It’s like Emily Bronte’s classic “Wuthering Heights” but light on
the angst and stuff.
Obama's mother met her second husband, an Indonesian named Lolo Soetoro, while working at the East-West Center in Hawaii. They married, and in 1967, the young Obama, then known as Barry Soetoro, traveled to Indonesia with his mother when the Indonesian government recalled his stepfather.
In Indonesia, the family's circumstances improved dramatically. According to Obama in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father," Lolo's brother-in-law was "making millions as a high official in the national oil company." It was through this brother-in-law that Obama's stepfather got a coveted job as a government relations officer with the Union Oil Co.
The family then moved to Menteng, then and now the most exclusive neighborhood of Jakarta, where bureaucrats, diplomats and economic elites reside.
A popular Indonesia travel site describes Menteng: "Designed by the Dutch Colonial Government in 1920s, Menteng still retains its graceful existence with its beautiful parks, cozy street cafes and luxurious housing complexes."
In 1971, his mother sent young Obama back to Hawaii, where his grandmother, Madelyn, known as Toots, would become one of the first female vice presidents of a Honolulu bank. His grandfather was in sales.
Obama's grandparents moved the same year into Punahou Circle Apartments, a sleek new 10-story apartment building just five blocks from the private Punahou School, which Obama would attend from 1971 to 1979.
….
Time magazine gushed in 2008 about Barack Obama's 12-year tenure as a law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, saying, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students."
That may have been true during his first two years, when he ranked first among the law school's 40 instructors, with students giving him a rating of 9.7 out of a possible 10.
But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily.
In 1999, only 23 percent of the students said they would repeat Obama's racism class. He was the third-lowest-ranked lecturer at the law school that year. And in 2003, only a third of the student evaluators recommended his classes.
His classes were small. A spring 1994 class attracted 14 out of a student body of 600; a spring 1996 class drew 13. In 1997, he had the largest class of his tenure with 49 students. But by then, his student rating had fallen to 7.75. Twenty-two of 40 faculty members ranked higher than Obama.
Some former faculty colleagues today describe Obama as disengaged, doing only what was minimally required and almost never participating in faculty activities.
And, unlike others on the Chicago Law School faculty who published numerous articles in legal journals, Obama's byline did not appear in a single legal journal while he taught there.
…
Four years after Barack Obama's historic election as president, little seems to have changed for the African-American communities on Chicago's South Side.
The lack of change -- or the sense that these neighborhoods are getting worse -- is eroding the president's standing among African-Americans in his hometown.
In 2011, Chicago suffered the third-highest black jobless rate among the nation's major metropolitan areas, at 19 percent, according to the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Chicago still lacks enough affordable housing. Not only did the city demolish 25,000 public housing units in the previous decade, it also experienced more than 80,000 foreclosures, mainly in low-income neighborhoods.
Chicago "black nationalist" Eddie Read contends Obama has never fought for the black community. "I would not honestly tag Obama as a fighter for black people, black agenda or black issues," Read told The Washington Examiner.
After Obama's election, Read said, "I hoped that it would change."
But four years later, as he looks around Chicago's neighborhoods, he said things haven't improved under Obama.
"I don't see where the quality of life or the quality has changed," he said, "except that it's worse."
So what took the popular press so long to do its job? Is there no more love for the Chosen One? Have the ratings and subscriptions tanked so badly that the editors got a clue? Or did someone wake up one morning and have an epiphany: one's job is to report the news, not stroke the ego of an obviously deficient world leader?
Related: Mitt Romney's tax records have been released. He paid more than what he owed and somehow that isn't good enough.
Remember: the left don't work for NASA for a reason.
An Iranian cleric said he was beaten by a woman in the northern province of Semnan after giving her a warning for being “badly covered,” the state-run Mehr news agency reported.Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti said he encountered the woman in the street while on his way to the mosque in the town of Shahmirzad, and asked her to cover herself up, to which she replied “you, cover your eyes,” according to Mehr. The cleric repeated his warning, which he said prompted her to insult and push him.“I fell on my back on the floor,” Beheshti said in the report. “I don’t know what happened after that, all I could feel was the kicks of this woman who was insulting me and attacking me.”
What? Pakistani
teachers use their students the way Wisconsin, Chicago
and Ontario
teachers do- as pawns to further an agenda?
The children in Karachi — seemingly between the ages of 6 and 8 — demonstrated across from the Karachi Press Club, said Ghulam Qadir, a Karachi police official charged with keeping track of all demonstrations at the club.The event was not formal or planned, so authorities didn’t know ahead of time it would happen, he said. In general, Pakistani parents are not informed about every event organized by a school.At least four teachers accompanied the children to the demonstration, Qadir said. There did not appear to be any parents there.
What are the benefits like for Pakistani teachers? A free
jerry can of gasoline and an American flag for a successful school year?
Remember: the messenger in Islam is greater than the message. Theological problem right there.
A KEY organiser of an Islamic rally to be held in Melbourne on Sunday has cancelled the protest amid fears of a backlash and police concerns it will be overrun by violent activists.Swaybah Javed, who had helped invite supporters through social networking to a rally outside the city’s State Library, said she’d been forced to scrap the event.“I am calling off the protest as I do not want more violence on the streets, as Islam does not promote violence,” the university graduate said today.“It is a shameful day for Australia when Islamophobia has boiled over to the point where it is impossible to carry out a peaceful protest.”
We could wax ad nauseum how Islam is as peaceful as a Great
White shark with a seal in its jaws but let’s touch on the Islamophobia aspect
for a moment.
Most important, Ibn Warraq describes the “mind-set” of most Muslims as intolerant, self-pitying, stagnant, and trained to blame others for their own failures.
Did you catch that? Instead of being honest, self-reflective
and responsible, Miss Javed created the canard of Islamophobia as a convenient
deflection and distraction. ‘Oh no! No one in the ummah has been violent or
irrational. Or, if they have, it’s Islamophobia that’s clouded the issue. Let’s
not talk about it anymore’. Is the populace Islamophobic because they saw droves of screaming bearded men who hate their current country demand Sharia law took to the streets in what is truly a sectarian harbinger? How impotent these apologists must feel when people cannot be convinced of the incredible. It
has now come to the point where
the State acts with greater urgency and speed to squash any criticism or
depiction of Islam lest it erupt, quite predictably, into violence. It’s
one thing when a member of this overly sensitive mob deludes itself into thinking
that they are not violent when in fact they are and that they are victims not
of their own ideologies or communities but of external liberal democracies.
It’s another thing when someone else believes it and will do nothing to fight against it.
Fat Ninja Park is not just a sign of the times; it's a warning.
The United States, a sovereign nation with universal
suffrage, got rid of the draft in 1973. There should be no reason why someone who
volunteered to join the armed forces should be hiding in Canada.
Oh my God! If I thought that Australia was populated only
with these
cute little wombats and not things that could maim or kill me, I would
think: “Wow! I
could swim at night or walk
in tall grass and never be afraid!”
But Nature, she does laugh.
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