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In 2017, David Garrow’s carefully researched Obama biography, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, appeared to much less fanfare than it deserved. The media undoubtedly downplayed it because it offered the truth behind many of Obama’s self-adulatory inventions, and Trump’s new presidency occupied everyone’s energy. What makes the book newsworthy today is that David Samuels has interviewed Garrow and revisited narratives in the book, reminding everyone of the scary, power-obsessed nastiness behind Obama’s carefully built façade. The interview on Tablet is long and worth every second it takes you to read it. However, I’ve summarized below some of the...

In 2013 scientists excavating a cave in South Africa found remains of Homo naledi, an extinct hominin now thought to have lived 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. Based on the cranial remains, the researchers concluded it had a small brain only about the size of an orange or your fist. Recently, they took another look at the skull fragments and found imprints left behind by the brain. The impressions suggest that despite its tiny size, Homo naledi’s brain shared a similar shape and structure with that of modern human brains, which are three times as large. “We’ve now seen that...

If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years. An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years. The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist...

An excerpt from one of former President Barack Obama's previously unpublished law school papers revealed he believed the American dream was to be like Donald Trump, although he called such a goal "unfounded optimism." At age 29, Obama wrote a paper with friend Robert Fischer titled "Race and Rights Rhetoric" in his last year at Harvard Law School. An excerpt of the paper was published in a biography of Obama's early life, titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Vice reported Friday. Obama had written that the average American mindset can be summed up in one sentence: "I may...

David Garrow, the award-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, has written a biography of Barack Obama. It’s called Rising Star. Carlos Lozada, a liberal who reviews books for the Washington Post, considers Garrow’s biography of Obama here. According to Lozada: Garrow. . .concludes his massive new work with a damning verdict on Obama’s determination: “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.” Based on Lozada’s review, it appears that Garrow supports this conclusion in part by examining Obama’s relationship with his long-time girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. The two nearly married, but...

In Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Jager told Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David J. Garrow that she had been seriously involved with the future president in the mid- to late ’80s and early ’90s. Not only did they move in together, but he proposed marriage — twice. However, Obama’s political ambitions reportedly did them in; a mutual friend of the couple recounted that Obama explained that “the lines are very clearly drawn: If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing here.” (For the record, Jager is of Dutch and Japanese ancestry.) Garrow wrote that...

The sex secrets of the young Barack Obama have been revealed in an authoritative new biography of the ex-president. Obama slept with his girlfriend Genevieve Cook on their first date, before she wrote him a poem about their 'f***ing' and called their sex 'passionate', the book about the former president reveals. They also did cocaine together - and after they split she slept with his best friend. Obama also considered a gay relationship while at college, twice proposed to another white girlfriend, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during the first year of their relationship. His past is revealed...

President Barack Obama considered being homosexual as a young man, according to a forthcoming biography of the president. The biography by David Garrow, “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” is set to come out on May 9. Garrow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post. In a chapter about the former president’s two years at Occidental College, Garrow reveals a close relationship Obama had with an openly gay assistant professor named Lawrence Goldyn. ------------------------------------------------- “Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to...

Freshman Congressman Jeff Landry, R-La., says that President Obama is misusing recess appointments, and he's going to do something about it. "When the president puts up nominees, they go through the confirmation process, and the senate blocks them or doesn't confirm them, and then he waits for a recess appointment just to appoint those people. He is circumventing the Constitution," said Landry on Fox News Saturday.

PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 3, 2010 – Army Capt. Matt Pratt and his songstress wife, Lisa, lived the dream in southern California Feb. 1, thanks to an Army morale and recreation program that supports soldiers and their families. Joey Beebe of Army Entertainment Division supports 2009 Operation Rising Star winner Lisa Pratt while her husband, Capt. Matt Pratt, watches from outside the recording booth at DMI Music’s Firehouse Studios in Pasadena, Calif., Feb. 1, 2010. Army photo by Tim Hipps  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. Lisa Pratt earned an all-expenses-paid trip to record a three-song demonstration CD at DMI Music’s...

Being in the minority in the Senate is not necessarily fatal. Ask Jim DeMint of South Carolina, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, a caucus of conservative senators that includes most of the Republican Conference. DeMint has managed to wage and win a handful of battles since the Republican reverses in the midterm elections, drawing on a disarming personality and keen political acumen, and fortified by unwavering conservative convictions.It all started with his crusade against pork in the lame-duck session of Congress late last year. DeMint, along with Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, set out to eliminate 10,000 earmarks from various...

ANNAPOLIS -- Former Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele will lead a major Republican fundraising group and start a public affairs consulting firm in Maryland. Mr. Steele will be the chairman of GOPAC, the national fundraising outfit that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich elevated to national prominence in 1994, and start the Legacy Strategies public affairs firm, he told The Washington Times yesterday. "I'm really looking forward to it," Mr. Steele said. "It has been a whirlwind challenge. I just finished up four years as lieutenant governor, and I was excited to do it. We'll keep plugging along." He begins both...

Still pursuing a lawsuit against one of California's top Democrats, an East Bay Republican leader seeks to advance his "rising star" reputation by becoming the state GOP's second-in-command. Looking at his extensive, slick Web site, thomasdelbeccaro.com, one might think Contra Costa County Republican Central Committee chairman Tom Del Beccaro seeks a publicly elected office. Instead, Del Beccaro — who sued to kick Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown off the November ballot for attorney general — is rallying support from hundreds of delegates to the party's convention this February in Sacramento. Del Beccaro, 44, who lives in Lafayette and practices law in...

SACRAMENTO - California's capital is packed with more than 1,000 lobbyists, but when people want to make something happen in Sacramento, they often turn instead to Bob White, a genial Republican maestro who helped elect Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. White has an advantage lobbyists don't. While registered influence peddlers must reveal whom they work for, White calls himself a strategist who doesn't directly push for changes in state policy. That legal distinction allows White to conceal who his corporate clients are, even though he and members of his consulting firm, California Strategies, go to bat for them by exploiting a loophole...

The national GOP may soon discover something Maryland conservatives have known for years: Michael Steele is a terrible thing to waste. At around 9 o'clock tonight, Steele — who is lieutenant governor of Maryland — will speak to the Republican delegates gathered at Madison Square Garden. And tomorrow night, he will appear on stage once more, in his role as deputy permanent chairman, to help preside over the roll call of the states. "I'm going to talk about the history of the party and its importance to the civil-rights movement," says Steele of his speech this evening. "I'm also going...

<p>With the exception of L. Brooks Patterson's deft turns as a stand-up comedian, this year's Detroit Regional Chamber conference on Mackinac Island was, as expected, dominated by Democrats.</p> <p>There was the feel-good Democrat: Gov. Jennifer Granholm, spreading fairy dust over throngs of rapt conference-goers. There was the edgy Democrat: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, trading quips with Patterson, Oakland County's executive, and showing off the formidable political skills that got him elected (after spending the past three weeks at home, making people wonder why they allowed it to happen).</p>