This page is organized
chronologically. Near the end are items describing the known,
living members of
Obama's family.
The Luo
The Obamas are members of the Luo, Kenya's
third-largest ethnic group, which is part of a larger family of ethnic
groups, collectively also known as Luo. This group belongs to the
Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. The Obama
family is largely concentrated in the western province of Nyanza.
Hussein
Barack Obama's grandfather was
Hussein Onyango Obama
(Grandfather). He was born about 1895 and died in 1979.
He worked for the British colonial government and was a prominent and wealthy farmer.
Grandfather lived for a time in
Zanzibar, where he converted from
Christianity to Islam. He was one of the first Muslim converts
in his village.
Grandfather, for whom Obama was given the middle name, Hussein,
was "fiercely
devoted to Islam." He had
at least 3 wives: Helima, who
had no children, Akuma who gave birth to Sarah Obama, Barack Hussein
Obama, Sr. and Auma Obama.
"What your grandfather
respected was strength -- discipline." Obama quoted his grandmother, Sarah, as telling him. "This is also why he
rejected the Christian religion.
"For a brief time, he converted, and even changed his name to Johnson. But he could not understand such ideas as mercy towards your enemies, or
that this man Jesus could wash away a man's sins."
"To your grandfather, this was foolish sentiment, something to comfort
women," she added. "And so he converted to Islam -- he thought its
practices conformed more closely to his beliefs."
Grandfather's third wife Sarah is the one often referred to by Obama
as his "grandmother." She is not a blood relative and describes
herself as a lifelong Muslim. "I am a
strong believer of the Islamic faith,"
she said.
Sarah became the primary caregiver for
Senior after his mother, Akuma, left the family while her children were still
young.
Hussein The Insurgent
During Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother
Sarah told him about the
resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya, with rallies and mounting
violence that would explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952. "Most of
this activity centered on Kikuyuland," she told him. "But the Luo,
too, were oppressed. Men in our area began to join the
Kikuyu"
"Granny Sarah"
told Obama that Hussein Onyango Obama, Obama’s paternal grandfather, became
involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a
British army officer after World War II. He was arrested in 1949 and
jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family,
he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing
insurgency. Sarah, said that her husband had supplied information to the
insurgents. "His job as cook to a British army officer made him a useful
informer for the secret oathing movement which would later form the Mau Mau
rebellion," she said. "At the time the insurgents were secretly taking
oaths which included promises to kill white settlers and colonialists," Mrs. Onyango said.
"To arrest a Luo, WW II veteran (Burma), who was a senior figure in the
community, is pretty serious. They must have had some damn good evidence,"
said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the
University of Oxford, and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.
Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling
memoir, "Dreams...," but states that his grandfather was held only for "more
than six months." Obama described his grandfather’s physical state: "When
he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty
walking, and his head was full of lice." For some time, he was too
traumatized to speak about his experiences.
Akumu
Habiba Akumu Obama was Obama's paternal
grandmother, and the second wife of Hussein Onyango Obama.
A
photograph of her holding her son, Barack Sr, on her lap is on the cover
of her grandson's memoirs titled "Dreams from my Father..."
Sarah
Sarah Obama is the third wife of Obama's
paternal grandfather and was born in 1922.
Also known, through
the addition of her late husband's name, as Sarah Onyango Obama, and
sometimes referred to as Sarah Ogwel, Sarah Hussein Obama or Sarah
Anyango Obama, she lives in Nyang’oma Kogelo village, 30 miles west of
western Kenya's main town, Kisumu, on the edge of Lake Victoria.
Senior
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.
Senior seems to have inherited his
father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for
attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), the
organization spearheading the independence movement. Sarah told Obama that
his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white
man’s prison: "Because he was not a leader in KANU, Senior was released
after a few days."
Shortly after his arrest, 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."
Chief Engineer found this 1960
"Time"
article about Tom Mboya. On page 8 it mentions the "Jackie
Robinson -- Harry Belafonte Fund" which Susan Mboya oversees and which
has already been used to send 81 Kenyans to the U.S. to be educated.
While Mboya has refused to release her father’s papers, some of them
may be among the personal papers and correspondence Mboya (father) had
with students who participated in the airlift. Those papers are at
Stanford and personal correspondence is listed as one of the items in
the holdings.
Of interest in the
"Time" article, it mentions Pam Odede was sent to Ohio as one of the
students. Pam would later become Mboya’s wife and it is no
coincidence that their daughter Susan now lives in Ohio.
In June, 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,
remained 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.
The Airlift
"When Obama Sr. arrived in Hawaii
in June 1959, future President Kenyatta was in jail in Kenya," as
reported by a story done in Hawaiian paper after he arrived:
"The Washington Post reported that when Barack Obama, Sr. first
arrived in Hawaii he was interviewed by the Hawaiian 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," the date of the story was JUNE,
1959.
The whole story is a lie right from word one of daddy
arrived courtesy of an airlift. He didn’t even arrive with the
other students, he arrived months before them, so the question becomes
why?
All of this can be found at the following link aside from
speculation of why. Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and
Jackie Robinson appeal letter, Aug. 24, 1959, box 3, Robinson Papers;
Smith, "East African Airlifts of 1959, 1960, and 1961," 25–43.
Barack Obama wrote that his father "had been selected by Kenyan leaders
and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States," but
a list of the students who landed in New York on September 9, 1959, does
not contain the name of the elder Obama. Tom Shachtman, working in
the African-American Students Foundation (AASF) papers for a book on the
airlifts, has found that the elder Obama came in 1959 with support from
the AASF but appears to have been routed a different way as he made his
way to the University of Hawaii.
Barack Obama, Dreams from My
Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York, 1995), 9; "Eighty-One
Kenya Airlift Students Arrived New York Sept. 9th 1959," box 3, Robinson
Papers; Tom Shachtman telephone interview by James H. Meriwether, Aug.
19, 2008, notes (confirmed via e-mail by Shachtman) (in James H.
Meriwether’s possession).
Kezia
Kezia was a 16-year-old schoolgirl while Senior, two years older, had just
got his first proper job as an office clerk in Nairobi.
Kezia said: "It was at a dance in Kendu Bay, my home town. Barack
(Senior) was there on holiday with his family.
"I went to the dance hall with my cousin William and I saw Barack enter
the room. I thought, 'ohhh, wow'. He was so lovely with his
dancing. So handsome and so smart.
"We danced together and then the next day my cousin came to our house
and told me that Barack liked me.
"It was December, so I was off school. Each day Barack and my
cousin would stop by the house.
"Every time I looked they were always there, trying to convince me to go
with Barack to Nairobi.
"About a week later, William and I took Barack to the station. We
were going to say: 'Bye bye, see you next time.' Except there was
no bye bye.
"When the train arrived William and Barack said, "You are going to
Nairobi." I went with him.'
Her father, a local driver, was furious.
Kezia said: "He did not like Obama. My father and brothers came to
Nairobi to bring me back. They said I had to go back to school.
"When I wouldn't, they said they would never speak to me again.
"Barack was also worried about what his father (grandfather) would think because I was
so young, but he gave us his approval. He sent my mother and
father 14 cows for my dowry.
Kezia and Barack Sr.
were
married in a tribal ceremony in January, 1957, and
set up a home in Jericho, a
section of Nairobi created for government employees, and began a family.
First son Roy was born in March 1958. Kezia insisted: "Barack was a good
husband."
Also known as Kezia Grace
Obama. She currently lives in Bracknell, Berkshire, England.
Can you imagine if a Republican was running for
president and it came out that his father had bought his first wife for
14 cows???!!!Just wow!!
The
Dunhams
The
Greatest
Generation
Stanley Armour Dunham was
born 23 March 1918. , came from the
oil-town of El Dorado, Kansas, the "other side of the railroad tracks."
He attended El Dorado High School and
worked
on oil rigs during the Depression.
Madelyn Lee Payne was born in Peru, Kan., on Oct. 26, 1922. When
she was 3, her family moved to Augusta, Kan., where she was raised.
Madelyn married Stanley Armour Dunham on May 5, 1940. The
newlyweds didn't tell her parents of the marriage until after she had
her high school diploma in hand.
They eloped
a month later,
on the evening of her high school graduation in June, 1940. She
was seventeen and a half years old, he was twenty-one. Her parents
disapproved of the match.
Stanley enlisted for military service in World War II
in June of 1942 and served in Patton's 3rd Army. He saw no combat.
After the war
Stanley became a retail furniture salesman. He moved his family to
Oklahoma, Texas, California and back to Kansas before they settled in
the Seattle area in 1955.
Although a Seattle
Times article reports that the family rented an apartment in the
Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle, records also show that the family
lived in the Wedgwood Estates apartment complex, in one of four units at
7529 39th Avenue NE, during their first year in Washington state.
Stanley Ann Dunham attended 8th grade at Eckstein Middle School in the
Wedgwood neighborhood.
He died in
Honolulu on
Feb. 8th, 1992. He is buried
at Punchbowl Cemetery because of
his military service. Madelyn died November 2, 2008. Obama
spread her ashes onto the sea from the cliffs of Hawaii.
Madelyn attended college at the University of Washington and then went to work on a
bomber assembly line during WW II. After the war, she attended UC-Berkeley,
worked various jobs on the Mainland. In 1960, when they came to the Islands, she
joined the Bank of Hawaii.
While Madelyn could be stern and tough at work, her personality changed
around her husband. A friend said he seemed like a real
rough-and-tumble guy. When Madelyn was with Stanley, she was very
quiet.
He was the man of the house.
The Dunhams had one daughter, Stanley
Ann Dunham (Anna), who was born in Wichita,
Kansas, on November 29th, 1942.
The Dunhams
moved to 3206 East Lexington St., Mercer Island, Washington in 1956,
after living in an apartment for a year in a
nearby Seattle. The lure was the high school that had just opened and
the opportunity it offered for their daughter, who was then 13.
In 1956 the family learned of a
new high school opening on Mercer Island, then a considerably more rural
community (the city itself would not incorporate until 1960), and moved
to the island, renting unit 219 of the Shorewood Apartments at 3206 E
Lexington Way. Stanley Dunham worked as a salesman at Standard-Grunbaum
Furniture in downtown Seattle initially, though by 1957 he was working
at Doces Majestic Furniture in Seattle. Madelyn found work as an
escrow officer in Bellevue.
As an historical aside,
Anna Dunham's forebears
were slaveholders.
One of Obama's
great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned
two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 Census in Nelson County, Ky.
The same records show that one of Obama's
great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two
slaves.
Mercer Island
The Fifties
The Dunhams went from El Dorado to a bigger
opportunity in 1955 -- to 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.
Seattle in the 1950s had no Space
Needle, no Microsoft, no Starbucks. Mercer Island, now a pricey home to
corporate luminaries such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, was then
"a rural, idyllic place," said Elaine Johnson, who remembered summers
with "sleepovers along the water in sleeping bags. It was so
safe." The island was quiet, politically conservative and all
white.
As a suburb, Mercer Island was still in its infancy. The 1950
census counted about 5,000 people, almost all white. Sanctioned
deer hunts had stopped just a few years before the Dunhams arrived.
But consistent with the 1950s, there were undercurrents of
turmoil. In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board,
John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities
Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.
Madelyn and Stanley shed
their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday
services at the
East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.
"In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the
hill,'" said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister.
Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his
daughter, was welcomed here.
High School
For four years on Mercer Island, Stanley Ann
Dunham impressed her high-school classmates with a wickedly sharp wit.
She was an "intellectual rebel" with a fledgling
beatnik sensibility that would eventually take her around the globe.
Stanley Ann Dunham's classmates, many of whom had lived on the island
their whole lives, viewed Dunham as a novelty.
"She had a really ironic sense of humor, sort of downbeat and she was
a great observer," said Iona Stenhouse, of Seattle, a former classmate.
"There was an arched eyebrow, or a smile on her face about the
immaturity of us all. I felt at times that Stanley thought we were
a bit of a provincial group."
The diversions for Dunham and her class were solidly 1950s vintage:
sock hops and sleepovers and the song "Rockin' Robin." Dunham's
father drove her and friends to boys basketball games, and would
embarrass his daughter with his noisy cheering.
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."
"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are
today: The press is dumbed down, education is dumbed down, people don't
know anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who
later taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.
"She was not a standard-issue girl. You don't start out life as
a girl with a name like Stanley without some sense you are not
ordinary."
At Mercer High School, two teachers -- Val Foubert and Jim
Wichterman -- generated regular parental thunderstorms by teaching their
students to challenge societal norms and question all manner of
authority. Foubert, who died recently, taught English. His
texts were cutting edge: "Atlas Shrugged," "The Organization Man," "The
Hidden Persuaders," "1984" and the acerbic writings of H.L. Mencken.
Wichterman taught philosophy.
The hallway between the two
classes was known as "anarchy alley," and students pondered the
challenging notions of Wichterman's teachings, including such
philosophers as Sartre and Kierkegaard. He also touched the
societal third rail of the 1950s: He questioned the existence of God.
And 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."
Anna
Class Of 1960
Stanley Dunham had wanted a son, so when his daughter
was born, he named her Stanley Ann Dunham, after himself.
Known as
Anna,
Obama's mother, was a strong-willed, unconventional member of the Mercer
Island High School graduating class of 1960. She
spent 8th grade through high school there. Here is her
application for a Social Security card, submitted when she was 16.
Stanley Ann Dunham was issued
Social Security number 535-40-8522.
Curious and precocious, Anna was
greatly influenced by left-wing and communist
teachers in the Mercer Island High School, who had the students read
the philosophers Sartre and Kierkegaard, "The Communist Manifesto" and
question the existence of God. Anna touted herself as an atheist.
Mercer Island High was a hotbed of pro-Marxist radical teachers.
John Stenhouse, board member,
testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that
he had been a member of the Communist Party USA and the school has a
number of Marxists on its staff. Two teachers at this school, Val
Foubert and Jim Wichterman, both Frankfurt School style Marxists,
taught a critical theory curriculum to students which included;
rejection of societal norms, attacks on Christianity, the traditional
family, and assigned readings by Karl Marx. The hallway between
Foubert’s and Wichterman classrooms was called "anarchy ally."
Susan Blake, a classmate and former city councilwoman from Mercer Island
who long ago changed the infant Barack's messy diaper, said of her
friend: "Hers was a mind in full tilt."
Anna
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."
"We were critiquing America in those days in the same way we are today:
The press is dumbed-down, education is dumbed down, people don't know
anything about geography or the rest of the world," said Wall, who later
taught at Mercer Island High and is now retired in Seattle.
A high school classmate described Anna as "a fellow traveler. . . . We
were liberals before we knew what liberals were."
The descriptive, "fellow traveler," was first applied to non-communists
who were inclined toward the views of the Communist Party by Leon
Trotsky.
On The Road
Summer 1960
Stanley Ann's graduation from high school is the
last documented event for the next four years of which the researcher
can be confident, although bits and pieces continue to surface.
Beginning that summer (1960), with the family's move
to Hawaii, Stanley Ann enters her "beatnik" period.
Mainstream media sources, the recollection of friends and associates
and Obama's account are frequently at odds about where Anna was, and
what she was doing, at any
point in time. No one knows for sure, and there are no records to
substantiate, where Stanley Ann Dunham was, or what she was doing,
between the summer of 1960, until she showed up in Hawaii with a two
year old.
What follows is the best account, cobbled together from
multiple sources. There are additional supporting sources at the
"More Stuff" button.
Anna
Meets
Senior
Fall 1960
In 1960, Anna's father found a better opportunity at a furniture store in Hawaii
and moved his family to Honolulu.
The Dunhams originally lived at
2277 Kamehameha Ave. before moving to 2234 University Ave.
When Ann Dunham
arrived in Hawaii , she was a full fledged radical leftist and
practitioner of critical theory. She practiced a little photo
modeling too. I won't post the pictures but
this website has them.
When Obama Sr. moved to Hawaii in June
of 1959 it has been well documented that he originally lived in a room
at the Atherton Y.M.C.A., but later moved to a small, single story
wooden home located at 625 11th Ave. located in the St. Louis Heights
area.
On Sept 26,1960 , Stanley Ann began classes at the University of
Hawaii, and began an intimate relationship with Barack Obama Sr. almost
immediately.
Dunham, who hadn't had a
boyfriend in high school, was seventeen years old and an anthropology student.
They met
in a Russian-language course at a time when the
Russian language was inextricably mixed up with communism.
Susan Blake remembers receiving a postcard from Stanley Ann over
Christmas, 1960.
She said
that she was dating an African exchange student, and that while her
parents weren't happy with it, they were dealing and adjusting.
Obama
would write, "My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful
black people playing in her head."
She spent weekends in
discussions that seemed to be, in part, a logical extension of the long
coffeehouse sessions in Seattle and the teachings of
Wichterman and Foubert, Anna's left-wing instructors.
The forum involved graduate students from the University of Hawaii.
They spent weekends listening to jazz, drinking beer and debating
politics and world affairs.
Neil Abercrombie, the Democratic congressman from Hawaii, was part of
those regular gatherings and described Anna as "the
original feminist."
Abercrombie
remembered 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."
Very comprehensive history of Stanley Ann
Dunham
and her son Barack --
Part 1 and
Part 2.
Anna
Really
Meets
Senior
Fall 1960
Although still married to Kezia
in 1960, Senior may or may not have married fellow student Anna Dunham.
If so,
Senior was now legally a bigamist. Over his lifetime and through
several wives, Senior eventually returns to Kezia.
On February 2, 1961, against Madelyn's
hopes, and against the desires of Obama's father back in Kenya, Ann,
three months pregnant, and
Obama hopped a plane to Maui and got
married.
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.
Obama, himself, hints that his father and mother’s wedding
may not have been
properly documented. "How and when the marriage
occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I have never
quite had the courage to explore," Obama writes in his memoir.
It's understandable that Obama overlooks
the particulars, since Ann Dunham was a minor of 17, when Senior, 24
and already
married, impregnated her?
Obama weighed eight pounds, two ounces when he was born on August 4,
1961 (p. 22 of Dreams from My Father), so we can assume he went close to
full term, or nine months.
Michelle Obama
contradicts this version. She described Anna as "very
young and very single when she had him (Obama)."
Marriage?
His parents’ alleged marriage took place six months before his birth on
February 2nd, 1961. Nine months before Obama’s birth would be
early November 1960, about three to four weeks before Ann Dunham’s 18th
birthday on November 29, 1960.
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 that Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior were not ever
legally married and that Obama Sr., a married man of 25, almost certainly impregnated
the 17-year-old Dunham.
And this -- There is no evidence whatsoever that Senior and Anna ever
lived together anywhere, at any time. The living arrangements
between the announcement of the wedding and the birth of the child were
uncertain.
Most likely,
Obama Senior remained in his dorm room while Ann lived with her parents. Letters written by
acquaintances of Senior during the period 1960-1961 with accompanying
photographs do not mention or show Anna at all.
Senior eventually
told Anna about a former marriage in Kenya but said he was divorced,
which she would discover years later was a lie.
The
Families
React
Spring
1961
The Dunhams weren't happy with the union, but
Barack Senior's father was furious.
He
wrote the Dunhams "this long, nasty letter saying that he didn't
approve of the marriage," Obama recounted his mother telling him, "He didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white
woman."
Six months after they wed,
another letter arrived in Kenya, announcing the birth of Barack
Hussein Obama, born Aug. 4, 1961. Despite her husband's continued
anger, Sarah Obama said in a recent interview, she "was so happy to have
a grandchild in the U.S."
This is
the same Sarah who also
said she was in the delivery room when Obama was
born in Kenya.
Barack
Summer 1961
Click to see larger copy of Obama's
Certification of Birth
Click that copy to see actual size copy.
The Obama campaign
supplied a "Certification of Live Birth" to Markos Moulitsas
Zuniga for posting on his Daily Kos site. Kos says so in the
comments.
From an
analysis of the image and the text, it looks like this
"certification" is presented as a true
copy of an original, certified document, but it is not a "birth
certificate."
Years later, when Obama was in high school, he
found 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."
This is a very strange question. Why would Obama, now in his
teens, wonder about a conflict that may have happened when he was a year
old? What is he saying in this passage?
Is he saying there was no birth certificate for his mother and he, or is
he saying something else?
Unless the voting public is given a real birth certificate to examine,
the question of Barack's birth is still up in the air.
At one time, there was a YouTube video posted here of Anna in Seattle,
shortly after Obama was born, entitled, "Stanley Ann displays parenting
skills." It has been removed from YouTube, "at the request of the
user."
What was Ann Dunham, at age 18, doing at Mercer Island
(outside of Seattle) with a newborn infant for a "brief" visit?
What were the logistics of a Honolulu-Seattle round trip in 1961: how
long was the flight, and how much would the trip have cost? Or,
was Anna returning from Kenya, as some have alleged.
Were there any restrictions in 1961 about flying with newborn babies?
Did Dunham travel alone with "Barry" (the name Blake used) or was she
accompanied by Barack Sr., her mother, or others?
Is it possible that Dunham actually delivered Barry someplace close
to Mercer Island -- either in the US or Canada -- and she popped in to
visit Ms. Blake on her way back to Hawaii?
Birth Place
Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, has said that Obama was born
in two different Hawaii hospitals.
In a November 2004
interview with the Rainbow Newsletter, Maya told reporters her
half-brother Sen. Barack Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, at Queens
Medical Center in Honolulu; then in February 2008, Maya told reporters
for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that Obama was at the Kapiolani Medical
Center for Women and Children.
Last week in Hawaii, World Net
Daily retained a top private investigator with extensive FBI training
and tasked him with visiting both the Queens Medical Center and the
Kaliolani Medical Center to investigate claims that Obama birth
certificates existed at either hospital.
But the private
investigator reported that
sheriff's deputies were stationed at both hospitals to fend off press
inquiries about Obama's birth certificate.
The Birth Announcement
click for large image
The Chief’s
theory was that Grandma placed the article to save face and give
respectability to her daughter’s condition. Now that we face an
assortment of photoshopped pics and documents, it is more likely that
the announcements are fake too.
Mr. & Mrs. blah blah blah would
lend no decency to her daughter since her daughter’s name is not
mentioned in the announcement. Since no one seems to have seen or
know the Dunham daughter was pregnant, what shred of cover or decency
would an Obama announcement provide for Stanley Ann?
Besides,
Madelyn would have made a wiser choice on the address. She would
have chosen a rental home near the University of Hawaii, not the
priciest spot on the island owned by the college professor. She
had record access to property titles through the bank. If Madelyn
had planted the announcement in 1961 to impress the Dunham friends, it
could have led to a huge embarrassment. Can you imagine friends
of the Dunhams stopping by to visit the new baby and knocking on the
Lefforge’s door? Or mailing newborn baby gifts and sending flowers
for Stanley to a wrong address?
This was planted long after 1961.
Likely, at the time of one of the book writings, the run for Congress,
or the run for the Senate.
No one on the island
remembers the wedding or the birth of the child. No one ever
saw Mr. & Mrs. Obama together with a baby.
The entire 'family story' comes from "Dreams From
My Father."
The Lefforges And The Nordykes
The birth announcement was "discovered" on July 22,
2008, ten days from the date of the death of the long-time owner of the
property at 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, one Mrs. Lefforge.
The
announcement was located in the Honolulu public library microfilm
(microfiche) of a notice placed in the Sunday Advertiser Aug. 13, 1961.
The announcement in the "Births, Marriages, Death" section read: "Mr.
and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4."
Now, look at the address on Obama's birth announcement?
According to the birth announcement, Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, (Sr.)
resided at 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy. There should be other links that
connect their stay at that address. There is no documentation or
corroborating evidence that they ever lived at that address or were
associated with that home.
The owners of the residence located at
6085 Kalanianaole Hwy, the alleged address of Obama’s parents when he
was born, was Orland S. and Thelma S. (Young) Lefforge, both of whom are
deceased.
In 1961 the Stanley and Madelyn Dunham lived on
Kamehameha Avenue. Obama Sr. lived on 11th Avenue. The
Lefforge family, including their 3 children under the age of seven were
residing at the luxury home listed on Obama’s birth announcement -- 6085
Kalanianaole Highway.
Beatrice Arakaki affirmed she was a
neighbor of the address listed. She has lived at her current
residence of 6075 Kalanianaole Highway from before 1961 to the present.
Mrs. Arakaki said that Obama, his 'mama,' and his 'papa' never lived
there. Arakaki told investigators that she had no recollection of
Obama being born or of the family living next door having a black child
born to a white mother.
Dr. Robert Allan Nordyke joined the
Straub Clinic, located at 7192 Kalanianaole Highway Honolulu, HI 96825,
on April 11, 1960. He was a pioneer in nuclear medicine.
I
suppose it's just a coincidence that his wife, Eleanor Nordyke, pops up
and says she gave birth to twins
on the same day in the same hospital, then the birth announcement shows
the same street address as her husband's clinic? And the twins
birth was never announced at all? A physician and his wife give
birth to twins and there's no announcement?
Where is the birth
announcement for the Nordyke twins, who both turned up in Obama's
kindergarten class? Were their names eventually removed and
another name substituted in the same space?
Which One?
Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, has
claimed Obama was born in two different Hawaii hospitals.
In
a November 2004 interview with the Rainbow Newsletter, Maya told
reporters her half-brother, Barack, was born on Aug. 4, 1961, at Queens
Medical Center in Honolulu; then in February 2008, Maya told reporters
for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin that Obama was at the Kapiolani Medical
Center for Women and Children.
"When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya
was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling
empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject
whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of
1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children."
"Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn
an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically
expired on Aug. 4,1982."
From
Texas Darlin -- In my understanding, Article II Requires that one be
a "Natural Born Citizen", and in terms of the Law as understood by the
Framers, anyone with Dual Citizenship could not be "Natural Born".
It does not matter that they no longer hold that Citizenship, they fall
into the same bracket as a "Naturalized Citizen" because they have/had
Divided Allegiance. That is my view and I haven’t moved an inch on
it.
However, the Kenyan Citizenship Issue may not be the main point here,
WAS HE, OR WAS HE NOT, an INDONESIAN CITIZEN? The Senator isn’t
saying, isn’t mentioning it, is trying to avoid producing any Paperwork
at all. Why? If he is/was an Indonesian Citizen, too, the
Senator’s entire narrative is a fiction and he should be ashamed of
himself.
He’s lied about Kenya, at least by omission, for months/years, so why
should I assume he isn’t lying about Indonesia? Note Kenyan
Citizenship automatically lapses if it isn’t renewed at age 21.
Indonesian Citizenship doesn’t. If he was an Indonesian Citizen he
would have to actively repudiate that Citizenship. Did he?
Has he? Because if he hasn’t, Senator Obama is Dual National
Indonesian at this moment, subject to the Laws of BOTH Countries,
equally.
Obama is a Constitutional lawyer which means that he knows, and has
always known, that he is probably ineligible to hold the Office of POTUS,
or that, at the very least, there is a strong Legal Argument that that
is the case.
If Lolo Soetoro adopted him, Obama ceased to be a US Citizen in the mid
1960s, BY INDONESIAN LAW. He also ceased to be a Kenyan Citizen,
BY INDONESIAN LAW. By Kenyan and US Law he retained his Original
Citizenships, until his 21st Birthday. By Indonesian Law he could
have given up Indonesian Citizenship at age 18, but did he? If he
didn’t he was, albeit accidentally, displaying a Legal Intention to void
his US Citizenship, since he knew he could not Legally hold both
Citizenships.
This new material at "Fight the Smears" displays arrogance,
hubris and bad faith, in my opinion. It is the Senator’s reaction
to Phillip Berg’s Law Suit (next item), and, basically, it amounts to an
open admission of mens rea. He is flaunting his bad faith and in
so doing destroys his own case.
Obama's website also contains the bogus
Certification of Live Birth, that has been labeled, "Barack Obama’s
Official Birth Certificate."
The "Certification of Live Birth" is NOT a birth certificate.
The
Breakup
Obama Sr. stayed in Hawaii to complete his
education and Anna returned to Seattle and Capital Hill.
In August or September of 1961,
enrolled
and attended classes in his final undergraduate year from the University
of Hawaii, from which he would
graduate with a Bachelors Degree in economics and mathematics 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 for Cambridge, Massachusetts, , leaving his still-teenage wife and child
in Seattle.
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.
Anna Visits
On at least one
occasion,
very shortly after the birth of Barack Obama Junior, friends of Anna
recall her visiting them in Seattle with her new born baby, Barack Obama
Junior.
Susan Blake, another high school classmate, said that during a brief
visit in 1961, Dunham was excited about her husband's plans to return to
Kenya "We all had June Cleaver as our role models, and she was blazing
new trails for herself," said Blake, a former Mercer Island city
councilwoman.
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.
This is Mary
Toutonghi's account from Anna's time on Seattle's Capitol Hill.
Anna Stays
Washington
Summer 1961
Through Winter 1963
Ann and the infant Barack were in Washington state by
August 1961 when she registered for classes at University of Washington
using the Capitol Hill apartment address as her address. She was
still living at that address in fall of 1962 when Barbara Cannon Rusk
visited her.
Shortly after Barack was born, Dunham and her new son moved to
Seattle. They lived in Apartment 2 of the Villa Ria Apartments
at 516 13th Avenue E on Capitol Hill, and she enrolled at the
University of Washington. But their stay was brief -- probably less
than a year -- and in 1962 they returned to Hawaii.
FROM a
DIFFERENT STORY (if same location): They lived in a three-story
house that had been converted into three inexpensive apartments.
Toutonghi and her family lived in the basement apartment, and Ann
Dunham -- Obama's mother -- lived in the apartment directly
upstairs.
FROM a 3RD story: Sum 1962 -- Sighting by
John W. Hunt in June-Sept 1962 "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 a...
In August, 1961, she
enrolled in a University of Washington extension
course. Between August, 1961 and March 1962, she enrolled in a
total of four extension courses at the University of Washington, earning
a total of 20 credits for her work in those courses, no small feat,
considering that graduation required 180 credits, and the typical full
time student earned 45 credits a year.
It was a curious academic choice. Why would she enroll in extension
courses at the University of Washington when she had found herself
intellectually stimulated during her previous year of studies at the
University of Hawaii?
It appears from the following item, that Anna returned to Hawaii
between the Univ. of Washington's Winter semester and the Univ. of
Hawaii's Winter semester. I'll try to get an exact date, but for
now, that would be around December 1962 or January 1963.
So it's fair to conclude that Anna was living in Washington during
the period from August 1961 through January 1963.
Anna Studies
Hawaii
Spring
1963 Through Summer 1967
Here's some information from
Atlas Shrugs about Anna and the mid-1960's.
It appears that
Anna settles down a little after returning to Hawaii and the university.
She divorces Senior, receives a degree in mathematics, and meets and
marries Lolo Soetoro.
According to this blog, Atlas reader Rudy emailed both the University
of Washington and the University of Hawaii, and they sent him back dates
of enrollment. It didn't match the dates Wikipedia had for Stanley Ann
Dunham. Bob tried to update Wikipedia and his updates got deleted within
minutes.
Here's what was returned by email:
"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)
And the response from University of Washington:
Ms. Stanley Ann Dunham was enrolled at the University of Washington
for:
Autumn 1961
Winter 1962
Spring 1962
Assuming these email responses were true, the University of Hawaii
has Anna starting class in Sept 26, 1960 and dropping out for the spring
semester (while pregnant). She then re-enrolled at the University
of Washington in the autumn of 1961, just after Obama was born.
Obama Sr. was still at the University of Hawaii, and graduated in 1962
while Anna was at University of Washington.
Some time between August 1961 and March
1962, Barack Obama Senior was
accepted
into Harvard's Ph d. program in economics. He left
Hawaii on June 22, 1962.
Senior had rejected a scholarship at the Marxist New School
for Social Research in New York City that would have paid for his family
to come with him. He chose to attend Harvard, where there was no
allotment for his family and he took up with Ruth, who would become his
third wife.
In "Dreams...," Obama claims that Senior left when he was two years old,
when, in fact, Senior left before Obama was 1 year old.
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 (Anna) 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.
I
believe the apartment located at 110 1427 Alexander St. was rented for
Anna and Barack Jr. by her parents upon her return from WA state. She remained
there until just before she registered for spring classes at UH at Manoa
in 1963.
In June, 1964, Senior left Harvard with a masters degree in economics and returned to Kenya to join the
fledgling Kenyatta government as
a
senior economist.
Neil
Abercrombie
said of Barack Sr., "I know he loved Ann," but "I think
he didn't
want the impediment of being responsible for a family. He expected great
things of himself and he was going off to achieve them."
This is the guy who Obama romanticized in
his first book, writing, "It was into my father’s image, the black man,
son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself..."
-- some role model -- Obama Sr. selfishly abandoned his family and
eventually became a drunk.
Anna filed for divorce in 1964 (page
2 -- page 3 --
click to enlarge) and remarried two years later, when her
son was 5.
Years later, Abercrombie and another grad school friend looked up their
old pal during a trip through Africa.
At that point, the senior Obama was a bitter man, according to the
congressman, feeling that he had been denied due opportunities to
influence the running of his country. "He was drinking too much; his
frustration was apparent," Abercrombie said.
To Abercrombie's surprise, Obama Sr.
never asked about his ex-wife or his son.
Senior Returns To Africa
Obama Sr. returned to Kenya from Harvard in
1964, not 1965 as has been widely reported. Before he arrived at
Harvard he took a three month tour of mainland U.S.A.
Senior
Marries
Ruth
In 1964, Obama Senior married his third wife, an American-born teacher called Ruth,
who met at Harvard
while still
legally married
to both Kezia and
Ann and who followed him to Africa.
Ruth is the third woman Obama Senior "marries" in
8 years.
Senior had two children with Ruth. Son Mark was born
in 1964 although no month has been given, nor has any date been given
for the marriage of Senior and Ruth.
Anna
Marries
Lolo
When Obama was almost 2,
Ann returned to college at the University of Hawaii. 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.
Obama's mother married Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo
in 1967. Lolo would later become an oil company
executive.
Lolo, who is a Muslim,
promptly moved his new family to Jakarta,
Indonesia, the worlds most populous Muslim country. Obama
lived in Indonesia for nearly five years as a child. He had a
pet ape named Tata, and sampled exotic foods -- dog, snake and
grasshopper.
Lolo and Anna had one daughter, Obama's
step-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.
It is she who
places Obama in
Jakarta, Indonesia, from 1968 through 1972.
In Obama's account of this move, he
states his mother was shocked to discover how her new husband reverted
to chauvinist Indonesian ways as soon as he left America and that
Indonesia was a nasty right-wing dictatorship (although the latter
doesn’t jibe with her spending much of the rest of her life in that
country).
In "Dreams," he inadvertently sheds some light on his formative years
and the
political views of his mother, an anthropologist and Islamophile who
hated America and subsequently goes native.
"Looking back, I'm not sure Lolo ever fully understood what my mother
was going through ... why the things he was working so hard to provide
for her seemed only to increase the distance between them ... He landed
a job in the government relations department of an American oil company.
... Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their
bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties,
where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo's
back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new
offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother
about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it
would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own
people, and my mother's voice would rise to almost a shout."
"They are not my people!"
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.
Lolo died in 1987.
The Adoption
Obama arrived in Indonesia at about the age of
five according to most accounts, although it was possible he arrived at
the age of six, according to a few sources. If Lolo Soetoro
adopted Obama at age five or younger, then Obama would automatically
have become an Indonesian citizen according to the country’s laws in the
1960’s, which stipulated any child aged five or younger adopted by an
Indonesian father is immediately granted Indonesian citizenship upon
completion of the adoption process.
According to Indonesian legal experts, it was difficult to enroll
non-Indonesian citizens in public schooling.
Assuming the
adoption was in order, Soetoro remained the legal father of Obama even
after the divorce. He is still Obama’s legal father. Obama
may very well have gone to the courts to correct his birth certificate
but it amount to a name change only.
Indonesian
Law
"The Indonesian Citizenship Law states that
children's citizenship is derived solely from the citizenship of the
father. Children of citizen mothers and foreign fathers are
considered foreigners and require visas to remain in the country until
the age of 18, at which time they may apply for citizenship. They
are prohibited from attending public schools and must attend private,
international schools, which usually are more expensive."
U. S. State Department
Sister Maya
Obama's
half-sister, Maya Kassandra Soetoro, was
born on August 15, 1970, in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Anna registered her birth as "born
in Honolulu" shortly after her birth, as well. Maya
would have a State of Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth, just like the
one Obama posted on the Internet.
Maya would also attend the private Punahou School.
It was Maya, who has said that Obama was legally adopted by her father,
Lolo Soetoro, and
Maya also said, "There was always a
joke between my mom and Barack that he
would be the first black president."
The
Drop
Off
In 1972, Ann took Barack
Jr.
back to Hawaii to live with her parents, who
lived in a modest two-bedroom Honolulu apartment, at 1617 S. Beretania
St., in order to
save money for Obama’s tuition to
attend the Punahou Academy, an elite private school. Madelyn would
live at that address until her death on November 2nd, 2008.
Anna and Obama's half-sister Maya
returned to Indonesia. Except for occasional visits to Hawaii, Dunham,
who traveled throughout Southeast Asia on business, would remain
based in Jakarta for the remainder of her life.
Anna
traveled around the world, pursuing a career in rural development
that took her to Ghana, India, Thailand, Indonesia, Nepal and
Bangladesh. In 1986, Anna worked on a developmental project in
Pakistan. Later that year, Anna and her daughter traveled the Silk
Road in China. In 1992, she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from
the University of Hawaii. Her dissertation, 'Peasant blacksmithing
in Indonesia: Surviving and Thriving Against All Odds,' was 1,067 pages
long. She worked for the Ford Foundation and promoted Microlending.
Shortly before her death of ovarian cancer, Anna returned
to Hawaii, where she died on November 7, 1995.
Senior
Visits
Senior only saw Obama once. He made a trip
to Hawaii in 1972 to attend to family business. This photo, of
Anna and Senior, was taken at the airport.
It was during Barry's
first year at Punahou School that his long-lost father stepped
briefly into his life, and just as quickly disappeared again. He
came for the month of December, and his mother returned from Indonesia
beforehand to prepare Barry for the visit.
At the first sight of the old man Obama thought he seemed far skinnier
than he had imagined him, and more fragile, with his spectacles and blue
blazer and ascot and yellowish eyes. It was not an easy month, and
what stuck in the boy's memory was the basketball that his dad gave him
as a present.
But this raises the question of why Obama Sr. flew halfway across the world to make his
only visit to his son. Remember, this was in the era before the
de-regulation of the airlines, and a plane ticket from Kenya to Hawaii
must have cost a small fortune [even by American standards, much less
third-world Kenyan standards].
Typical
White
People
Obama would
describe his grandparents, the people
who would raise him, as "white folk" and later, during the campaign
would describe his grandmother as a "typical white person."
Madelyn Dunham, who Obama affectionately called
"Toot,"
raised Barry Obama. It was probably her money that got him
admitted to the prestigious Punahou School in Hawaii and paid his fees.
Her efforts were formative, perhaps even more so than those of Obama's
mother Ann, Madelyn's daughter. And yet Madelyn is being hidden
away, as Obama said, "somewhere in Hawaii."
Two years before Anna left Barry with her mother, in December 1970,
Madelyn was named one of the first two female vice presidents at Bank of
Hawaii.
It was a no-nonsense, serious workplace. And Dunham had a
reputation as a tough boss who quickly tested young management trainees.
"The first day I met her I was totally scared," Ching said. "She was the
Grande Dame of escrow who started the local escrow association. I
was just a trainee who didn't know anything about escrow whatsoever.
But she gave me a file and said, 'You're a college grad. Here,
close this.' You don't know how to swim and she throws you in and
you either sink or swim."
And America's media have supinely allowed Obama to pretend he has no
white relatives. On may occasions, his Kenyan step-grandmother,
Sarah, who
never laid eyes on Obama Jr. until 1986, has been put on public display
as "his grandmother." His real
grandmother, who actually raised him, has been put away in a closet.
The Chicago Tribune
reports "the Obama campaign declined to make [his white grandmother]
available."
Is this because she is white and Barry Obama is a "black" candidate for
president.
The "segregation" of Madelyn Dunham,
Obama's white grandmother, and only real grandmother, has to be one of
the cruelest and most mendacious political kidnappings this nation has
ever seen.
On the other hand,
Stanley Dunham was in the habit of taking the
11-12-year-old Barry to a bar in the black "red-light district," the
hangout of prostitutes and drug pushers, according to Obama's book.
Barack Finds His Birth Certificate
"I discovered this article, folded away among
my birth certificate and old vaccination forms, when I
was in high school. It's a short piece, with a photograph of him.
No mention is made of my mother or me, and I'm left to wonder whether
the omission was intentional on my father's part, in anticipation of his
long departure. Perhaps the reporter failed to ask personal
questions, intimidated by my father's imperious manner; or perhaps it
was an editorial decision, not part of the simple story that they were
looking for. I wonder, too, whether the omission caused a fight
between my parents."
In 1980, a few of his friends at Occidental
College had already begun to
call him Barack, and he'd come to prefer that. The way his
half sister, Maya, remembers it, Obama returned home at Christmas in
1980, and there he told his mother and grandparents: "no more Barry."
Senior
Crashes
and
Burns
According to his daughter, Auma, Obama
Sr. was an alcoholic who was extremely found of Scotch". He
killed a man
in a drunk driving accident in the early 1970's.
In 1982, Obama Senior killed himself in an alcohol-related car accident in Kenya, leaving
three wives, one mistress, six sons and a
daughter -- there is also the possibility of an eight progeny via a mistress.
Although Obama claims Obama Senior was an atheist, Obama Senior was
buried as a Muslim. The
rival
families of Obama's late father are still suing each other over his
meager estate.
One of Senior's former drinking partners, Kenyan writer Philip Ochieng
said that his friend's downfall was his
weak character.
In fact he was a menace to life, said Ochieng. "He had many
extremely serious accidents. Both his legs had to be amputated.
They were replaced with crude false limbs made from iron.
"He was just like Mr. Toad [from Wind In The Willows], very arrogant on
the road, especially when he had whisky inside. I was not
surprised when I learned how he died."
"Although charming, generous and extraordinarily clever, Obama Sr. was
also imperious, cruel and given to boasting about his brain and his
wealth," he said.
"He was excessively fond of Scotch. He had fallen into the habit
of going home drunk every night. His boasting proved his undoing
and left him without a job, plunged him into prolonged poverty and
dangerously wounded his ego."
Ochieng recalls how, after sitting up all night drinking Black Label
whisky at Nairobi's famous Stanley Hotel, Obama Sr. would fly into rages
if Ruth asked where he had been.
Ochieng remonstrated with his friend, saying: "You bring a woman from
far away and you reduce her to pulp. That is not our way."
But it was to no avail. Ruth sued for divorce after her husband
administered brutal beatings.
Ruth refused to comment on the abuse charges when we tracked her down to
the Kenyan school where she now works.
She said: "I was married to Barack's father for seven years so, yes, you
could say Barack is my stepson.
"Barack's father was a very difficult man. Although I was
married to him the longest of any of his wives he wasn't an easy person
to be around."
After Obama Sr.'s return to
Kenya, he fathered two more children by Kezia. [Kids 3 and 4]
Somewhere in that period, he also married Ruth, who followed him to
Africa from Harvard. [Wife #3]
The Daily Mail quotes a relative of Obama as saying, "We told him
[Obama] how his father would still go to Kezia and it was during these
visits that she became pregnant with two more children. He also
had two children with Ruth." [Kids 5 and 6]
According to the Daily Mail, even after losing both legs in the car
accident, Obama senior fathered yet another son, his eighth child,
[Okay, they got me, that would only be 7 by my count. Not sure old
BHO, Sr. was keeping a close count either] by yet another woman, and
"continued to come home drunk."
Regardless of the motives, in "Dreams from my Father" Obama never states
precisely how many wives his father had, or how many half-brothers and
-sisters he has from different mothers, whether married to his father or
not.
Splitsville
Anna
filed for divorce from Lolo Soetoro on
June 15th, 1980. The divorce was granted on August 28th, 1980,
took effect on November 5th, 1980, and closed on November 26,1988.
The documents show Anna and Lolo were "lawfully married to each
other" and "have 1 child below age 18 and 1 child above age 18 but still
dependent on the parties for education." Lolo was not required to
pay any support and Anna resumed the use of Stanley Ann Dunham as her
name.
Further documentation has been uncovered by independent
investigators. These documents, "Information Concerning Child
Care" (page1 and
page2), signed on June 15,
1980, (click to enlarge) show
that:
Lolo and Anna ceased living together in August of 1974.
Lolo visited every three months for the purpose of seeing Maya, his
daughter.
Lolo had not contributed to the support of Anna and the
two children since 1974, was living with another woman and wished to
remarry.
Under living arrangements, the documents states, "oldest
child in university and mother resides with youngest child in 4 bedroom
home provided by mother's employer (USAID); household includes 2
full-time live-in domestics."
"Mother's work hours coincide with
youngest child school hours so child care not a problem."
"Mother
spends approximately $300 per month on domestic help, including after
hours babysitting, if necessary."
And, this is interesting,
although Maya was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, of an Indonesian father,
Anna claims, "both mother and child are U. S. citizens, while father is
an Indonesian citizen."
Anna
Freaks
Obama
To Obama, his mother is a
Kumbaya-era liberal. He feels
that she messed up her life due to naïve faith in Third World countries
and Third World men.
In the early eighties,, when he’s working on Wall Street, he’s creeped out by his
visiting mother’s insistence on seeing her favorite film, the 1959
Brazilian art-house classic "Black Orpheus." He belatedly realizes
that his very fair-skinned mother is sexually attracted to dark men.
He pompously intones, "The emotions between the races could never be
pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some
element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our
demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that:
menacing, alien, and apart."
Wallace-Wells mentions in Rolling Stone:
There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama’s autobiography when he
writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize
African-American men. "More than once," he recalls, "my mother
would point out Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet."
What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama’s
political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of
this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women
respond to a charismatic black man.
Early in his run for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Obama’s pollsters
discovered that women loved him,
especially nice white ladies who like
personalities more than politics and definitely don’t like political
arguments.
Anna's Dissertation
Anna
publishes her dissertation, "Peasant Blacksmithing in Indonesia," in
1992. In the index section, she references her own work as "Ann
Dunham Sutoro."
However, at the front of the dissertation
published in 1992, in the front, she uses:
In May 2009,
news reports said that that a dissertation written by
Obama's late mother was being published.
Duke University Press
said Monday that an edited version of Ann Dunham's anthropological study
about rural craftsmen in Indonesia is scheduled to reach stores this
fall. Dunham completed the study three years before she died in 1995.
Duke marketing manager Emily Young said the foreword was written by
Obama's half-sister and Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng.
The
book is based on Ann Dunham's 14 years of research among village workers
on the Indonesian island of Java.
Young said the project came to
the university's press arm because it has a reputation for publishing
anthropological studies.
The
operative words in this press release are "edited version" -- all the
anti-American, communist stuff will be redacted.
Anna
In
Southeast Asia
Anna went to work for the Ford Foundation from
1981 through 1984. She was
employed as a program officer for "Women and Employment" at the
"Regional Southeast Asia Office of the Ford Foundation in Jakarta.
She
lived
in Pakistan for the five years beginning in 1987 and ending in 1992.
During this time, Obama visited his mother and stayed for a few months.
Anna was hired as a consultant by the Asian Development Bank for
Pakistan Agricultural Development Bank’s Gujranwalla Agricultural
Development Program.
Anna monitored the funds received for this program from the Asian
Development Bank and trained the Mobile Credit Officers of the
Agricultural Bank. This program was controlled from the Gujranwalla Regional Office. She stayed for five years in the
Hilton International Hotel (now Avari Hotel), Lahore. She
travelled daily from Lahore to Gujranwalla. When Barack Obama
visited Pakistan, he stayed in the same hotel. After returning
from Pakistan, she died from cancer within three years.
Anna also worked for the Ford Foundation and Women’s World Bank,
establishing micro-credit loans in developing countries. Her
antipathy for America and Americans didn't prevent her from funneling
its money to third-world countries.
She worked at Bank Rakyat of
Indonesia, where she facilitated the practice "macrofinancing,"
making loans to people with poor credit and low incomes. You know
the one, exactly what the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac banks were pushing
-- loans to people with poor credit and low incomes that created the
mortgage meltdown.
Bank Rakyat is 70% government owned (Persero)
and has been government owned for the entire period since the war of
independence in 19XX It is also part of the "Islamic banking
cooperative."
So, Obama went to Pakistan twice. The
first time in 1981 while he was at Occidental and the second trip
referenced above.
The Name Game
Stanley Ann -- known names or aliases:
- Stanley Ann Dunham (maiden) - Anna Dunham (her friends
called her Anna) - Anna Obama (after getting hitched to Obama Sr, in
Washington phonebooks) - Stanley Ann D. Obama (1964 Divorce) - Ann
Soetoro (in several quotes in that timeframe) - Stanley Ann Soetoro
(1980 Divorce) - Ann Dunham Sotoro (Dissertation) - S. Ann Dunham
(Dissertation)
- ... and a few others I’m sure I’m forgetting ...
Obama has just about as many aliases and nicknames, with variants of
Barack Obama, Barry Soetoro, Barry Obama, etc, as well...
Barack
Meets
Michelle
In 1989, Obama was a summer intern at the corporate law firm Sidley Austin LLP in
Chicago where
he met Michelle Robinson, his summer
adviser.
Also working at the law firm was terrorist and ex-FBI "Most
Wanted," Bernadine Dohrn, wife of co-conspirator, fellow terrorist, and Obama
employer and buddy, Bill
Ayers.
Barack
Marries
Michelle
Obama and Michelle
Robinson of Chicago, Illinois were
married (October 18, 1992). The
ceremony was performed by Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. at Trinity United
Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois.
Michelle Robinson was born into a working-class family from the South
Side of Chicago in 1964. She graduated from Whitney Young
High School in 1981 and majored in sociology at Princeton University,
graduating cum laude in 1985. She obtained her Juris Doctor degree
from Harvard Law School in 1988.
Michelle has also been an associate dean at the University of Chicago
and is currently a vice president at the University of Chicago
Hospitals. She sits on six boards, including the prestigious Chicago
Council on Global Affairs and the University of Chicago Laboratory
Schools.
The
Brother-in-Law
In 1992, Obama's brother-in-law, Craig Robinson pulled him aside and
asked about his plans. "He said, 'I think I’d like to teach at
some point in time, and maybe run for public office,'" recalls Robinson,
who assumed Senator Obama meant he’d like to run for city alderman.
"He said no -- at some point he’d like to run for the U.S. Senate.
And then he said, 'Possibly even run for President at some point.'
And I was like, 'Okay, but don’t say that to my Aunt Gracie.' I
was protecting him from saying something that might embarrass him."
Robinson was a two-time Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton
University, graduating in 1983 with an AB in Sociology. He is the
fourth highest scorer in school history. He earned an MBA in
Finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in
1992.
Robinson was drafted in the fourth round of the 1983 NBA draft, but
never played in the league. He played professionally in Europe,
returning to the U.S. in 1988 to became an assistant coach at the
Illinois Institute of Technology.
An assistant for six years at Northwestern University, he became a head
coach at Brown University in 2006, where he continues to run a variation
of the Princeton offense which he learned from Pete Carril during his
years at Princeton University. He was named the Ivy League "Coach
of the Year" for the 2006-2007 season by Basketball-U.
On April 7, 2008, Robinson was hired as the Oregon State Beavers' new
head basketball coach.
The
Mother-in-Law
Obama's transition team confirmed that his
71-year-old mother-in-law would be moving into the grand residence at
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Obama has said he would be delighted to
have his wife's mother, Marian Robinson, join the first family in
Washington.
"Mrs. Robinson
will be
coming with the family to help the girls get acclimated, and she
will determine in the coming months whether or not she wants to stay in
D.C. permanently," said Katie McCormick Lelyveld, spokeswoman for
Michelle Obama.
During the campaign, she retired from her job as a bank
secretary to care for the Obama girls, Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10, while
their parents were on the road.
The
Condo
Obama has said that his and Michelle Obama's
"student loan debt was higher than [their]
mortgage".
This may be less a function of their high student loans than a low
mortgage payment; public records show that they put down $110,000 on
their three bedroom condo in 1993. Forty percent down will
dramatically reduce interest and principal payments. Given that
the Obamas didn't have children for another six years, their decision to
purchase a larger condo instead of paying off some of those student
loans that they constantly complain about doesn't speak much of their
money skills.
Regardless of the size of the condo, though, where did they get the
money for their down payment? At the time of the purchase, Obama
had just signed on with Davis Miner and was living off his smaller
advance from Random House to finish his book. Both Obamas
constantly emphasize their lowly backgrounds, so their families were
presumably not the source. So where did they get $110K for a down
payment?
The
Children
Daughter Malia, the
Hawaiian form of Mary, is born in 1999 and
daughter Sasha, the Russian pet form of Aleksandra, is born in 2001.
Both children would be baptized by the Rev. Jeremiah A Wright, hater and
racist.
No
Birthdays
Or
Christmas
Obama
told
People magazine in the issue out Friday (7/24/08) that he and his wife,
Michelle, do not give Christmas or birthday presents to their two young
daughters.
Obama tells the magazine’s Sandra Sobieraj Westfall in a seven-page
cover story that he and his wife follow the unusual practice because
they "want to teach some limits."
A Muslim custom Obama no doubt learned in his youth. Imagine, a
"Christian" that doesn't celebrate the birth of Christ.
The
House
Ethical questions surround Obama's shady real estate deal and relationship with indicted political fundraiser and Arab-American activist Tony Rezko, who befriended Obama during his Harvard days.
The 2005 deal involves the purchase of Obama's home, a
big Edwardian-era detached house in fashionable Kenwood section of
Chicago and home of the acting head of the Nation of Islam, Louis
Farrakhan.
The former owner
wasn't willing to sell the house without the large chunk of land
next to it, which Obama seemingly couldn't afford.
So Obama bought the mansion
for $1,650,000 at a gigantic discounted price -- some
$300,000 less than the asking price.
To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern
Trust in Illinois.
The freshman Democratic senator received an
excellent discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625
percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such
loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known
in banker lingo as a "super super jumbo." Obama paid no
origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their
interest rates.
Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama’s
rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.
The same day, Rezko's
wife bought the adjoining lot, that can't be accessed from the public street, paying the full $625,000 asking price.
Six months later, Obama bought
approximately one-sixth of the Rezko property for $104,500, so he
could "extend his garden," leaving Rezko with a lot that can't be
accessed from the street.
Did Tony Rezko and his wife
subsidize the purchase of Obama's
opulent home? Of the transaction, Obama wrote,
"It was a mistake to have been engaged with him at all in this or
any other personal business dealing that would allow him, or anyone
else, to believe that he had done me a favor. For that reason, I
consider this a
