Like several parts of Barack Hussein Obama’s (mm mmm mmmm) life story, little is known about his college experience.  He attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia in 1981.  The move receives a small mention in Mr. Obama’s 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father”.   Instead, he devoted that chapter to his impressions of race and class struggles in New York.  I’m shocked.

An article in Columbia College Today, a publication of the university, reported that Scooter portrayed Columbia as a period of buckling down following a troubled adolescence.   Obama said that he did not socialize much, instead spending a lot of time in the library, “like a monk.”  Yeah, right.  He has also said that he was involved to some extent with the Black Students Organization.

Federal law limits the information that Columbia can release about Scooter’s time there. A spokesman for the university, Brian Connolly, confirmed that  Obama spent two years at Columbia College and graduated in 1983 with a major in political science.   He did not receive honors and specific information on his grades is sealed.   A program from the 1983 graduation ceremony lists him as a graduate.

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Obama studied, while at Columbia, under the late Edward Said, an Arafat devotee. That alone really does not mean a whole lot.  Said was a popular professor and hundreds of students took his comparative literature courses.   However, Scooter evidently maintained some sort of tie with Said.   A photo that made the Internet rounds before the election shows Obama talking to the professor at a 1998 Arab American community dinner in Chicago, where the Obamas and Saids were seated together.

Said knew a lot of radical operatives.   Among those radicals were Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  When they emerged from wherever they were hiding in the early 1980s (while Obama was attending Columbia), Ayers enrolled in education courses at Bank Street College, adjacent to Columbia in Morningside Heights.  He then earned his doctorate at Columbia’s Teachers College in 1987.  Said liked Ayers so much, he wrote a paragraph for the dust jacket of the bomber’s 2001 book, Fugitive Days, in which Ayers brags about being a part of the Weather Underground.

From 1985 – 1988, Obama was a Community Organizer in Chicago.  What does a Community Organizer do?  I’m glad you asked.

Per Byron York in an article found at nationalreview.com:

Community organizing is most identified with the left-wing Chicago activist Saul Alinsky (1909-72), who pretty much defined the profession. In his classic book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote that a successful organizer should be “an abrasive agent to rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; to fan latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expressions.” Once such hostilities were “whipped up to a fighting pitch,” Alinsky continued, the organizer steered his group toward confrontation, in the form of picketing, demonstrating, and general hell-raising.

Obama was hired by Jerry Kellman, a New Yorker who had gotten into organizing in the 1960s.  Kellman was trying to help laid-off factory workers on the far South Side of Chicago, in a nearly 100% black community.   He led a group, the Calumet Community Religious Conference, that had been created by several local Catholic churches in the industrial community.   Kellman was advised to hire a black organizer for a new spinoff from CCRC.  They called it the Developing Communities Project, designed to focus solely on the Chicago part of the area.

One of Obama’s projects while he was there, was to try to build an alliance of white and black churches and enlist them in the cause of social justice.  Obama had a problem, though.   He didn’t go to church himself.   And that, brothers and sisters, is how Obama, drawn to the preaching of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (and a political opportunity), joined Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street.

If you ask Obama’s fellow Community Organizers what his most significant accomplishments were, they’ll say two things: the expansion of a city summer-job program for South Side teenagers and the removal of asbestos from one of the area’s oldest housing projects.   Those  were his biggest victories.

So, after 3 years of Community Organizing, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School at the age of 27.  The question is:  How did he get the money for this?  In my article Why Haven’t I Heard of Khalid Al-Monsour? ,  I attempted to answer that question:

President Obama attended Harvard Law School from 1988 – 1991.  The average tuition during that time was $25,000 per year.  It would have cost $75,000 to attend there for 3 years.  As president of the Harvard Law Review, he received no stipend from the school, according to Harvard spokesman Mike Armini in a interview with Newsmax.

If numbers cited by the Obama Presidential Campaign for Scooter”s student loans are accurate, that means that Obama came up with more than $32,000 over three years from sources other than loans to pay for tuition, room and board.  Hmmmmm.

Along with the funding issue, very little is known about Obama’s time at Harvard Law School,and his sycophants in the Liberal hierarchy, Main Stream Media,  and even Harvard Law School Administrators have done a remarkable job in running interference against anyone trying to find out about it.

From Jodi Kantor’s article at nytimes.com:

He arrived there as an unknown, Afro-wearing community organizer who had spent years searching for his identity; by the time he left, he had his first national news media exposure, a book contract and a shot of confidence from running the most powerful legal journal in the country.

During his time at Harvard, Obama met and started dating Michelle Robinson, the future First Lady.  I don’t know if he was attracted to her arms or not.

He also managed to get himself elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Bruce Spiva, a former review editor who now practices civil rights law in Washington, said that the law review is:

fairly disconnected from the breadth and the rough and tumble of real politics.  It’s an election among a closed group. It’s more like electing a pope.

As the president of the review, Scooter had to walk a delicate line. He served on the board of the Black Law Students Association, often speaking passionately about the hot topic of the week, but in a way that would not make white classmates defensive.   He kept away from fiery rhetoric.  He even did a spot-on impersonation of the Rev. Jesse Jackson when he came to speak on campus, according to Franklin Amanat, now a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn.  Obama’s  brashest public speaking moment came at a rally for faculty diversity, where he compared Professor Derrick Bell, who had resigned after agitating for greater faculty diversity,  to Rosa Parks.

Most of the time, young Scooter stayed away from the fiery rhetoric of campus debate, choosing safer topics for his speeches. At the black law students’ annual conference, he fervently told students to remember the obligations that came with their privileged education.

Barack Hussein Obama graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard Law School.  We don’t know anything about his actual courses or grades.   The records have been sealed.

Now, law degree in hand, Obama was ready to return to the Windy City.

During this period of Barack Hussein Obama’s (peace be upon him) life, we see the seeds planted during his childhood and teen-age years start to take root and grow into a full-fledged, Alinsky-inspired Socialist ideology.

In the next section, we’ll explore his adventures among the Chicago Liberal and Academic Elite and the path that led him to his first political campaign.

Sources:  nysun.com, nationalreview.com, nytimes.com

Part 3: The Chicago Ascent

In the summer of 1988, while still at Harvard, Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) landed a job as an intern in the Chicago office of the influential law firm of Sidley Austin. ( How does a first-year law student get an internship at such a prestigious law firm?)  He was dating Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer from a working-class family in the South Shore area of the South Side.  She also just happened to be his mentor at the firm. The lovebirds got married in 1990, and settled in the Hyde Park neighborhood on the South Side along the lakefront.  Built around the University of Chicago, both black and white  affluent families lived among the middle class and the poor.  Hyde Park boasts a strong base of independent voters who are committed to political reform, which influenced Obama’s political message.

He worked for seven months in 1992 on a voter registration and education project that helped elect Bill Clinton as president and Carol Moseley Braun as the state’s first African-American femalesenator.

You may have heard of it:  Project Vote.   In 2008,  Project Vote and ACORN were responsible for a voter registration drive targeting battleground states Obama needed to win the White House.

Though officially non-partisan, the ACORN/Project Vote voter drive focused on groups that they thought would vote Democratic in the presidential contest: African-American, young, Latino and low-income earners.  They referred to these groups as “historically underrepresented in elections” in a press release they issued, in an attempt to justify what they were doing.

ACORN/Project Vote operated voter registration drives in 21 states in 2008; including the battlegrounds Colorado, Florida, Michigan (since move to Obama) Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  They were very instrumental in Obama’s victory.

Also in 1992, Scooter went to work for Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a firm specializing in civil rights law and other forms of public advocacy.   Working there provided him with the opportunity to make many contacts in the Chicago Political Machine.   The longtime fire he had in his gut concerning a political career found inspiration through the changes being made in Chicago by Harold Washington, its black mayor.   African-Americans were finally getting the power and control that they hadn’t had before, and Obama decided that politics was the career for him.

Obama started another part-time gig in 1992.  Per the University of Chicago:

From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track.

Why didn’t they just call him a Part-time Lecturer?

In 1995  “Bomber” Bill Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn hosted a fund-raiser for Obama prior to Obama’s run for Alice Palmer’s seat in the state Senate  and Ayers donated $200 to Obama’s upcoming state Senate campaign.

In 1996 at age 34, he ran for the state Senate in dubious campaign that is barely known of, outside of Chicago.   Alice Palmer, the incumbent, had decided to run for Congress and supported Obama as her successor.   But after Palmer’s congressional campaign ran into trouble, she changed her mind and decided to run for re-election to the Illinois Senate after all. Obama refused to step aside and the melee ensued.  One of Scooter’s volunteers challenged whether Palmer’s nominating petitions were even legal.  Obama’s campaign pulled the same chicanery concerning the petitions of other candidates.  Palmer dropped out, and the other candidates were disqualified.   So,  Obama won unopposed in the Democratic primary—guaranteeing his victory in the general election.  This was truly an example of Chicago-style politics at it’s finest…or dirtiest.

Around this same time, at a Bill Clinton White House event, philanthropist Walter Annenberg announced that he was making a $500 million grant to cities across the nation to put towards the reform of public schools.   Bill Ayers was the head of the Chicago group that, with$49.2 million in hand,   formed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.  The launch party in 1995 was attended by the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago, as well as anybody was influential among the Chicago Political Elite.   Guess who the  first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was?  You guessed.   Obama held the post until 1999.  At that time, he stepped down and remained on the board.   Bill Ayers worked closely with the Challenge as a leader of the newly formed Chicago School Reform Collaborative.

They also both served on the board of the charitable Woods Fund of Chicago from 1999 to 2002.   Just a “guy from the neighborhood”.  Huh, Scooter?

Additionally, Scooter served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002.  This foundation started as the financial back-up plan of a widow whose family had made millions in the lumber industry.

After her death, it was run by philanthropic people who increasingly dedicated their giving to Liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.  It has grown over the years until it is now bigger than the TIDES Foundation and actually funds it.

The Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the capital outlay to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, believe it or not, air.

What a coincidence, that, as president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities, huh?

While he served in the State Senate in Springfield, Illinois, Obama wrote more than 40 columns for his neighborhood Newspaper, The Hyde Park Herald.  He also received extensive coverage in the Chicago Defender, an over-one hundred year old newspaper of record serving Chicago’s black community.

Per Howard Kurtz, writing for weeklystandard.com, from an article published August 11-18, 2008:

What they [the newspaper articles] portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan. Elected president, this man would presumably shift the country sharply to the left on all the key issues of the day-culture-war issues included. It’s no wonder Obama has passed over his Springfield years in relative silence.

You’re a prophet, Mr. Kurtz.

Obama remained in the Illinois State Senate until 2004, when he became the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate seat from Illinois.   We’ll examine this period of his life in the next section.

Sources:  usnews.com, suntimes.com, uchicago.edu, michellemalkin.com, pajamasmedia.com, weeklystandard.com

Part 4: Hittin’ The Big-Time

In 2004, Illinois State Senator Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) decided to run for The United States Senate.

In order to have a successful Senatorial campaign, Scooter  had to secure tremendous financial backing and be the recipient of astute political mentoring.  No problem.

It is now very well-known that George Soros, evil genius, major Democratic Party donor and anti-Israel crusader, has been a generous contributor to Barack Obama. However, not too many people know that a loophole in McCain-Feingold allowed Soros and his family members to be extremely generous in their support of Obama’s 2004 Senatorial campaign.

Obama had to run against Blair Hull in the primary and then Jack Ryan in the general (both multi-millionaires). Obama received huge donations from individuals, to so-called “millionaires exception.”  Usually,  individuals are limited to giving $2300 to candidates in federal elections, but if the candidates are running against millionaires, these limits do not apply and candidates are allowed to receive up to $12,000 from a single individual. Soros and his family gave Barack Obama $60,000. This does not count the money that Soros was funneled to so-called 527 groups (Moveon.org, for example) that have also been politically active; nor does it include money that Soros raised fromtapping a network of friends, business associates, and employees.

Besides garnering unlimited campaign funds, as the campaigns entered their closing rounds, the news ”happened to be” leaked to media outlets that both Hull and Ryan had “personal scandals” in their past. The timely release of this news wiped out both of their campaigns, leading to an easy victory for Obama in the primary and then in the general election.

The New York Times Magazine revealed that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief political and media adviser, may well have been behind the leak of the story that doomed the Hull candidacy as the primary reached its home stretch.  I’m shocked.

As he has shown over the years, Axelrod was right at home operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. One can not bring up Axelrod’s name  in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. Approaching the 2004 Senate primary, it was clear that it was a two-man race: the millionaire liberal, Hull, leading in the polls, and Obama, who was the figurehead of an impressive grass-roots campaign. One month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune “just happened” to reveal, at the end of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. This revelation proceeded to erupt into a full-fledged scandal.  This scandal destroyed Hull’s campaign and handed Obama an easy primary victory.

The Tribune reporter who wrote the story later admitted in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. However, a lot of folks in Chicago believe that Axelrod leaked the initial story. They will tell you that before signing on with Obama, Axelrod interviewed with Hull. They also point out that Obama’s TV ad campaign just happened to start at almost the same time. Axelrod swears up and down that “we had nothing to do with it” and that the campaign’s television ad schedule was in the works for a long time.

Axlerod’s explanation?

An aura grows up around you, and people assume everything emanates from you.

After Obama won the Primary, he was invited to deliver a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention on July 27th in Boston, Massachusetts.

As the result of the now-legendary speech, Out of Many, One, Obama rose to national prominence, and his speech is regarded by Liberal pundits as one of the great political statements of the 21st century.  This speech thrust Obama into the national spotlight, and sycophants crowned him the new political prince of the Liberal Elite.

In an interview published on oprah.com on Nov. 1, 2004, the talk show queen asked Obama why he was chosen to speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention:

We won our primary in a way that shocked people.   (I’ll say.)  In a seven-person field, we got 53 percent of the vote. People’s assumption had been that if I won, I’d get 90 percent of the black vote, then maybe a little of the liberal white vote. We did win the black vote by 90 percent, but we also won the white vote—both on Chicago’s South Side and up north. That created a sense of hopefulness among Democrats. I debunked this notion that whites won’t vote for blacks. Or suburbanites won’t vote for city people. Or downstate Illinois won’t vote for upstate Illinois. That was the bedrock of my campaign: People may look different, talk different, and live in different places, but they’ve got some core values that they all care about and they all believe in. If you can speak to those values, people will respond—even if you have a funny name. (Brings a tear to the eye, doesn’t it?)

Barack Hussein Obama (Peace be upon him.) won the Senatorial election and went on to “serve” as a United States Senator from Illinois from 2005 – 2008.

Obama sponsored 121 bills as a senator, of which 115 never made it out of committee and 3 were successfully enacted.   He co-sponsored 506 bills during the same time period.

Barack Obama missed 314 (24%) of 1,300 roll call votes.  He did not have the option of voting “Present” as he did 130 times in the Illinois State Senate.

One and one half years after taking his seat in the U.S. Senate, Obama declared himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination as their representative in the 2008 Presidential Election.

And the rest, as they say, gentle readers, is history. 

Sources:  americanthinker.org, govtrack.us, oprah.com

EPILOGUE:

Here we are…a country divided by an individual who wants to “spread the wealth around” and who proclaims that America is “not just a Christian Nation any more”.

The sad fact is Americans have elected…not once, but twice, a man who believes that America is not better than any other country in the world. In fact, his mission has been to make us that way.

American Exceptionalism is anathema to him.

In Barack Hussein Obama’s country, every one is equal. That is to say, accomplishment is not rewarded, until it is done for the good of the State.

Children are given medals and trophies for accomplishing nothing at all.

When Obamacare is fully implemented, if you are over 76 years old, you will not be able to receive Cancer Treatment.

Christians are being harassed and abused, because there can be no other god, but the State.

What Obama does not understand is, no matter how hard you try, your arm’s too short to box with God. God always has the last word. And, he will in this situation America finds itself in on this Sunday morning.

Keep the faith and stay the course, as our Founding Fathers did.

They fought against tyranny and oppression, also.

And, with God’s help, they won.

We will, too…God willing.

Until He Comes,

KJ