[GVnana]

•For starters, Ann Dunham spent her formative years in Washington State, several of them in the progressive cocoon of Mercer Island. It was to Washington that she returned for a year immediately after Obama's birth, a fact missed by every Obama biography I could find. •Baby Barack spent most of his first year in Washington as well, another fact overlooked by the biographers. •There is not much storybook to a romance in which the mother leaves home immediately after her son's birth. Barack Sr.'s close friends have no memory even of a relationship between him and Dunham. •When Barack Sr. left Hawaii a year after Obama's birth, Ann's father Stanley was there to see him off with smiles. He would always speak well of the black man who knocked up his daughter and then abandoned wife and child -- mighty unusual behavior from a father-in-law. •There was a marriage license from another county, Maui -- a classic way to avoid local notification -- and a divorce, but if there was a wedding, then no one attended it. There was no ring, no photos, no leis. •Ann Dunham met Barack Sr. in Russian class. (In 1960, people like Lee Harvey Oswald took Russian classes.) The possibility that the Dunhams recruited Barack Sr. to front for a less savory impregnation of Ann by a black man makes more sense than the fabled romance. Obama looks nothing like Barack Sr.

Which all leads me back to the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement. I know that's supposed to be the end of the story... But.

In 1960 Hawaii, the "surf culture" was in it's heyday. A lot of those same people inhabited Haight-Ashbury by 1967-68, and some of them were throwbacks to the Beats of San Francisco's North Beach from the 50s. Yes, the surfers were pot smokin' (although hashhish was just as available in the pacific rim) and took speed, and LSD (it was a prescribed medication then, and freely available on the black market) and were "free love" advocates. (This stuff wasn't invented in 1968 ya' know.)

I know this because I knew one girl in particular (a "surfer") who lived in Hawaii through the 60s, got pregnant in Hawaii, had the baby at home in Hawaii, and registered the kid's birth here in California.

All Stanley Ann's mother (Obama's grandmother) had to do was go to the Advertiser and give them the info. You can enroll a kid in public school based on the newspaper's birth announcement. And there you have it. Paper trail.

[smoothsailing]

Which all leads me back to the Honolulu Advertiser birth announcement.

Thanks for the info, GVnana. I've always questioned the reliability of that birth announcement.

I worked in the newspaper business for twenty years and know that you can have just about anything published in a newspaper if you're willing to pay the line rates. To the newspaper, birth notices, wedding announcements, classified ads, etc., are all considered nothing more than revenue enhancers.