says, complained that the work he gave her was unsatisfactory. He says he gave her the Coors beer ads, which he considered one of the more glamorous assignments they had. Even then, he says, "she at one point went over my head and complained [to human resources] that I wasn't giving her enough interesting stuff, and the person came down to my office and said, 'Basically she's complaining that she's being treated like she's a second-year associate,' and we agreed that she was a second-year associate. I had eight or nine other associates, and I couldn't start treating one of them a lot better."

White says he talked to Michelle about her expectations, but the problem could not be resolved because the work was what it was. He is not sure any work he had would have satisfied her. "I couldn't give her something that would meet her sense of ambition to change the world."

"Not many people went over my head," says White. It was an unusual move for a young associate to make, and he believes it was consistent with her personality. She "wanted something that pushed her harder. Waiting five to seven years to make partner was a good career move for me but not for [her]. There are too many other opportunities out there that mature faster than that."

Abner Mikva, a former congressman and federal judge who is close to the Obamas and was an early mentor to Barack, finds that account of Michelle's 20-something impatience amusing. "It doesn't surprise me at all," he says. (Source: Chicago Sun Times: Lynn Sweet.)

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Marian Shields Robinson (Mother of Michelle Obama)

Michelle Obama's mother (birthname Marian Shields, born July 1937), now widowed, married Michelle's father, Fraser Robinson in 1960. Robinson was formerly a secretary at Spiegel catalog and a bank. While Michelle and Barack Obama were campaigning in 2008, Robinson tended the Obama's young children and she intends to do the same while in Washington, DC. In January 2009 it was reported that Robinson will officially be moving into the White House itself as part of the First Family; she will be the first live-in grandmother there since Elvira "Minnie" Doud during the Eisenhower administration. Some media outlets have dubbed Robinson the "First Granny". (Source: Wikipedia.)

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Stanley Ann Dunham-Obama-Soetoro (mother):

Who was Obama's mother? The shorthand version of the story has a woman from Kansas marrying a man from Kenya, but while Stanley Ann Dunham was born in Wichita in the fall of 1942, it is a stretch to call her a Jayhawk. After leaving Kansas when she was a youngster, she and her parents lived in Berkeley, Calif., for two years, Ponca City, Okla., for two years, and Wichita Falls, Tex., for three years before they ventured to the Seattle area. They arrived in time for her to enter ninth grade at the new high school on Mercer Island, a hilly slab of land in Lake Washington that was popping with tract developments during the western boom of the postwar 1950s. The island is not much more isolated than Staten Island on the other side of the country. Just east of Seattle, it is connected to the city by what was then called the floating bridge.

The population explosion, along with a nomadic propensity, brought the Dunhams to Mercer Island. Stan was in the furniture trade, a salesman always looking for the next best deal, and the middle-class suburbs of Seattle offered fertile territory: All the new houses going up would need new living room and dining room sets. He took a job in a furniture store in Seattle.

Madelyn, who brought home a paycheck most of her life, found a job in a banking real estate escrow office, and the family settled into a two-bedroom place in a quiet corner of the Shorewood Apartments, nestled near the lakeshore in view of the Cascade Mountains. Many islanders lived there temporarily as they waited for new houses to be finished nearby. But the Dunhams never looked for another home, and they filled their high-ceilinged apartment with the Danish modern furniture of that era.


Dunham family

Stanley Ann was an only child, and in those days she dealt head-on with her uncommon first name. No sense trying to hide it, even though she hated it. "My name is Stanley," she would say. "My father wanted a boy, and that's that." Her mother softened it, calling her Stanny or Stanny Ann, but at school she was Stanley, straight up. "She owned the name," recalled Susan Botkin, one of her first pals on Mercer Island. "Only once or twice was she teased. She had a sharp tongue, a deep wit, and she could kill. We all called her Stanley."

In a high school culture of brawn and beauty, Stanley was one of the brains. Often struggling with her weight, and wearing braces her junior year, she had the normal teenage anxieties, according to her friends, though she seemed less concerned with superficial appearances than many of her peers. Her protective armor included a prolific vocabulary, free from the trite and cliched; a quick take on people and events; and biting sarcasm.

John W. Hunt said those traits allowed Stanley to become accepted by the predominantly male intellectual crowd, even though she had a soft voice. "She wasn't a shouter, but sat and thought awhile before she put forth her ideas. She was one of the most intelligent girls in our class, but unusual in that she thought things through more than anyone else," Hunt said.

Stanley would not use her wit to bully people, her classmates recalled, but rather to slice up prejudice or pomposity. Her signature expression of disdain was an exaggerated rolling of her big brown eyes.

Susan Botkin thought back to late afternoons when she and Stanley would go downtown to the Seattle library and then hitch a ride home with Stan and Madelyn. "We would climb into the car, and immediately he would start into his routine," she recalled. In the back seat, the daughter would be rolling her eyes, while in the front, Madelyn -- "a porcelain doll kind of woman, with pale, wonderful skin, red hair, carefully coiffed, and lacquered nails" -- would try to temper her husband with occasional interjections of "Now, Stan . . ."

Another high school friend, Maxine Box, remembered that they enjoyed getting rides in the old man's white convertible and that he was always ready and willing to drive them anywhere, wanting to be the life of the party. "Stanley would gladly take the transportation from him," Box said, but would "just as soon that he go away. They had locked horns a lot of times." The mother, she sensed, was "a buffer between Stan and Stanley."

Stanley and her friends would escape across the bridge into Seattle, where they hung out at a small espresso cafe near the University of Washington. Anything, Hunt said, to "get away from the suburban view. We would go to this cafe and talk and talk and talk" -- about world events, French cinema, the meaning of life, the existence of God.

Their curiosity was encouraged by the teachers at Mercer Island High, especially Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert, who taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte, "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman and "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx. "The Communist Manifesto" was also on the reading list, and it drew protests from some parents, prompting what Wichterman later called "Mothers Marches" on the school -- a phrase that conjures up a larger backlash than really occurred but conveys some of the tension of the times. "They would come up in ones and twos and threes and berate the teacher or complain to the principal," Hunt recalled.

Wichterman and Foubert, noted Chip Wall, were "instrumental in getting us to think, and anybody who tries to do that, particularly in high school, has trouble. 'Make my kid a thinker, but make sure he thinks like I do.' " In tracking the Obama story this year, some conservative Web sites have seized on the high school curriculum of his mother as evidence of an early leftist indoctrination. Wall, who has spent his life challenging dogma from any ideology, and whose take on the world often veers from the politically correct, answered this interpretation with a two-word dismissal: "Oh, crap."

Stanley was decidedly liberal. She challenged the existence of God and championed Adlai Stevenson. But while some of her friends turned toward cynicism, she did not. "She was intrigued by what was happening in the world and embraced change," Susan Botkin recalled. "During our senior year, the Doomsday Clock seemed as close as it had ever been to boom. And the thought affected people in our class. There was a sense of malaise that permeated the group: Why bother? The boom is going to happen. But Stanley was better able to laugh it off, to look beyond it. Come out of that bomb shelter and do something."

Their senior class graduated in June 1960, at the dawn of the new decade. A few days after commencement, Stanley left for Honolulu with her parents. Decades later she told her son that she had wanted to go to the University of Chicago, where she had been accepted, but that her father would not let her be that far from them, since she was barely 17. Her friends from Mercer Island recalled that, like many of them, she intended to stay in Seattle and go to "U-Dub," the University of Washington, but that again her father insisted that she was too young even for that and had to accompany them to Hawaii. That was nearly a half-century ago. Time compresses, and the high school classmates of Stanley Ann Dunham now have an unusual vantage point from which to witness the presidential campaign of her son. "You see so much of her in his face," Maxine Box said. "And he has his grandfather's long chin." In watching Obama speak and answer questions, Chip Wall could "instantly go back and recognize the person" he knew decades ago. Stanley is there, he said, in the workings of the son's mind, "especially in his wry sense of speech pattern." The fact that her son is black was surprising but not out of character; she was attracted to the different and untouched by racial prejudice.

The hardest thing for them to grasp was that Barack Obama Jr. came into being only a little more than a year after Stanley left Mercer Island. She seemed like such an unlikely candidate for teenage motherhood, not just because of her scholarly ways and lack of boyfriends, but because she appeared to have zero interest in babies. Botkin had two little brothers and was always babysitting, she recalled, but "Stanley never even babysat. She would come over to the house and just stand back, and her eyes would blink and her head would spin like, 'Oh, my God, what's going on here?' "

In the fall of 1960, as Botkin worried about whether she had the proper clothes to go through sorority rush at U-Dub, where they pinched the young women to make sure they were wearing girdles and where nylons were part of the uniform, she received her first letter from her friend in Hawaii. Stanley was enjoying newfound freedoms. She had ditched her first name and was now going by Ann. And no more nylons and perfect outfits, either. "I'm wearing shorts and muu muus to class," she wrote.

In the next letter, she said she was dating an African student she had met in Russian class. Botkin was more interested in the fact that her friend was studying Russian than in whom she was dating. But soon enough came a card revealing that Ann was in love, and then another that said she was married and expecting a baby in the summer. (Source: Washington Post: David Maraniss.)

---

Ann Soetoro moved to Yogyakarta, while Obama Jnr studied in Jakarta. (SITE NOTE: This is a strange comment. Supposedly she moved there in 1977.) She was inspired by Jogja village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

“She loved living in Java,” said Dr. Dewey, who recalled accompanying Ms. Soetoro to a metalworking village. “People said: ‘Hi! How are you?’ She said: ‘How’s your wife? Did your daughter have the baby?’ They were friends. Then she’d whip out her notebook and she’d say: ‘How many of you have electricity? Are you having trouble getting iron?’ ”

Dunham-Soetoro became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan, then joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor. (Source: Indonesia Matters.)

---

Sixteen years later, Barry was no more, replaced by Barack, who had not only left the island but had gone to two Ivy League schools, Columbia undergrad and Harvard Law, and written a book about his life. He was into his Chicago phase, reshaping himself for his political future, but now was drawn back to Hawaii to say goodbye to his mother. Too late, as it turned out. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, before he could get there.

Ann had returned to Honolulu early that year, a few months before "Dreams From My Father" was published. She was weakened from a cancer that had been misdiagnosed in Indonesia as indigestion. American doctors first thought it was ovarian cancer, but an examination at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York determined that it was uterine cancer that had spread to her ovaries. Stan had died a few years earlier, and Madelyn still lived in the apartment on Beretania. Ann took an apartment on the same floor, and underwent chemotherapy treatments while keeping up with her work as best she could. "She took it in stride," said Alice Dewey, chair of the University of Hawaii anthropology department, where Ann did her doctoral dissertation. "She never complained. Never said, 'Why me?' "

Ann's career had reached full bloom. Her dissertation, published in 1992, was a masterwork of anthropological insight, delineating in 1,000 pages the intricate world of peasant metalworking industries in Indonesia, especially traditional blacksmithing, tracing the evolution of the crafts from Dutch colonialism through the regime of General Suharto, the Indonesian military strongman. Her deepest work was done in Kajar, a blacksmithing village near Yogyakarta. In clear, precise language, she described the geography, sociology, architecture, agriculture, diet, class structure, politics, business and craftsmanship of the village, rendering an arcane subject in vivid, human terms.

It was a long time coming, the product of work that had begun in 1979, but Dewey said it was worth the wait: Each chapter as she turned it in was a polished jewel.

Her anthropology in Indonesia was only part of Ann's focus. She had also worked in Lahore, Pakistan; New Delhi; and New York, helping to develop microfinancing networks that provided credit to female artisans in rural communities around the world. This was something she had begun in Jakarta for the Ford Foundation in the early 1980s, when she helped refine Bank Rakyat, set up to provide loans to farmers and other rural entrepreneurs in textiles and metalwork, the fields she knew best. David McCauley, who worked with her then, said she had earned a worldwide reputation in the development community. She had a global perspective from the ground up, he said, and she passed it along to her children, Barack and Maya.

Maya was in New York, about to start graduate school at New York University, when her mother got sick. She and her brother were equally slow to realize that the disease was advancing so rapidly. Maya had seen Ann during that visit to Sloan-Kettering, and "she didn't look well. She was in a wheelchair . . . but I guess I thought that was the treatment. I knew that someday she would die, but it never occurred to me that it would be in November. I think children are capable of stretching out the boundaries of denial." School always came first with Ann, and she had urged Maya to stay at NYU until the December break.

But by November her condition had worsened. She was put on morphine to ease the pain and moved from her apartment to the Straub Clinic. One night she called Maya and said she was scared. "And my last words to her, where she was able to respond, were that I was coming. I arrived on the seventh. My grandmother was there and had been there for some time, so I sent her home and talked to Mom and touched her and hugged her, and she was not able to respond. I read her a story -- a book of Creole folk tales that I had with me about renewal and rebirth -- and I said it was okay with me if she decided to go ahead, that I couldn't really bear to see her like that. And she died. It was about 11 that night."

Barack came the next day. He had just finished a book about his missing father, but now it was more clear to him than ever that his mother had been the most significant force in shaping his life. Even when they were apart, she constantly wrote him letters, softly urging him to believe in himself and to see the best in everyone else.

A small memorial service was held in the Japanese Garden behind the East-West Center conference building on the University of Hawaii campus. Photographs from her life were mounted on a board: Stanley Ann in Kansas and Seattle, Ann in Hawaii and Indonesia. Barack and Maya "talked story," a Hawaiian phrase that means exactly what it sounds like, remembering their uncommon mother. They recalled her spirit, her exuberance and her generosity, a worldliness that was somehow very fresh and naive, maybe deliberately naive, sweet and unadulterated. And her deep laugh, her Midwestern sayings, the way she loved to collect batiks and wear vibrant colors and talk and talk and talk.

About 20 people made it to the service. When it was over, they formed a caravan and drove to the south shore, past Hanauma Bay, stopping just before they reached Sandy Beach, Barry's favorite old haunt for body surfing. They gathered at a lookout point with a parking lot, and down below, past the rail and at the water's edge, a stone outcropping jutting over the ocean in the shape of a massive ironing board. This was where Ann wanted them to toss her ashes. She felt connected to Hawaii, its geography, its sense of aloha, the fact that it made her two children possible -- but the woman who also loved to travel wanted her ashes to float across the ocean. Barack and Maya stood together, scattering the remains. The others tossed flower petals into the water.

Suddenly, a massive wave broke over the ironing board and engulfed them all. A sign at the parking lot had warned visitors of the dangers of being washed to sea. "But we felt steady," Maya said. "And it was this very slippery place, and the wave came out of nowhere, and it was as though she was saying goodbye."

Barack Obama left Hawaii soon after and returned to his Chicago life. (Source: Washington Post: David Maraniss.)

---

Stanley Ann Dunham as a senior at Mercer Island High School in Washington state and about one year before moving to Hawaii, enrolling at UH, becoming pregnant with Obama and "marrying" Obama, Sr. Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942—November 7, 1995) was born in Wichita, Kansas. Little is known about her early years; her life seems to have begun at age 13 upon her arrival at Mercer Island. Though the Dunham family moved to the island in 1956 "so Stanley Ann could attend the new high school," she actually began classes at Mercer Island High School in 1957, one year later.



As a student, Stanley Ann was known as a "strong-willed and unconventional atheist" who "made after-school runs to Seattle to sip coffee for hours and hours, listening to jazz and defending her well-read views on atheism and organized religion," according to former MIHS classmates. Estranged from the "matched sweater-set crowd," the opinionated and often sarcastic Stanley Anne graduated "with honors" in 1960 at age 17. Teachers at Mercer Island HS described Stanley Ann as an "independent thinker" and an excellent debater who could skillfully defend her beliefs, no matter how unorthodox. Stanley Ann intimated to her classmates that she was not interested in marrying or having children.

Described as "boyish" and "petite," she was preoccupied with her weight and her domineering father. Still, she excelled at grasping the concepts outlined in "The Communist Manifesto" and discussions about sex and theology. Though Stanley Ann was accepted, Stanley Dunham refused to permit his daughter to attend the University of Chicago and moved his family to Honolulu, in 1960, for a brighter furniture sales future. Stanley Ann enrolled in the University of Hawaii where she met a Kenyan graduate student named Barack Obama and conceived a child before completing her first semester of college. The Dunhams were against the marriage, which took place during Stanley Ann's third month of pregnancy. The union would only last about two years.

Obama, Sr., transferred to Harvard University in 1963, leaving his young family behind. According to African relatives, Stanley Ann explained away the absence of his father by telling little Obama that "supporting the family would have been too much of a financial burden." In 1965 (some accounts say 1966), Obama, Sr., signed divorce papers and Stanley Ann was free to marry Lolo Soetoro (c. 1936—Jan., 1987), which she did in 1967.



Soetoro was also a UH grad student who moved his new family to Jakarta, Indonesia. Soetoro had landed a job as an Indonesian Army geologist for one year before joining Mobil Oil. Soetoro, "a devout Muslim," fathered a daughter, Maya (now Soetoro-Ng), with Stanley Ann. The couple separated in 1972 and divorced in 1980.

While in Indonesia, Stanley Ann Soetoro, a self-described anthropologist, researched peasant blacksmithing. She was also credited with facilitating "thousands" of micro-loans to indigent women throughout underdeveloped nations. How interesting: Working under the auspices of the Ford Foundation, Mrs. Soetoro was able to forge her peculiar interest in "blacksmithing" while arranging bank loans to "poor" women. She also taught English at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta.

Upon her return to Honolulu in 1972, Stanley Ann again attended UH as an anthropology major and completed a "Ph.D." dissertation on "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia." The thesis is also described as being from "800 to 1,067 pages" in length. (PhD - Anthropology, Summer 1992 (August 9, 1992)

Stanley Ann Dunham-Obama-Soetoro eventually developed ovarian cancer and reportedly (by Obama) died at age 57 on November 7, 1995. "Her ashes were scattered over the Pacific Ocean," according to Obama.

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Here are two official emails that make the public version of Obama’s Birth and his mother’s marriage to Obama Sr. HIGHLY unlikely.
How could she be in Honolulu in Aug 1961 giving birth, AND in Seattle attending U of WA? (Source: Andy Martin on Obami Blog on Thu, 30 Oct 2008 Andymart20@aol.com.)

From: pubrec@u.washington.edu [mailto:pubrec@u.washington.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008
Subject: Re: Stanley "Ann" Dunham 1960 to 1970 class registration
Ms. Stanley Ann Dunham was enrolled at the University of Washington for:
Autumn 1961
Winter 1962
Spring 1962
The records responsive to your request from the University of Washington are above as provided by the Public Disclosure Laws of Washington State. This concludes the University's response to your Public Records request. Please feel free to contact our office if you have any questions or concerns.
Madolyne Lawson
Office of Public Records
206-543-9180

From: Stuart Lau [mailto:stuartl@hawaii.edu]
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008
Subject: Re: Inquiry
The University of Hawaii at Manoa is only able to provide the following information for Stanley Ann Dunham:
Dates of attendance:
Fall 1960 (First day of instruction 9/26/1960)
Spring 1963 - Summer 1966
Fall 1972 - Fall 1974
Summer 1976
Spring 1978
Fall 1984 - Summer 1992
Degrees awarded:
BA - Mathematics, Summer 1967 (August 6, 1967)
MA - Anthropology, Fall 1983 (December 18, 1983)
PhD - Anthropology, Summer 1992 (August 9, 1992)
Sincerely, Stuart Lau
****************************************

Stuart Lau
University Registrar
Office of Admissions and Records
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Ph: (808) 956-8010

Who is Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro (Barack Obama's mother)?

Amanda Ripley

Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama's mother was at least a dozen things. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.

"When I think about my mother," Obama told me recently, "I think that there was a certain combination of being very grounded in who she was, what she believed in. But also a certain recklessness. I think she was always searching for something. She wasn't comfortable seeing her life confined to a certain box." Obama's mother was a dreamer. She made risky bets that paid off only some of the time, choices that her children had to live with. She fell in love—twice—with fellow students from distant countries she knew nothing about. Both marriages failed, and she leaned on her parents and friends to help raise her two children. "She cried a lot," says her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, "if she saw animals being treated cruelly or children in the news or a sad movie—or if she felt like she wasn't being understood in a conversation." And yet she was fearless, says Soetoro-Ng. "She was very capable. She went out on the back of a motorcycle and did rigorous fieldwork. Her research was responsible and penetrating. She saw the heart of a problem, and she knew whom to hold accountable."

Today Obama is partly a product of what his mother was not. Whereas she swept her children off to unfamiliar lands and even lived apart from her son when he was a teenager, Obama has tried to ground his children in the Midwest. "We've created stability for our kids in a way that my mom didn't do for us," he says. "My choosing to put down roots in Chicago and marry a woman who is very rooted in one place probably indicates a desire for stability that maybe I was missing." Ironically, the person who mattered most in Obama's life is the one we know the least about—maybe because being partly African in America is still seen as being simply black and color is still a preoccupation above almost all else. There is not enough room in the conversation for the rest of a man's story.

But Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.

It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.

In most elections, the deceased mother of a candidate in the primaries is not the subject of a magazine profile. But Ann Soetoro was not like most mothers.

Stanley Ann Dunham

Born in 1942, just five years before Hillary Clinton, Obama's mother came into an America constrained by war, segregation and a distrust of difference. Her parents named her Stanley because her father had wanted a boy. She endured the expected teasing over this indignity, but dutifully lugged the name through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town.

During her life, she was known by four different names, each representing a distinct chapter. In the course of the Stanley period, her family moved more than five times—from Kansas to California to Texas to Washington—before her 18th birthday. Her father, a furniture salesman, had a restlessness that she inherited. She spent her high school years on a small island in Washington, taking advanced classes in philosophy and visiting coffee shops in Seattle. "She was a very intelligent, quiet girl, interested in her friendships and current events," remembers Maxine Box, a close high school friend. Both girls assumed they would go to college and pursue careers. "She wasn't particularly interested in children or in getting married," Box says. Although Stanley was accepted early by the University of Chicago, her father wouldn't let her go. She was too young to be off on her own, he said, unaware, as fathers tend to be, of what could happen when she lived in his house.

After she finished high school, her father whisked the family away again—this time to Honolulu, after he heard about a big new furniture store there. Hawaii had just become a state, and it was the new frontier. Stanley grudgingly went along yet again, enrolling in the University of Hawaii as a freshman.

Mrs. Barack H. Obama

Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. "I suddenly realized," he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, "that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen ... was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different."

By college, Stanley had started introducing herself as Ann. She met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian-language class. He was one of the first Africans to attend the University of Hawaii and a focus of great curiosity. He spoke at church groups and was interviewed for several local-newspaper stories. "He had this magnetic personality," remembers Neil Abercrombie, a member of Congress from Hawaii who was friends with Obama Sr. in college. "Everything was oratory from him, even the most commonplace observation."

Obama's father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. "We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records," Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. "Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion—no one more so than Barack."

The exception was Ann, the quiet young woman in the corner who began to hang out with Obama and his friends that fall. "She was scarcely out of high school. She was mostly kind of an observer," says Abercrombie. Obama Sr.'s friends knew he was dating a white woman, but they made a point of treating it as a nonissue. This was Hawaii, after all, a place enamored of its reputation as a melting pot.

But when people called Hawaii a "melting pot" in the early 1960s, they meant a place where white people blended with Asians. At the time, 19% of white women in Hawaii married Chinese men, and that was considered radical by the rest of the nation. Black people made up less than 1% of the state's population. And while interracial marriage was legal there, it was banned in half the other states.

When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn't notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man's hand, according to Obama's book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head."

On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama's parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records. It was a Thursday. At that point, Ann was three months pregnant with Barack Obama II. Friends did not learn of the wedding until afterward. "Nobody was invited," says Abercrombie. The motivations behind the marriage remain a mystery, even to Obama. "I never probed my mother about the details. Did they decide to get married because she was already pregnant? Or did he propose to her in the traditional, formal way?" Obama wonders. "I suppose, had she not passed away, I would have asked more."

Even by the standards of 1961, she was young to be married. At 18, she dropped out of college after one semester, according to University of Hawaii records. When her friends back in Washington heard the news, "we were very shocked," says Box, her high school friend.

Then, when Obama was almost 1, his father left for Harvard to get a Ph.D. in economics. He had also been accepted to the New School in New York City, with a more generous scholarship that would have allowed his family to join him. But he decided to go to Harvard. "How can I refuse the best education?" he told Ann, according to Obama's book. (SITE NOTE: Obama Sr. got a MA at Harvard. The part about the New School in New York City cannot be verified and may be a "family myth" passed on by Ann Dunham.)

Obama's father had an agenda: to return to his home country and help reinvent Kenya. He wanted to take his new family with him. But he also had a wife from a previous marriage there—a marriage that may or may not have been legal. In the end, Ann decided not to follow him. "She was under no illusions," says Abercrombie. "He was a man of his time, from a very patriarchal society." Ann filed for divorce in Honolulu in January 1964, citing "grievous mental suffering"—the reason given in most divorces at the time. Obama Sr. signed for the papers in Cambridge, Mass., and did not contest the divorce.

Ann had already done things most women of her generation had not: she had married an African, had their baby and gotten divorced. At this juncture, her life could have become narrower—a young, marginalized woman focused on paying the rent and raising a child on her own. She could have filled her son's head with well-founded resentment for his absent father. But that is not what happened.

S. Ann Dunham Soetoro

When her son was almost 2, Ann returned to college. Money was tight. She collected food stamps and relied on her parents to help take care of young Barack. She would get her bachelor's degree four years later. In the meantime, she met another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, at the University of Hawaii. ("It's where I send all my single girlfriends," jokes her daughter Soetoro-Ng, who also married a man she met there.) He was easygoing, happily devoting hours to playing chess with Ann's father and wrestling with her young son. Lolo proposed in 1967. (SITE NOTE: The statement of her return to college when Obama was 2 is NOT true. She returned to Washington immediately after Obama was born and enrolled at the University of Washington for the autumn term of 1961. She remained there until the completion of the spring term of 1962 and returned to Hawaii after Obama Sr. departed.)

Mother and son spent months preparing to follow him to Indonesia—getting shots, passports and plane tickets. Until then, neither had left the country. After a long journey, they landed in an unrecognizable place. "Walking off the plane, the tarmac rippling with heat, the sun bright as a furnace," Obama later wrote, "I clutched her hand, determined to protect her." (SITE NOTE: Philip Berg asserts that Obama was born in Kenya meaning she had been out of country, but the proof is very shaky.)

Lolo's house, on the outskirts of Jakarta, was a long way from the high-rises of Honolulu. There was no electricity, and the streets were not paved. The country was transitioning to the rule of General Suharto. Inflation was running at more than 600%, and everything was scarce. Ann and her son were the first foreigners to live in the neighborhood, according to locals who remember them. Two baby crocodiles, along with chickens and birds of paradise, occupied the backyard. To get to know the kids next door, Obama sat on the wall between their houses and flapped his arms like a great, big bird, making cawing noises, remembers Kay Ikranagara, a friend. "That got the kids laughing, and then they all played together," she says.

Obama attended a Catholic school called Franciscus Assisi Primary School. He attracted attention since he was not only a foreigner but also chubbier than the locals. But he seemed to shrug off the teasing, eating tofu and tempeh like all the other kids, playing soccer and picking guavas from the trees. He didn't seem to mind that the other children called him "Negro," remembers Bambang Sukoco, a former neighbor.

At first, Obama's mother gave money to every beggar who stopped at their door. But the caravan of misery—children without limbs, men with leprosy—churned on forever, and she was forced to be more selective. Her husband mocked her calculations of relative suffering. "Your mother has a soft heart," he told Obama. As Ann became more intrigued by Indonesia, her husband became more Western. He rose through the ranks of an American oil company and moved the family to a nicer neighborhood. She was bored by the dinner parties he took her to, where men boasted about golf scores and wives complained about their Indonesian servants. The couple fought rarely but had less and less in common. "She wasn't prepared for the loneliness," Obama wrote in Dreams. "It was constant, like a shortness of breath."

Ann took a job teaching English at the U.S. embassy. She woke up well before dawn throughout her life. Now she went into her son's room every day at 4 a.m. to give him English lessons from a U.S. correspondence course. She couldn't afford the élite international school and worried he wasn't challenged enough. After two years at the Catholic school, Obama moved to a state-run elementary school closer to the new house. He was the only foreigner, says Ati Kisjanto, a classmate, but he spoke some Indonesian and made new friends.

Indonesia has the world's largest Muslim population, but Obama's household was not religious. "My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew," Obama said in a 2007 speech. "But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution. And as a consequence, so did I."

In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: "A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs," says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. "It was like the United Nations."

In 1971, when Obama was 10, Ann sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents and attend Punahou, an élite prep school that he'd gotten into on a scholarship with his grandparents' help. This wrenching decision seemed to reflect how much she valued education. Ann's friends say it was hard on her, and Obama, in his book, describes an adolescence shadowed by a sense of alienation. "I didn't feel [her absence] as a deprivation," Obama told me. "But when I think about the fact that I was separated from her, I suspect it had more of an impact than I know."

A year later, Ann followed Obama back to Hawaii, as promised, taking her daughter but leaving her husband behind. She enrolled in a master's program at the University of Hawaii to study the anthropology of Indonesia.

Indonesia is an anthropologist's fantasyland. It is made up of 17,500 islands, on which 230 million people speak more than 300 languages. The archipelago's culture is colored by Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim and Dutch traditions. Indonesia "sucks a lot of us in," says fellow anthropologist and friend Alice Dewey. "It's delightful."

Around this time, Ann began to find her voice. People who knew her before describe her as quiet and smart; those who met her afterward use words like forthright and passionate. The timing of her graduate work was perfect. "The whole face of the earth was changing," Dewey says. "Colonial powers were collapsing, countries needed help, and development work was beginning to interest anthropologists."

Ann's husband visited Hawaii frequently, but they never lived together again. Ann filed for divorce in 1980. As with Obama's father, she kept in regular contact with Lolo and did not pursue alimony or child support, according to divorce records.

"She was no Pollyanna. There have certainly been moments when she complained to us," says her daughter Soetoro-Ng. "But she was not someone who would take the detritus of those divorces and make judgments about men in general or love or allow herself to grow pessimistic." With each failed marriage, Ann gained a child and, in one case, a country as well.

Ann Dunham Sutoro

After three years of living with her children in a small apartment in Honolulu, subsisting on student grants, Ann decided to go back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Ph.D. Obama, then about 14, told her he would stay behind. He was tired of being new, and he appreciated the autonomy his grandparents gave him. Ann did not argue with him. "She kept a certain part of herself aloof or removed," says Mary Zurbuchen, a friend from Jakarta. "I think maybe in some way this was how she managed to cross so many boundaries."

In Indonesia, Ann joked to friends that her son seemed interested only in basketball. "She despaired of him ever having a social conscience," remembers Richard Patten, a colleague. After her divorce, Ann started using the more modern spelling of her name, Sutoro. She took a big job as the program officer for women and employment at the Ford Foundation, and she spoke up forcefully at staff meetings. Unlike many other expats, she had spent a lot of time with villagers, learning their priorities and problems, with a special focus on women's work. "She was influenced by hanging out in the Javanese marketplace," Zurbuchen says, "where she would see women with heavy baskets on their backs who got up at 3 in the morning to walk to the market and sell their produce." Ann thought the Ford Foundation should get closer to the people and further from the government, just as she had.

Her home became a gathering spot for the powerful and the marginalized: politicians, filmmakers, musicians and labor organizers. "She had, compared with other foundation colleagues, a much more eclectic circle," Zurbuchen says. "She brought unlikely conversation partners together."

Obama's mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. "She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do," says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls' high school in Honolulu. "She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."

In the expat community of Asia in the 1980s, single mothers were rare, and Ann stood out. She was by then a rather large woman with frizzy black hair. But Indonesia was an uncommonly tolerant place. "For someone like Ann, who had a big personality and was a big presence," says Zurbuchen, "Indonesia was very accepting. It gave her a sense of fitting in." At home, Ann wore the traditional housecoat, the batik daster. She loved simple, traditional restaurants. Friends remember sharing bakso bola tenis, or noodles with tennis-ball-size meatballs, from a roadside stand.

Today Ann would not be so unusual in the U.S. A single mother of biracial children pursuing a career, she foreshadowed, in some ways, what more of America would look like. But she did so without comment, her friends say. "She wasn't stereotypical at all," says Nancy Peluso, a friend and an environmental sociologist. "But she didn't make a big deal out of it."

Ann's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to '92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. "I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program," he says. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.

While his mother was helping poor people in Indonesia, Obama was trying to do something similar 7,000 miles (about 11,300 km) away in Chicago, as a community organizer. Ann's friends say she was delighted by his career move and started every conversation with an update of her children's lives. "All of us knew where Barack was going to school. All of us knew how brilliant he was," remembers Ann's friend Georgia McCauley.

Every so often, Ann would leave Indonesia to live in Hawaii—or New York or even, in the mid-1980s, Pakistan, for a microfinance job. She and her daughter sometimes lived in garage apartments and spare rooms of friends. She collected treasures from her travels—exquisite things with stories she understood. Antique daggers with an odd number of curves, as required by Javanese tradition; unusual batiks; rice-paddy hats. Before returning to Hawaii in 1984, Ann wrote her friend Dewey that she and her daughter would "probably need a camel caravan and an elephant or two to load all our bags on the plane, and I'm sure you don't want to see all those airline agents weeping and rending their garments." At his house in Chicago, Obama says, he has his mother's arrowhead collection from Kansas—along with "trunks full of batiks that we don't really know what to do with."

In 1992, Obama's mother finally finished her Ph.D. dissertation, which she had worked on, between jobs, for almost two decades. The thesis is 1,000 pages, a meticulous analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia. The glossary, which she describes as "far from complete," is 24 pages. She dedicated the tome to her mother; to Dewey, her adviser; "and to Barack and Maya, who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."

In the fall of 1994, Ann was having dinner at her friend Patten's house in Jakarta when she felt a pain in her stomach. A local doctor diagnosed indigestion. When Ann returned to Hawaii several months later, she learned it was ovarian and uterine cancer. She died on Nov. 7, 1995, at 52.

Before her death, Ann read a draft of her son's memoir, which is almost entirely about his father. Some of her friends were surprised at the focus, but she didn't seem obviously bothered. "She never complained about it," says Peluso. "She just said it was something he had to work out." Neither Ann nor her son knew how little time they had left.

Obama has said his biggest mistake was not being at his mother's side when she died. He went to Hawaii to help the family scatter the ashes over the Pacific. And he carries on her spirit in his campaign. "When Barack smiles," says Peluso, "there's just a certain Ann look. He lights up in a particular way that she did."

After Ann's death, her daughter dug through her artifacts, searching for Ann's story. "She always did want to write a memoir," Soetoro-Ng says. Finally, she discovered the start of a life story, but it was less than two pages. She never found anything more. Maybe Ann had run out of time, or maybe the chemotherapy had worn her out. "I don't know. Maybe she felt overwhelmed," says Soetoro-Ng, "because there was so much to tell." (Source: Odisky blog.)

The woman behind Obama

Elayne Clift

Thirty years ago, when Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro lived in Yogyakarta, it was perhaps a less busy, tourist-filled metropolis than it is today. But probably little else has changed since the 1970s. Marlioboro, the wide boulevard that is home to copious Batik emporia, is still filled with 'becak' (bicycle rickshaws) and horse-drawn surreys. 'Warung' (street-side food vendors) continue to offer 'Martabak' (pancakes) and 'Nasi Gorung' (fried rice). And in this cultural capital of Indonesia, artists still thrive.

Soetoro, who died in 1995 at age 52 from ovarian cancer, was the mother of Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate for president in the U.S. Her influence on her now-famous son cannot be underestimated. Although he wrote a bestseller about his search for the absent father, 'Dreams From My Father', Obama has said that his mother "was the single constant in my life." He describes her as "the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known. What is best in me," he says, "I owe to her."

Soetoro was a study in contradictions. Married to Obama's Kenyan father when she was a pregnant teenager, she went on to earn a Ph.D. in anthropology and do vital work for women in the field of microfinance. A Midwestern American, she married first an African and then an Indonesian. A mother who adored her children, she insisted on working. She has been described by those who knew her as "fearless, capable, intelligent, curious and open."

Stanley Ann Dunham (so named because her father wanted a boy) was born in 1942 in Kansas. The family moved frequently and lived in Honolulu when Ann enrolled at the University of Hawaii. There, she met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian language class. Several months after they met, in February 1961, Ann and Barack married. Ann was three months pregnant. She dropped out of college. When Barack was not yet one, his father left for Harvard to earn a Ph.D. in economics and the marriage ended.

Not long after, with help from family and friends, Ann returned to college to earn a bachelor's degree. During this time she met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaii. In 1967, Ann and her young son Barack followed him to Jakarta, to a home without electricity, a backyard with chickens and a baby crocodile, and a neighborhood of unpaved streets. Eventually Soetoro did well working for an American oil company but he and Ann grew apart as she became increasingly intrigued with traditional Indonesia.

Ann began teaching English at the American embassy in Indonesia while giving her son English lessons in the early morning hours before he left for school.

At night she would expose her young son to books about the American civil rights movement and her daughter, Maya, to multicultural dolls. "She believed that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was to treat everybody as unique individuals," Obama told TIME Magazine in an April interview.

In 1971, when Obama was 10 years old, his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents while attending prep school on scholarship. The separation was hard on both mother and son but a year later Ann was also back in Hawaii to earn a master's degree in anthropology, focusing on Indonesia. This also marked the end of her marriage to Soetoro from whom she was divorced in 1980.

The move marked a turning point in Ann's life. She became increasingly self-assured and passionate about her work, eventually deciding to return to Indonesia for Ph.D. fieldwork. Obama, then 14, decided to stay in Hawaii for high school. Again, the separation was difficult but mother and son remained close.

Ann began working for the Ford Foundation, as programme officer for women and employment and her home became a haven for politicians, artists and others who wanted to talk liberal politics.

Eventually she became a leader in microfinancing for women in Indonesia, well before the idea of giving women small loans became a major component of development. Her research helped the Bank Rakyat Indonesia set policy and today, according to TIME Magazine, "Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc."

By this time Obama, having graduated from Harvard Law School and having turned down lucrative work in a private law firm, was working in Chicago as a community organiser, an experience he sights often as he campaigns. He would soon go on to state and then national politics.

In 1992, two years before her premature death, Ann completed the extensive Ph.D. dissertation she had been working on for nearly two decades. The thesis, an in-depth analysis of peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia, is dedicated to Barack and Maya "who seldom complained when their mother was in the field."

In an interview with 'The New York Times' in March, later reprinted by 'The Jakarta Post Sunday Magazine', Barack Obama's half-sister Maya said her mother "felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core." She did not want her children "to be limited by fear or narrow definitions," Maya added.

As Barack Obama campaigns for the presidency in America at a time of enormous social, political and economic change, those words seem prophetic. The first black to seek the highest office in the land, Ann Soetoro's son is certainly wandering through uncharted territory. He has spoken eloquently about not letting fear dominate voters' decisions and he has worked diligently to broaden crucial definitions that influence policy.

In Indonesia, almost no one seems to be aware of Barack Obama's connection to this country. Not one person I spoke to informally for this article knew that he and his mother had lived here. No one realised he had an Indonesian half-sister (now working in Hawaii). And yet, ask anyone about Barack Obama and there is an immediate thumbs up, accompanied by a broad smile. (Some people think he is already president.) "Good man," they say. "Very good man." (Source: The New Nation.)

Barack Obama; The Unauthorized Biography Of A Marxist - Obama's Factual Family Story

Posted on October 28, 2008 by mcauleysworld OBAMA: The Unauthorized Biography - Part 1

Chapter 2: Stanley Ann Dunham - Obama's mother

Very little has been written about Stanley Ann Dunham prior to her arrival on Mercer Island and the beginnning of her highschool years in 1955. Articles state that Stanley Ann was born in November 1942, 11 months after the start of WWII, while her father was away serving in the US Army. (Chicago Tribune.)

After leaving Kansas when she was a youngster, she and her parents lived in Berkeley, Calif., for two years, Ponca City, Okla., for two years, and Wichita Falls, Tex., for three years before they ventured to the Seattle area. (Washington Post.) Stanley Ann finished the 8th grade at Bellevue Washington's Eckstein Middle School in June 1955. She began highschool the next September. Stanley Ann's friends from Mercer Island remember her well. "She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue," said Maxine Box, who was Dunham's best friend in high school. "She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn't." (Chicago Tribune.)

Dunham has been described by her friends as "a fellow traveler…" a slang term of the 1950's used to refer to a communist or communist sympathizer who had not publicly acknowledged their Party membership. The term "fellow traveler" was not a derogatory term nor was it used by anti-communists. (Ted Montgomery and Hawaii.edu.)

One of Stanley Ann's Mercer Island friends, Susan Botkin. recalled her directness, "in those days she dealt head-on with her uncommon first name. No sense trying to hide it, even though she hated it. "My name is Stanley," she would say. "My father wanted a boy, and that's that." Her mother softened it, calling her Stanny or Stanny Ann, but at school she was Stanley, straight up. "She owned the name," recalled Susan Botkin, one of her first pals on Mercer Island. "Only once or twice was she teased. She had a sharp tongue, a deep wit, and she could kill. We all called her Stanley."" (Washington Post.) In a high school culture of brawn and beauty, Stanley was one of the brains. Often struggling with her weight, and wearing braces her junior year, she had the normal teenage anxieties. John W. Hunt said those traits allowed Stanley to become accepted by the predominantly male intellectual crowd, even though she had a soft voice. (Washington Post.)

Stanley was decidedly liberal. She was encouraged in her Liberal beliefs, not just by her parents but by Mr Stenhouse the Chairman of the school board and by two of her teachers at Mercer Island High, Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert. These teachers taught advanced humanities courses open to the top 25 students. The assigned reading included not only Plato and Aristotle, Kierkegaard and Sartre, but also late-1950s critiques of societal conventions, such as "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte, "The Lonely Crowd" by David Riesman and "The Hidden Persuaders" by Vance Packard, as well as the political theories of Hegel and Mill and Marx. (Washington Post.)

A wing of Mercer Island High was nicknamed "anarchy alley" because of the teachings of Jim Wichterman and Val Foubert. (Seattle Times.)

In speaking with the Seattle Times Wichterman said, "Dunham thrived in the environment". "As much as a high-school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?" (Seattle Times.)

Obama visited the Seattle area last October, and in a speech to a Democratic Party rally at Bellevue Community College, he mentioned that his mother attended Mercer Island High School before moving on to Hawaii. In "Dreams," Obama wrote that the family moved to Seattle "long enough for my mother to finish high school." The Chicago Tribune noted that, "her stop was more than some educational cup of coffee; Obama's mother spent 8th grade through high school here. Four of those five years were spent on Mercer Island. (Chicago Tribune.) Those years served to reinforce the Marxist unbringing Stanley Ann received at home.

The Chicago Tribune noted that Wichterman also touched the societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God. He didn't stop there, ""I had them read 'The Communist Manifesto,' and the parents went nuts," said Wichterman, adding that parents also didn't want any discussions about "anything to do with sex," religion and theology. The parental protests were known as "mothers' marches." (Chicago Tribune.) The Dunhams did not join the uproar. Madelyn and Stanley had shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing prior to arriving on Mercer Island or joining the East Shore Unitarian Church where Stenhouse was President.

Stanley Ann's friends remember her fondness for poetry, jass music and the coffee house scene. "Dunham gravitated toward an intellectual clique. According to former classmate Chip Wall, she caught foreign films at Seattle's only art-house theater, the Ridgemont, and trekked to University District coffee shops like the Encore to talk about jazz, the value of learning from other cultures and the "very dull Eisenhower-ness of our parents." (Seattle Times.)

"If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first," said Chip Wall, who described her as "a fellow traveler". . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were." (Chicago Tribune.)

Sometime prior to Stanley Ann's graduation in June 1960, her father Stanley travelled to Hawaii and secured employment at a new funiture store and arranged for living quarters for his family. As graduation neared for the class of 1960, Dunham had hoped to join many of her classmates at the University of Washington, however, Stanley Ann did not know of her father's plan to move the family. (Seattle Times.)

In "Dreams" Obama claims his mother was accepted at the University of Chicago, however, there is no documentation to prove this claim. It is an interesting coincidence given the role that the city of Chicago plays both in Obama's later life and its connection to those who will influence Obama's life as a young man.

Stanley Ann's friend's don't recall her mentioning the University of Chicago. They recall a desire to stay and attend the University of Washington or U-Dub as they referred to it. Maxine Box told the Chicago tribune, "I remember she didn't want to go to Hawaii." None the less, shortly after her graduation in June 1960, Stanley Ann Dunham moved with her parents to Hawaii. Fourteen short months later Barack Hussein Obama would be born. (Chicago Tribune.)

Part 2 - The Hawaii Years - Barack Obama; The Unauthorized Biography Of A Marxist - Part 2 - The Hawaii Years - Frank Marshall Davis

In June 1960 when Stanley Ann Dunham arrived in Hawaii after highschool she was described by her friends as a liberal athiest and an avowed Marxist. Stanley Ann's friends who were similiarly inclined refered to her as a "fellow traveler". An "intellectual rebel" with a fledgling beatnik sensibility. (Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times and The Truth Seeker.)

Former classmates noted her love of foreign films, art-house theaters, poetry and University District coffee shops like the Encore where discussion of jazz and politics would take place. Dunham hadn't had a boyfriend in high school, according to Maxine Box, her best friend at the time. John W. Hunt, another of her close friends, recalled the coffee house discussions about world events, French cinema, the meaning of life and the existence of God. Others state that, "When Ann Dunham arrived in Hawaii, she was a full-fledged radical leftist and practitioner of critical theory." (Seattle Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Truth Seeker, and Ted Montgomery.)

The Hawaii or Oahu of 1960 was much smaller than it is today. While Oahu still occupies about 550 square miles, the population was only 500,000. Compare that for example with the 1960 population of Chicago - which was 7 times larger - 3.5 Million (3,500,000). (Enterprise Honolulu.)

When they arrived in Hawaii the Dunham family moved into a large house on Kamehameha Avenue. (Washington Post.)

Ann, she dropped the Stanley after arriving in Hawaii, would not begin classes at the University of Hawaii until September, three months away. Prior to starting those classes she would meet one of her Father's acquaintances, Frank Marshall Davis.

Frank Marshall Davis

Frank Marshall Davis was born in 1905 in Arkanasas City, Kansas. In 1923 he began his college education at Friends Unversity in Whichta, Kansas. When Friends University was originally founded in 1898 it was associated with the Religous Society of Friends or Quakers. (Wikipedia: Friends University , Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis , and Litencyc.com.)

In 1924 Davis transferred to Kansas State Agricultrural College, now called Kansas State University. Davis studied there in 1924-1927 and again in 1929, but her did not finish his degree. (Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis, Litency.com.)

Davis spent his early years in Kansas as had Obama's grandparents and mother. (Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis, Litency.com.)

In 1927, Davis moved to Chicago. where he worked at various African-American newspapers. He also wrote free-lance articles and short stories for African-American magazines. It was during this time that Davis began a serious effort to write poetry, including his first long poem, entitled Chicago's Congo, Sonata for an Orchestra. Norman Forge's Black Cat Press published Davis's first book, Black Man's Verse, in the summer of 1935. The book was an alliance of free verse written in the rhythm of jazz that condemned racial prejudice. (Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis , and Washburn.edu.)

In 1930, Davis moved to Atlanta to work as editor for a semiweekly black newspaper. Later, Davis became the editor of the Atlanta Daily World. (Washburn.edu.)

In 1935, Davis moved back to Chicago to take the position of managing editor of the Associated Negro Press, a news service for Black newspapers. (Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis , and Washburn.edu.)

In 1937, his second book, I Am the American Negro, loudly critiqued racism and its social connotations. The following year, Davis published his third book, Through Sepia Eyes (1938), which contained four poems. The poems were published in later volumes of Davis' books. In 1948, Davis published 47TH STREET which many believe to be his best work. In his title poem, Davis chronicled a "rainbow race" of south side Chicagoans and their commonalities of economic class rather than race. (Washburn.edu.) Yes, in his day, Davis was a south side Chicago community oraganizer.

A reader interested in Davis' poetry should check out this site: http://www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping/davis/index.html where poetry from "47th Street" and "Awakening" can be viewed. Also see: http://www.orangeturtle.com/fourglimpses.html.

In 1946, Davis married Helen Canfield, who is descibed as a white Chicago Socialite 19 years his junior. The couple divorced in 1970. Canfield was Davis' second wife.

In 1948, after 47th Street was published, Davis moved to Hawaii. There has been much speculation about why Davis left Chicago for Hawaii, including comments that the actor Paul Roberson suggested Hawaii would be a place more tolerant of a bi-racial marriage. (Hawaii.edu: Frank Marshall Davis.)

Roberson, himself a Communist, would later be defended by Davis. (Hawaii.edu: Honolulu Record.)

According to Davis' biographer, Davis told the press he was there for an extended vacation to write, while his wife painted. (Hawaii.edu: Frank Marshall Davis.) In actuallity, Davis immediately began work launching The Honolulu Record with Koji Ariyoshi. The "Record" was a paper published by the International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union headed by Harry Briggs. (Hawaii.edu: Frank Marshall Davis, Clear UHWO, and Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis.). Both Ariyoshi and Briggs were convicted of being Communists in 1958. (USA Survival.org.)

Davis confirmed this relationship and his contacts in his own biography. http://www.usasurvival.org/docs/hawaii-obama.pdf at page 15. Davis compared the Honolulu Record with the Chicago Star, a paper now acknowledged as a Communist publication of the 1940's.

In 1975, Hawaii Governor John Burns, who in the 1950s was a Democratic Party organizer and delegate to Congress, would reflect that perhaps there were Communists in the union. "Every guy in the ILWU was at one time or another a member of the Communist Party of America. This is where they got their organizational information and how to organize, and how to bring groups together and how to create cells and how to make movements that are undetected by the bosses and everything else. … I know what they were about. I said this is the only way they are going to organize," he said. Dan Inouye, the U.S. Senator from Hawaii. who during the 1950s was Burns' political ally, noted in his autobiography that Communists were probably enrolled in the union. "No one with any sense of political reality denied that there were probably some Communists in the ILWU. … " (Star Bulletin.)

Davis authored a column called "Frankly-speaking" in the Honolulu Record. (Hawaii.edu: Frank Marshall Davis, Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis.) Davis authored a column called "Frankly-speaking" in the Honolulu Record. (Hawaii.edu: Frank Marshall Davis, and Wikipedia: Frank Marshall Davis.)

For the reader interested in sampling Davis' columns written for the "Record" check out this site: http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/HonoluluRecord1/frankblog1949.html - The site has posted columns from 1949 - 1950. In his columns critize Davis critizes the Marshall Plan, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, opposes support for Nationalist China and denounces our Democratic Allies from WWII while extolling the virtues of Marxist/Communist Russia and China.

Immediately after arriving in hawaii Davis also undertook organizational activities for the Communist party. These activites led to his ouster from the Hawaii NAACP. The International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union would eventually sever ties with its Communist connections and join the CIO. The CIO would later merge and become the AFL-CIO. In 1958 the Honolulu Record would close.

A history of the Hawaii NAACP's clash with the Communists can be read here: USA Survival - page 16. Davis was specifially identified as a Communist organizer in a letter from Edward Berman (NAACP Chair, Hawaii) to National NAACP leader Roy Wilkins. USA Survival page 17.

Berman's letter stated, ""I (Berman) was at one of the election meetings at which one Frank Marshall Davis, formerly of Chicago (and formerly editor of the Chicago Communist paper, the Star) suddenly appeared on the scene to propagandize the membership about our 'racial problems' in Hawaii. He had jut sneaked in here on a boat, and presto, was an 'expert' on racial problems in Hawaii. Comrade Davis was supported by others who had recently 'sneaked' into the organization with the avowed intent and purpose of converting it into a front for the Stalinist line….

…Already, scores of Negro members were frightened away from these meetings because of the influx of this element. Only by a reorganization with a policy that will check this infiltration, can we hope to get former members back into a local NAACP branch. We are going to have to have that authority over here-otherwise you'll have a branch exclusively composed of yelping Stalinists and their dupes-characters who are more concerned about the speedy assassination of Tito (Yugoslav communist dictator who had just broken with the USSR) than they are about the advancement of the colored people of these United States." (American Thinker.) Davis' own writings on the mistakes of the Oahu NAACP, The CIO, the dangers of State Employees taking a "loyalty oath" or pledge to "protect and defend the Constitution" and the joys of a discrimination free Soviet Union can be read here: http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/HonoluluRecord1/frankblog1949.html.

A partial history of Marxist/Communist activities in Hawaii can be read here. USA Survival: Davis , Star Bulletin, USA Survival: Obama - at page 9.

When the Dunham's arrived in 1960 Honolulu, Frank Marshall Davis, fellow Kansan, athiest, Marxist-Communist, writer, poet and jass musician was waiting to greet them. Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley Dunham were drinking buddies and in the local vernacular, "Choomers", or pot heads as we would have called them in my 1960's neighborhood. (London Telegraph.)

It is hard to imagine that young, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham would not have been impressed with the accomplished Davis. He was after all, the imbodiment of all that she had been taught to admire. Davis at this time was 55 years old and married to a 35 year old white sociallite from Chicago. A renowned Communist, athiest, author, journalist, poet, musician and political organizer. To the young Stanley Ann Dunham he must have been the equivalent of a modern era rock star. Commentators speculate whether Davis might be the reason Stanley Ann Dunham may have told her son, if she told her son, of a desire to attend the University of Chicago. There is no documentation that she ever applied the University of Chicago. Of course the "allegation" that Stanley Ann Dunham had been accepted at the University of Chicago may simply be another example of the "literary license" or just another lie presented by Obama in "Dreams".

Other writers speculate that Frank Marshall Davis may, in fact, be Barack Obama's biological father. (Truth Seeker.)

This speculation seems to be based on three facts.

Fact 1:

That in 1968 Davis published a hard core autobiograpical, pornograpic novel titled Sex Rebel: Black. The novel was published in San Diego in 1968 by Greenleaf Classics under the pseudonym Bob Greene. (London Telegraph.)

Before his death Mr Davis confirmed that he was the author of "Sex Rebel: Black" after a reader had noticed the "similarities in style and phraseology" between the pornographic work and his poetry. (London Telegraph.)

Davis stated, "I could not then truthfully deny that this book, which came out in 1968 as a Greenleaf Classic, was mine." In the introduction to "Sex Rebel", Mr Davis (writing as Greene) explains that although he has "changed names and identities…all incidents I have described have been taken from actual experiences". (London Telegraph.)

In this book Davis notes a sexual liason with "Anne" an underage girl of 13. (Note that Stanley Ann Dunham was 17 when she met Davis).

The book, which closely tracks Mr Davis's life in Chicago and Hawaii and the fact that his first wife was black and his second white, describes in lurid detail a series of shockingly sordid sexual encounters, often involving group sex.

One chapter concerns the seduction by Mr Davis and his wife of a 13-year-old girl called Anne. Mr Davis wrote that it was the girl who had suggested he have sex with her. "I'm not one to go in for Lolitas. Usually I'd rather not bed a babe under 20. But there are exceptions. I didn't want to disappoint the trusting child. At her still-impressionistic age, a rejection might be traumatic, could even cripple her sexually for life." He then described how he and his wife would have sex with the girl, "Anne came up many times the next several weeks … She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes….I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual."

Davis's alleged sexual perversion adds a dramatic and alarming element to the controversy. Davis's sexual proclivities were documented in a 1968 pornographic novel, written just two years before Davis became Obama's mentor, which was titled, Sex Rebel: Black (Memoirs of a Gourmet Gash). Davis wrote the book, which is now generally unavailable, under a pseudonym, Bob Greene.

The book, which closely tracks Mr. Davis's life in Chicago and Hawaii and the fact that his first wife was black and his second white, describes in lurid detail a series of shockingly sordid sexual encounters, often involving group sex. One chapter concerns the seduction by Mr. Davis and his first wife of a 13-year-old girl called Anne. Mr. Davis wrote that it was the girl who had suggested he had sex with her. In the book he describes how he and his wife would have sex with the girl many times over the course of several weeks. This explosive information, if the character in the book is actually based on Davis's own experiences, would further demonstrate why Obama would want to cover up Davis's true identity in his book, calling him just "Frank." There is no question that Davis wrote the book under the pseudonym of "Bob Greene." John Edgar Tidwell, the editor of other books by Davis, has confirmed this is the case.

In the introduction to Livin' the Blues, a book by Davis that Tidwell edited, Tidwell reveals that Davis left behind after his death an uncompleted manuscript, "The Incredible Waikiki Jungle," which describes how Davis "specialized in sex" during the period 1969-1976. Tidwell also says that Davis wrote another unpublished manuscript called "Mixed Sex Salad." Whether the book Sex Rebel is entirely based on Davis or not, the controversy certainly demonstrates that Davis had a perverted sexual interest. (Source: Texas Darlin' Comments.)

Stanley Ann Dunham arrived in Hawaii in June 1960. Her best friends on Mercer Island state she had no boyfriends while in Highschool. By November 1960 she had conceived Barack Hussein Obama.

Fact 2:

In the Obama family lore, Barrack Hussein Obama Sr., abandoned his family to study at Havard. Having been accepted at both the New School in New York and Harvard, he choose Harvard and abandoned his family rather than study at the New School where scholarship money would have helped support the family. The facts do not support these allegations. Ann Dunham took her new born infant and abandoned Barack Obama, Sr. just weeks after the infants birth. (Christian Faith and Reason.)

Fact 3:

"Dreams" portrays Obama as an exceptionally gifted student in Indonesia. This is not particular accurate. The facts show Obama struggled with the language and was a marginal student, as many students studying in a foreign language would be. At about age 10, Obama was sent back to live with his Grandparents in Hawaii. Just prior to Obama's arrival, Frank Marshall Davis divorced his 2nd wife. (1970). (London Telegraph. and Chrisitian Faith and Reason.) (Source: McCauley's World.) (SITE NOTE: Because he published little poetry between 1948 and his final volume, Awakening, and Other Poems, published in 1978, Davis’s reputation as a poet diminished, but he was rediscovered during the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s. Davis also authored a soft-core pornographic novel, which was published in 1968 under a pseudonym. The book, titled Sex Rebel: Black (Memoirs of a Gash Gourmet), was written under the pseudonym “Bob Greene,” and was published by William Hamling's Greenleaf Publishing Company. Davis visited Howard University in Washington, D.C., to give a poetry reading in 1973, marking the first time he had seen the U.S. mainland in 25 years. His work began to appear in anthologies. Livin' the Blues: Memories of a Black Journalist and Poet (1992), Black Moods: Collected Poems (2002), and Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press (2007) were published posthumously. Frank Marshall Davis died in Honolulu, in 1987 of a heart attack, at the age of 81. (Source: Wikipedia.)

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Obama's Half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng in Hawaii

Maya Kassandra Soetoro-Ng was born August 15, 1970 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Maya Soetoro was born to Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian businessman, and Ann Dunham, a white American cultural anthropologist, who was also Barack Obama's mother. She was named after American poet Maya Angelou. (SITE NOTE: As part of the Obama controversy, Maya was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, but possesses a Hawaii Certification of Live Birth (COLB) as well showing that the COLB can be obtained by anyone. It would be interesting to see if her COLB to see if it has Jakarta, Indonesia entered as place of birth -- or like Obama has "Honolulu, Hawaii." If one believes that Obama "gamed" the system by using his Indonesian citizenship to his advantage -- with the complicity of Ann and Madelyn/Stanley Dunham -- then it also a certainty that Maya followed in his footsteps at Punahou School and Columbia.)

By the time Maya was born in 1970, Ann's second marriage was coming apart. This time, there was no sudden and jarring disappearance. The relationship lingered off and on for another 10 years, and Lolo remained part of Maya's life in a way that Barack Obama did not for Barry. As Maya analyzed her parents' relationship decades later, she concluded that she came along just as her mother was starting to find herself. "She started feeling competent, perhaps. She acquired numerous languages after that. Not just Indonesian, but her professional language and her feminist language. And I think she really got a voice. So it's perfectly natural that she started to demand more of those who were near her, including my father. And suddenly his sweetness wasn't enough to satisfy her needs."

In 1970, Obama returned to the Hawaii to live with his grandparents. In 1972 Ann Dunham returned to Hawaii with her daughter Maya. She and her two children lived in a small apartment in Honolulu. Money was still tight. In 1974, Ann Dunham goes back to Indonesia to do fieldwork for her Masters. Barack Obama decided to stay in Hawaii with Ann's parents. Barack Obama was 13 -- and in effect had been adopted by his grandparents and attended Punahou. Maya was 4. Although raised largely in Indonesia she lived with Obama in Hawaii with their white grandparents from 1973-1976.



As a child, Maya Soetoro-Ng loved to get on Barack Obama's nerves. But she also says that he was always a patient older brother, who saw the best in her and those around them. After her parents divorced, Barack took on a parental role, looking after her and making sure she had a strong male presence in her life. Now she speaks to Americans across the country about her brother, talking about his leadership and character and why we need him as our next president.

In 1976, Maya rejoins her mother in Indonesia. In 1982, she returns to Hawaii to attend Punahou school. By this time, Obama has graduated from Punahou (1979) and is attending Occidental College in LA. (This period is vague and nothing found on the internet.) Soetoro-Ng reinforced some of Obama's best-selling writing on their grandmother, Madelyn Dunham of Honolulu. "She has been the quintessential matriarch in our lives," Soetoro-Ng said. Most of all, she said, their grandmother, successful in banking in Hawaii, encouraged her grandchildren to pursue careers based on the "mandates of our hearts."

In an interview, Soetoro-Ng joked about occasions when she was a teen-ager and her older brother would chastise her for reading People magazine instead of books he bought for her. "I listened to him and I'm a great lover of literature now and I don't read people magazine anymore," Soetoro-Ng. Even with the age difference Obama and his sister have common interests in books and music, she said. "We would have long conversations about literature," she said. She also recalled a time when Obama placed speakers around her, a sort of makeshift surround-sound, and had her listen to classical music.


Maya and family greet the Obama family in Hawaii

Like her half-brother, Soetoro attended the private Punahou School in Hawaii. She is an alumna of Barnard College of Columbia University. She later received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa in 2006. She worked as a teacher in two separate schools namely Hawaii School for Girls High School and did some evening classes at the University of Hawaii.

Soetoro married Konrad Ng of Burlington, Ontario, Canada, a Chinese Canadian assistant professor at the University of Hawaii's Academy of Creative Media at the end of 2003 in Hawaii. He is the Canadian son of Malaysian Chinese immigrants. They have one daughter, Suhaila.

Soetoro-Ng is a high-school history teacher at La Pietra: Hawaii School for Girls in Honolulu, Hawaii. She also conducts night classes at the University of Hawaii. Her mother was agnostic and her father was nominally a Muslim. She philosophically describes herself today as a Buddhist.



(SITE NOTE: Philip Berg in his suit claims, "Shortly thereafter, Applicant discerned that Obama's Mother engaged in a pattern of illegal and fraudulent conduct as a result of both of her two children's birth outside of the United States: (1) Obama, Jr. born in Kenya Africa and (2) Maya Soetoro born in Jakarta Indonesia, but the mother, a US Citizen, raced to Hawaii after each of her children's birth where she engaged in fraudulent conduct upon the United States by declaring a late registration birth for both children claiming that they were born in Hawaii." In other words, Maya Soetoro is shown as being born in Hawaii on her birth certificate COLB (not vault copy), but in fact was born in Indonesia -- the same as Barack Obama.

The MSM was not interested whether Maya's birth certificate mimicked Obama's showing Honolulu birth -- when there is no doubt that she was born in Indonesia. This is another of the missing pieces.

There was also an initial brouhaha over Maya's birth certificate being used as a forgery for Obama's -- and mentioned in Philip Berg's suit. The "expert" (Tech dude) was subsequently discredited. However, the question still lingers whether the Obama COLB is a forgery and it is alleged that words and border have been photoshopped over other entries.)

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Stanley Armour Dunham (maternal grandfather):

Stanley Armour Dunham (March 3 or 23, 1918—February 8, 1992) was the maternal grandfather of Obama. Stanley Dunham was born to Baptists Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham and Ruth Lucille Armour in El Dorado, Kansas. Stanley Dunham, at age 8, had discovered his mother's body after she allegedly committed suicide in 1926. The traumatic event reportedly contributed to his being expelled from school as a teen, after having punched his school principal in the nose.

Stanley Dunham married Madelyn Lee Payne, whom he met during her weekly visits to "hear the big bands in Wichita." Stanley Dunham reportedly had a penchant for "drinking moonshine, hopping freight trains and chasing women," then enlisted in the U.S. army the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 8, 1941 and was assigned a tour of duty in Europe.

Upon returning home after the war, "Sgt. Dunham" became a career furniture salesman. He worked as a store manager in El Dorado before moving his family to California, then Texas, back to Kansas for a spell and then to Mercer Island and, finally, Honolulu.

The move to Seattle suburb Mercer Island was, according to official biographers, "to enable 13-year-old Stanley Ann to attend the new high school." While living on Mercer Island, Stanley Dunham worked at the Standard-Grunbaum Furniture store in downtown Seattle. Upon Stanley Ann's graduation from Mercer Island High School in 1960, Stanley Dunham moved his family to Honolulu where he found a better sales job in the furniture business.

Though Stanley Ann was accepted at the University of Chicago, her father refused to grant her permission to attend that school; Stanley Ann attended the University of Hawaii at Manoa instead. Stanley Dunham was remembered as a "loving grandfather," according to Obama, despite his "disapproval of his daughter's marriage to a black man from Kenya." Stanley Dunham died at age 73 on February 8, 1992. He was interred at Punchbowl National Cemetery north of Honolulu. The cemetery is situated on land that ancient Hawaiians used for human sacrifices.

Army veteran grandfather was Obama's boyhood pal in Hawaii

By Dan Nakaso Advertiser Staff Writer

Madelyn Dunham — now more famously known as Barack Obama's grandmother — will be remembered today at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, near the site where her husband's ashes are inurned in niche No. 440. In August, Obama and his daughters walked up to Court 1, Wall B at Punchbowl and left two lei beneath the bronze plaque that honors the tall, silver-haired man Obama called Gramps.

Stanley Armour Dunham was entitled to be interred at Punchbowl because of his service during World War II. He was a sergeant in Patton's 7th Army in Europe, a charismatic figure who liked to drink and loved to tell stories but later struggled to make a living selling furniture and insurance in Honolulu. He was, however, a success at being the primary man in the young life of the future president — after Obama's father left Hawai'i when the boy was just 2. "They walked everywhere and little Barry was always with him," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who lived nearby and has been a family friend since. "He relished that little boy's company. When I would see them, Stanley would offer how bright Barry was and how well he was doing in school. He had ambitions for little Barry. "That man loved Barry and everybody knew that," Abercrombie said. "He maybe had his weaknesses and his shortcomings, like other people, but love of that boy was not one of them. It was obvious to everybody and certainly must have been obvious to little Barry that his grandfather not only loved him but, more importantly, liked him and liked having him around and liked him as his pal."

ROLE MODELS

Dunham made a point of introducing Obama to positive black male role models around town, said Jerry Burris, co-author of "The Dream Begins: How Hawai'i Shaped Barack Obama." "Stanley would take Barry along with him when he was visiting his buddies," Burris said. "I think he had in mind that Barry had to be exposed to some black males of substance. It wasn't just come along, see my friends. I think he was conscious of Barry seeing adult black male role models." Madelyn Dunham, whom Obama called Toot, from the Hawaiian term for grandparent, tutu, has been credited with using her Kansas upbringing to help form the foundation of Obama's upbringing. "From what you think you understand of Stanley, you don't see a lot of him in Barry," Burris said. "Barry isn't happy-go-lucky or a dreamer type. He's much more like grandma."

But Stanley Dunham had plenty of his own particular form of charm. When Madelyn gave birth to their daughter, Stanley named her after himself, calling her Stanley Ann Dunham. "She would later complain to her friends that her father had 'wanted a boy, but he got me,' " Burris and co-author Stu Glauberman wrote in their book. Stanley and Madelyn grew up less than 20 miles away from each other in Kansas — she was from Augusta, he from El Dorado.

By the time he was 15, Stanley had been thrown out of high school for punching the principal in the nose, Obama wrote in his best-selling book, "Dreams From My Father." "For the next three years he lived off odd jobs, hopping rail cars to Chicago, then California, then back again, dabbling in moonshine, cards, and women," Obama wrote. "As he liked to tell it, he knew his way around Wichita, where both his and Toot's families had moved by that time, and Toot doesn't contradict him; certainly, Toot's parents believed the stories that they'd heard about the young man and strongly disapproved of the budding courtship. The first time Toot brought Gramps over to her house to meet the family, her father took one look at my grandfather's black, slicked-back hair and his perpetual wise-guy grin and offered his unvarnished assessment." 'He looks like a wop.' "My grandmother didn't care." Madelyn and Stanley eloped "just in time for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and my grandfather enlisted," Obama writes.

Moving around

Stanley never saw combat and in peacetime relocated his young bride to California, where he enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley through the GI bill. Stanley bounced the family back to Kansas, through Texas, Seattle and — finally — Honolulu in 1959, the same year Hawai'i became a state. "He would whip out pictures of the family and offer his life story to the nearest stranger," Obama wrote. He "would pump the hand of the mailman or make off-color jokes to our waitresses at restaurants."

As Madelyn earned a series of promotions at Bank of Hawaii, which was then the Islands' largest bank in terms of assets, Stanley's career struggled to gain financial traction. Madelyn's success "had become a source of delicacy and bitterness between them as his commissions paid fewer and fewer of the family's bills," Obama writes.

Cancer death at 73

Stanley Dunham died of prostate cancer in 1992 at age 73. His funeral at Punchbowl "was a small ceremony with a few of his bridge and golf partners in attendance, a three-gun salute, and a bugle playing taps," Obama wrote. The next president of the U.S. says little else in his book about the loss of his grandfather — or what it meant to him. He certainly never expressed his feelings to Abercrombie, one of Obama's first supporters in Congress. "I simply don't know," Abercrombie said. "We have never entered into that discussion." But whatever those emotions are, they must be complicated, Abercrombie said, especially as Obama mourns the loss of his grandmother, who died just two days before his historic election. "It's always difficult to discern all the emotional implications of not having a father," Abercrombie said, "and then to lose a grandfather who was a substitute." (Source: Honolulu Advertiser.) (SITE NOTE: Abercrombie was a friend of Obama's father during his UH days -- and stated in 2006 that he knew both of Obama's parents.)

Barack Obama; The Unauthorized Biography Of A Marxist - Obama's Factual Family Story

Posted on October 28, 2008 by mcauleysworld OBAMA: The Unauthorized Biography - Part 1

Introduction

Barack Obama's first book, "Dreams of My Father" has been discussed at length in the popular press and by the Candidate himself. Unfortunately, the book and the discussions associated with book on broadcast media are short on fact and long on the fiction that the candidate has carefully manufactured about his past.

Obama, himself, gives the readers a "buyers beware" warning in the introduction to the reissued edition of "Dreams". Obama notes the dangers of writing an autobiography include "the temptation to color events in ways favorable to the writer … [and] selective lapses of memory." Obama states, "I can't say that I've avoided all, or any, of these hazards successfully."

My question, did candidate Obama even make an attempt to avoid the temptation? (Chicago Tribune

In "Dreams" Obama distorts many of the truths concerning his youth to serve his own self interest. The Chicago Tribune noted, "Still, the story of his early years highlights how politics and autobiography are similar creatures: Each is shaped to serve a purpose." (Chicago Tribune.) I wonder what the Tribune writer meant, in plain words? That Obama shaped his autobiography to serve Obama's political purpose? Yes, I would agree, if that is what the writer intended to say.

A Washington Post author noted, "Dreams From My Father" is as imprecise as it is insightful about Obama's early life". This writer believes the "imprecision" speaks volumes about Obama, the man and the candidate. The Post author goes on to state, "… he readily acknowledged, he rearranged the chronology for his literary purposes and presented a cast of characters made up of composites and pseudonyms" (Washington Post.)

In "Dreams" Obama puts words spoken by adult, radical leftists, into the mouths of his classmates who deny ever having had the discussions attributed to them in his book. (Chicago Tribune.)

In "Dreams" Obama paints a portrait of a "youth living in a distant land searches[ing] and finds new friends, a new language and a heartbreaking lesson about his identity in the pages of an American magazine." Researchers later determine that this claim is, at a minimum, factually incorrect. Why let a bald face lie get in the way of telling a good story? (Chicago Tribune.) Some have suggested that this "lie" is actually a reference to the musician MICHAEL JACKSON.

Obama goes to great length in "Dream's" to describe himself as "A young black man who struggles for acceptance at an institution of privilege, where he finds himself growing so angry and disillusioned at the world around him that he turned to alcohol and drugs." (Chicago Tribune.)

Obama's minority and mixed race friends at the Punahou School, an ultra-elite private school in Hawaii, failed to notice Obama's anger over "race", "social injustice" or "acceptance". The direct quote from the Chicago Tribune writer is, "The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama." (Chicago Tribune.)

In "Dream's" Obama neglects to mention the Bohemian/Marxist lifestyle practiced in his Grandparent's home. Alcohol and marijuana use were a regular part of the Marxist social gatherings at the Dunham residence. Obama's first expsoure to "chooming", Hawaian slang for smoking pot, was not at school but at home. (Chicago Tribune.) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/barackobama/2601914/Frank-Marshall-Davis-alleged-Communist-was-early-influence-on-Barack-Obama.html

Frank Marshall Davis, a renowned Activist, Poet, Jass Musician, Labor Organizer and member of the Communist Party, United States of America (CPUSA), was a family friend and regular guest of the Dunham/Obama Family. (London Telegraph.) http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5047/1/32/ Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama's half-sister, told the Associated Press recently that her grandfather had seen Mr Davis was "a point of connection, a bridge if you will, to the larger African-American experience for my brother", Barack Obama. (London Telegraph.) The record shows that the young Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at the age of 10 in 1971, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his "poetry" and getting advice on his career path. In "Dreams" , Obama refers to Davis as "Frank." (World Net Daily.)

There is some speculation that Frank Marshall Davis may, in fact, be Barack Obama's true biological father. (Andy Martin.) At a minimum, Obama obtained a good deal of his ideology from Frank Marshall Davis. In a 2007 speech at the dedication of a Communist Party (CP) archive, "fellow traveler" and historian Gerald Horne, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, clarified the relationship between Obama and Davis, "…… (Political Affairs.)

In "Dreams" Obama continues his family myth that Barack Obama, Sr, abandoned his family to attend Harvard University. The facts bring into question whether Barack Obama, Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham were ever officially married. The facts also established that Stanley Ann took her infant son and abandoned Obama within weeks of the child's birth. (Christian Faith and Reason.)

In "Dreams" Obama claims his maternal grandparents were "conservative" "Methodists" or "Baptists" from Kansas. While this may have been true of his maternal great-grandparents, it is an absolutely false description of the grandparents who raised Obama. The Dunham's abandoned the faiths of their parents and attended a Marxist Unitarian Church during his mother's formative years. (Christian Faith and Reason and Chicago Tribune.)

Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an avowed Athiest not a Christian as Obama claims. (Washington Post and Chicago Tribune.)

Obama's mother, Stanley Ann was a Marist. (Seattle Times.)

Obama's grandparents moved their family to Mercer Island in Washington State to join a small but liberal community of Marxists.

Chapter 1 - Obama's Maternal Grandparents:

Madelyn Payne, Obama's maternal grandmother, was born in the oil boomtown of Augusta, Kansas, to stern Methodist parents who did not believe in drinking, playing cards or dancing. She was one of the best students in the graduating class of 1940. Her family were members of the well to do, white collar community. Madelyn, however, in ways that would foretell the flouting of conventions by her daughter Stanley Ann, was different.

"A bunch of us would go to Wichita, to the Blue Moon Dance Hall," said Nina Parry, a classmate who still lives in Augusta. "We'd hear Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey and Glem Miller . . . . All the big bands came. It was wonderful." Then Madelyn met Stanley. Stanley Armour Dunham is Barack Obama's maternal grandfather. (Chicago Tribune.) Four years older, Stanley Armour Dunham lived 17 miles east, in El Dorado. In 1920, El Dorado, with a population of 12,000, seemed to exist solely for the purpose of drilling holes in the ground. And for good reason. In 1918, the El Dorado field produced 9 percent of the world's oil production. The Dunhams were Baptists. Unlike the Paynes, Stanley Dunham did not come from the white-collar crowd. Gregarious, friendly, challenging and loud, "he was such a loose wheel at times," said Clarence Kerns, from the El Dorado class of 1935. Others who knew Dunham described him as a salesman "who could charm the legs off a couch." (Chicago Tribune.) His marriage to Madelyn was one of those that acquaintances said spanned both sides of the railroad tracks, and Stanley was always placed on the wrong side. They secretly married on the spring weekend of the annual junior-senior banquet in 1940, Madelyn's senior year, several weeks before graduation, according to friends. Continuing to live with her parents, Madelyn didn't tell them about her marriage until she got her diploma in June. The news was not a big hit at the Payne family home, but parental objections didn't matter.

Obama writes the following about his Grandfather, "When he was 8 years old, Stanley Armour Dunham found his mother's body. It was 1926, and Ruth Armour Dunham had committed suicide at the age of 26." Barack Obama has written that that tragic discovery might have contributed to making his grandfather "a bit wild" as a teenager in Wichita, Kansas. Obama alleges that after his grandfather was kicked out of high school "for punching the principal in the nose." Obama also claims that the man Obama would later know as "Gramps" hopped freight trains and dabbled in "moonshine, cards and women." (Sun Times.)

When World War II came in December 1941, Stanley enlisted in the Army. Madelyn became a Rosie-the-Riveter at Boeing Co.'s B-29 production plant in Wichita, Kansas. The Dunham's only child, Stanley Ann Dunham, Barack Obama's mother, arrived in late November 1942. (Chicago Tribune.)

The Dunhams were full-time working parents, renters and strugglers in pursuit of the next opportunity. After the war, Madelyn worked in restaurants while Stanley managed a furniture store on Main Street in El Dorado, Kansas. (Chicago Tribune.)

In 1955 Stanley Dunham began work at a "large store in downtown Seattle called Standard-Grunbaum Furniture at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Pine Street. "First in Furniture, Second at Pine," read the Yellow Pages ad in the Seattle telephone directory." (Chicago Tribune.) Madelyn went to work at a bank as an escrow officer. The Dunham's settled on Mercer Island and enrolled their daughter, Stanley Ann, in the new highschool.

The Chicago Tribune author goes on to quote one of Stanley Ann's childhood friends when he writes, "The island was quiet, politically conservative and all white." (Chicago Tribune.)

While Mercer Island was quiet and nearly all white, it was anything but conservative.

The furniture store where Stanley Dunham worked, "Standard-Grunbaum Furniture at the corner of 2nd Avenue and Pine Street" was located down the street from the Regional Headquarters of the Communist Party USA. That headquarters was located at 1016 1/2 Second. In 1948, during testimony before the Un-American Activities in Washington State Investigation, the Communist Party's Seattle headquarters was identified as being located at 1916 Second Ave, between Stewart Street and Pine Streets. The CPUSA party headquarters had been located in that area for at least 7 years. (Red County.com.) This second site, "The Communism in Washington State History and Memory Project" is dedicated to preserving the history of the Communist movement in Washington State. It is not an anti-communist site. (Seattle Times.)

In 1955 the Chairman of the Mercer Island School Board was John Stenhouse, an admitted member of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA). (Time Magazine.). Mr Stenhouse was a British immigrant who was born (DOB:1908) and raised in China.

Stenhouse's testimony/confession to being a Communist was featured in the April 15, 1955 issue of Time Magazine. Two months later the Dunham's enrolled their daughter, Stanley Ann, in the Mercer Island highschool which was under the direction of Stenhouse. Two of Stanley Ann's teachers at this school were avowed Marxists.

John Stenhouse was also the President of Eastshore Unitarian Church, frequently referred to as the "Little Red Church on the Hill". The church's nickname was related to the congregations Marxist/Leninist beliefs. Peter Luton, the church's current senior minister discussed the church's Marxist history with the Chicago Tribune. (Archiver and East Shore Unitarian.)

On the campaign trail Obama refers to his maternal grandparents as "conservative Methodists or Baptists from Kansas", most writers are forced to disagree with that assertion. It simply is not supported by the facts. Even the Chicago Tribune notes the Duham's had shed their Baptist and Methodist beliefs prior to reaching Mercer Island. (Chicago Tribune and Truthseeker.)

On the campaign trail, Obama describes his mother this way, "My mother was a Christian from Kansas…", "the only daughter of parents who grew up in the "dab-smack, landlocked center of the country," in towns "too small to warrant boldface on a roadmap." …….. Clearly, both of these statements are lies. Even the Chicago Tribune noted, "Implicit in that portrayal is this message: If you have any lingering questions or doubts about the Hawaiian-born presidential candidate with a funny name, just remember that Mom hails from America's good earth." The Tribune goes on to note, "That presentation, though, glosses over Stanley Ann Dunham's formative years, spent not on the Great Plains but more than 1,800 miles away on a small island in the Pacific Northwest." (Chicago Tribune.)

In "Dreams" Obama contradicts his campaign speeches when he states, "I was not raised in a religious household… My mother's own experiences… only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones …." (Time Magazine.)

The truth of the story is something else ………. (Source: McCauley's World.)

(NOTE: Together Mrs Dunham and her husband, the late Stanley, raised Obama until the age of 6 and again after he returned from Indonesia aged 10. At that time it was his grandfather's boss that pulled strings to get him into the top private school in Honolulu. It his hardworking grandmother's salary as a VP of a significant Hawaii Bank and his grandfather's commission checks that paid for his expensive education. (Source: Obama WTF.) \

Obama's grandparents maneuvered him into Punahou; his grandfather's boss, an alumnus, intervened to have Obama accepted. And Madelyn's job at the bank helped pay the steep tuition. By living in a modest apartment and sending Obama (and eventually Maya) to private school, his grandparents had sacrificed their own prosperity for the sake of Obama and his sister. This pattern would follow Obama throughout his charmed personal life and into his political career—people going out of their way to clear a path for him to succeed. At Punahou, Obama took his first step into an educational institution for elites, a rarefied world where he would remain through all of his formal education. (Source: Obama's biography 2007 D Mendell.))

I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity - she doesn't. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know...there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that's just the nature of race in our society.

Well, what I meant really was that some of the fears of street crime and some of the stereotypes that go along with that were responses that I think many people feel. She's not extraordinary in that regard. She is somebody that I love as much as anybody. I mean, she has literally helped to raise me. But those are fears that are embedded in our culture, and embedded in our society, and even within our own families, even within a family like mine that is diverse.

Eighty-seven years old. She can't travel. She has terrible osteoporosis so she can't fly, but, you know, she has been the rock of our family and she is sharp as a tack. I mean, she's just - she follows everything, but she has a very subdued, sort of Midwestern attitude about these things. So when I got nominated, she called and said, ‘That's nice, Barry, that's nice.'"

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Charles T. Payne (Maternal Great-Uncle) (1925-2008)

Great-uncle of Barack Obama, younger brother of Madelyn Dunham, born 1925. Served during World War II in the U.S. Army 89th Infantry Division. Obama has often described Payne's role in liberating Buchenwald concentration camp. (Source: Boston.com, July 22, 2008.)

There was brief media attention when Obama mistakenly identified the camp as Auschwitz during the campaign. Payne appeared in the visitor's gallery at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, when his great-nephew was nominated for President. He was the assistant director of the University of Chicago's Library (Source: Wikipedia.)

(SITE NOTE: There is a coincidental pattern with University of Chicago that is uninvestigated. Obama MAY have been teaching at the University of Chicago part-time when Payne was still an assistant director of the the Library in the early 1990s. However, he is unmentioned by Obama.)

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Barack Obama, Sr. (father):

Barack Obama, Sr. (1936-1982), was born in Nyamgoma-Kogelo, Kenya, to Hussein Onyango (Obama), a polygamist and missionary cook in Nairobi who converted from Christianity to Islam after joining British colonial forces in World War I and marrying "Akuma," his second wife. According to Wikipedia.org, Obama, Sr., was "raised by Onyango's third wife, Sarah," when Akuma "left the family." Obama, Sr., "grew up herding goats, went to school in a tin-roof shack and was a cook, a domestic servant to the British," according to Obama in his speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. In short, Obama's father was from a very poor family.

Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Senior) was born in Nyangoma-Kogello, Siaya District, Kenya in 1936. He was a member of the Luo tribe and grew up in the sleepy village of Alego-Kogello. The myth is that Obama Sr. was a goat herder. Obama Sr. may have herded some goats that were part of Grandfather's extensive livestock collection, but Obama Sr. spent his time at school where he was actually an extremely bright student and sufficiently educated to go on to obtain degrees from the University of Hawaii and Harvard. In 1955, at 18 years of age, Senior married a girl called Kezia from the local village. It was Kezia who remained his one true love and to whom he always returned. In 1958, Obama Senior was awarded an American sponsored scholarship in economics to the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was selected by a former Kenyan cabinet minister, the late Tom Mboya, who was earmarked as the successor to Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya's first prime minister and leader of the terrorist Mau Mau. The presumption was that Senior would return to Africa and use his "Western-honed skills in a new Kenya." In 1959, at the age of 23, Obama Sr. became the first African student enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Kezia, who is pregnant, remains in Kenya. Senior would have two more children with Kezia in subsequent years. Eventually, Senior will have three wives and one mistress. With them, he will have seven children, although there are some reports of an eighth. (Source: Obama File)



The Luo tribe to which Onyango belonged was predominately Ugandan, Tanzanian, and Kenyan, inheriting 12 percent of the power bestowed upon these countries when they were granted their "freedom" from British colonialism. At age 18, Obama, Sr., married "Kezia," a young girl from his tribe, with whom he fathered two children, Malik and Auma.


Obama-Dunham marriage in Maui in 1961. Obama was born six months later.

Deemed an "outstanding student" in his Wikipedia.org biography, Obama, Sr., received an airline ticket and a scholarship through a "special program promoted by the Kennedys" that enabled 81 under-privileged African students to study in U.S. institutes of higher education (There is no mention of what school Obama, Sr., attended to earn his bachelor's degree).

Due to a program offering Western educational opportunities to outstanding Kenyan students that was organized by nationalist leader Tom Mboya, Obama Sr. was awarded a scholarship in economics, and at the age of 23 (1959) he enrolled at the University of Hawaii. Initial financial supporters of the program included Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Jackie Robinson, and Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate who provided most of the financial support for Obama Senior's early years in the United States. Elizabeth Mooney Kirk worked in Kenya and in concert with Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya. Kirk and Malcolm X, both New Yorkers, would have certainly met in Kenya. Kirk co-authored many books with Frank Charles Laubach, founder of LLI. Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. (Source: Atlas shrugs.)

He chose to attend the University of Hawaii at Manoa to study economics as a 23-year-old grad student. There he met Stanley Ann Dunham in a Russian language class.

Obama, Sr. was simply one of the Kenyan students on a student visa, provided by the State Department through the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. He was a member of Tom Mboya's "African Airlift." This took place during the high heat of the Nixon-Kennedy President Campaign. Eisenhower was President, and his Secretary of State was Christian Herter, former Governor of Massachusetts. The Kennedy Foundation, which paid the airfare, was run by Sargent Shriver, Arnuld's father-in law. Philip H. Coombs was a Deputy in the Kennedy State Department. These students were poor, and in need of financial aid. They were told to live off the land. Note: They were given student visas, and were supervised in this country by the British Embassy. Obama senior studied Economics at the University of Hawaii. (Source:Time Magazine, 1961.)

He was known to have had an "engaging personality" and spent after-school hours drinking beer, shooting pool and debating political issues with fellow students. On February 2, 1961,Obama, Sr., married Stanley Ann in Maui. According to Obama, Stanley Ann's parents were against the marriage, as was senior Obama's own father. This was clearly a "marriage of convenience."

One story that stuck with him (Obama Jr.) concerned his father. It's the only such story about his father—told by his white relatives—that dealt explicitly with race. It goes like this:

Barry's white grandfather and several other Hawaiian friends take Barry Sr. to a Waikiki bar. It's a joyous scene, everyone eating and drinking "to the sounds of a slack-key guitar," when a white man with a booming voice announces to the bartender that he shouldn't have to drink "next to a nigger." The stunned clientele expects a fight. But Barry Sr. smiles and quietly lectures the man "about the folly of bigotry, the promise of the American dream, and the universal rights of man." In response, the shamed white man gives Barry Sr. $100, in apparent payment for his sin of racism. Even the young Obama found the tale hard to believe. But many years later, he recalls in "Dreams From My Father," he got a phone call from a Japanese-American man who had been a classmate of Barry Sr.'s in Hawaii. Unprompted, the man told Obama the same story. Obama says he was struck by the man's tone of "disbelief—and hope."

Obama has collected similar stories over the years—like the one he told in his Philadelphia speech about the young white woman who pretended to love mustard-and-relish sandwiches to help her sick mother through a time of financial stress, and the older black man who felt political kinship for her. The punch line is generally the same: blacks and whites have more in common than you might think, and he knows it because he is it: black and white, together as one. Or so his story goes. (Source: Newsweek.) (SITE NOTE: This anecdote of Obama Sr. might be best placed in the category of "folklore." In the 1960s, a "nigger" remark would have gotten the white person immediately ejected from ANY Waikiki bar. Being a resident of Hawaii and college student in the 1960s -- and frequent visitor of Waikiki bars -- with a brother and family playing music professionally in Waikiki, this tale borders on "fairy-tale." In Hawaii, there was racism, but negroes were referred to as "popoki" -- a wild black berry -- and open discrimination was abhorrant. Remember that many Portugese from the Azores came to Hawaii in the 1890s and were negroid by blood -- and intermixed with the Hawaiian populace. The second reason I find this unusual is that judging from the history of Ann Dunham leaving for Washington soon after Obama Jr. was born, the image of Stanley Dunham taking his "son-in-law" for a friendly drink in Waikiki would be fantasy.)

On August 4, 1961, Obama, Sr., became a father for the third time of Barack Hussein Obama II. The couple remained together for two years is the "official" story, but there is evidence that Ann Dunham almost immediately departed for Washington state where she enrolled in the Autumn semester of 1961. Something is very strange about the dates -- "Ms. Stanley Ann Dunham was enrolled at the University of Washington for: Autumn 1961 Winter 1962 Spring 1962" according to University of Washington records. This would mean that Ann Dunham went to Washington in Oct-Nov 1961 -- NOT 1962. This would mean she moved to Washington immediately after giving birth to Obama. Her "two year marriage" to Obama Sr. seems to have ended immediately following the birth. This is strange. (Source: Count Us Out.)

By 1962, Dunham had returned to Seattle as a single mother, enrolling in the University of Washington for spring quarter and living in an apartment on Capitol Hill. Dunham was "overwhelmed" and returned to Hawaii. (SITE NOTE: It should be noted that by this time, Obama Sr. had moved to Harvard. Again her "two year marriage" is called into question.)

Stanley Dunham and Obama moved back to Hawaii in 1963. This seems to coincide with when Barack Obama Sr. departed for Harvard in 1963, and Dunham returned to Hawaii to reenter the University of Hawaii for the Spring Semester in 1963. From this we surmise that there was no relationship between Dunham and Obama instead of the "illusion" that there was a two year marriage between 1961-1963. In fact, there was NO physical relationship and the fantasy that Obama builds up about his father may be all fiction.

This corroborates why none of Barrack Hussein Obama Sr.'s friends from Hawaii remember Ann or Barrack Obama Jr. When Obama Sr. left Hawaii in 1962, he never mentioned Ann Dunham or Barack Hussein Obama Jr. to even his closest friends. Obama Jr. has never produced records of his supposed parent's marriage or divorce most likely because they don't exist. (Source: Atlas shrugs.) Obama departed Hawaii on 22 Jun 1962.

Then Obama, Sr., left to pursue a masters degree in economics at Harvard. Obama, Sr. signed the divorce papers in Cambridge, Mass.– He did not contest the divorce. LLI's Elizabeth Mooney Kirk wrote to Tom Mboya in May 1962 to request additional funds to "sponsor Barack Obama for graduate study, preferably at Harvard." She said she would "like to do more" to assist the young man but had two stepchildren ready for college. Kirk's letter worked and Obama Sr. was offered a scholarship (from Tom Mboya in Kenya) to pursue a doctorate at Harvard. (SITE NOTE: It was a Masters.) Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii with honors in June 1962. A story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22 1962, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son. Obama arrived in Cambridge on a brisk fall day in 1962, not returning to Hawaii until Dec 1971. (Source: Atlas shrugs.)


Obama Sr

Another two years passed before Obama, Sr., divorced his second wife, Stanley Ann, in absentia. Upon graduation from Harvard, he returned to Kenya accompanied by schoolteacher Ruth Nidesand whom he married circa 1967. It is alleged that Obama, Sr., fathered two more children with Kezia while still married to Ruth. Ruth, too, eventually divorced Obama, Sr. and teaches kindergarten in Nairobi today.

(SITE NOTE: The two children with Kezia were Malik Obama and Auma. The one child with Ann Durnham was Barack Obama II. The two other children with Kezia after his return to Kenya was George and Bernard. The two children by Ruth Nidesand were Mark and David. David died in a motorcycle accident and Mark is in China. Ruth remarried and the sons bore the second husband's name.)

On his return to Kenya, Obama Sr. was hired by an US oil company and then served as an economist in the Ministry of Transportation, and later became senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. The mass airlifts of Kenyan students to the United States had a "huge" impact on the young African nation, which gained its independence from Britain in 1963. A University of Nairobi study showed that 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence, including Obama Sr., were products of the American program. LLI was proud of their part in this social change.

Subtle charges of spousal abuse were hinted by Ruth and other relatives in Kenya.Obama, Sr., while holding a high-level job as an economist with the Kenya government, was described as an abusive, alcoholic husband. He was killed in an automobile accident in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1982.

---

The first African student at the University of Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama, reached Honolulu 11 months before Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents got there from Seattle. He was on the first airlift of Kenyan students brought to study at U.S. universities as part of a program organized by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and funded primarily by hundreds of American supporters. At the time, there were no colleges in Kenya, which was in the last throes of British colonialism. His arrival in Honolulu was announced in an article in a local newspaper, the Star-Bulletin, under the headline: "Young Men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H."

Obama told the journalist, Shurei Hirozawa, that he grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, in east Africa, and was a member of the Luo tribe. He said he had worked as an office clerk in Nairobi for several years to save money for college and settled on the University of Hawaii "when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance."

Other accounts have said he went to Hawaii because it was the only U.S. university to offer him a scholarship, but that appears unlikely, based on this contemporaneous report. Obama told Hirozawa that he had enough money to stay in Hawaii only for two semesters unless he applied for a scholarship. He said he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy. He was concerned, he said, about his generation's disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with westernization. Taking a room at the Charles H. Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama quickly adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army barracks-style building near his business classes. It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane. They were antiestablishment intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. They were immediately taken by the one and only African student in their midst.

"He was very black, probably the blackest person I've ever met," recalled Zane, a Chinese Hawaiian, who now runs an antiques shop a few miles from the university. "Handsome in his own way. But the most impressive thing was his voice. His voice and his inflection -- he had this Oxford accent. You heard a little Kenyan English, but more this British accent with this really deep, mellow voice that just resounded. If he said something in the room and the room was not real noisy, everybody stopped and turned around. I mean he just had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He was charismatic as a speaker." (SITE NOTE: Pake Zane runs a store called Antique Alley in Hawaii. Although in the 1960's Hawaii offered a diverse cultural mix, native Hawaiian Pake Zane recalls that "He (Obama Sr.) was the first real black man I ever met". )

It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who went on to become a congressman from Honolulu, but Obama's entire outsize persona -- the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an "incredibly vital personality. He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated. If you didn't know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you're not smart enough to know what you're talking about and you're talking about it, then you don't deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was." (SITE NOTE: Neil Abercrombie is now Hawaii State's 1st district Representative in the US Congress. He is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who until 1999, worked in open partnership with Democratic Socialists of America.)

An interesting note about the snack bar crowd is that, even decades later, they all pronounce the first name of their Kenyan friend "Bear-ick" -- with the accent on the first syllable. That is how he referred to himself, they said. In Hawaii at least, they never heard him call himself "Buh-rock," with the accent on the second syllable, the pronunciation his son would adopt in his adult life. Perhaps it was a minor accommodation to westernization.

In late November, a few months into Obama's first semester, the Honolulu paper wrote another story about him, this time focusing on his positive conclusions about racial attitudes on the island. "No one seems to be conscious of color," he said. But there were stereotypes to shatter on both sides -- his of Hawaii and Hawaii's of Africa. "When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing, but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races," he acknowledged.

When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: "Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion [a long-standing uprising against the British] and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they've improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars."

He did not answer those questions in the story. Nor, on one matter, was he forthcoming with his friends at the university. Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya.

The events in Africa intrigued Obama's fellow students and were inevitably part of the movable discussion, which often went from the university snack bar over to the Stardust Lounge or George's Inn, where beer pitchers cost two bucks, and then on to Peter Gilpin's apartment nearby. As they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the hi-fi, Obama pontificated on Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen. "He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism," Neil Abercrombie said. "And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta [Kenya's first postcolonial leader] was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We'd get into it that deeply."

Late in the summer of 1960, at the start of his second year and the beginning of her first, Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham met in a beginning Russian class. He was 25; she was not yet 18. She called him "Bear-ick," too. He called her Anna. Decades later, Ann would tell her son a story about their first date that he then depicted in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. I got there and he hadn't arrived, but I figured I'd give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. An hour later he showed up with a couple of friends. I woke up and three of them were standing over me and I heard him saying, serious as can be . . . 'You see gentlemen, I told you she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' "

Recounting the scene long after the fact, knowing how the relationship would end, the son was at his most lyrical. "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that's how any love begins."

This was the prelude to the beginning of the second Barack Obama, the hapa, and in the narrative he creates about his mother, here, as always after, he writes with the sensibility not so much of a son as of an acute if sympathetic psychologist, approaching condescension but not quite crossing that line.

During his time in Hawaii, the elder Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life. He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie. While the scene in the book includes two friends who were with him when he arrived late for a first date with Ann, few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Pake Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama.

Neil Abercrombie did remember her appearing at some of the weekend gatherings. Obama was such a strong personality, he said, that he could see how the young woman was awed and overwhelmed by him. "She was a girl, and what I mean by that is she was only 17 and 18, just out of high school. And he brought her at different times. She mostly observed because she was a kid. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad-student types."

Before the end of her first semester, Ann learned she was pregnant. The jolt that most parents might feel at such news from a teenage daughter was intensified for the Dunhams by the fact that the father was Obama. Madelyn Dunham has steadfastly declined requests for interviews this year, but a few years ago she talked to the Chicago Tribune's David Mendell, who was researching his biography, "Obama: From Promise to Power." Dunham, known for her practicality and skepticism in a family of dreamers, told Mendell that Stanley Ann had always been stubborn and nonconformist, and often did startling things, but none were more stubborn or surprising than her relationship with Obama.

When Mendell pressed her about Obama, she said she did not trust the stories the Kenyan told. Prodding further, the interviewer noted that Obama had "a great deal of charm" and that his father had been a medicine man. "She raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself," Mendell wrote of Madelyn. " 'He was . . .' she said with a long pause, 'strange.' She lingered on the a to emphasize 'straaaaaange.' "

On Feb. 2, 1961, against Madelyn's hopes, and against the desires of Obama's father back in Kenya, Ann and Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got married. No guests, not even family members, were there. Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born six months later in Honolulu.

Ann, the earnest student, dropped out of school to take care of him. Her husband finished his degree, graduating in June 1962, after three years in Hawaii, as a Phi Beta Kappa straight-A student. Then, before the month was out, he took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and namesake child. He did not return for 10 years, and then only briefly. A story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son.

Many years later, Barack Jr., then in high school, found a clipping of the article in a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms. Why wasn't his name there, or his mother's? He wondered, he later wrote, "whether the omission caused a fight between my parents."

LLI's Elizabeth Mooney Kirk wrote to Tom Mboya in May 1962 to request additional funds to "sponsor Barack Obama for graduate study, preferably at Harvard." She said she would "like to do more" to assist the young man but had two stepchildren ready for college. Kirk's letter worked and Obama Sr. was offered a scholarship (from Tom Mboya in Kenya) to pursue a doctorate at Harvard. Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii with honors in June 1962. A story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22 1962, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son. Obama arrived in Cambridge on a brisk fall day in 1962, not returning to Hawaii until Dec 1971. (Source: Atlas Shrugs.)

On his way east, Obama stopped in San Francisco and went to dinner at the Blue Fox in the financial district with Hal Abercrombie, who had moved to the city with his wife, Shirley. Abercrombie would never forget that dinner; he thought it showed the worst side of his old friend, a combination of anger and arrogance that frightened him. Shirley was a blonde with a high bouffant hairdo, and when she showed up at the side of Hal and Barack, the maitre d' took them to the most obscure table in the restaurant. Obama interpreted this as a racial slight. When the waiter arrived, Obama tore into him, shouting that he was an important person on his way to Harvard and would not tolerate such treatment, Abercrombie recalled. "He was berating the guy and condescending every time the waiter came to our table. There was a superiority and an arrogance about it that I didn't like."

In the family lore, Obama was accepted into graduate school at the New School in New York and at Harvard, and if he had chosen the New School there would have been enough scholarship money for his wife and son to come along. However, the story goes, he opted for Harvard because of the world-class academic credentials a Crimson degree would bring. But there is an unresolved part of the story: Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge? Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression. Susan Botkin, Maxine Box and John W. Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called.

"She was on her way from her mother's house to Boston to be with her husband," Botkin recalled. "[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him. And I was intrigued with who she was and what she was doing. Stanley was an intense person . . . but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother's living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies. She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her. She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston."

But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii. (Source: Washington Post: David Maraniss.) (SITE NOTE: She did enroll in the University of Washington from Autumn 1961- Spring 1962 and returned to Hawaii in 1962 after Obama left. She reentered the UH for Spring Semester 1963. (Source: Count Us Out.).)

On his return to Kenya in 1965, Obama Sr. was hired by an US oil company and then served as an economist in the Ministry of Transportation, and later became senior economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance. The mass airlifts of Kenyan students to the United States had a "huge" impact on the young African nation, which gained its independence from Britain in 1963. A University of Nairobi study showed that 70 percent of top Kenyan officials after independence, including Obama Sr., were products of the American program. LLI was proud of their part in this social change. (Source: Atlas Shrugs.)

In 1965 Obama Sr. wrote a paper titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism," published in the East Africa Journal, harshly criticizing the blueprint for national planning, "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya", which had been produced by Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. As President-elect Barack Obama describes in his memoir, his father's conflict with President Kenyatta destroyed his career.

Obama Sr.'s life then took a tailspin into drinking and poverty, from which he never recovered. His friend, Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng, has described Obama Sr.'s difficult personality and drinking problems in the Kenya newspaper The Nation.Obama Sr. lost both legs in an automobile collision, and subsequently lost his job. He died in 1982, at the age of 46, in a car crash in Nairobi.

Obama in Hawaii: Father was ambitious, proud

IThe first African student at the University of Hawai'i, Barack Hussein Obama, reached Honolulu 11 months before Stanley Ann Dunham and her parents got there from Seattle. He was on the first airlift of Kenyan students brought to study at U.S. universities as part of a program organized by Kenyan nationalist Tom Mboya and funded primarily by hundreds of American supporters.At the time, there were no colleges in Kenya, which was in the last throes of British colonialism. His arrival in Honolulu was announced in a newspaper article under the headline "Young Men from Kenya, Jordan and Iran Here to Study at U.H."

Obama told the reporter that he grew up on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, in East Africa, and was a member of the Luo tribe. He said he had worked as an office clerk in Nairobi for several years to save money for college and settled on UH "when he read in an American magazine about its racial tolerance." Other accounts have said he went to Hawai'i because it was the only U.S. university to offer him a scholarship, but that appears unlikely, based on this contemporaneous report. In the newspaper story, Obama said he had enough money to stay in Hawai'i only for two semesters unless he applied for a scholarship.

He said he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy. He was concerned, he said, about his generation's disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with Westernization. Taking a room at the Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army-barracks-style building near his business classes.

It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane. They were intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. They were immediately taken by the one and only African student in their midst. "He was very black, probably the blackest person I've ever met," recalled Zane, a Chinese-Hawaiian, who now runs an antiques shop a few miles from the university. "Handsome in his own way," Zane said. "But the most impressive thing was his voice. His voice and his inflection — he had this Oxford accent. You heard a little Kenyan English, but more this British accent with this really deep, mellow voice that just resounded. If he said something in the room and the room was not real noisy, everybody stopped and turned around. I mean he just had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He was charismatic as a speaker."

It was not just the voice, said Neil Abercrombie, who is now the congressman for Hawai'i's First Congressional District, but Obama's entire persona — the lanky 6-foot-1 frame, the horn-rimmed glasses, the booming laugh, the pipe and an "incredibly vital personality." "He was brilliant and opinionated and avuncular and opinionated. Always opinionated," Abercrombie said. "If you didn't know him, you might be put off by him. He never hesitated to tell you what he thought, whether the moment was politic or not. Even to the point sometimes where he might seem a bit discourteous. But his view was, well, if you're not smart enough to know what you're talking about and you're talking about it, then you don't deserve much in the way of mercy. He enjoyed the company of people who were equally as opinionated as he was." Decades later, the snack bar crowd still pronounces the first name of their Kenyan friend "Bear-ick" — with the accent on the first syllable. That is how he referred to himself, they said. In Hawai'i at least, they never heard him call himself "Buh-rock," with the accent on the second syllable, the pronunciation his son would adopt in his adult life. Perhaps it was a minor accommodation to Westernization.

stereotypes all sides

A few months into Obama's first semester, another newspaper story about him focused on his conclusions about racial attitudes on the island. "No one seems to be conscious of color," he said. But there were stereotypes to shatter on both sides — his of Hawai'i and Hawai'i's of Africa. "When I first came here, I expected to find a lot of Hawaiians all dressed in native clothing and I expected native dancing and that sort of thing, but I was surprised to find such a mixture of races," he said. When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: "Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion (an uprising against the British) and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they've improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars."

Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya.

Events in Africa intrigued Obama's fellow students and were part of the movable discussion, which often went from the university snack bar over to the Stardust Lounge or George's Inn, where pitchers of beer cost two bucks, and then on to Gilpin's apartment nearby. As they listened to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on the hi-fi, Obama spoke about Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen. "He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism," Neil Abercrombie said. "And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya's first post-colonial leader) was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We'd get into it that deeply."

Late in the summer of 1960, at the start of his second year and the beginning of her first, Obama and Stanley Ann Dunham met in a beginning Russian class. He was 25; she was not yet 18. She called him "Bear-ick," too. He called her Anna. Decades later, Ann would tell her son a story about their first date that he then depicted in his memoir "Dreams From My Father." "He asked me to meet him in front of the university library at one. I got there and he hadn't arrived, but I figured I'd give him a few minutes. It was a nice day, so I laid out on one of the benches, and before I knew it I had fallen asleep. An hour later, he showed up with a couple of friends. I woke up and three of them were standing over me and I heard him saying, serious as can be ... 'You see gentlemen, I told you she was a fine girl, and that she would wait for me.' "

Recounting the scene long after the fact, knowing how the relationship would end, the son was at his most lyrical. "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father's attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents' lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs, but it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that's how any love begins." This was the prelude to the beginning of the second Barack Obama, the hapa, and in the narrative he creates about his mother, here, as always after, he writes with the sensibility not so much of a son as of an acute if sympathetic psychologist.

lied about divorce

During his time in Hawai'i, the elder Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life. He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie. While the scene in the book includes two friends who were with him when he arrived late for a first date with Ann, few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama. Neil Abercrombie did remember her appearing at some of the weekend gatherings. Obama was such a strong personality, he said, that he could see how the young woman was awed and overwhelmed by him.

"She was a girl, and what I mean by that is she was only 17 and 18, just out of high school. And he brought her at different times. She mostly observed because she was a kid. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad-student types." Before the end of her first semester, Ann learned she was pregnant. The jolt that most parents might feel at such news from a teenage daughter was intensified for the Dunhams by the fact that the father was Obama. Madelyn Dunham has declined requests for interviews this year, but a few years ago she talked to the Chicago Tribune's David Mendell, who was researching his biography, "Obama: From Promise to Power."

Dunham, known for her practicality and skepticism in a family of dreamers, told Mendell that Stanley Ann had always been stubborn and nonconformist, and often did startling things, but none were more stubborn or surprising than her relationship with Obama. When Mendell pressed her about Obama, she said she did not trust the stories the Kenyan told. Prodding further, the interviewer said that Obama had "a great deal of charm" and that his father had been a medicine man. "She raised her eyebrows and nodded to herself," Mendell wrote of Madelyn. "'He was ...' she said with a long pause, 'strange.' She lingered on the a to emphasize 'straaaaaange.'"

On Feb. 2, 1961, against Madelyn's hopes, and against the desires of Obama's father back in Kenya, Ann and Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got married. No guests, not even family members, were there. Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was born six months later in Honolulu. Ann dropped out of school to take care of him. Her husband finished his degree, graduating in June 1962, after three years in Hawai'i, as a Phi Beta Kappa straight-A student. Then, before the month was out, he took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and child. He did not return for 10 years, and then only briefly. (SITE NOTE: There is a disparity here that Ann Dunham went to Washington state and enrolled in the University of Washington during the Autumn semester of 1961 -- and returned in 1962 after Obama left returning to the UH in the Spring semester of 1963.)

leaves for mainland

A newspaper story on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of Mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son. Many years later, Barack Jr., then in high school, found a clipping of the article in a family stash of birth certificates and old vaccination forms. Why wasn't his name there, or his mother's? He wondered, he later wrote, "whether the omission caused a fight between my parents."

On his way east, Obama stopped in San Francisco and went to dinner at the Blue Fox in the financial district with Hal Abercrombie, who had moved to the city with his wife, Shirley. Abercrombie would never forget that dinner; he thought it showed the worst side of his old friend, a combination of anger and arrogance that frightened him. Shirley was a blonde with a high bouffant hairdo, and when she showed up at the side of Hal and Barack, the maitre d' took them to the most obscure table in the restaurant. Obama interpreted this as a racial slight. When the waiter arrived, Obama tore into him, shouting that he was an important person on his way to Harvard and would not tolerate such treatment, Abercrombie recalled.

"He was berating the guy and condescending every time the waiter came to our table. There was a superiority and an arrogance about it that I didn't like." In the family lore, Obama was accepted into graduate school at the New School in New York and at Harvard, and if he had chosen the New School there would have been enough scholarship money for his wife and son to come along. However, the story goes, he opted for Harvard because of the world-class academic credentials a Crimson degree would bring.

But there is an unresolved part of the story: Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge? Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression. Susan Botkin, Maxine Box and John W. Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called. "She was on her way from her mother's house to Boston to be with her husband," Botkin recalled. "(She said) he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him. And I was intrigued with who she was and what she was doing. Stanley was an intense person ... but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother's living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies. She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her. She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston." But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawai'i. (SITE NOTE: The disparity in the stories lead us to believe that Ann Dunham in August 1961 -- shortly after Obama's birth -- was in Washington state to enroll in the University of Washington and concocted the stories to give her a semblance of a married life -- and legitimacy to her son.) (Source: David Maraniss, Washington Post.)

---

Obama not quite his father's son

Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2008

Friends and family note the similarities between the senator and his Kenyan father -- both idealistic, charismatic, eloquent and ambitious. But in many ways, he's 'quite the opposite.'

NAIROBI, Kenya - During an emotion-packed visit to his father's homeland in 2006, Sen. Barack Obama took time from family reunions and official visits to chastise Kenya's government for failing to stem corruption and tribalism, irking his hosts in the process. It wasn't the first time an Obama had taken Kenya's elite to task. Forty years earlier, a rising star named Barack Obama -- tall, elegant and impeccably dressed -- attacked the nation's post-independence government, accusing leaders of betraying their ideals and replicating the nepotism of departing colonialists. "It must be something in our family," observed a smiling Said Obama, younger brother of Obama Sr.

Although the lives of father and son scarcely intersected beyond a few letters and a 1971 visit in Hawaii when the younger Obama was 10, friends and family see similarities in the men's charisma and eloquence, even if their lives took dramatically different turns. Both achieved success at a young age. Both advocated change. And both displayed a self-confidence that friends described as bordering on cocky. "The father was full of life, ebullient and arrogant, but not unpleasantly so," recalled Philip Ochieng, a former drinking buddy of Obama Sr. and veteran Kenyan journalist. "But in many ways, the son is quite the opposite. He has self-control. The ambition is controlled. And he has a more sober mind."

The elder Obama was one of Kenya's most promising sons, rising from the goat pastures of a western village to the study halls of Harvard, eventually taking a coveted spot among the nation's post-colonial government leaders. He often introduced himself as "Dr. Obama," though there is no record of him completing a doctorate. He was a heavy drinker, ordering straight scotch by the "double double," or four shots at a time. Beer, he said, was a "child's drink."

He is best remembered for his booming baritone, which intimidated opponents and charmed women, friends said. One of those was Ann Dunham, who met Obama Sr. while both were studying at the University of Hawaii in 1959. They separated a few years later when Obama got a scholarship to Harvard, leaving Dunham to raise their son, Barack Jr.

Sen. Obama has spoken often of the effect of his father's abandonment. At first, he said, it pushed him to try to live up to the expectations of an absent, almost-mythical figure. Later, as he learned the details of his father's troubled life, he said that it propelled him to try to make up for Obama Sr.'s shortcomings. "He was a brilliant guy," Obama told biographer David Mendell, "but in so many ways his life was a mess."

Despite his ambition and talent, the elder Obama's career disintegrated amid external forces and personal weaknesses, including the alcohol problem, which led to a string of car accidents. A crash in 1982 took his life. Friends and family say his career imploded in part because of his brash personality and an idealistic belief, nurtured in America, that the best ideas and smartest people would always rise to the top. Confronted with the reality of corruption and cronyism in Kenya, Obama sank into disillusionment and despair. "To that extent, he was naive," said his friend Peter Aringo, a longtime member of parliament from Obama's home village. "He thought he could fight the system from the outside. He thought he could bring it down." Instead, it brought him down.

From a young age, Obama was the village's pride. His father was a respected chieftain, known as one of the first in his Lake Victoria village to befriend British colonialists, learn English and adopt their style of dress. (As a boy, upon hearing stories that his grandfather was a village chief, Sen. Obama envisioned his father as an African prince, he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, "Dreams From My Father.") After excelling in school, Obama Sr. moved to Nairobi, the capital, where he caught the eye of Tom Mboya, one of Kenya's founding fathers. Mboya selected Obama and about 80 other students to send on scholarships to U.S. universities in a 1959 "airlift" in anticipation of Kenya's independence in 1963. The students included Wangari Maathai, who became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. "There was so much excitement during that time," recalled Mboya's widow, Pamela, one of those on the trip. "We were going to the U.S. to be educated so we could come back and take over, and that's exactly what we did."

In Hawaii, Obama wooed and married Dunham, the progressive only child of Kansas parents. The interracial relationship raised alarm on both sides of the family; their son was born Aug. 4, 1961. Obama Sr. left Dunham and Barack Jr. after winning a graduate scholarship to Harvard; he enrolled in September 1962, records show. Family members say Obama Sr. could not afford to take his new family but felt he could not pass up the chance to attend one of America's best universities. In addition, Obama apparently failed to tell Dunham that he'd never divorced his first wife in Kenya, who was raising their two children. He and Dunham divorced in 1964.

At Harvard, he began another relationship, with schoolteacher Ruth Nidesand, who followed him to Kenya. Friends said Obama's relationships with women were a product of the time and his culture. "In America, that might be a shocking thing, but in Africa it was not that unusual," said former Ugandan Foreign Minister Olara Otunnu, who knew Obama Sr. in the late 1970s.

In a 2006 speech in Nairobi, Sen. Obama speculated that his father was unable to reconcile his African roots with the Western ideals he'd come to respect. "He related to women as his father had, expecting them to obey him no matter what he did," he said.

At Harvard, Obama Sr. thrived in the academic setting, earning a master's degree in economics with a focus on econometrics, a mathematics-based specialty used in forecasting. He became a fixture in bars in Cambridge, Mass., chain-smoking in his signature black-rimmed glasses. Nearly 30 years later, his son would become the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.

The elder Obama returned to Kenya full of hope and expectation, but problems emerged in the government almost immediately as the nation's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, began rewarding members of his Kikuyu tribe with land tracts, loans and plum jobs. For Kenyans schooled during the United States' 1960s civil rights movement and expecting the birth of a new Africa, coming home was difficult. "In developing countries, it is always the brightest people who suffer the most," said Fredrick Okatcha, a professor at Kenyatta University who knew Obama Sr. in the U.S. "They are regarded as rebels."

Obama Sr., who got a job as a government economist, had little patience for politics or aptitude for diplomacy, publicly contradicting superiors, belittling co-workers and exposing fraud. Once when a senior official proudly proclaimed a government-funded highway had been completed, Obama interrupted to say he'd visited the area and work had not begun. "He had no fear," Otunnu said. In academic journals, Obama lambasted government policies in impassioned essays. Government bosses labeled him a troublemaker.

In addition, Obama was from the rival Luo tribe, complicating matters. As President Kenyatta consolidated his power, Luo leaders were shuffled aside. Mboya, Obama's mentor and a fellow Luo, was assassinated in 1969. Obama's worsening drinking binges strained his career and marriage. "He would pass out on the doorstep," said Leo Odera Omolo, a former drinking buddy and friend of the family. "Ruth would complain he's getting out of hand." The couple divorced in the early 1970s.

He was injured in several alcohol-related car accidents, including one in 1965 that killed a passenger, a recently engaged postal worker who was a friend from Obama's hometown. "Barack never really recovered from that," Omolo said. The accidents also tarnished Obama's reputation. "Because he was so highly educated, people treated him like a king. Now, they were gossiping for the first time about his behavior."

In 1971, Obama visited Hawaii to see his son. In his memoir, the senator describes a tense, monthlong visit during which his father taught him some African dance moves, impressed his classmates and squabbled with his mother one night over whether their son should study, as his father wanted, or watch a holiday airing of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"

The father returned to Kenya brimming with pride and told friends that he wanted to bring his son to the country. "He showed me pictures and said, 'Look, my son is a bull now,' " Omolo said.

But his career descent accelerated, culminating in his losing an important promotion, Aringo said. That sparked years of on-again, off-again stints at various government ministries. Sometimes he'd be fired, but usually he quit in disgust. "He felt the whole system was corrupt," Aringo said. "He would call and say, 'I can't stand it anymore. Let's get a drink.' "

Friends began to keep their distance. Walgio Orwa, a professor at Great Lakes University in Kisumu, said the man he first met in the United States when both were students was unrecognizable when Orwa later saw him in the 1970s. "Before, he was everyone's role model," Orwa said. "With that big beautiful voice, we all wanted to be like him. Later, everybody was asking what happened." On Nov. 24, 1982, as he drove home about 11 p.m., Obama's car ran off the road and crashed, according to the Nairobi Times. He was 46, the same age at which his son became the first African American to clinch a major U.S. party's presidential nomination. (Source: Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times.)

Barack Obama - The Unauthorized Biography of a Marxist -

Part 3 - The Hawaii Years, Barack Obama Sr

In 1935 just before Hitler took power in Germany and just before World War II would begin in Europe, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was born into the Lou Tribe, on the banks of Lake Victoria, Nyang-oma Kogelo in Kenya, East Africa. As a young man Obama was raised as a Muslim, however, as he developed a Marxist philosophy he renounced Islam for Athiesm. (Wikipedia: Obama Sr..)

In the early 1950's the Mau-Mau rebellion began in Kenya. The Rebellion started within the Kikikuyu Tribe. The Mau - Mau's wanted independance from Britian and a Kenya that was free of Whites. The first recorded meetings of the rebellions leaders are now reported as having taken place in August 1951. The Rellions goal; end British Rule in Kenya and drive out or kill all white settlers in Kenya. http://africanhistory.about.com/od/kenya/a/MauMauTimeline.htm The Mau-Mau imposed an "oath" on black Kenyans, those who refused to take the oath were slaughtered. Intitiation into the Mau-Mau could include the murder of Whites settlers.

A Brief History Of The Mau-Mau Rebellion & Time Line Of Obama Sr's Life

• 24th August 1952 - The Kenyan government imposes a curfew in three districts on the outskirts of Nairobi where gangs of arsonists, believed to be members of the Mau Mau, have been setting fire to homes of Africans who refuse to take the Mau Mau oath. (These sites also provide a broader historical review of the Mau-Mau Rebellion) (African history, Mau-Mau, History.com, Wikinfo: Mau Mau, and Jonathan Forney.)
  
  
• 7th October 1952 - Senior Chief Waruhui is assassinated in Kenya — he is speared to death in broad daylight on a main road on the outskirts of Nairobi. He had recently spoken out against increasing Mau Mau aggression against colonial rule. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 19th October 1952 - The British government announces that it will send troops to Kenya to help the fight against the Mau Mau. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 21st October 1952 - With the imminent arrival of British troops, the Kenyan government declares a state of emergency following a month of increasing hostility. Over 40 people have been murdered in Nairobi in the last four weeks and the Mau Mau, officially declared terrorists, have acquired firearms to use along with the more traditional pangas or machettes. As part of the overall clamp down Jomo Kenyatta, president of the Kenya African Union, is arrested for alleged Mau Mau involvement. Kenyatta would later visit the Soviet Union and seek support for his Marxist endeavors. While there can be no doubt that Kenyatta and the Mau-Mau's were influenced by Soviet Marxism, the support the Mau-Mau's received from the Soviets was largely verbal. Very little in the way of armaments or money were forth coming from Moscow. http://www.jmss.org/2006/2006spring/articles/MauMau.pdf Moscow was busy consolidating its possessions behind the Iron Curtain. The Communists, however, have a different view of this history. http://amadlandawonye.wikispaces.com/1989,+Furedi,+Mau+Mau,+Consolidation+of+Reaction
  
  
• 30th October 1952 - British troops are involved in the arrest of over 500 suspected Mau Mau activists. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 14th October 1952 - Thirty-four schools in Kikuyu tribal areas are closed in the continuing clamp down on Mau Mau activists. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 18th November 1952 - Jomo Kenyatta, president of the Kenya African Union and the country's leading nationalist leader is charged with managing the Mau Mau terrorist society in Kenya. He is flown to a remote district station, Kapenguria, which reportedly has no telephone or rail communications with the rest of Kenya, and is being held there incommunicado. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 25th November 1952 - The Mau Mau declare open rebellion against British rule in Kenya. British forces respond by arresting over 2000 Kikuyu suspected of Mau Mau membership. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  THE REBELLION ESCALATES
  
  
• 18th January 1953 - Governor-general Sir Evelyn Baring imposes the death penalty for anyone who administers the Mau Mau oath - the oath is often forced upon Kikuyu tribesmen at the point of a knife, and calls for the individual's death if he fails to kill a European farmer when ordered. Refusal to take the "blood oath" or failure to kill Europeans when ordered results in immediate execution by the Mau-Mau. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 26th January 1953 - Panic has spread through Europeans in Kenya after the slaying of a white settler farmer and his family. Settler groups, displeased with the government's response to the increasing Mau Mau threat have created their own Commando Units to deal with the threat. Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor-general of Kenya has announced that a new offensive is to begin under the command of Major-general William Hinde. Amongst those speaking out against the Mau Mau threat and the government's inaction is Elspeth Huxley, author (who wrote The Flame Trees of Thika in 1959), who in a recent newspaper article compares Jomo Kenyatta to Hitler. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• January 1953 - Barack Obama, Sr. marries his first wife, Kezia. In some press reports Obama's marriage to Kezia is noted as having occurred in 1957. Obama was married to his first wife when he was 18. Obama was born in 1935, he was 25 years old when he met Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii in 1960. The tribal marriage to Kezia was sealed with a dowery payment of 14 cattle. (Wikipedia: Obama Sr. and Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• 1st April 1953 - British troops kill twenty-four Mau Mau suspects and capture an additional thirty-six during deployments in the Kenyan highlands. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 8th April 1953 - Jomo Kenyatta, known to his followers as Burning the Spear, is sentenced to seven years hard labour along with five other Kikuyu currently detained at Kapenguria. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 17th April 1953 - An additional 1000 Mau Mau suspects have been arrested over the past week around the capital Nairobi. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 3rd May 1953 - Nineteen Kikuyu members of the Home Guard are murdered by the Mau Mau. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 5th March 1953 - Joseph Stalin dies.
  
  
• 29th May 1953 - Kikuyu tribal lands are to be cordoned off from the rest of Kenya to restrict movement of potential Mau Mau terrorists. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• July 1953 - Another 100 Mau Mau suspects have been killed during British patrols in Kikuyu tribal lands. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 15th January 1954 - General China, the second in command of the Mau Mau's military efforts is wounded and captured by British troops. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 9th March 1954 - Two more Mau Mau leaders have been secured: General Katanga is captured and General Tanganyika surrenders to British authority. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• March 1954 - The great British plan to end the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya is presented to the country's legislature — General China, captured in January, is to write to the other terrorist leaders suggesting that nothing further can be gained from the conflict and that they should surrender themselves to British troops waiting in the Aberdare foothills. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 11th April 1954 - British authorities in Kenya admit that the 'General China operation' revealed previously to the Kenyan legislature has failed. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 24th April 1954 - Over 40,000 Kikuyu tribesmen are arrested by British forces, including 5000 Imperial troops and 1000 Policemen, during widespread, coordinated dawn raids. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 26th May 1954 - The Treetops Hotel, where Princess Elizabeth and her husband were staying when they heard of King George VI's death and her succession to the throne of England, is burnt down by Mau Mau activists. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 18th of January 1955 - The Governor-general of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, offers an amnesty to Mau Mau activists — the offer means that they will not face the death penalty, but may still be imprisoned for their crimes. European settlers are up in arms at the leniency of the offer. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 21st April 1955 - Unmoved by Kenya's Governor-general's, Sir Evelyn Baring, offer of amnesty the Mau Mau killings continue - On this day two English schoolboys are murdered. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• June 10th , 1955 - Britain withdraws the offer of amnesty to the Mau Mau. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• Barack Obama, Sr. turns 20 years old.
  
  
• October 1955 - Official reports suggest that over 70,000 Kikuyu tribesmen suspected of Mau Mau membership have been imprisoned, whilst over 13,000 people have been killed (by British troops and Mau Mau activists) over the last three years of the Mau Mau Rebellion. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 7th January 1956 - The official death toll for Mau Mau activists killed by British forces in Kenya since 1952 is put at 10,173. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 5th February 1956 - Nine Mau Mau activists escape from Mageta island prison camp in Lake Victoria. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• January 1958 - Barack Obama, Sr. has his first child, a son Roy, with his first wife Kezia. http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/obama3.html
  
  
• 25th - 27th May - 1958 - Tom Mboya, General Secretary of the Kenyan Federation of Labor organized a non-violent boycott of Nairobi's buses, cigarettes and beer. Mboya, like Obama, was a member of the Luo Tribe. (Mau Mau - page 9). Unlike Obama, Mboya was not a Pro-Soviet Marxist. Mboya was raised in Catholic Schools in Kenya and later attended Oxford University. Mboya's Socialist leanings were in line with those of the British Labour Party not the Soviet Communist Party. (Mboya.)
  
  
• Early 1959 - Tom Mboya traveled to the United States to persuade Americans to contribute to a scholarship fund and he was remarkably succesful in his efforts. Kenya, he said, needed Kenyans to be trained in America, so that when independence came they would be capable of replacing the British bureaucrats and administrators who ran the country. In the late 1950s, there were no universities in Kenya. Eight thousand Americans contributed to the fund, among them leaders of the black community including Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Jackie Robinson - the famous baseball player. According to the "Tom Mboya Archives" at Stanford University, Elizabeth Mooney Kirk, a literacy advocate, provided most of the financial support for Obama Sr.'s early years in the United States. (Christian Faith and Reason, Wikipedia: Obama Sr., Mboya, Washington Post.) Mboya's affinity for American and British educational systems offended both the Soviets and the Pro-Soviet forces within Kenya.
  
  
• July 1959 - 11 Mau Mau activists held at Hola Camp in Kenya are killed. British opposition political parties cite the deaths in their attacks on the UK government along with Britian's continuing role in Africa in upcoming British elections. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• August 1959 - Kezia, now three months pregnant with the Obama's second child, a daughter, Auma, says her farewell as Barack Obama, Sr. leaves to study at the University of Hawaii. Barack Obama Senior was one of eighty one Tom Mboya scholars that year, along with his friend Phil Obeigwe. The two would meet for a send off party in Mboya's Nairobi offices before flying off to America together. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• September 1959 - Barack Obama Senior begins studies at the University of Hawaii. (Washington Post , Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• 10th November 1959 - The British call an end to tthe state of emergency in Kenya. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 18th January 1960 - The Kenyan Constitutional Conference being held in London is boycotted by African nationalist leaders. In "Dreams", Barack Obama Jr. claims that, "The Kennedy's (President John F Kennedy) decided: 'We're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country." This account of Obama Sr's arrival in the US is entirely fiction. The Kennedy family involvement with the airlift did not begin until 1960, one year after Obama, Sr. had arrived and started studies at the University of Hawaii. (Wikipedia: Obama Sr. (Washington Post.) Obama repeated this falsehood in a 2007 civil rights speech in Selma, Alabama. These facts can be confirmed by documents in the Kennedy Library. (Speech During the Selma speech Obama went on to falsely embellish when he said, "There was something stirring across the country [then] because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Junior was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama." Bloggers have pointed out that the Selma bridge protest did not occurr until four years after Obama's birth. The Washington Post went on to confirm the falsehood. Barrack, if you have a claim on a connection to Selma, it isn't this one. (Washington Post)
  
  
• June 1960 - Barack Obama, Sr. finishes his first year of study at the University of Hawaii.
  
  
• June 1960 - Stanley Ann Dunham arrives in Hawaii with her family.
  
  
• September 1960 - Barack Obama, Sr and Stanley Ann Dunham meet in a Russian Language class at the University of Hawaii.
  
  
• November 1960 - Stanley Ann Dunham turns 18 and conceives Barrack Obama, Jr.
  
  
• February 21 1961 - It is claimed that Barack Hussien Obama, Sr. married Stanley Ann Dunham in Maui, Hawaii. There were no parents, friends or witnesses present. Writers have suggested that since no documentary evidence of a marriage has ever been produced, the failure to produce such evidence strongly suggests that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior were never legally married. http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/obama5.html The State of Hawaii maintains all marriage records in its Department of Vital Records, a part of the Department of Health. Its website states that any family member can request copies of valid marriage certificates by simply paying a small fee. Documentary evidence for marriages that took place in Hawaii in 1961 is readily available for any any inquiring family member. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• 18th April 1961 - In return for the release of Jomo Kenyatta, African nationalist leaders agree to take a role in Kenya's government. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• June 1961 - Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. finishes his second year of studies at University of Hawaii. Stanley Ann Dunham finishes her first year studies at the University of Hawaii.
  
  
• 14th July 1961 - Jomo Kenyatta, now aged 71, is finally released from house arrest in Gatundu, 22 kilometres outside Nairobi.
  
  
• August 4, 1961 - Barack Hussein Obama, Jr is born. It is reported that Stanley Ann Dunham drops out of school to take care of the child. This is incorrect. It has been reported that Barack Hussein Obama, Sr was not present at the birth. Stanley Ann's high school classmate Susan Blake had the impression that he was not there, and may not even have been on the island of Hawaii at the time, but no other contemporary has any recollections on this issue one way or the other. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• August 1961 - Obama biographer David Mendell reports that Barack Obama Senior rented a small one floor house near the campus of the University of Hawaii around this time, ostensibly as a home for his young wife and their new son. http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/obama6.html Other reports suggest this is incorrect.
  
  
• Late August 1961 - Stanley Ann (Dunham) Obama returns to Mercer Island, Washington and enrolls in classes at the University of Washington. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  The Obama Family Myth - as desribed in "Dreams" is that Barack Obama Sr. abandoned his wife and young child to study at Harvard. That Obama Sr. had a choice between Harvard and the New School, that he choose Harvard over the New School where scholarship money would have helped support the family. Again, this is myth. Ann Obama left Barack Obama Sr, in August 1961, weeks after Barack Jr's birth. Ann found funding for her own studies at the University of Washigton while Barack Sr completed his studies at the University of Hawaii. Ann did not attend Obama's graduation ceremonies and did not return to Hawaii until Obama had moved on to Harvard University.
  
  
• 21st August 1961 - All restrictions on Jomo Kenyatta's movements are lifted following his release from prison the previous month. September 1961 - Barack Obama, Sr. continues his studies at the University of Hawaii. Ann Obama continues her studies at the University of Washington. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• March 1962 - Ann Obama registers for additional courses at the University of Washington. http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/obama7.html May 1962 - According to the Tom Mboya archives at Stanford University, Elizabeth Mooney Kirk wrote to the Mboya Scholarship Fund asking it to fund Obama Senior's graduate studies at Harvard. No mention was made in the request of the need to fund the living expenses of a wife and son. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• June 1962 - Barack Hussein Obama, Sr graduates with honors (Phi Betta Kappa) after only 3 years of study at the University of Hawaii. Neither Ann Obama nor Barack Jr. attend the graduation. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• June 22, 1962 - The Honolulu Star-Bulletin noted Obama's departure from Hawaii for Harvard. http://www.christianfaithandreason.com/obama9.html June/September 1962 - Ann Obama moves back to Hawaii with Barack, Jr. She would resume her attendance at the University of Hawaii on an irregular part time basis. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• September 1962 - Barack Sr. begins studies at Harvard University. Obama would meet an American-born teacher named Ruth Nidesand who would return to Kenya with Obama after his graduation from Harvard. Obama and Nidestand would eventually marry, she would become his third wife. The couple would have two children before they divorced. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  
• 27th May 1963 - Jomo Kenyatta is elected prime minister in Kenya's first multi-racial elections. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• November 1962 - President Kennedy is killed in Dallas, Texas. 12th December 1963 - Kenya becomes the 34th African state to achieve independence. (Mau Mau Timeline.)
  
  
• 16th December 1963 - General amnesty is announced for Mau Mau activists. (Mau Mau Timeline.) January 1964 - Ann Obama files for divorce.
  
  
• Spring 1964 - Barack Obama graduates from Havard University with a Masters degree in Economics.(the degree was awarded in 1965) and Obama returned home to Kenya. Upon his return Obama was hired by Shell Oil Company, however he soon obtained a position as an Economist with the Kenyan Ministry of Transportation. Obama would then become the Senior Economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Finance working under the direction of Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. (Wikipedia: Obama Sr..)
  
  
• 12 December 1964 - Kenya is declared a republic. Jomo Kenyatta the first President. (Mau Mau Timeline.) BBC Newsreel - Kenya a Republic - President Kenyatta / Vice President Odinga
  
  
• July 1965 - Barack Obama, Sr. publishes an article titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism" in the East Africa Journal. The article was highly critical of the blueprint for national planning titled "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya". The blueprint had been prepared by Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. (East Africa.) Mboya a fellow member of the Luo Tribe had been Obama's mentor and protector. It had been Mboya, not the "Kennedy Family", who had provided Obama with his opportunity for education in the US. Myboya's publication, also called "Sessional Paper 10 on Harambee and the Principles of African Socialism" (adopted by Parliament in 1964) provided a model of government based on "African values" rather than Pro-Soviet Marxism. Mboya's paper was considered the equivalent of Kenya's "Economic Constitution" - Obama's criticism of Mboya and his the support for the Pro-Soviet Marxists in the KPU (Kenyan Peoples Union), was a career killer. (Amadlandawonye.) (The above post by Communist University online).
  
  
• Early 1967 - Support for the KPU had significantly diminished - KPU support was limited to a "handful of Luos". (Amadlandawonye.) ( 5th July 1969 - Tom Mboya was assassinated by Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njorogein in Nairobi. After mboya's death, Obama could not find another sponsor to help further his career. Obama's career in Government stagnated. Whether President Jomo Kenyatta was involved in the killing of Mboya or not has always been highly disputed. (Tom Mboya and Wikipedia: Mboya.)
  
  Some have suggested Mboya was killed because of alleged ties with the American CIA. (Afroarticles.)
  
  These allegations have been presented in works friendly to Marxist/Leninist ideology as a justification for Mboya's assassination. There is no credible evidence of a CIA tie with Mboya, however, pro Soviet Marxists strongly opposed Mboya's educational programs for young Kenyan's (Marxists or not). Moscow wanted to educate the young Kenyan's. (Kumekucha and Amadlandawonye.) ( Questions remain as to whether Mboya may have been killed by the last remenants of the Pro-Soviet Marxist KPU.
  
  Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng, who traveled with Obama to America as a fellow student remained Obama's friend for life. Ochieng, who referred to himself as Obama's, "old drinking buddy", recalled that Obama antagonized other officials with his "boasting," was "excessively fond of Scotch" and ended up in poverty "without a job." He got into frequent car accidents, one of which led to the amputation of both his legs. He was killed in another car accident, in 1982, at the age of 46." (Washington Post)
  
  In 'Dreams" Obama states that Obama Sr's career "was destroyed by a conflict with President Kenyatta", that assertion is not supported by the facts. (Wikipedia: Obama Sr..)
  
  While it is probable that President Kenyatta distrusted Obama Sr. on the basis of their different tribal affliations (the animosity between the Kikuyu and Luo tribes continues to this day) it is much more probable that Obama's betrayal of Tom Mboya and his radical Pro-Soviet Marxism made him an outcast in both the mainstream Luo Tribal Political System and in the greater Pan-African political movement fostered by Mboya and Kenyatta. Acknowledging this would be politically inconvenient for Candidate Obama.
  
  

  Part 4 A - Barack Obama - The Unauthorized Biography of a Marxist -
  
  Obama Sr and Stanley Ann Dunham - 11 Months in Hawaii?

  In early 1959 a 29 year-old Kenyan by the name of Tom Mboya came to the United States to raise scholarship moneys to educate young Kenyan's in the United States. Mboya had been educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Kenya. He also attended Holy Ghost College, Cambridge and Oxford Universities. (Mboya.) There were no Universities in 1959 Kenya. In 1959 Kenya was in the midst of the Mau-Mau Rebellion. (Mboya bio, Mau Mau, Afroarticles, Amadlandawonye, Wikipedia: Obama Sr. and Washington Post.)
  
  The Mau Mau Rebellion was partly a Nationalist movement, partly a Tribal Movement. 1959 Kenya had other concurrent independance movements. Some supported Western alliances while others had a Soviet-Marxist orientation. Mboya was certainly a Nationalist and his preference for Western educational practices cannot be disputed. Mboya's Socialist beliefs were similar to the British Labor Party's. Mboya's beliefs and his dynamic leadership would earn him the life long enmity of Kenya's Pro-Soviet Marxist groups. Ten years after this trip to the United States, Mboya would be assassinated by Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njorogein in Nairobi. Some would blame the act on Kenya's Presdient Kenyatta, others would blame the Pro-Soviet Marxists members of the Kenyan Peoples Union (KPU). Communist publications would place the blame (or justification for the killing) on a mythical connection between Mboya and the American CIA. Presdient Kenyatta ordered the arrest of KPU leader and Mboya's fellow Luo tribesman, Oginga Odinga. Odinga was never formally charged inregard to the killing. Oginga Odinga is the father of Raila Amollo Odinga the current Prime Minister of Kenya. Raila Odinga assumed office following the highly disputed 2007 Kenyan Presidential Elections. Independant Election observors declared Odinga's opponent the winner. Odinga seized power by force. Subsequent protests led to the deaths of thousands of Kenyans and the displacement of an additional 500,000. Odinga was educated in East Germany in 1960. East Germany was a Communist Block country at the time. Afroarticles, Amadlandawonye, Kumekucha, Wikipedia: Obama Sr., Tom Mboya, Mboya bio, Sunday Vision, Washington Post, Odinga, Wikipedia: Clashes in Kenya and Kenya election.)
  
  Barack Obama Sr. was not only a fellow Luo Tribesman, he was Oginga Odinga brother in law. This has been confirmed by Prime Minister Raila Odinga, Oginga Odinga's son, who states that Obama, Sr is his "maternal uncle". http://iperceive.net/the-odinga-obama-cousin-thing/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1574963/I%27m-Barack-Obama%27s-cousin-says-Raila-Odinga.html Odinga's BBC Radio interview, where he makes this claim is here: (BBC.)
  
  Pictorial History - 2007 Kenyan Election Violence Here: Washington Post.)
  
  Again, Mboya came to the United States in 1959 with the intent of rasing scholarship money to educate the next generation of Kenyan leaders in the United States. Mboya rejected the extreme violence of the Mau-Mau Rebellion in favor of a non-violent form of resistance. Mboya choose the path of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., not the path of Lenin and Stalin. Mboya, the General Secretary of the Kenyan Federation of Labor, received international acclaim in May 1958 when he organized a non-violent boycott of Nairobi's buses, cigarettes and beer. The boycott has been compared to Ghandi's salt march/boycott in 1930's India (March 1930). Mboya has been compared to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. (Transnational, Kamat, Mau Mau, Tom Mboya, Sunday Vision.)
  
  Mboya's attempts to persuade Americans to contribute to his scholarship fund were remarkably succesful. Kenya, he said, needed Kenyans to be trained in America, so that when independence came they would be capable of replacing the British bureaucrats and administrators who ran the country. Eight thousand Americans contributed to the fund, including some very famous leaders of the black community - those contributors included Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Jackie Robinson. (Christian Faith and Reason, Wikipedia: Obama Sr., Mboya bio, Washington Post.)
  
  In late August 1959, Barack Obama, Sr. said farewell to his wife Kezia at Nairobi Airport and departed to begin his educational studies as one of 81 Tom Mboya Scholarship recipients. Obama would leave his 18 month old son, Roy, behind. Kezia was 3 months pregnant with their second child, a daughter Auma. (Christian Faith and Reason and Washington Post.)
  
  VIDEO: WBBM TV CHICAGO REPORTS: OBAMA CAMPAIGNS FOR ODINGA DURING 2006 SENATE TRIP TO KENYA
  
  VIDEO: REUTERS REPORTS - ODINGA CLAIMS TO BE OBAMA COUSIN
  
  VIDEO: Barack Obama Jr. Campaigns for Odinga In Kenya At Us Taxpayer Expense - Senate Fact Finding Trip
  
  VIDEO: Violence Following Kenyan Election
  
  In his autobiography, "Dreams of My Father", Barack Obama Jr. claims that, "The Kennedy's (President John F Kennedy's family) decided: 'We're going to do an airlift. We're going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is. This young man named Barack Obama [Sr.] got one of those tickets and came over to this country." This account of Obama Sr's arrival in the US is ficticious. The Kennedy family involvement with the airlift did not begin until 1960, one year after Obama, Sr. had arrived and started studies at the University of Hawaii. The Kennedy involvement, while laudable, was limited to arranging transportation for subsequent students. At no time did the Kennedy family provide scholarships - that money being raised through Tom Mboya's efforts. Myboya did, in fact, become a confidant of President Kennedy. (Luo American, Wikipedia: Obama Sr., Washington Post.)
  
  Obama repeated this falsehood in a 2007 civil rights speech in Selma, Alabama. The true facts can be confirmed by documents in the Kennedy Library and other first hand sources. (African grant, Luo American.)
  
  During the Selma speech Obama went on to falsely embellish the story when he said, "There was something stirring across the country [then] because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Junior was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama." Bloggers have pointed out that the Selma bridge protest did not occurr until four years after Obama's birth. The Washington Post went on to confirm that the Bloggers were correct. (Washington Post and .)
  
  VIDEO: Odinga Supporters Violence In Kenya
  
  In September 1959 Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. begins his studies at the University of Hawaii. Eleven months later, Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is born.
  
  By the time Obama arrived in Hawaii in 1959, Frank Marshall Davis had been working for Marxist-Soviet causes in Hawaii for 11 years. (Source: McCauley World, Wikipedia; Friends Univ, Wikipedia: Davis, Litencyc.com, Hawaii.edu: Davis, Hawaii.edu: Speech, Hawaii.edu: Davis, UHWO, Hawaii.edu: Davis, USA Survival at page 15. Hawaii.edu: Frankblog, and Star Bulletin.)
  
  In September 1960 Obama, Sr. began his second year at the University of Hawaii. He met a young, 17-year-old, Stanley Ann Dunham in his Russian language class. Ann, as she would later be called, had arrived in Hawaii in June 1960. Frank Marshall Davis was a friend of Ann's family. Davis was known to drink and smoke marijuana (or "choom" in the local vernacular) with Ann's father and namesake, Stanley Dunham. (London Telegraph.)
  
  

  PART 4B -- CONTINUED

  The Washington Post reported that when Barack Obama, Sr. first arrived in Hawaii he was interviewed by the Hawain Press, the reporter Hirozawa relays Obama's comments, "he would study business administration and wanted to return to Kenya to help with its transition from tribal customs to a modern economy." He was concerned, he said, about his generation's disorientation as Kenyans rejected old ways yet struggled with "westernization"." (Washington Post.) Obama did not mention his opposition to the "Westernization" of Kenya in the interview - Obama was, in fact, a Marxist.
  
  The Washington Post went on to report that, "Taking a room at the Charles H. Atherton branch of the YMCA, not far from campus, Obama quickly adapted to the rhythms of student life. One of his frequent hangouts was the snack bar in an old Army-barracks-style building near his business classes. It was there that he met the Abercrombie brothers, first Neil and then Hal, who had escaped the darkness of Buffalo to attend graduate school in Honolulu, and their friends Peter Gilpin, Chet Gorman and Pake Zane. They were antiestablishment intellectuals, experimenters, outsiders, somewhere between beatniks and hippies, and they loved to talk and drink coffee and beer. Neil Abercrombie went on to become a Democratic Congressman from Honolulu, Hawaii. (Washington Post.)
  
  The Washington Post went on to elaborate on Obama's Press interview with Hirozawa, "When asked if people questioned him about Kenya, he laughed and said: "Oh, yes. People are very interested in the Mau Mau rebellion [a long-standing uprising against the British] and they ask about race relations in Kenya. I tell them they've improved since the rebellion but are not perfect. They also ask if Kenya is ready for self-government. Some others ask me such questions as how many wives each man has back home, what we eat, how I dress at home, how we live, whether we have cars." He [Obama] did not answer those questions in the story. Nor, on one matter, was he forthcoming with his friends at the university. Neither newspaper readers nor his fellow students knew that he had left a son and a pregnant wife back in Kenya. (Washington Post.)
  
  Obama "pontificated on Kenya and nationalism and colonialism and his fears about what might happen." "He was very concerned that tribalism would trump nationalism," Neil Abercrombie said. "And that people like himself would not be properly recognized, would not be fully utilized, and there would be discrimination and prejudice. Jomo Kenyatta [Kenya's first post-colonial leader] was a Kikuyu, and Barack and Mboya were Luo, and Kikuyu were going to run things. We'd get into it, that deeply" said Abercrombie. (Washington Post.)
  
  This writer won't speculate on whether Abercrombie's memory is faulty, or the Washington Post's writers notes were in accuate, however, the historical facts are this ….. When Obama Sr. arrived in Hawaii in June 1959, future President Kenyatta was in jail in Kenya. This was a matter of discusssion in local and Internation Press. The Bristish did not call and end to the "State of Emergency" in Kenya until November 1959. Kenyatta was not released from jail in Kenya until July 1961, after Obama Sr. had finished his second year of studies in Hawaii. In June 1962 Barack Obama Sr finisjed his studies at the University of Hawaii, with honors and according to a report in the Honolulu-Star-Bulletin, departed Hawaii for Harvard on June 22, 1962. It wasn't until May 1963 before Jomo Kenyatta would be elected the first President of Kenya, 11 months after Obama Sr had left Hawaii. In December 1963 Kenya was granted independence. In the spring of 1964 Obama Sr completed his Masters degree at Harvard and returned home to Kenya. In December 1964 Kenya becomes a Republic. While Abercrobie and Obama may have discussed Kenya, the discussion as described, did not place in the time frame reported. (Washington Post.)
  
  The Washington Post goes on to report, "During his time in Hawaii, the elder Obama seemed adept at walling off various aspects of his life." The Washington Post goes on to repeat the Obama Jr claim in "Dreams" that, "He eventually told Ann about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced, which she would discover years later was a lie", the Post closed with these comments, "few members of the snack bar crowd remember the Obama-Dunham relationship. Hal Abercrombie said he never saw them together. Pake Zane, who left the island for a spell in 1961, could not recall Ann from those days but had precise memories of Obama"…. " (Washington Post.)
  
  Neil Abercrombie did remember her appearing at some of the weekend gatherings. Obama was such a strong personality, he said, that he could see how the young woman was awed and overwhelmed by him. "She was a girl, and what I mean by that is she was only 17 and 18, just out of high school. And he brought her at different times. She mostly observed because she was a kid. Everybody there was pretty high-powered grad-student types." Ann's friends on Mercer Island found Ann's involvement with the group a, "logical extension of long coffeehouse sessions in Seattle and the teachings of Wichterman and Foubert. The forum now involved graduate students from the University of Hawaii. They spent weekends listening to jazz, drinking beer and debating politics and world affairs." (Washington Post and Time Magazine.)
  
  Clearly, Neil Abercrombie's recollections are coloured by the vision he had as a 25 year-old. No other individual has described Stanley Ann Dunham Obama in this manner - no one. The role of "observor" is in direct contradiction to all other descriptions of Ann. It would seem, based on all of the descriptions given of Ann, that if she were acting as an observor, it was done so intentionally and not due to being in awe of the upper classman. Possibly, the comments reflect Abercrombie's latent sexism. After all, these upperclassman, with the exception of Obama Sr, were only psuedo intellectual Marxists. At home, Ann could converse with the real deal, Frank Marshall Davis. With Frank Marshall Davis as a family friend and visitor, I doubt that Ann Dunham Obama, was overly awed by this wannabe college clique. The local college football star is just a bit less impressive when Eli or Payton Manning are regular dinner guests at your home. Why didn't the clique ever go to Ann's home, a large house on the very fashionable Kamehameha Blvd..
  
  Again, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham Obama, met in a Russian language class in September 1960. (Time Magazine.)
  
  In 1960, thirty thousand college students were enrolled in Russian Language courses across the United States. The University of Hawaii was one of the first to offer the instruction. The basic Russian class was taught that year by one of the two Russian Language instructors on staff, Ella Wiswell or Isabelle Tripianky. The teachers were similar in both background and teaching style. Wiswell was a Russian emigre and talented linguist who for a while had been the only University of Hawaii Russian Language faculty member. Tripianky was also a Russian emigre, who like Wiswell had studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. The class was held in old Hawaii Hall, and numbered about two dozen students in all, many filled with the dewy eyed idealism of American Cold Warriors who hoped to work as intelligence analysts for the CIA. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Other students enrolled in the Language course for a variety of reasons, including their support of the Soviet Union. While just a matter of coincidence, it was at about this time that a young man, who had previously studies Russian in just such a course while serving in the US Marines, who later served at a "listening post" in Japan where he intercepted Soviet Military transmissions and intrepreted them for the US Government, was returning from the Soviet Union where he had gone to live after renouncing his American citizenship. That young man would become famous in a few short years, 1963 Dallas, Texas, to be exact. Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963.
  
  Obama's acquaintences in Hawaii rationalize his study of Russian in this manner, "Barack Obama Senior's interest in the class seemed to make far more sense. As a future member of the Kenyan government's technocratic elite, the ability to speak both English and Russian, the languages of the two countries vying for influence and control over his native land would certainly give him a leg up in the competition among returning scholars for plum jobs back home." (Christian Faith and Reason)
  
  This rationale would prove to only partially correct. English was a common language in Kenya but Russian would serve Obama's intended course of political activity to a higher degree. Obama was a Pro-Soviet Marxist.
  
  There is scant evidence of the relationship between Barack Obama and Ann Dunham. Obama's friends have little or no memory of her. Obama relates two stories, a first date where Obama Sr was late and a dinner at the Dunham home where his maternal Grandparents failed to notice their daughter holding her "friends hand". I chuckle when I read this second reference, a clear Obama fabrication - as Obama grows older he will realize how transparent this fabrication is to all men who have daughters, or to those daughters who now have daughters of their own - it is not remotely possible for a man's daughter to sit at the dinner table and "secretly" hold hands with her "friend" without both parents, particularly the father, not knowing exactly what is going on….. and it doesn't matter if the parents approve or disaprove of the young man.
  
  What is clear is this, based on the account in "Dreams", Ann Dunham met Barack Obama in September 1960. Two months later she was expecting Barack Obama Jr..
  
  Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior were said to have married before a justice of the peace on the island of Maui on February 2, 1961, by which time the now eighteen year old Ann's pregnancy was known to both of them. The wedding had no witnesses, not even her parents, and no record of the event has yet been found. The only evidence that suggests a February, 1961 date for the wedding was a document included in Ann Dunham's 1964 divorce proceedings against Obama Senior. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  The lack of any documentary evidence, when such evidence for legal marriages that took place in Hawaii during 1961 is readily available today to any inquiring family member, strongly suggests [to some] that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior were not ever legally married. The State of Hawaii maintains all marriage records in its Department of Vital Records, a part of the Department of Health. Its website states that any family member can request copies of valid marriage certificates by simply paying a small fee. If Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama were legally married on February 2, 1961, the marriage certificate is maintained by the Hawaii Department of Vital Records, and a copy of it can be made available to any blood relative easily. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961 at 7:52 PM in Honolulu, Hawaii. Stanley Ann Dunham was listed as the maiden name of the mother and Barack Obama was listed as the name of the father in the document put forward that appears to be a State of Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth. The document was filed on August 8, 1961. There is no indication that Barack Obama Senior was present at the birth of his third child. Stanley Ann's high school classmate Susan Blake had the impression that he was not there, and may not even have been on the island of Hawaii at the time, but no other contemporary has any recollections on this issue one way or the other. (Christian Faith and Reason.) (SITE NOTE: We are NOT certain what is on the birth CERTIFICATE (vault copy) because Obama has refused to release it. It is possible that Obama was actually born without a father listed -- and it was legally entered in 1971. There are also other possibilities and this item is left open until the birth certificate is revealed.)
  
  Strangely, there is no documentation that would support the fact that Barack Obama and Ann Dunham Obama ever cohabitated. True, one not need cohabitate to impregnate, but, the failure to cohabitate, even after the pregnancy & marriage, certainly raises questions in this writer's mind about the legitimacy of the Obama account in "Dreams".
  
  Obama biographer David Mendell reports that after the birth of Barack Jr., in late August or early September, Barack Obama Senior rented a small one floor house near the campus of the University of Hawaii, ostensibly as a home for his young wife and their new son. It's not clear how much time, if any, the Obama family spent there together, living under the same roof. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Prior to this time Obama had continued to live at the YMCA, while Ann Obama continued to live with her parents. (SITE NOTE: Public records show that Obama resided at a residence in Kaimuki at the same time that Obama's birth announcement showed that he resided at 6085 Kalaniana'ole Hwy on the other side of the island.)
  
  Stanley Ann Dunham arrived in Hawaii in June 1960. Within 11 months she met both Frank Marshall Davis and Barack Obama, conceived Barack Obama Jr and left Hawaii to return to Mercer Island with her infant son but without her "husband". (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Blake recalls that Dunham, who was calling herself Ann Obama at the time, visited her at her house in Mercer Island during the last week of August, 1961. She left Honolulu just as soon she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby. He was just 3 weeks old. She had sent a postcard that she would be in town, and was staying with a friend of her mother's. She drove out to my house in her mother?s friend's car, and we spent the entire day together. She was very excited about her new life, and her husband. She was nuts about him, crazy in love. I was under the impression that he had left Honolulu before Barack's birth, that he had gone to Harvard already for his studies, and that Ann was on her way to join him there. She planned on raising her son, getting a job, and attending school, she told me. Her husband would head back to Kenya after graduating from Harvard to join the newly formed government, and she would take her place beside him. It was all very exciting, a dramatic change in her life in the one year since she had graduated from high school." (Washington Post and Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Another high school classmate, Maxine Box, recalls visiting with Stanley Ann Dunham and her new born baby a week or two later, in early September 1961. I remember it was a sunny day, and I visited Stanley at the house of the friend she was staying with on Mercer Island. We talked for about an hour, mostly about her new baby, Barack Obama Junior. I recall that she said she was on her way to join her husband, but I don?t recall where that was. We didn?t talk much about her husband or her plans, we talked mostly about the baby. Like most of my friends, I was shocked at the turn of events. Stanley Ann was only a year out of high school and was already married with a child. I never thought that she was someone who wanted to get married. She was always someone who seemed focus on getting an education. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Seattle Times journalist Jonathan Martin reports that some high school classmates recall visiting her and her young son alternately at the Laurelhurst student housing, then at a Capitol Hill apartment during the period that stretched from March 1962 to at least September 1962. (Christian Faith and Reason.) In March, 1962, Stanley Ann Dunham enrolled as a full time student at the University of Washington for the spring quarter, which continued until June, 1962, earning 10 credit hours that quarter. She also rented her own apartment. Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  Another class mate, Barbara Cannon Rusk, recalls visiting Stanley Ann Dunham and her baby son Barack at her apartment on Capitol Hill in Seattle shortly after the end of these spring quarter classes. (1962). (Christian Faith and Reason.) I had moved to Utah for a while after high school, and I came back to Seattle in the summer of 1962. I remember visiting the World's Fair, and then stopping by Stanley Ann's apartment on Capitol Hill. It was a small apartment, upstairs. It was after June, and could have been as late as September, 1962. I visited her for half a day or so. It was after the end of the spring quarter classes, and she wasn't in classes, and didn't have a job. I recall her being melancholy at the time. I had a sense that something wasn't right in her marriage. It was all very mysterious. First, her husband wasn't there, he was already off in Harvard. I didn't ask her about the relationship, feeling it was a private matter. My daughter Michelle was just a few weeks younger than Stanley's son, who she called Barry, and they played together on the floor. (Chrisitian Faith and Reason.)
  
  While Stanley Ann Dunham was living in Seattle, Barack Obama Senior finished his senior year at the University of Hawaii. The Kenyan sponsor who had covered most of Barack Obama Senior's expenses while he studied at the University of Hawaii, Ella Kirk, wrote to Tom Mboya asking him to fund Obama Senior's graduate studies, preferably at Harvard, in May of 1962. No mention was made in the request of the need to fund the living expenses for his wife and son.
  
  As with Susan Blake and Maxine Box, Barbara Cannon Rusk never saw her friend Stanley Ann Dunham again.
  
  As previously noted, Obama Sr. graduated from the University of Hawaii in June of 1962 with a degree in mathematics and economics and a Phi Beta Kappa key in recognition of his academic excellence. He departed for Harvard on June 22, 1962. (Christian Faith and Reason.)
  
  In "Dreams", Obama Jr notes, that the "story in the Star-Bulletin on the day he left, June 22, said Obama planned a several-weeks grand tour of mainland universities before he arrived at Harvard to study economics on a graduate faculty fellowship. The story did not mention that he had a wife and an infant son." Author and Washington Post writer David Marannis confirms this story. This should be framed in a new context, it is likely that Stanley Ann Dunham did not attend her husband?s graduation ceremony, she was in Seattle.
  
  Some time between the late summer 1962 visit with Barbara Cannon Rusk at her Seattle apartment and January, 1964, when she filed for divorce against Barack Obama Senior, Stanley Ann Dunham Obama moved back to Honolulu from Seattle. She returned to live with her parents, rather than continue her efforts to raise Barack in Seattle as a single mother attending college. After her return she attended the University of Hawaii on an irregular, part time, basis.
  
  Barack Senior finished his studies at Harvard in the spring of 1964 and immediately returned to Kenya. The amount of time Barack Obama Sr spent with his namesake, if, in fact he spent any time at all, is unknown. Obama Sr returned to Hawaii some 9 or 10 years later and spent a month with Barack Obama, Jr. (That visit will be dioscussed in a later installement).
  
  Upon his return to Kenya in June 1964, Obama Sr joined the Kenya Peoples Union (KPU) a Pro-Soviet group founded by Oginga Odinga. Odinga, while a fellow member of Luo tribe, opposed Tom Mboya and President Kenyatta and all those who favored Kenyan ties with the West and Western styled democracy. ln July 1965, just 11 months after his return to Kenya, Barack Obama Sr published an article titled "Problems Facing Our Socialism" in the East Africa Journal. The article was highly critical of the blueprint for national planning (titled "African Socialism and Its Applicability to Planning in Kenya" or "Sessional Paper 10) prepared by Tom Mboya's Ministry of Economic Planning and Development. The Mboya "plan" had been passed by the Kenyan Parliamnent. (Politico.)
  
  Mboya a fellow member of the Luo Tribe had been Obama's mentor and protector. It had been Mboya, not the "Kennedy Family", who had provided Obama with his opportunity for education in the US. Myboya's publication, also called "Sessional Paper 10 on Harambee and the Principles of African Socialism" (adopted by Parliament in 1964) provided a model of government based on "African values" rather than Pro-Soviet Marxism. Mboya's paper was considered the equivalent of Kenya's "Economic Constitution" - Obama's criticism of Mboya and his support for the Pro-Soviet Marxists in the KPU (Kenyan Peoples Union), was a career killer. Obama Sr betrayed his mentor Mboya, sided against those in favor with western ties and, as he had been educated in the West (America) was never completely trusted by the KPU or their Soviet Associates. Having severed his ties with those who had helped, he was never able to compensate for the fact that there were hundreds of Kenyan's who had been educated on Soviet scholarships behind the "Iron Curtain". (Amadlawonye.) (The above post by Communist University online).

American shock jocks, dirty tricks masterminds and political bloggers: Beware the wrath of an 86-year-old Kenyan villager. A frown replaces the dimpled beam of Sarah Hussein Obama, grandmother of U.S. senator Barack Obama, when asked on Wednesday about recent attacks on her grandson that include the spreading of rumors that he is secretly a Muslim and the repeated use of his middle name — Hussein — by a radio host at rally of the Republican presidential candidate.


Obama and Sarah Onyango Obama in Kenya

"Untruths are told that don't have anything to do with what Barack is about," she said in the local Luo language, her gray hair smoothed neatly under a headwrap. "I am very against it." Obama and fellow senator Hillary Clinton are close in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination after results from races on Tuesday. Clinton, who was trailing Obama, won the crucial states of Texas and Ohio and won big in Rhode Island. Obama's thin lead narrowed further after he only picked up Vermont. In recent weeks, two Clinton volunteers in the state of Iowa resigned after forwarding false e-mails falsely saying he was a Muslim and a threat to national security. Matt Drudge, who publishes the political blog the Drudge Report, said that he was e-mailed a widely circulated picture of Obama in a turban and robe by the Clinton campaign.

"Bringing such pictures that are trying to imply that not only is he a foreigner, he is a Muslim is wrong, because that is not what he is," scolded Sarah Obama. The photo was taken when he was presented with the outfit while on a visit to his late father's native Kenya, where many of the family still live. Clinton campaign officials have said they did not condone any such dirty tricks.

Obama's grandfather had converted to Islam from Roman Catholicism and taken the name Hussein, Sarah Obama said, but his children had inherited only the name, not the religion. Each person should be able to choose how they worshipped, she said. "In the world of today, children have different religions from their parents," she said. She, too, is a Christian. Barack Obama has visited his Kenyan relatives three times in Kogelo, and his grandmother has gone to the U.S. twice. She says they are close, although they have to speak through an interpreter.

Sarah Obama was the second wife of the candidate's late grandfather, so is not his biological grandmother. But Barack Obama's half sister, Auma Obama, said: "By our definition, in our culture, she is his grandmother," she said. The intense interest generated by the race for the Democratic nomination — between two candidates who would either be the first female or the first black president — has thrust Obama's Kenyan family into the spotlight. Four wheel drive vehicles packed with journalists bounce over the rutted red roads, and students at the local high school named after him don't even turn anymore to watch as crews unload satellite equipment under a mango tree.

Each twist and turn of the race is closely scrutinized, says Auma Obama. The family gathered in his grandmother's house on Tuesday night to watch the results come in, she said, on a television donated by a family friend — the grandmother's own simple house does not have one of its own. "Barack's done extremely well and we're very proud of him," Auma Obama said when asked for a reaction to the losses on Tuesday. "This is like a football match. The game continues." (Source: USA Today.)

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SARAH OBAMA 'Sparkling, laughing eyes' She's really his step-grandmother, but Barack Obama calls her "Granny." Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama's face was "smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes," Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father of his first visit with her. "She hugged Auma and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake."

Sarah Obama was the third wife of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama. But Barack Obama Jr.'s own father treated Sarah Obama as his natural mother after his biological mother, Akumu, left when her husband moved her and his other wives to another part of Kenya.

Sarah Obama was just 16 when she married Obama's grandfather, an older man who was her father's friend. Arranged marriages and obedience to husbands -- enforced by beatings, if necessary -- were the plight of Kenyan women of her generation, she explained in Obama's book. " 'Our women have carried a heavy load,' " she says in the book. " 'If one is a fish, one does not try to fly -- one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I was young today, I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that's not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.' " (Source: Sun Times.)

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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. (Source: BBC.)

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Dreams from Obama's Grandmother Several thousand miles and a world away, Barack Obama is campaigning to change American politics. But in the tiny farmstead where his father used to herd goats, his Kenyan relatives are praying for anything but more political upheaval. "We are spending sleepless nights praying that peace will prevail," says the 86-year-old woman whom the presidential contender calls Granny Sarah.

The Obamas' home has been spared the violence that has wracked Kenya since President Mwai Kibaki was sworn in for a controversial second term two months ago. More than 1,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more uprooted, forced to return to their tribal homelands as waves of political violence brought decades of ethnic tension into the open.

Outside the Obama home, calves are grazing on the thick green grass that grows here in one of Kenya's most fertile regions. Plowed fields stand ready to be sown with maize. And scrawny chickens peck for grubs in the shade of mango trees. Inside, Granny Sarah's simple sitting room is plastered with black-and-white photographs of Obama Senior — the stepson she raised as her own — alongside Obama Junior's campaign posters.

Her eyes sparkle as she talks of her pride at his success and how he will make a fine President. "He is very loving and very hardworking and never had to be told what to do," she says, pointing out a photograph of a young, gangly Obama with a sack of vegetables over his shoulder during his first visit to Kenya. "Even though he is very learned, he's a very good listener and respects the opinions of others." A chicken wanders in through the open door and Granny Sarah hauls herself out of her chair to shoo it away.

As she settles back down, Granny Sarah, a non-practicing Muslim whose real name is Sarah Anyango Obama, says: "The senior Barack was a great friend of President Kibaki and also with Raila Odinga, so if Barry becomes President of America he will be well placed to help find peace." (Violence broke out in Kenya after Raila Odinga, the leader of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement, accused Kibaki of stealing the election. It opened up tribal fissures that many thought Kenya had long ago moved beyond. On Feb. 28, after on-again-off-again negotiations led by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, the two bitter rivals agreed to form a coalition government.) While there is simple pride at Obama's rise to prominence in the U.S., there has also been hope that his influence could go a long way toward calming the country's political turmoil. He has kept in regular touch with his relatives here for updates.

The Obamas live about an hour's drive — first on potholed asphalt roads then on a rutted dirt track into the village of Kogelo — from the city of Kisumu, the center of opposition support, standing on the shores of Lake Victoria. The population here is Luo, arch-rivals of President Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe. Angry mobs torched shops, bars and garages belonging to Kikuyu businessmen and forced their families to board buses for their tribal homelands in Central Kenya. In spite of the apparent political breakthrough in the capital Nairobi, the anger remains even if the mobs have been called off for now.

Every street corner in Kogelo hosts a political debate. It usually starts with a discussion of Kenya's crisis before moving on quickly to the chances of a Luo son moving into the White House. Maurice Kogode is the chairman of the grandly named Central Square Consultation Forum, which meets beneath a vast jacaranda tree. He says Obama's message of hope and change designed for voters in America also offers inspiration to young Kenyans. "Too many politicians here have an egocentric mind and they just won't give in," says Kogode. "They protect their own interests, not the majority."

In a country where politics has become a byword for corruption and tribal loyalty, Obama offers a different model, he explains. Instead of a leader who would use power to ensure his supporters get their turn at the trough, showering jobs, grants and contracts on family, he is seen by many as a President who would govern in the interests of all.

Not everyone sees it that way, though. A steady stream of would-be economic migrants has been arriving at Granny Sarah's door seeking an American visa. Almost every day she has to explain that the U.S. embassy in Nairobi is the only place that can make their American dream come true. (There's been a steady stream of journalists as well, so many that appointments now have to be made in advance before Granny Sarah will see them.) But even Granny Sarah admits to harboring secret hopes of a local windfall if Obama's momentum carries him all the way to America's highest office. "What we hope is that with his Kenyan and Africa roots we will see some of the fruits of his power, like electricity, water and a new road," she says simply in her native Luo language. (Source: Time.com.)

A public record search lists an “O. Onyango Obama”, born on June 3, 1944, at 24 Colgate Road whose name matches that of the “Uncle Omar” in Dreams from My Father.

Nelson Ochieng, a cousin of Mr Obama who lives in the Kenyan city of Kisumu, near the family village of Kogelo, said that Omar had changed his first name after moving to the US. “Before he went to America we all knew him as Omar, but he dropped that bit, changing it to Obama Onyango, because he said he preferred his African name,” he said. Gail Greenberger, the landlady who bought the four-storey brick block of flats at a foreclosure sale in 1994, knew her tenant, however, by the name Obama Onyango. “We used to call him ‘Oh-bummer!’. That is how I pronounced Obama in 2000,” she said.

Ms Greenberger said she inherited him with the building but was forced to evict him in 2000 for nonpayment of his rent of about $500 a month. “I remember him being decent but I think he lost his job. When they lose their job, they just stop paying rent. He did not even go to court. He bolted from the apartment,” she said. Records of Boston Housing Court show a “summary process” was executed against Mr Onyango on February 23, 2000, for unpaid rent of $2,324.70.

Mr Onyango was a business partner in a “convenience store” called the Wells Market at 1760 Dorchester Avenue, now a Hispanic bodega, or grocery. Records list him as the treasurer of the corporation, which was set up without his name in 1992 and involuntarily wound up in 2007 after failing to file annual reports since 1997.

In 1994 Obama Onyango was attacked in an armed robbery at the Wells Market, the Boston Herald reported. According to a police report, two masked black males entered the store around 9.30pm on June 7, 1994, and “did assault and beat the victim, and did rob victim of an undetermined amount of US currency. Suspects were believed to be armed with a ‘sawed-off’ rifle, and did flee the area on foot .”

Asked why the man believed to be “Uncle Omar” went by the name Obama Onyango, Zeituni Onyango said that Obama was his true name. “That is the name his father gave him,” she said. Dershaye Geresu, the Ethiopian-born president of Wells Market Inc, confirmed that Mr Onyango was a “cousin” of Mr Obama. Lennard Tenende, whose wife Lucy was secretary to the shop, said: “I don’t know where he is. It seems as if he is getting a lot of inquiries, a lot of people trying to find him and find out about his relationship with Obama and he just doesn’t want to be found.” Mr Ochieng said that he believed Mr Onyango ran a chain of stores.

The Obama campaign was repeatedly approached for comment yesterday but had not responded at the time of going to press. It is not clear whether Mr Obama has been in touch with his African relatives living in the US, or even whether he is aware that they are on US soil. (Source: McAuley's World.)

Allegedly is a fugitive absconder deportee like Zeituni Onyango -- possesses a Social Security Number and supposedly registered to vote although an illegal alien with deportation ordered. Supposedly on welfare like Zeituni Onyango. (Source: Posted by J D MAHONEY.) There is no corroboration on whether he is an illegal alien. His whereabouts remain unknown. (SITE NOTE: We suspect that he is in Columbus, Ohio as Zeituni "ran away" from the press to Columbus to "stay with relatives." In Ohio, Zeituni picked up her present lawyer to defend her at the deportation hearings. As she had no financial resources, the lawyer fees must have been from her "relatives" -- leading us to think it might be her missing brother Omar.)

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Step-Aunt Zeituni Onyango in America

As an indictment of the US press' investigative ability -- or lack of it -- the scoop was made by the LONDON TIMES -- five days before the election on 31 Oct. What we find even more amazing is how the press immediately started to white-wash her living in the tenements as "living quietly for years in a South Boston public housing project" -- like "living quietly" in the country only this is a run-down tenement. (Source: Washington Post.)

We believe the US media is trying to bury this story. For example, Zeituni supposedly came to America to be near her son said to be studying in America. However. we have seen no followup on this story.

What we find interesting is that Obama who recently visited Kenya and even mentioned these relatives in his book, did not know that they were in America. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently very briefly in 2006. Someone had better explain how no one bothered to inform Obama that his Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Omar-- even their MOTHER Sarah Onyango Obama who Obama visited. Not likely that she wouldn't mention them -- so here we get to Obama either knowing but not wanting to recognize them OR Mama Sarah just forgot to ask about her kids in America to her politically powerful American grandson.

While he lives in $1.65 million house in Kenwood, his Aunt Zeituni lives in a tenement flat. His Uncle Omar lost his job and disappeared after failing to pay the rent.


Aunt Zeituni Onyango, walkiing from the housing project in a Boston suburb (Oct 2008)

Before it was found out that she was definitely an illegal alien, we stated Aunt Zeituni Onyango contributed to Obama's campaign (meaning she is a citizen) -- but she is not registered to vote. (TimesOnLine.com.) This led us to suspect that she was an illegal alien. The Associated Press found that Obama's aunt had been instructed to leave the country in 2004 by an immigration judge who rejected her request for asylum from her native Kenya. (NOTE: It is interesting that in Jan 2005, her mother Sarah Onyango Obama and she attended Obama's swearing in to the Senate. Home videos show they were dressed in African garb. Still Obama claims that he did not know that she was living in Boston.)

Campaign records show Onyan go donated at least five times to Obama's campaign, in July and September, three times for $5 and twice for $25. She listed her occupation as "RHA Volunteer/Boston Housing Authority." (Source: Washington Post.) However, Obama donations records show she donated a total of $260 in the third quarter of 2008. (Source: Contribution.) After it was found she was an illegal alien, the funds were supposedly returned to her. The campaign said it was returning $260 that Onyango had contributed in small increments to Obama's presidential bid over several months. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations. Onyango listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority and last gave $5 on Sept. 19.

Equally interesting is that Aunt Zeituni says that she won't talk to reporters until AFTER the 4 Nov elections. (Source: Washington Post.) After we found she was an illegal alien, it became obvious that after Obama had become President, it was very likely her deportation status would have been "reviewed" by special order of the President. This is highly suspect, but there is evidence of Obama's direct knowledge of her existence as of 2 Nov 2008 ... two days before the election. 56-year-old Zeituni, the half-sister of Obama’s father, has been living in public housing in South Boston illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago.

The directive from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which was obtained last week by the AP in a Freedom of Information Act request, was e-mailed to ICE agents on Oct. 31 and expressed concerns about "negative media or congressional interest" and ordered ICE agents to seek approval before making arrests. Now a spokeswoman for the ICE, Kelly Nantel, has told the AP that the directive was reversed weeks after the election. From AP...

The directive was lifted at the end of November, after Obama's win, ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said Monday. Nantel previously had told the AP the directive was still in place, and the White House told the AP late Sunday that Obama would consider whether to overturn it. Nantel said she had been under the impression the directive was still in effect. Nantel also told the AP that the directive was intended for any high-profile cases, and was not specific to Obama's family. The Obama administration commented that the president "has not contacted any government agency regarding Ms. Onyango's case, nor has any representative of the president." However, the timing of the directive and its subsequent reversal raises the question of whether it was issued to prevent Onyango's arrest in order to protect the agency from the appearance of interfering with the election.

Zeituni Onyango was granted a stay in her deportation case by a judge on December 17, and granted a new hearing on her asylum request December 30, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer is now reporting. Onyango's attorney, Margaret Wong, will represent her at an immigration hearing in Boston on April 1. The details of when Onyango left Boston to go to Cleveland are still sketchy, but the Plain-Dealer reports she moved in with relatives in Cleveland sometime in late December. "The judge will be looking at evidence that they may not have been aware of four years ago," said Michael Rogers, spokesman for Wong. "Wong is optimistic. We would have preferred to not conduct this case in the media spotlight, but that's not going to happen." She stayed with relatives in Cleveland's African immigrant community, said Wong. Rogers said she moved back to Boston sometime later in December.

Critics complained that after overstaying her visa, ignoring a federal deportation order for years, escaping apprehension in Boston, and taking refuge in Cleveland, the destitute illegal alien aunt of Barack Obama somehow found her way to Washington, D.C., for her nephew’s inauguration. Federal immigration officials couldn’t find her, but she was spotted by several media outlets and partygoers around the Beltway. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported: Just a few blocks from Obama’s soon-to-be residence, elected officials, former officeholders, proud volunteers and party activists from the Buckeye State noshed and drank at the Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, a historic luxury hotel … One special guest who commanded attention at the party was Zeituni Onyango, 56, Obama’s aunt from Kenya who has been in this country illegally and is getting help in her immigration fight from another ball guest, Cleveland attorney Margaret Wong. About 900 people, who each paid $300, attended the ball, which was put on by a special committee set up for the event. She did not meet the President.

Found in a rundown Boston estate: Barack Obama's aunt Zeituni Onyango

Barack Obama has lived one version of the American Dream that has taken him to the steps of the White House. But a few miles from where the Democratic presidential candidate studied at Harvard, his Kenyan aunt and uncle, immigrants living in modest circumstances in Boston, have a contrasting American story. Zeituni Onyango, the aunt so affectionately described in Mr Obama's best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father, lives in a disabled-access flat on a rundown public housing estate in South Boston.

A second relative believed to be the long-lost "Uncle Omar" described in the book was beaten by armed robbers with a "sawed-off rifle" while working in a corner shop in the Dorchester area of the city. He was later evicted from his one-bedroom flat for failing to pay $2,324.20 (£1,488) arrears, according to the Boston Housing Court.

The US press has repeatedly rehearsed Mr Obama's extraordinary odyssey, but the other side of the family's American experience has only been revealed in parts. Just across town from where Mr Obama made history as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, some of his closest blood relatives have confronted the harshness of immigrant life in America.

In his book Mr Obama writes that "Uncle Omar" had gone missing after moving to Boston in the 1960s – a quarter-century before Mr Obama first visited his family in Kenya. Aunt Zeituni is now also living in Boston, and recently made a $260 campaign contribution to her nephew's presidential bid from a work address in the city. (SITE NOTE: Contribution: Zeituni Onyango, Volunteer Resident Health Advoca Boston Housing Authority, Q3/2008, $260, 81 ORTON MAROTTA WAY, South Boston MA.)

Speaking outside her home in Flaherty Way, South Boston, on Tuesday, Ms Onyango, 56, confirmed she was the "Auntie Zeituni" in Mr Obama's memoir. She declined to answer most other questions about her relationship with the presidential contender until after the November 4 election. "I can't talk about it, I just pray for him, that's all," she said, adding: "After the 4th, I can talk to anyone."

A photograph of Ms Onyango was later shown to George Hussein Onyango, Barack Obama's half-brother in Nairobi, who confirmed that it was their aunt. George Onyango, 26, the youngest child of Barack Obama Sr, said that he had spent weekends with his Aunt Zeituni when he was growing up, and instantly recognised her.

George Onyango said that his aunt had left for the US about eight years ago but sent him e-mails. "She left to find work and I suppose she thought her life would be better there," he said. "She was kind and caring."

In his memoir Mr Obama describes the joy of meeting his father's family during his first visit to Kenya in 1988. Aunt Zeituni, then a computer programmer at Kenya Breweries in Nairobi, is portrayed as a feisty woman who proclaims herself "the champion dancer". Uncle Omar, by contrast, remains a mysterious figure who left for America and never came back. At one point in the book a half-sister tells Mr Obama that people "like our Uncle Omar, in Boston" move to the West.

"They promise to return after completing school. They say they'll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it's just a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again."

Aunt Zeituni and Uncle Omar are the children of Mr Obama's grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, by his third wife – the woman Mr Obama calls "Granny" because she raised his father. Mr Obama's father, Barack Sr, was Onyango Obama's son by his second wife, Akumu. That makes Zeituni and Omar a half-sister and half-brother of Mr Obama's father, or Mr Obama's half-aunt and half-uncle.

While Mr Obama was on his voyage of personal discovery in Africa, his aunt and uncle were engaged in their own journey in his homeland. The Times could not determine their immigration status and an official at Boston City Hall said that Ms Onyango was a resident of Flaherty Way but not registered to vote on the electoral roll. However, that Ms Onyango made a contribution to the Obama campaign would indicate that she is a US citizen. Records at the Boston City Hall confirmed Zeituni Onyango's birthdate as May 29, 1952.

It is not clear when Ms Onyango first came to the US. She said: "I have been coming to America ever since 1975. I always come and go." She is a frail woman who walks with the aid of a metal stick. Neighbours said that she lived alone in a ground-floor flat normally set aside for people facing physical hardship.

An Associated Press story about poor people buying lottery tickets at cheque-cashing shops, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 25, 2003, quotes a Zeituni Onyango whom it describes as out of work and without much money. "It's like when I feel luck might fall I do that, like manna might come from Heaven. That's when I buy it," she told AP.

A staff member at the Boston Housing Authority office, 50 yards from her house, said Ms Onynango had been a volunteer resident health advocate between December 2007 and August this year. She worked six hours a week for a small stipend. Records show she used the housing authority's address to make her campaign contribution.

Ms Onyango is also listed on the internet as a volunteer with Experience Corps, a programme in which adults over 55 mentor children in their communities. The "former computer systems co-ordinator" tells the group's online newsletter: "I felt that I should help the children in my community. I love people and enjoy interacting with them . . . Also, I was idle, and this was a chance to get involved."

A public record search lists an "O. Onyango Obama", born on June 3, 1944, at 24 Colgate Road whose name matches that of the "Uncle Omar" in Dreams from My Father.

Nelson Ochieng, a cousin of Mr Obama who lives in the Kenyan city of Kisumu, near the family village of Kogelo, said that Omar had changed his first name after moving to the US. "Before he went to America we all knew him as Omar, but he dropped that bit, changing it to Obama Onyango, because he said he preferred his African name," he said. Gail Greenberger, the landlady who bought the four-storey brick block of flats at a foreclosure sale in 1994, knew her tenant, however, by the name Obama Onyango. "We used to call him 'Oh-bummer!'. That is how I pronounced Obama in 2000," she said.

Ms Greenberger said she inherited him with the building but was forced to evict him in 2000 for nonpayment of his rent of about $500 a month. "I remember him being decent but I think he lost his job. When they lose their job, they just stop paying rent. He did not even go to court. He bolted from the apartment," she said. Records of Boston Housing Court show a "summary process" was executed against Mr Onyango on February 23, 2000, for unpaid rent of $2,324.70.

Mr Onyango was a business partner in a "convenience store" called the Wells Market at 1760 Dorchester Avenue, now a Hispanic bodega, or grocery. Records list him as the treasurer of the corporation, which was set up without his name in 1992 and involuntarily wound up in 2007 after failing to file annual reports since 1997.

In 1994 Obama Onyango was attacked in an armed robbery at the Wells Market, the Boston Herald reported. According to a police report, two masked black males entered the store around 9.30pm on June 7, 1994, and "did assault and beat the victim, and did rob victim of an undetermined amount of US currency. Suspects were believed to be armed with a 'sawed-off' rifle, and did flee the area on foot ."

Asked why the man believed to be "Uncle Omar" went by the name Obama Onyango, Zeituni Onyango said that Obama was his true name. "That is the name his father gave him," she said. Dershaye Geresu, the Ethiopian-born president of Wells Market Inc, confirmed that Mr Onyango was a "cousin" of Mr Obama.

Lennard Tenende, whose wife Lucy was secretary to the shop, said: "I don't know where he is. It seems as if he is getting a lot of inquiries, a lot of people trying to find him and find out about his relationship with Obama and he just doesn't want to be found." Mr Ochieng said that he believed Mr Onyango ran a chain of stores.

The Obama campaign was repeatedly approached for comment yesterday but had not responded at the time of going to press. It is not clear whether Mr Obama has been in touch with his African relatives living in the US, or even whether he is aware that they are on US soil.

In the preface to the 2004 reissue, he writes: "Most of the characters in this book remain a part of my life, albeit in varying degrees – a function of work, children, geography, and turns of fate."

"What is family?" he reflects. "Is it just a genetic chain, parents and offspring, people like me?" Twenty years after he first met Aunt Zeituni, and first heard of the elusive Uncle Omar, the man likely to be the next president will have the opportunity for another family reunion, rather closer to home. (Source: TimesOnLine.com.)

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MAKE SURE BARRY DOESN'T GET LOST

How Barack Obama tells of his first meeting with his aunt

''Barack!" I turned to see Auma [his Kenyan cousin] jumping up and down behind another guard who wasn't letting her pass into the luggage area. I excused myself and rushed over to her, as we laughed and hugged as silly as the first time we'd met. A tall, brown-skinned woman was smiling beside us, and Auma turned and said: "Barack, this is our Auntie Zeituni. Our father's sister."

"Welcome home," Zeituni said kissing me on both cheeks . . .

We went to drop Zeituni off at Kenya Breweries, a large, drab complex where she worked as a computer programmer. Stepping out of the car, she leaned over again to kiss me on the cheek, then wagged her finger at Auma. "You take good care of Barry now," she said. "Make sure he doesn't get lost again." Once we were back on the highway, I asked Auma what Zeituni had meant about my getting lost. Auma shrugged.

"It's a common expression," she said. "Usually it means that the person hasn't seen you in a while. 'You've been lost,' they'll say. Or, 'Don't get lost'. Sometimes it has a more serious meaning. Let's say a husband or son moves to the city, or to the West, like our Uncle Omar in Boston. They promise to return after completing school. They say they'll send for the family once they get settled. At first they write once a week. Then it's just once a month. Then they stop writing completely. No one sees them again. They've been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are." (Extracted from Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama, pp305-307 (Canongate))

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Campaign confirms Obama aunt in South Boston (30 Oct 2008)

Barack Obama's campaign has confirmed that a woman living in a South Boston housing project is indeed the senator's aunt, a little-known relationship that was only revealed this week - five days before the election. Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin confirmed to the Herald this afternoon that Zeituni Onyango, 56, who lives on Flaherty Way, is Obama's aunt on Obama's father's side. Onyango, a Kenyan native is believed to be the "Aunti Zeituni" in Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father."

Onyango received a small stipend over the past year working six hours a week as a volunteer resident health advocate for the BHA (Boston Housing Authority) complex she lives in, said BHA deputy director Bill McGonagle. McGonagle said Onyango has lived in Boston public housing for five years. "She has been an exemplary resident," McGonagle said. He said that Onyango had conversations with several BHA employees in recent days indicating that she is the presidential-contender's aunt. She proudly displays photos of Obama, including some that appear 25 years old or older, inside her first-floor apartment, McGonagle said.

McGonagle said BHA employees were caught off guard when they learned of the connection. "We were as surprised as anyone," he said. "We were a little bit flabbergasted." A message left at Onyango's apartment this morning was not returned. McGonagle said that Onyango has been overwhelmed by the media attention since the news of her relationship with Obama was broken yesterday by The Times of London. "Miss Onyango has asked that we respect her privacy and she be left alone," he said. "She's feeling very put upon. We are asking the press to back off because she is feeling a little bit oppressed." (SITE NOTE: It is surprising that a LONDON newspaper would discover this fact -- while US newspapers simply will not vet the candidate.)

The Times of London reported that Onyango is actually Obama's half aunt. She is the half sister of Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. In an interview outside her rundown apartment building on Flaherty Way, Onyango told The Times of London that she didn't want to say much before the Nov. 4 election. "I can't talk about it, I just pray for him, that's all," she said, adding: "After the 4th, I can talk to anyone." (Source: Boston Herald.)

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Obama's Aunt Allegedly In U.S. Illegally -- Candidate Says He Didn't Know Of Relative's Status After AP Reports Kenyan Aunt Was Told To Leave Four Years Ago

Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama said Saturday he didn't know his aunt was living in the United States illegally and believes that laws covering the situation should be followed. The Associated Press found that Obama's aunt had been instructed to leave the country four years ago by an immigration judge who rejected her request for asylum from her native Kenya. The woman, Zeituni Onyango (zay-TUHN on-YANG-oh), is living in public housing in Boston and is the half-sister of Obama's late father.

A statement given to the AP by Obama's campaign said, "Senator Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws be followed." Traveling with Obama in Nevada, campaign strategist David Axelrod declined to elaborate on the statement, but said: "I think people are suspicious about stories that surface in the last 72 hours of a national campaign." (SITE NOTE: We find this VERY hard to believe. In 2004, "Mama Sarah" (Obama's step-grandmother) came to Washington for his swearing in ceremony. In 2004, Zeituni was issued the deportation order. Don't you think that "Mama Sarah" would ask her now powerful grandson to help her daughter living in Boston? It would be the natural thing for a mother to do. This is why we think that Obama is a liar -- and he just doesn't want the taint to rub off on him. It is also strange that Zeituni was in Washington (with her lawyer) for Obama's inauguration -- though no one can say if she met the President.)

An adviser to Republican John McCain's campaign, Mark Salter, said he had no comment on the reports about Obama's relative. "It's a family matter," Salter said. The campaign said it was returning $260 that Onyango had contributed in small increments to Obama's presidential bid over several months. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations. Onyango listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority and last gave $5 on Sept. 19.

Onyango, 56, is part of Obama's large paternal family, with many related to him by blood whom he never knew growing up. Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., left the future presidential nominee when the boy was 2, and they reunited only once — for a monthlong visit when Obama was 10. The elder Obama lived most of his life in Kenya, where he fathered seven other children with three other wives. He died in a car crash in 1982.

Obama was raised for the most part by his mother and her parents in Hawaii. He first met his father's side of the family when he traveled to Africa 20 years ago. He referred to Onyango as "Auntie Zeituni" when describing the trip in his memoir, saying she was "a proud woman." Obama's campaign said he had seen her a few times since that meeting, beginning with a return trip to Kenya with his future wife, Michelle, in 1992. Onyango visited the family in Chicago on a tourist visa at Obama's invitation about nine years ago, the campaign said, stopping to visit friends on the East Coast before returning to Kenya.

She attended Obama's swearing-in to the U.S. Senate in 2004, but campaign officials said Obama provided no assistance in getting her a tourist visa and doesn't know the details of her stay. The campaign said he last heard from her about two years ago when she called saying she was in Boston, but he did not see her there. Onyango's refusal to leave the country would represent an administrative, noncriminal violation of immigration law, meaning such cases are handled outside the criminal court system. Estimates vary, but many experts believe there are more than 10 million such immigrants in the U.S.

The AP could not immediately reach Onyango for comment. When a reporter went to her home Friday night, no one answered the door. A neighbor said she was often not home on weekends. Onyango did not immediately return telephone and written messages left at her home. Onyango was instructed to leave the country by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango's case.

It was unclear why her request was rejected in 2004. A spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Kelly Nantel, said the government does not comment on an individual's citizenship status or immigration case. Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.

Onyango's case — coming to light just days before the presidential election — led to an unusual nationwide directive within Immigrations and Customs Enforcement requiring that any deportations before Tuesday's election be approved at least at the level of the agency's regional directors, the U.S. law enforcement official told the AP. The directive suggests that the administration is sensitive to the political implications of Onyango's case coming to light so close to the election.

The East African nation has been fractured by violence in recent years, including a period of two months of bloodshed after December 2007 that killed 1,500 people. In Boston, Lydia Agro, communications director for the Housing Authority, said Onyango had been screened and approved for public housing as an "eligible non-citizen" when she moved in in 2003. She said the authority is not notified of deportation orders and did not know Onyango was related to Obama until two days ago. (Source: CBS News.)

(SITE NOTE: On 2 Nov, spokesman Bill Burton said "Sen. Obama has no knowledge of her status but obviously believes that any and all appropriate laws [should] be followed." The Obama campaign did not indicate whether Obama has been in touch with his aunt, whom he describes in his book "Dreams From My Father." We reiterate that Sarah Onyango, his step-grandmother, came to his swearing in to the Senate in 2004 and last saw him in 2006. Sarah had been communicating with Kenya relatives by email. Don't you think a mother would ask her powerful political grandson about taking care of her two children, Zeituni and Omar, who were in the US?

Democratic U.S. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan fired off a letter asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to investigate whether someone leaked the information to the media in an effort to damage Obama. "The AP reports that it 'could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,' a very disturbing (suggestion) indeed," read the letter from Conyers, who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. This was part of the Democratic push to limit the damage. Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release. (Source: AP.)

Others are denouncing the London Times as though it were a political plot -- rather than US reporter incompetence. They claim the London Times is owned by conservative mogul Rupert and thus it is a suspect story. The claim is ridiculous at best.)

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Feds Probe Leak About Obama's Aunt (Oct 2008)

The government is investigating whether any laws were broken in the disclosure that Barack Obama's aunt was living in the country illegally. Obama's half-aunt, who is from Kenya, was ordered to leave the United States years ago after an immigration judge denied her request for asylum, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss the case.

The woman, Zeituni Onyango, is living in public housing in Boston and is the half-sister of Obama's late father.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked its inspector general and the Office of Professional Responsibility on Saturday to investigate whether any policies were violated when information about Onyango's case was publicly disclosed, ICE spokeswoman Kelly Nantel said. The Homeland Security Department, which oversees ICE, cannot disclose details about an individual's immigration status. Information about Onyango's case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release, just five days before the presidential election.

Obama's campaign strategist David Axelrod said people are suspicious about stories that surface so close to an election. Obama said Saturday he did not know his aunt was living in the United States illegally and believes that laws covering the situation should be followed. The campaign said it was returning $260 that Onyango had contributed in small increments to Obama's presidential bid over several months. Federal election law prohibits foreigners from making political donations. Onyango listed her employer as the Boston Housing Authority and last gave $5 on Sept. 19. (Source: ABC News.) (SITE NOTE: In a interview with Katie Couric, Obama stated he was concerned for her but that he was not able to get in touch with her. Would you support her being deported to Kenya? Obama stated that if she violated any laws, he agreed as we are a nation of laws. (Source: ABC News))

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Obama's Ability to Help Illegal Immigrant Aunt May be Limited (Nov 2008)

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to use his executive power to help struggling Americans with a variety of issues, but his hands may be tied when it comes to helping an illegal immigrant -- his own aunt -- stay in the country. Zeituni Onyango was ordered to leave the country in 2004 by an immigration judge who rejected her request for asylum from her native Kenya. Her illegal-immigrant status was revealed to the public days before Obama's election on November 4, and now she is fighting the deportation order. Onyango fled her public housing apartment in Boston, where she had lived for five years, and is now staying with relatives in Cleveland.

Contrary to popular opinion, Obama will not have executive power to unilaterally grant her, or anyone, legal immigration status when he becomes president. His only course of action would be to appeal to Congress to file a private bill providing citizenship. "It is an avenue that exists for anyone," said Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But for President Obama, it would be an avenue dotted with pitfalls. "It looks untoward," immigration attorney Jay Marks said, although he said would probably succeed if he tried.

"For a guy like me, I might as well be trying to have a snowball not melt in hell," said Marks, who has unsuccessfully pursued this option for many of his clients. "But for him, it might be easier to do." Marks said he would advise Obama to do nothing, in order to avoid any appearance of showing favoritism. He added that the publicity surrounding his aunt's case shouldn't affect the outcome, especially to her advantage. "Having seen what goes in immigration court, I don't see how this is going to favor her," he said. "The immigration judge would have to spell out his decision in very clear terms in what should be a lengthy decision and whether or not this woman has met her burden under the law," he said.

Onyango will need to show that she has physically spent 10 years in the country, has not been convicted of certain crimes and has qualifying relatives with extreme hardship. Her attorney, Margaret Wong, has said she may file a motion to reopen Onyango's case or file an appeal for her to stay on humanitarian grounds.

Onyango is Obama's father's half-sister. The president-elect met his father's side of his family for the first time when he traveled to Africa 20 years ago. He referred to Onyango as "Auntie Zeituni" when describing the trip in his memoir, calling her "a proud woman."

She attended Obama's swearing-in to the U.S. Senate in January 2005, but his aides have said Obama provided no assistance in getting her a tourist visa and he doesn't know the details of her stay. They say said he last heard from her about two years ago when she called to say she was in Boston, but he did not visit her there. Onyango has been ailing since her immigration status became public, and she may have neurological problems, said her spokesman, Michael Rogers.

He said Onyango is happy in Cleveland and is hopeful that she will win her deportation fight. (Source: Fox News.)

Obama's Half-brother Malik (by Kezia) Chooses Life in Slow Lane in Kenya (Oct 2004)

Western Kenya and Illinois share a landscape of gentle hills and an economy built on family farms. But Kenya has few roads, railways and airports and nothing like the city of Chicago. And that's just fine for Malik Obama, the older half-brother of Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat running for U.S. Senate. "An African doesn't need too much to go on," he said.

While Barack may soon be heading to Washington, Malik, a 46-year-old Kenyan, has chosen to make his life in Nyangoma-Kogelo, a village of several hundred that is the Obama ancestral home. Until Barack's bid for Congress, little happened here to disturb the chickens scratching in the dust or the dogs sleeping in front of tin-roofed homes. Though peaceful, life can be hard in this part of Kenya, one of the East African nation's poorest regions. Not only is there little infrastructure, but the region is prone to drought, which leaves many hungry.

Still, Malik Obama prefers the village to the fast-paced capital, Nairobi, where he grew up. He runs an electronics shop in a town a half-hour drive away, and works as a consultant in Washington for a few months each year. It was in the United States, in 1985, that he first met his 43-year-old half-brother Barack. "He was best man at my wedding and I was best man at his," said Malik, who likes to point out that his younger brother's name is actually Barack Obama II, because their father was the original Barack Obama.


Malik holding photo of Obama in his Kenya shop

Their paternal grandfather, Onyango Hussein Obama, was one of the first Muslim converts in Nyangoma-Kogelo, Malik said. However, not all of his descendants are Muslim, Malik added. Barack is Christian. The candidate's father first worked as a university lecturer in Uganda after studying economics at Harvard University. He then worked in Kenya's private sector before joining the treasury department, where he became a senior economist. He died in car crash in 1982, leaving three wives, six sons and a daughter. All his children except Malik live in Britain or the United States. One of the brothers died in 1984. Barack grew up in Hawaii with his American mother after his parents divorced. He has visited Kenya three times, most recently in the early 1990s to introduce his fiancee to his Kenyan family.

When pressed for more details about the family, Malik said, "As far as I'm concerned, we are one family." Sitting in his shop, wearing glasses and a traditional cap, Malik explained that he likes his privacy. He hasn't enjoyed visits by dozens of journalists searching for the African family of an up-and-coming politician.

In Kenya, few had heard of Barack Obama until he spoke to the Democratic National Convention. Now many middle-class Kenyans, who watched the highlights of Obama's speech on television, are assessing his talents and discussing how Kenya needs politicians like him. Peter Aringo, who represented Nyangoma-Kogelo in parliament for 28 years, said his constituents wanted to organize a delegation to show their support for Barack before the U.S. election, but the trip was too expensive. "The constituents ... have been following his campaign for Senate and they're very much supportive of one of their own," said Aringo.

Moses Omondi, who works in region's only city, Kisumu, says he's not interested in American politics, "unless it is our man competing." He said he follows Barack Obama's candidacy by listening to the British Broadcasting Corp. These days, everyone wants to lay claim to the Barack Obama. "Obama's my brother," Omondi joked. (Source: MSNBC.)

So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama's half-sister Auma says to me: "My daughter's father is British. My mom's brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman." My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He's the son of Obama's father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to Kenya. That was after his marriage with Obama's mother in Hawaii ended. Another son from the union with Ruth, called David, was killed in a motorcycle accident. In all, Obama Sr. fathered eight children by four women.


Auma Obama and Sarah Onyango Obama with Barack in Kogelo, Kenya (26 Aug 2006)

I've been thinking about this because not enough has been written about Obama's family. As Auma suggested, it's unusual in the extent of its continent-crossing, religion-melding, color-fusing richness. But the Benetton-ad family is less unusual than it may seem. This is the age of globalized, far-flung families. Remittances make the world go round. More needs to be written because if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, you know the Republican attack machine, through innuendo and otherwise, will go after his identity, just as it went after Senator John Kerry's in 2004.

The difference is that Obama is much more certain and coherent about who he is than Kerry was. He has built his identity in a shifting world; that resonates with a lot of Americans. His radical Chicago pastor contributed to that journey. Now Obama has grown beyond him. I have no problem with that. But you can already see the headlines: Obama has brother in China! You can hear the whisperings about a polygamous father. That not enough has been written about his family is strange in that Obama himself devoted a remarkable book, "Dreams From My Father," to his quest to fill the void left by an absent Dad.

As Auma said to me: "He was trying to figure out who he was. He needed to be whole to be able to do what he's doing now. He went about it the right way. A big chunk of his life was missing. It's very healthy that he now knows he has these roots here." Those roots were discovered during Obama's first visit to Kenya two decades ago. During that trip, as recounted in his memoir, he encountered Ruth in Nairobi. She is described as "a white woman with a long jaw and graying hair." But who is Ruth, a woman who divorced Obama's father, remarried, and gave the family name of her second husband to her two sons by Obama Sr.? In the book she says, with less than exquisite tact, to Barack Obama: "But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?"

As for Ruth's son, and Obama's half brother, Mark, the one in China, he's described as studying physics at Stanford in the 1980s. "The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it at all," Ruth enthuses. But Mark, "a black man of my at 46: "Life's hard enough without all the excess baggage," he muses.

If nominated, Obama's family baggage will get pored over. Four years ago, Bush's people cast Kerry as un-American for speaking French. A Republican camp campaigning at the sorry nadir of Bush's handiwork will try to portray the war hero John McCain as more American and patriotic than his opponent. But things are different. Less fearful, Americans are less willing to be manipulated. They've backed Obama this far in part because they're sick of the narrow American exceptionalism of Bush's divisive rule.

Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world's. Americans see that. When your mortgage is packaged into some ingenious security that's sold to a German bank before the scheme unravels and you lose your house, the globe looks smaller. With some 30 percent of the revenue of U.S. corporations coming from overseas, and the Chinese buying American debt, and more than seven million people naturalized in the past decade, it's harder to separate America's fate from that of others. Isolationism is not merely wrong, it's impossible. If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid, a Muslim, told me: "My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me."

Obama's bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance. (Source: NY Times.)

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Half-brother Abongo (Roy) Obama (by Kezia) in Washington, DC (Oct 2008)

Abo Obama is a younger half-brother of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. He was born in 1968 to Barack Obama Sr and Kezia Obama. Abo Obama was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. He earned a degree in accounting from the University of Nairobi. He met his half-brother for the first time in 1985 when Barack flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to visit him. Abo and his half-brother Barack were best men at each other's weddings.

The way Barack Obama describes his half-brother in his book, Abongo (Roy) Obama inherited their father's hard-drinking ways but straightened his life out by embracing Islam and his African heritage. "Brother Abongo "Roy" Obama who is a Luo activist and a militant Muslim. An accountant, Abongo Obama also argued that the black man must "liberate himself from the poisoning influences of European culture," Obama wrote. "But the magic of his laughter remains, and we can disagree without rancor." "Abongo's new lifestyle has left him lean and clear-eyed, and at the wedding, he looked so dignified in his black African gown with white trim and matching cap that so me of our guests mistook him for my father," Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father. Abongo Obama began using his Luo tribal first name and had sworn off pork, smoking and drinking by the time of his younger brother's 1992 wedding.

'The person who made me proudest of all,' Obama wrote, 'was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage. "He converted to Islam, and has sworn off pork and tobacco and alcohol.'" (Source:Gather.com.)

When Barack Obama first met him during a visit to Kenya in 1987, his half-brother Abo Obama was visibly disappointed that the portable tape recorder his Chicago relative brought him as a gift wasn't a Sony. "I nodded at him, trying not to get angry," Barack Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father. The future presidential hopeful wrote that he noticed something in his half-brother's eyes -- "something that reminded me of young men back in Chicago. An element of guardedness, perhaps, and calculation. The look of someone who realizes early in life that he has been wronged."

In an exclusive interview, the brother of the presidential front-runner told how he communicates with him every day and worries that he has become an assassination target. Abongo Obama said he is "hoping and praying" that no harm will come to the Democratic hopeful after federal agents foiled an alleged plot by two racists to kill him this week. The 51-year-old said: "We are extremely excited about how it's all going and really positive about it, but when you hear about a threat against Barack's life, you are brought back down to reality. "All the dangers he is facing become apparent again. We are hoping and praying that he will be protected.

"Based on American history, it's a reality that we have to consider seriously. A lot of people have been assassinated. When you're in that position, you're a big target. Barack is not only in danger because of his race, but because of the position he is going for. There's always a danger and fear he can be hurt." The accountant, who has lived in Washington DC for 23 years, is the eldest of Mr Obama's siblings. The brothers have the same father, Barack Obama Snr, but different mothers. Abongo Obama's mother Kezia was Mr Obama Snr's first wife. They married in their homeland of Kenya. He went on to marry two more women, the presidential candidate's mother Ann Dunham an American he met during a scholarship to the US and an American teacher called Ruth. He eventually went back to his first wife, with whom he had four children. After his father's death, Mr Obama, then 21, went to Kenya and met his sister and brothers for the first time.

"I am very close to Barack. I was best man at his wedding and he was best man at mine," said Mr Obama. "I have no doubt that he is going to be successful in his campaign. I am in constant touch with him on the phone, by text and email to show him that I'm here for him and I'm supporting him."

Mr Obama, a married father-of-eight, is currently holidaying at their family home in the village of Nyan'goma Kogelo, western Kenya, with his mother, who flew there from her home in Bracknell, Berkshire this week. His siblings Auma, 48, Abo, 40, and Ben, 36, who all live in Kenya, are also there. The family wanted to be together on election night to celebrate together.

"We look forward to celebrating and congratulating our brother," he said. "Our father would have been very proud of him. "America has come a long way in recent years, my brother's progress shows that." Mr Obama has been at the centre of more than 500 death threats since launching his campaign. At least 12 were so serious that secret service agents hunted the suspects, according to reports from the US. (Source: Evening Standard (UK).)

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Half-brother Bernard (by Kezia) living in Kenya

Bernard, born to Kezia and Barack Obama Sr. in 1970 leads a normal and serene life working at a car parts firm in Nairobi, Kenya. Barack Obama's father's first wife, Kezia, is Bernard Obama's mother. And Bernard was born when Barack Obama Sr. had resumed his relationship with Kezia. Some relatives question whether another man she was also seeing at the time is actually the young man's father, Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father. But Barack Obama Sr. was said to have treated Bernard as his son.

Bernard converted to Islam as an adult and has said: "I'm a Muslim, I don't deny it. My father was raised a Muslim. But it's not an issue. I don't know what all the hullabaloo is about." He currently resides in Bracknell, England, with his mother Kezia. Bernard has one child.

Bernard was 17 when he met Barry for the first time. He has since met him again, along with Barack’s wife, Michelle, while they were visiting Kenya. He finds them both charming and charismatic. "That sweetness, the lack of guile, made him seem much younger than his seventeen years," Obama wrote in his book. "But he was seventeen, I reminded myself, an age where a little more independence, a sharper edge to his character, wouldn't be such a bad thing. I realized that he had time for me partly because he had nothing better to do. He was patient because he had no particular place he wanted to go." (Source: Sun Times.)

The Sun was the first newspaper to track down and speak to Bernard Obama, 37. And he said of Democrat candidate Barack: "I'm very proud of my big brother. "It's quite a funny feeling that he might be the next President of the USA." Muslim Bernard — an avid Manchester United fan and Sun reader — is staying with his bingo-loving mum Kezia, 67, who has lived in the Berkshire new town for six years. He was glued to the TV news in the modest suburban bungalow last night as Barack, 46, was due to arrive in Britain. Bernard leads a quiet life, running a car parts firm in Nairobi, Kenya.

But he is a regular visitor to the UK to visit Elvis fan Kezia. She married Barack Obama Snr in Kenya in 1957 when she was a teenager. He later left for the US and went on to meet Ann Dunham, who gave birth to his now widely acclaimed son.

Obama Snr, a Kenyan goatherd who became a leading economist in his east African homeland's government, was killed in a car crash in 1982. Barack Jnr was 21 and Bernard 12. He said: "Our father passed away when I was young and I didn't get the chance to get to know him very well. "When you lose your dad at such a young age, that's when you really miss him." Bernard smiled when he spoke of his famous half-brother. He said: I was around 17 when I first met Barack. He was visiting Kenya and it was obvious from the way he spoke and his charisma that he was going to be a success. He is charming, very good company and very charismatic. I've met him since with his wife Michelle in Kenya. She's very nice, a very strong and intelligent person. I don't think we will see him on this visit to Britain. It's official business and he'll be very busy.

Bernard is remaining with Kezia for the next month as she recuperates from illness. Barefoot and dressed in cream shorts and red T-shirt, he said: "I love coming to Britain because I love football and I like reading about it in The Sun.

Converted

"I'm a big Manchester United fan but I think Barack's more into basketball."

Bernard converted to Islam 18 years ago. The dad of one said: "I'm a Muslim, I don't deny it. My father was raised a Muslim. "But it's not an issue. I don't know what all the hullabaloo is about." Barack is a staunch Christian. A recent cartoon in the New Yorker magazine caused a furore by portraying him as a turban-wearing Muslim and his wife as a terrorist. In February, photos emerged of Barack in traditional Somali robes during a trip to Kenya in 2006. But Bernard dismissed jibes about Barack's religion and said there was no significance to the photos.

He added: "If you go to Japan or Nigeria you put on the traditional dress. People are trying to look for ways to tarnish him." In his biography, Dreams From My Father, Barack told of meeting Bernard in Kenya. He wrote: "That sweetness, the lack of guile, made him seem much younger than his 17 years. "As we stepped into the street, Bernard draped his arm over my shoulder. 'It's good to have a big brother around,' he said, before waving goodbye and vanishing into the crowd."

The pair's dad left Kenya in 1959 when he took up a US scholarship. Kezia, then three months' pregnant with daughter Auma, already had a year-old son Malik to look after. Barack Snr met Barack's mum Ann in Hawaii, and she gave birth to the now presidential hopeful in August 1961. The Democrat's dad returned to Kenya in 1965 and Kezia subsequently gave birth to two sons, Abo in 1968 and Bernard in 1970.

Raunchy

Barack's former brother-in-law Ian Manners, 55 — divorced from Bernard's and Barack's sister Auma — is writing a book about his in-laws. Daughter Akinyi, 11, spent Christmas with Barack in the US. She said: "I asked him if I could meet Beyonce. He smiled and said he'd see what he could do." Barack attended Ian's 1996 wedding to Auma and famously ran out of a pub in Wokingham, Berks, during Ian's stag bash when a raunchy dancer took to the stage. Businessman Ian said: "We were having a few drinks, then a stripper dressed as a St Trinian's schoolgirl appeared. "She was no Miss World and it was the last thing I wanted. As soon as Barack saw what was about to happen he made a hasty retreat. "He was in politics already and left the pub immediately." Ian added: "I played a couple of rounds of golf with him in 1997. "We had to go to a municipal course because golf clubs wouldn' t have been keen on a black man playing on their course back then. "He is very competitive and beat me both times. It was obvious Barack was going to get to the top." Bernard agreed, saying: "Barack is going to win the election, definitely, and I want to be in the US for his inauguration. "He will be a breath of fresh air for the world." (Source: The Sun.)

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Obama Relatives by Ruth Ndesandjo

Ruth Ndesandjo (Paternal Step-mother)

Obama Sr. returns to Kenya, with a woman named Ruth Nidesand, who he met at Harvard. Obama, Sr. marries Nidesand in Kenya in 1967; they are eventually divorced. Born Ruth Nidesand, in US c. 1940s, Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife and a private kindergarten director in Kenya. Ruth's two sons with Barack Obama, Sr., are Mark and David Ndesandjo; her third son, Joseph Ndesandjo, was born c. 1980 from a subsequent marriage to a Tanzanian. (Source: Wikipedia.)

Met Obama Sr. while he was attending Harvard and followed him to Kenya where they married.

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Half-brother Mark Ndesandjo (by Ruth) in China

Barack Obama's half-brother, son of Ruth Nidesand and Barack Obama Sr. He runs an Internet company called WorldNexus that advises Chinese corporations how best to reach international customers. Mark graduated from Brown University, studied physics at Stanford University, received an MBA from Emory University, and has lived in Shenzhen, China, since 2002 and is married to a Chinese woman. He is also an accomplished pianist. (Source: Wikipedia.) The following is an account by Thomas Crampton in Nov 2008.

Mark Ndesandjo is president-elect Barack Obama's half-brother who lives in Shenzhen, teaches piano at an orphanage and runs an Internet company, World Nexus, that helps Chinese companies export to the US. The company website says they assist Chinese companies set up websites for foreign customers. Their motto: "Good Communication is Good Business". Boilerplate says Worldnexus is registered with the Shenzhen city government and under the Chinese name ??(TIAN XIA).

I did an earlier blog posting about the World Nexus.



Above photo is from Shenzhen Daily article published Nov 6 that had an amusing "only in China" anecdote: After Ndesandjo's identity was revealed, the wine producers of Shenyang Dragon Medical Co. Ltd., Liaoning Province, invited Ndesandjo to be their product spokesman. Ndesandjo turned down the offer, saying that he would think about it after the election.

If anyone knows him, please let me know. I'd like to request a video interview for my blog. Sounds like he has carved out a very interesting life in Shenzhen. - From Chinese-language sources in Chination Report:

Mark teaches piano in an orphanage, according to a March 2004 article in the Nanfangnet Daily: Mark doesn't have much money. His goal is to bring the art of music to the orphans. He believed an orphan's life needs not only the essentials. The arts are needed, too. Mark began teaching piano lessons at the orphanage every week – at least until events of this year overtook him. Since 2002, Mark has taught several dozen piano students. Two of his students studied with him for more than two years, one is Xing Yun, who went on to college in Guangzhou. The other is Long Ben.

From a CD cover that Mark produced: "Mark is a writer, painter and composer who spends most of his time in Asia and USA. He was born in Kenya. He studied at Brown and Stanford Universities. He published 3 CDs and one book. The book's title is Observations in Africa and others. This (semi-autobiographical) book is about a young Kenyan man who immigrated to the US and lived in a metropolitan city there. He studied Communications and worked at Lucent Technologies and Notel Networks in high positions. His hobbies included sky diving, skiing and surfing."

Mark's business ventures:

"While dining, Sui came up with a plan: Instead of just consulting, why not also open a barbeque stand? This idea excited Mark a lot. He said he wanted to open such stands in Kenya to introduce grilled tofu and potato chips to his countrymen. While enjoying their beer and chips, they drew up a business plan on a piece of scrap paper. They even designed a menu. Mark insists that it has to be natural. He wanted a very simple, unpretentious hut instead of a fancy restaurant. They named the hut-restaurant Cabin BBQ. At the end of 2003, the first Cabin BBQ was opened in Shenzhen, adjacent to their existing information consulting office.



As of today, Cabin BBQ has seven branches, including one in Yingchuan in the northwest of China, far away from Shenzhen. They are also planning on entering the Kenyan market with their next Cabin BBQ. Sui said, "From a simple joke out of desperation to a viable business, we feel like we're in a dream!" Thanks to the opening of their first Cabin BBQ, which became a very successful, profitable business, they were able to pay themselves a salary while covering the overhead of the consulting firm, which is still not profitable." - According to a 2004 article in News Guangdong

MARK NDESANDJO has been teaching children at the Shenzhen Social Welfare Center how to play piano since June 2002. A successful businessman in telecommunications, Ndesandjo is also a self-taught musician. "When I first came to Shenzhen from Florida (in the United States) two years ago, I started collecting VCRs, DVDs and pianos from my classmates in the executive MBA program in Atlanta, Georgia and donated them to the welfare center," said Ndesandjo. But soon Ndesandjo found that every time he went there, it seemed like a big party. "Children were dressed up and organized to meet us,"he said."The children here don't need food, but there is no art, or music to appreciate. Music connects human beings on the spiritual level and can have a lasting impression on the children, so I thought of setting up a program in arts education in the center," said Ndesandjo.

According to Roger Cohen in the NY Times Obama's half brother, Mark, the one in China, he's described as studying physics at Stanford in the 1980s. "The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it at all," Ruth enthuses. But Mark, "a black man of my at 46: "Life's hard enough without all the excess baggage," he muses. (SITE NOTE: This article with half-sister Aum (by Kezia). In it it Aum said Obama, "But who is Ruth, a woman who divorced Obama's father, remarried, and gave the family name of her second husband to her two sons by Obama Sr.? In the book she says, with less than exquisite tact, to Barack Obama: "But your mother remarried. I wonder why she had you keep your name?")



- Here is Mark's Linked In profile. He has three connections as of Nov 6. (Source: Thomas Crampton.)

Obama meets with half brother in China (Nov 2009) When President Barack Obama landed in Beijing on Monday on his first state visit to China, his first order of business was family business. Before he headed to a formal dinner with China's President Hu Jintao, he set aside time to see his half brother, Mark Ndesandjo, and Ndesandjo's wife, who had flown up from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen where they live.

Describing the meeting Monday as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China. "My big brother, you know I think he was on his way to see the president of China. ... He came directly off the plane, changed some clothes and then came down and saw us. And he just gave me a big hug. And it was so intense. I'm still over the moon on it. I am over the moon. And my wife. She is his biggest fan, and I think she is still recovering," he said with a laugh.

Ndesandjo said he bought tickets to fly to Beijing months ago, hoping to reconnect with his brother. The two last met in January when Ndesandjo attended Obama's inauguration in Washington, D.C., as a family guest.The three had a long chat, with Obama being introduced to Ndesandjo's wife, a native of Henan, China, whom he married a year ago, he said. He gave few specifics about what they discussed. "All I can say is, we talked about family, and it was very powerful because when he came in through that door, and I saw him and I hugged him, and he hugged me and hugged my wife. It was like we were continuing a conversation that had started many years ago," he said.

Ndesandjo is tall and slim, with close-cropped hair that gives him a strong resemblance to his brother. The two men did not grow up together. Ndesandjo's mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. Just before he arrived in Beijing on Monday, Obama had been in a townhall-style meeting with students in Shanghai, where he joked with the audience that a family gathering in his home "looks like the United Nations."

President Obama's father had been a Kenyan exchange student who met his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, a Kansas native, when they were in school in Hawaii. The two separated two years after he was born. The senior Obama later met Ndesandjo's mother as a graduate student at Harvard University, and the two returned to live in Kenya, where Mark and his brother, David, were born and grew up. David later died in a motorcycle accident. Obama's mother went on to marry an Indonesian man and he spent part of his young life in Jakarta. His sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, is half-Indonesian and her husband is Chinese-Canadian.

Since 2001, Ndesandjo has been living in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen near Hong Kong and earns a living as a marketing consultant. For most of that time, he has maintained a low profile, with few people knowing his connection to the U.S. president. But two weeks ago, he went public to launch a new novel, a semi-autobiographical book called "Nairobi to Shenzhen" that features a protagonist who is the son of a Jewish mother and an abusive father from Kenya.

The book, available over the Internet by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, was partly meant to raise awareness about domestic violence, he said. His father beat him and his mother when they were living in Kenya, Ndesandjo said. "For a long time, I had serious, serious reservations about using that name (Obama) because of the hurt I experienced," he said. Though he wanted to maintain his privacy, he decided to write the novel because "there are certain things you can do and you really should do because you know it will help people." (Source: AP.)

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Half-brother David Ndesandjo (by Ruth)

Barack Obama's half-brother (also known as David Opiyo Obama), son of Ruth Nidesand and Barack Obama Sr. Killed in a motorcycle accident.

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In this Obama Family photo are: (bottom row, from left) half-sister Auma Ndesandjo, her mother Kezia Obama, Obama's step-grandmother Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama and unknown; (top row, from left) unknown, Barack Obama, half-brother Abongo (Roy) Obama, and three unknowns. (Obama Family) (SITE NOTE: Supposedly Mark Ndesandjo -- Obama's half brother by Ruth is to the top right, but this person has also been identified as Bernard Obama)

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Obama bro: Dad was wife-beater! -- President's brother discloses details that may shed light into mysterious relationship (Nov 2009) President Obama's father was abusive and hit at least one of his American wives, Obama's half-brother claimed at a press conference in China today. The relationship Barack Obama Sr. had with his third wife might shed some light into the mysterious relationship between Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, and Barack Obama Sr. It also may provide some background into why Dunham sought a divorce from Obama Sr., although there is no record of their marriage.

Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo – who had the same, late, father as the U.S. president – spoke to reporters as part of the launch of a novel he says draws on his painful childhood under an abusive father.

Ndesandjo's mother, Ruth, was an American. She was the third wife of Obama Sr. Ruth followed Obama Sr. to Kenya when he returned there after studying at Harvard in 1965. She eventually had two children with him before they divorced.

Ndesandjo's new book, "Nairobi to Shenzhen," was released as a fictional account, but he said it started off nearly 10 years ago as an autobiography and "reflects many experiences in my own life as a child brought up in Kenya," including a troubled relationship with his father. "My mother used to say of my father, he's a brilliant man but a social failure," Ndesandjo said, speaking at the press conference in China two weeks before Obama is scheduled to visit that country.

Ndsesandjo currently resides in China. "I remember times in my house when I would hear screams, and I would hear my mother's pain," he said. "My skin had turned hard emotionally for so many years because of what I'd seen my mother go through," said Ndesandjo. The childhood experiences of Ndesandjo provide a glimpse into the life and character of Obama Sr. and may help shed some light into multiple mysteries surrounding the relationship between Obama's stated birth parents. ... (Source: WND.)

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Obama Relatives by Jael Otieno

Jael Otieno (Mistress of Barack Obama Sr.)

Mistress of Barack Obama Jr.'s father and now a resident of Atlanta, Georgia. Son George was six months old when Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident. She went on to live in Nairobi with a Frenchman. She later lived in South Korea for two years for business reasons. (Source: Telegraph.) (SITE NOTE: The mainstream media does NOT want to research this person because of the embarassing nature of the relationship.)

Barack Obama's 'lost' brother George (by Jael) found in Kenya Slum (Aug 2008)

Youngest half-brother of Barack Obama, born c.1982, son of Barack Obama Sr. and a woman named Jael (now a resident of Atlanta, Georgia). George was six months old when his father died in an automobile accident, after which he was raised in Nairobi by his mother and a French step-father. He later lived in South Korea for two years while his mother resided there for business reasons.

Returning to Kenya, George Obama "slept rough for several years," until his aunt gave him a six-by-eight foot corrugated metal shack in the Nairobi, Kenya, slum of Huruma Flats. As of August 2008, Obama was studying to become a mechanic.

George received little attention until being featured in an article in the Italian language edition of Vanity Fair in August 2008, which portrayed him as living in poverty, shame, and obscurity. The article quoted Obama as saying that he lived "on less than a dollar a month" and stated that he "does not mention his famous half-brother in conversation" out of shame at his poverty. In later interviews George contradicted this picture.

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi. Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender. "No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less than a dollar a month."

According to Italy's Vanity Fair his two metre by three metre shack is decorated with football posters of the Italian football giants AC Milan and Inter, as well as a calendar showing exotic beaches of the world. Vanity Fair also noted that he had a front page newspaper picture of his famous brother - born of the same father as him, Barack Hussein Obama, but to a different mother, named only as Jael.

He told the magazine: "I live like a recluse, no-one knows I exist." Embarrassed by his penury, he said that he does not does not mention his famous half-brother in conversation."If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed," he said.

For ten years George Obama lived rough. However he now hopes to try to sort his life out by starting a course at a local technical college. He has only met his famous older brother twice - once when he was just five and the last time in 2006 when Senator Obama was on a tour of East Africa and visited Nairobi.

The Illinois senator mentions his brother in his autobiography, describing him in just one passing paragraph as a "beautiful boy with a rounded head". Of their second meeting, George Obama said: "It was very brief, we spoke for just a few minutes. It was like meeting a complete stranger." George added he was no longer in contact with his mother and said:"I have had to learn to live and take what I need. "Huruma is a tough place, last January during the elections there was rioting and six people were hacked to death. The police don't even arrest you they just shoot you. "I have seen two of my friends killed. I have scars from defending myself with my fists. I am good with my fists." (Source: Telegraph.)

In an interview with The Times, Obama "said that he was furious at subsequent reports that he had been abandoned by the Obama family and that he was filled with shame about living in a slum." He told The Times, "Life in Huruma is good." Obama said that he expects no favors, that he was supported by relatives, and that reports he lived on a dollar a month were "all lies by people who don’t want my brother to win.”

He told The Telegraph that he was inspired by his half-brother. According to Time, George "has repeatedly denied...that he feels abandoned by Obama." CNN quoted him as saying, "I was brought up well. I live well even now. The magazines, they have exaggerated everything... I think I kind of like it here. There are some challenges, but maybe it is just like where you come from, there are the same challenges." George's reported poverty was seized on by conservative critics of Barack Obama. Columnist Dinesh D'Souza solicited donations for George Obama from his readers, while Jerome Corsi planned to give him a $1,000 check during a trip to Kenya (Corsi was expelled from the country by immigration authorities).

On January 31, 2009, George Obama was arrested for possesion of marijuana, or bhang in Swahili, by Kenyan police. Obama also apparently resisted arrest as he was being charged. (Source: CNN.)


George Hussein Onyango Obama, Senator Barack Obama's long lost brother was tracked down living in a hut on the outskirts of Nairobi Photo: Guy Calaf, Vanity Fair, Italy

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Other Kenyan Relatives (Jan 2008)

Seated on plastic chairs surrounded by chickens and barefoot children, Barack Obama's Kenyan relatives listened to the radio Tuesday for news of how their favorite son was doing in the New Hampshire primary. The early results were encouraging, bringing a whoop of satisfaction from the candidate's uncle. "Ah, that's wonderful," Said Obama declared, breaking into a wide grin. "But I don't want to jump just yet." Results of the New Hampshire voting didn't become clear until well after midnight in Kenya, with Obama finishing a close second to Hillary Clinton. "I am still fired up and ready to go," he told cheering supporters.

Kogelo, the western Kenyan village of Barack Obama's father, has been spared the political and ethnic violence that has erupted in Kenya after last month's disputed presidential election. But it's just 90 minutes' drive from a town where torched and looted buildings bear testimony to the clashes that have left more than 500 people dead, and the turmoil in Kenya, as well as his nephew's political success, were on Said Obama's mind.

While the dispute is political, violence has pitted other tribes _ such as the Obamas' Luo _ against the Kikuyu of President Mwai Kibaki, who have long dominated politics and the economy in Kenya. If Barack Obama were in Kenya today, he would "work with the leadership to bring them to a round table and find a solution to the problems that have been ravaging the country," his uncle said.

In fact, Obama's spokesman Robert Gibbs confirmed the senator spoke to opposition leader Raila Odinga for about five minutes Monday before going into a rally in New Hampshire. Odinga, a Luo, told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that Obama's father was his uncle, and that Obama called him "in the midst of his campaigning ... to express his concern and to say that he is also going to call President Kibaki so that Kibaki agrees to find a negotiated, satisfactory solution to this problem." Gibbs said Odinga and Obama's father are from the same tribe, though he was not aware they are related.

Obama, speaking Tuesday in New Hampshire, said he urged that "all the leaders there, regardless of their position on the election tell their supporters to stand down, to desist with the violence and resolve in a peaceful way in accordance with Kenyan law." Obama was coordinating his efforts with the State Department, his advisers said, and has discussed the situation with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

He has also spoken with South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, calling him during last week's Iowa caucuses in between satellite interviews with local Iowa stations. Tutu has been in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, trying to secure an end to the violence. On his last visit to Kenya, in August 2006, Obama touched on themes not normally debated openly here, criticizing the high-level corruption and the tribal politics that have dominated the country since its 1963 independence from Britain. Both have played a role in the post-election violence.

"Very many people sat up and listened, but the government didn't like it," Said Obama said of his nephew's speech, which was televised nationwide. "It touched a nerve they didn't want touched. The corruption is endemic here and tribalism cannot escape your eyes _ you just have to look at the government ministries." In his speech, Barack Obama said: "Corruption is not a new problem; it's not just a Kenyan or African problem. It's a human problem. ... While corruption is a problem we all share, here in Kenya it is a crisis robbing an honest people of the opportunities they have fought for and deserve." "Ethnic-based tribal politics have to stop," he said, to applause from university students and staff.

Obama's relatives, gathered Tuesday in the family compound at the end of a dusty dirt road lined with mimosa and mango trees, listened for news of their American relative's election fortunes. Inside his grandmother's cinderblock home, framed photos of Obama's 2006 visit and an earlier one in 1987 lined the walls, alongside a signed election poster from his Senate race. Sarah Hussein Obama, wearing a brightly patterned dress and sandals decorated with shells and beads, sat in a wooden chair in the immaculate living room, waiting for news of her grandson. Obama's father, also named Barack Obama, won a scholarship to a university in Hawaii, where he met and married the candidate's American mother. The two separated and Obama's father returned to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist until he died in a car crash in 1982. His white-tiled grave is located in a secluded corner of the family compound. The younger Obama was mostly raised in Hawaii and did not know his father well, but his presidential bid has sparked excitement in Kenya. Thousands were drawn to his appearances during his 2006 visit.

Said Obama said his nephew "has proved to be a beacon of hope here and shown that even in difficult circumstances you can make it to the highest office (Source: Huffington Post.) ___

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