A White Woman From Kansas (your drink will come out your nose alert)

New York Fishwrap ^ | 6/3/11 | Cohen

[pabianice]

LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation.

[ilovesarah2012]

Stanley Ann Dunham worked for Peter F. Geithner. The turbo-tax kids father.Peter was the director of the Ford Foundation. Obama’s mother Ann looked over the Ford micro finance program she was developing.

Timothy spent most of his childhood in Zimbabwe, Zambia, India, Thailand and finished high school in Bangkok.To think Obama’ father worked for shell oil and his step father worked for Mobil oil!Peter F Geithner was also inter woven with Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers and Bob Schrank who was the author of Growing up Radical and Red in the USA!

http://www.oilforimmigration.org/facts/?p=4695#more-4695

[Eva]

I don’t know like about being useful, more like useless. As my husband would say, like a third tit.

These women were both looking for the meaning of life and never found it. At least Rachel Corrie died before she could mess up anyone else’s life in the process.

[ilovesarah2012]

Her father really wanted a son. I imagine knowing that could mess up a girl, especially since she was given a boy’s name. One messed up family.

[Texas Fossil]

As in getting pregnant at 17 by the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawaii

Are you sure? My read indicates it is possible that the father may be other than BHO Sr.

[Paladin2]

"Being biracial in the America Obama grew up in was not much of an option. "

Uh, he didn't grow up in the Kansas type of America. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, likely quite the places for bi-raciality acceptance.

[bushpilot1]

Stanley Ann Dunham's favorite movie...she saw it several days before meeting the African transient student.

[colorado tanker]

The family moved to Seattle in 1955. I’d hardly call Stanley Ann a Kansas gal. Her formative years were spent in the Pacific Northwest.

[Liberty Valance]

[bushpilot1]

[Rocketwolf68]

The hippie skank from the “lil’ red schoolhouse” Is how I would characterize her.

[When do we get liberated?]

Yeah, put that one up against Herman Cain’s actual American Dream story and that pretty much sums up the two. Here’s a news flash, a cute blonde woman with few intellectual abilities, no determination and no ambition can float through life on a series of interested-for-a-while men.

[When do we get liberated?]

Yeah, I am certain she was an “unrivaled expert at javanese blacksmithing” There is no doubt in my mind that she knew far more about it that any 10th generation Javanese blacksmith! Seems like Obama got his skill at self absorbtion from her.

[COUNTrecount]

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

So he invited her to Miami.

[MeganC]

>>>I’m so tired of all the sad stories about white “baby mommas” getting mistreated by their black “baby daddies” that I’m just losing all my natural sympathy for these poor souls...<<<

I’ve a girlfriend who oft complains of the misadventures of her ‘ethnic’ ghetto-thug boyfriends and I once told her thjat there was NOTHING wrong with the boyfriends as they were who they are. What’s wrong is her taste in men and I told her so long as she keeps seeking out losers she’ll keep dealing with them.

[DrC]

““Obama Sr., who loved her and left her — for Harvard.”

This was a surprising statement to read from someone who also concedes: “in some essential sense “Dreams from My Father” was fictionalized.”

[Iron Munro]

Let's see the marriage certificate and the divorce agreement.

How could Obama Sr. legally marry Little Suzie Roundheels Stanley Ann in the USA when he was already married?

Simple answer - he couldn't.

[combat_boots]

“combat boots.”

Make that rubber boots, please. ;>

[Iron Munro]

Stanley Ann, you ignorant slut.....

[combat_boots]

Mercer Island is freaking outrageously expensive. Has been for decades.

Cutthroat working people by day.......Commies by night.

[combat_boots]

“was 27, not 25”

So, she was underage (17) and statutorially raped by a foreigner?