Posted on 01/02/2009 1:16:10 PM PST by patriot08
Ed Hale of Plains Radio has secured a copy of the Dunham/Obama divorce decree as promised. He has registered this at the courthouse and has turned the document over to lawyers who are reported to be happy and enthused over the contents.
This is the first page. This is all that can be divulged at this time as those who have seen the decree are sworn to silence. You may hear information about it tonight on Ed's plainsradio show.
Correction, although some sources say Jr went to Kenya in 1988 he actually went in 1987 after his brother David died.
There was an NYT article with an interview of Jr after he was named President of the Harvard Law Review in which he said he managed to pay off his student loans with his first two jobs he had after graduating from Columbia. As you may notice his salary at the time was first year $15,000/yr and the second year it was less than $10,000/yr. It’s difficult to tell who is telling the truth if either Jr or Ann are, since both lie a lot!
His first year at Oxy he was on a full scholarship but I do not know if that went into the second year with his drugging and partying. I cannot see paying off student loans for a year at Oxy and two years at Columbia on the salary he was making.
Hell, no.
Barf alert!
President-Elect Barack Obama’s Work History as an Organizer with
the New York Public Interest Research Group
NYPIRG: An Overview. NYPIRG is New York State’s largest student-directed consumer, environmental and government reform organization. We are a nonpartisan, not-for-profit group established to effect policy reforms while training students and other New Yorkers to be advocates. NYPIRG’s 21 college campus chapters provide much of NYPIRG’s energy, resources, and activism. Each campus chapter consists of at least one full-time staff organizer – the position held by Senator Obama – and a large core of student volunteers.
Senator Obama’s Role as a NYPIRG Project Coordinator. As mentioned in his autobiography, Dreams for My Father, Senator Obama was hired in his first job as an organizer as a “Project Coordinator” in February 1985 to run NYPIRG’s office at the City College of New York. He continued in this position for approximately three months until the end of the academic year. During a typical work week, Project Coordinators are expected to both educate and motivate students to develop their organizational skills by working on a wide variety of public interest projects. Project Coordinators are also expected to advance NYPIRG’s project work through their own efforts. Senator Obama received training from NYPIRG on advocacy skills and issues including: effective public speaking, structuring campaigns, increasing voter participation, public mass transit, and funding for higher education. While NYPIRG’s records from this time are limited, this document also relies on the recollections of NYPIRG staff members from that time, some of whom still work for the organization.
Specific Examples of Senator Obama’s Work as a Project Coordinator
* Recruitment. Senator Obama was expected to recruit and educate students on a wide variety of topics and to train them with skills needed to run successful campaigns on or off campus. Public speaking, designing campaign timelines, motivating volunteers and teaching skills were components of this work.
* Administrative. Senator Obama was responsible for maintaining ongoing contact with a wide range of campus entities including the campus administration, student government and other organizations. Administrative responsibilities also included running NYPIRG’s City College office.
* The Fight for Better Mass Transit. NYPIRG’s Straphangers Campaign continued to chronicle the sorry state of the city’s subways and to push for better service. Senator Obama helped recruit and coordinate surveyors at City College for the Straphangers Campaign Report Back to Go (and is credited in the fall 1985 report as a surveyor). Straphangers Campaign reports such as these played an ongoing role in mobilizing support to rebuild the city’s crumbling mass transit system. A NYPIRG document notes that Senator Obama also organized hundreds of City College students to write letters in support of improvements to the city’s transit system.
* Student Empowerment/Voter Participation. Senator Obama oversaw NYPIRG’s nonpartisan voter registration work at the City College campus. This included learning the mechanics of registration and motivating students to become engaged in the political process.
* Ahead of the Curve/Environmental Justice. Senator Obama worked to raise awareness of the benefits of recycling as NYPIRG helped lead a campaign opposing plans for a municipal trash incinerator in Brooklyn, a proposal which was ultimately defeated. Senator Obama’s work included recruiting and preparing students to meet with state legislators in Albany on environmental issues. Campus chapters also worked to increase funding to clean up toxic waste sites.
* Support for Higher Education. As noted in The Audacity of Hope, Senator Obama’s work included educating students on the politics and specifics of public support for higher education. This included recruiting and driving a carload of City College students to Washington D.C. to participate in a lobby day in support of the Higher Education Reauthorization Act. Our records confirm that Senator Obama also generated hundreds of letters from students at City College to public officials in support of adequate funding for higher education during his time on campus.
Conclusion In the 23 years since Senator Obama’s work as an organizer at NYPIRG, much of the work and responsibilities of a Project Coordinator have remained constant. The position requires an enormous dedication to public service and a commitment to bettering the lives of others. The rewards are many, including having a direct impact on important policy decisions affecting New Yorkers, educating and empowering new generations of students to become engaged in the political process, and personal and professional development. NYPIRG considers itself fortunate to have provided Senator Obama, and so many others, the opportunity to work as an organizer on our behalf.
I have to find it, but I read an interview with someone who worked with Obama at that writing place. The bottom line is that it was glorified ad copy or something like that. I’ll look for the article.
Has this been posted?
Alumni Corner
Barack Obama ’83, My Columbia College Roommate
By Phil Boerner ’84
I was Barack Obama ’83’s roommate at Columbia College in fall 1981. I met him in 1979, when we were freshmen at Occidental College (Oxy) in Los Angeles and our dorm rooms were directly opposite each other.
I came to college as a middle-class guy from Bethesda, Md., where I’d lived from fifth grade through high school. At Oxy, we attended some of the same social events and had late-night philosophical discussions related to our college reading or to current affairs. We attended rallies on campus where we were urged to “draft beer, not people,” and discussed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, apartheid in South Africa, the hostages in Iran and the Contras in Latin America. The crowd we hung out with included men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics and international students. Barack listened carefully to all points of view and he was funny, smart, thoughtful and well-liked. It was easy to sit down with him and have a fun conversation.
We both transferred from Oxy to Columbia in fall 1981. Barack had found an apartment on West 109th Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus, and suggested that I room with him. Our sublet was a third-story walk-up in a so-so neighborhood; the unit next door was burned out and vacant. The doorbell didn’t work; to be let in when I first arrived I had to yell up to Barack from the street. It was a railroad apartment: From the kitchen, you walked into Barack’s room, then my room, and lastly the living room. We didn’t have a television or computers. In that apartment we hosted a number of visitors, mostly friends from Oxy who stayed overnight when they were passing through town. Barack was very generous to these visitors. As a host and roommate, he sometimes did the shopping and cooked the chicken curry.
Barack has said that he spent a lot of time in the library while at Columbia and one reason for this was that our apartment had irregular heat, and we didn’t enjoy hanging out there once the weather got cold. The radiators in our apartment were either stone cold, or, less often, blasted out such intense heat that we had to open the windows and let in freezing air just to cool things down. When the heat wasn’t on, we sometimes sat with sleeping bags or blankets wrapped around ourselves and read our school books. We also didn’t have regular hot water and sometimes used the Columbia gym for showers.
I remember often eating breakfast with Barack at Tom’s Restaurant on Broadway. Occasionally we went to The West End for beers. We enjoyed exploring museums such as the Guggenheim, the Met and the American Museum of Natural History, and browsing in bookstores such as the Strand and the Barnes & Noble opposite Columbia. We both liked taking long walks down Broadway on a Sunday afternoon, and listening to the silence of Central Park after a big snow. I also remember jogging the loop around Central Park with Barack.
One weekend I invited Barack to meet my grandparents, Elizabeth and William Lytton Payne ’46 GSAS, at their summer place in the Catskills, which we called “the farm.” I took Barack to meet some neighbors on the mountain; everyone seemed to like him pretty well, whether they were die-hard supporters of Ronald Reagan or extreme liberals. While at the farm, Barack joined the routines there, which typically included a few morning hours doing chores, such as clearing brush and sawing firewood.
After that first semester, we had to move. Barack tried to find an apartment for both of us, but was only able to find a studio for himself. I was able to house-sit in Brooklyn Heights. Barack and other friends came and visited me there a few times; we typically watched pro basketball or football on TV, or went out for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He was amused by my beginning banjo playing (I’m much better today!). Hanging out, we could get pretty emotional about sports, food and injustice. I remember one time when we were out walking he took the time to ask a homeless guy how he was doing, so even then he was concerned about others.
Through different living arrangements in Astoria, Queens; Bay Ridge, Brooklyn; and all over Manhattan, we stayed in touch and remained friends for the rest of our college years. He got to know my girlfriend from Arkansas, who is now my wife. Since I last saw him in 1985, we have exchanged a few letters and photos. He left for Chicago, and I eventually settled in Sacramento.
Barack wasn’t thinking about becoming President when he was in college; he wanted to be a writer. Barack is a good man — some might even call him a saint for tolerating my beginning banjo playing. Based on my six years of knowing him in college and the years immediately after, I can vouch that Barack is a man of character, and I trust him to do the right things when he is President.
Phil Boerner ’84 was born in Washington, D.C., and lives with his wife and two children in Sacramento, Calif. He is communications and public relations manager at the California Veterinary Medical Association.
(no link)
“The Barack Obama Story’ - Harvard Law Review gets its first black president
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE - Sunday, April 1, 1990
Author: TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND: Los Angeles Times
EXCERPT
Although some question what personal goals motivate Obama , his interest in social issues is deeply grounded. At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Obama studied international relations and spent much of his time helping to organize anti-apartheid protests. In his junior year, he transferred to Columbia University, “more for what (New York City) had to offer than for the education,” he said.
After graduating, Obama landed a job writing manuals for a New York-based international trade publication. Once his college loans were paid off, he took a $13,000-a-year job as director for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based social action group in Chicago.
There, he and a coalition of ministers set out to improve living conditions in poor neighborhoods plagued by crime and high unemployment. Obama helped form a tenants’ rights group in the housing projects and established a job-training program.
After four years, Obama decided it was time to move on. He wanted to learn how to use the political system to effect social change. He set his sights on Harvard Law School, where he quickly distinguished himself as a top student.
He was soon chosen, through the strength of his writing and grades, to serve as one of 80 student editors on the law review. Unlike many peer-review professional journals, the law review is run solely by students. It is widely considered to be the major forum for current legal debate and consequently is watched closely by courts around the country.
In his second year at law school, Obama decided to run for law-review president after a conversation with a black friend. “I said I was not planning to run, and he said, “Yes, you are because that is a door that needs to be kicked down and you can take it down.”’
It was a marathon selection process, an arcane throwback to the early days of the review. The student editors deliberated behind closed doors from 8:30 a.m. until early the next day. The 19 anxious candidates took turns cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner for the selection committee, whose members emerged with a historic decision.
But few students at the law review were prepared for the deluge of interview requests for Obama from newspapers, radio and television stations. Some students made light of the media invasion, posting a memo entitled “The Barack Obama Story, a Made for TV Movie, Starring Blair Underwood as Barack Obama .”
Yet tensions were building. White students grumbled about the attention paid to Obama ‘s race. Black students criticized him for not choosing more blacks for other top positions at the review. Caught in the cross-fire, Obama , who has a tendency toward understatement, downplayed his own achievements.
“For every one of me, there are thousands of young black kids with the same energies, enthusiasm and talent that I have who have not gotten the opportunity because of crime, drugs and poverty,” he said. “I think my election does symbolize progress, but I don’t want people to forget that there is still a lot of work to be done.”
Describing Obama , fellow students and professors point to a self-confidence tempered by modesty as one of his greatest attributes.
“He’s very unusual, in the sense that other students who might have something approximating his degree of insight are very intimidating to other students or inconsiderate and thoughtless,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor. “He’s able to build upon what other students say and see what’s valuable in their comments without belittling them.”
We are on a roll tonight, GF!
Did we ever learn Ayers address in NY?
I don't recall seeing this pic before. He had that arrogance way back when.
I haven’t seen it.
I was wrong, it was more than glorified ad copy, but it was not the influential job Obama describes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html
Should be Bank Street College of Education
Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”
In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”
Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”
Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.
“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”
>>>>Someone posted a copy of a blank Kenyan birth certificate. A Kenyan birth certificate has a second page which contains immunizations at birth, being these are important in African countries. In one of Obama’s books, he states he found his birth certificate among his immunization papers in his father’s belongings. You can’t get more clear than that, lacking his actual kenyan Bc. He’s born in Kenya no doubt (double underscore).<<<<
Was it his father’s or was it his mother’s?
Very intersting. Pinging a few of you who might find this interesting.
Good luck trying to find the article, it was scrubbed from the net a week after I found it. The article I found was a woman from Utah who gushingly described her first job after graduating from University and she was Jr’s co-worker.(Title was “Utahn recounts sharing job with Obama in New York”) Analyze this has one of his other co-workers describing how Jr exaggerated his importance at BIC which turned into a veritable reunion of former workers. The link to it is here”
http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/09/barack-obama-embellishes-his-resume/
Who indeed reads these Obama books?
Anybody willing to read a book by Obama (and not for money such as NY Times critics, who would never post such info) is certainly not a regular FReeper. I seriously doubt it anyhow.
I am just thinking here.
Ha ha, Lawrence Tribe’s viewpoint - so trustworthy!
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