born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is thefirst African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.
A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.
Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in theU.S. House of Representatives in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Democratic primary and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.
As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 in December 2010. Other domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. In foreign policy, Obama gradually withdrew combat troops from Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, and signed an arms control treaty withRussia. In October 2009, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
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W.I.P. got the subjects for starters
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Barack Hussein Obama Sr.
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The Red Childhood of Berry Sotoro
Anti-Colonialism [Tortured Grandfather]
Race and Life
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Barack; Fitting In, In College
Drug Use
Senior Lecturer
In most English-speaking nations professor is a title reserved for a senior academic who holds a departmental chair (especially as head of the department), or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual. However, in the United States and Canada the title of professor is given to a much larger group of senior teachers in two- and four-year colleges and universities.
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Community Organizing, Eschewing Ayers and Chicago Politics
Palmer
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2001 Interview on Chicago Public Radio 91.5 FM
Obama: “You know if if if you look at um, the the victories and failures of the civil rights movement, um, and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights uh, in uh previously dispossessed peoples, so that uh, I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. Ah But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth uh and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And uh to that extent as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, ah, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from uh, the essential constraints that were placed by the ah founding fathers in the Constitution, as least as it’s been interpreted, and Warren Court interpreted in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties, says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf uh And that hasn’t shifted and one of the, uh I think, uh one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive ah change, ah and uh in some ways we still suffer from that.”
Caller: Hi, um, the gentleman made the point that the warren court wasn't uh terribly radical, my question is, um with economic changes, my question: is it too late for that kind of reparative work, economically and is that the appropriate place for reparative economic work to take place?Obama: uh uh uh, you know uh, maybe I'm showing my bias here, here as a legislator, as well as a law professor, but uh, you know, I-I'm not optimistic about bringing about, uh, a major, uh, redistributive uh, change, uh, through the courts. um you know the institution just isn't structured that way uh..." -- "Um, you-you-you just um-ould look at very rare examples where you know the desegregation era the court was willing to-uh order uh uh you know changes that cost money to a-h local school district; the court was very uncomfortable with it, it was hard to manage it was hard to figure out ah, you start getting into all sorts of ah-separations of powers issues, uh-you know, in terms of uh-the court monitoring or-or-or engaging in a process uh, that essentially is administrative and takes a-a lot of time..." -- "Um, you know-a-the courts just not very good at it and politically its just-its very hard to legitimize opinions from the court-so I may-I think that, although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally-um-you know,-I think you can-any-any three of us sitting here could come up with uh, a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts..."
Interviewer: You mean the court?
Caller: The court, or would it be legislation at this point?
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Progressivism and SEIU
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Bail Out [Under Bush]
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Being Sworn In, Obama's Oath of Office
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Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act (CHIP)
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The "Stimulus" Bill, aka ARRA
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ( $787 billion, and almost $1.2 trillion with debt service included)
Tripling The Debt
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Bowing
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Obama-Care, Pelosi-Care, Health Care "Reform"
[Nationally Socialized Health Care] 'Reform"
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Financial "Reform" Bill
[LAW]
FINANCIAL BILL HR 4173 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act
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http://www.sec.gov/about/laws/wallstreetreform-cpa.pdf
http://business.cch.com/briefings/FinancialReformBill.pdf
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2300 page bill [in its final form]
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1. Does nothing about Fannie & Freddie; no regulation on them
2. Creates "Too Big To Fail" Protection Class: Sec 113; A Financial Stability Oversight Committee will choose the firms deemed "too big to fail"
3. Seizure of private property "without meaningful judicial review" Secretary of Treasury can order the seizure of any financial firm "In danger of default" that could hurt the country's economy
4. Creates a Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection [BCFP]: Which will have broad powers to limit what financial products and services can be offered to consumers
[Reduces options, limits credit] [Track transactions] Section 102 defines "A nonbank financial company [as] substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature"
Obama Signed, July 21st 2010
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Version as of April 22nd 2010 -
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/04/senator-dodds-regulation-plan-14-fatal-flaws
Financial Regulation Reform (Bill that Passed the Senate) -Heritage Foundation-
Section 102(B)(ii) of the bill defines a “nonbank financial company”” as a company “substantially engaged in activities … that are financial in nature.” The phrase “financial in nature” is defined in existing law quite broadly. According to former Treasury official Gregory Zerzan, it includes things such as “holding assets of others in trust, investing in securities … or even leasing real estate and offering certain consulting services.”[5] As a result, a broad swath of private industry may find itself ensnared in the financial regulatory net. As Zerzan explains: “An airplane manufacturer that holds customer down payments for future delivery, a large home improvement chain that invests its profits as part of a plan to increase revenues, and an energy firm that makes markets in derivatives are all engaged in ‘financial activities’ and potentially subject to systemic risk regulation.”
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Net Neutrality
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Extending Bush Tax Cuts vs Obama Tax Hikes
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/signed-legislation?page=36
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America would not be "Great" without Entitlements
April 14, 2011 at 7:49 am - CNS News Dateline: Washington DC
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Obama's FALSE Claims that Chrystler Repaid "Every Dime It Owes" June 4th 2011
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/president-obamas-phony-accounting-on-the-auto-industry-bailout/2011/06/06/AG3nefKH_blog.html
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WIP WIP WIP
She was a good-looking woman, Joyce was with her green eyes and honey skin and pouty lips. We lived in the same dorm my freshman year, and all the brothers were after her. One day I asked her if she was going to the Black Students' Association meeting. She looked at me funny, then started shaking her head like a baby who doesn't want what it sees on the spoon.
"I'm not black," Joyce said. "I'm multiracial." Then she started telling me about her father, who happened to be Italian and was the sweetest man in the world; and her mother, who happend to be part African and par French and part Native American and part something else. "why should I have to choose between them?" she asked me. Her voice cracked and I thought she was going to cry. "It's not white people who are making me choose. Maybe it used to be that way, but now they're willing to treat me like a person. No - it's black people who always have to make everything racial. They're the ones making me choose. They're the ones who are telling me that I can't b who I am ..."
They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people...
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed necolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society’s stifling constraints. We weren’t indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated. But this strategy alone couldn’t provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerated. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." Page 101 of Dreams From My Father
"Dreams from My Father" [pg. 220]: Yes, I’d seen weakness in other men – Gramps and his disappointments, Lolo and his compromise. But these men had become object lessons for me, men I might love but never emulate, white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela. And if later I saw that the black men I knew – Frank or Ray or Will or Rafiq – fell short of such lofty standards; if I had learned to respect these men for the struggles they went through, recognizing them as my own – my father’s voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people’s struggle. Wake up, black man!
When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose – the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down…well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself.
Dreams from My Father pg. xv
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/coilofrage.asp
http://factcheck.org/2008/06/obamas-dreams-of-my-father/
