Obama's half-brother writes memoir contradicting 'Dreams from my Father' and exposing their common father's chronic drunken physical abuse

Barack Obama's Ivy-League educated half-brother is publishing his autobiography next month, painting a dramatically different picture of their few meetings from the one the president related in his best-selling 'Dreams from My Father' memoir.

Mark Obama Ndesandjo includes an appendix in his book, cataloguing what he says are factual errors in 'Dreams' – including words falsely attributed to his mother, a Jewish woman named Ruth.

'A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book, and I can understand that,' he told the Associated Press last year when he planned to self-publish his book.

'To me,' Ndesandjo said then, 'for him the book was a tool for fashioning an identity and he was using composites. I wanted the record to be straight. I wanted to tell my own story, not let people tell it for me.'

His book, 'An Obama's Journey: My Odyssey of Self-Discovery across Three Cultures,' is due in stores September 16 and published by Globe Pequot Press.

Describing a two-day stretch in 1988 when the two half-brothers first met and shared a next-day lunch, Ndesandjo, who bears only a vague family resemblance to the president, writes that 'overall, it was a very awkward, cold meeting.'

Barack Sr., he explains, was someone he tried not to think of since he had divorced Ruth years earlier and descended further into alcoholism and a downward career spiral.

But with Barack Jr. suddenly in his living room, brought for a visit by the future president's aunt, avoiding thoughts about their common father became uncomfortably impossible. It was, he writes, as 'though the skeleton that no one ever talked about had strayed into the middle of a family party.'

Ndesandjo, according to a writer at WND.com who obtained an advance copy of the book, 'described their lunch together during that second day as filled with tension, as Barack struggled to embrace the African heritage of a father Ndesandjo had rejected.'

The author 'had refused even to use the Obama name, unable to forget, as a child, experiencing the alcoholism and brutality of their father.'

The elder Barack was a blithely self-involved alcoholic, once killing a man in a DUI auto accident and dying at age 46 while driving drunk.  His viciousness is largely absent from the president's 'Dreams' – President Obama met Barack Sr. just once after his infancy, at age 10 – and is relegated to Obama quoting his half-brother criticizing Barack Sr.

'You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing,' Ndesandjo tells the future president in 'Dreams.'

'Well, you're right. At a certain point, I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.'

In 'Dreams,' Obama casts himself as the all-seeing observer trying to connect himself back to his Kenyan roots. But Ndesandjo now recalls details that never made it into the president's 1995 book.

'My impression at the first meeting,' he writes, 'was that Barack thought that I was too white, and I thought that he was too black.'

'He was an American search for his African roots. ... I'm an American but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots.'

'I remember that when I spoke with him about the heroes of Western culture, he rolled his eyes impatiently,' he has told Maariv, an Israeli newspaper.

'My feeling was that, here is an American who in many ways is trying to be a local Kenyan youth. This is something I tried to flee my entire life.'

Ndesandjo says his effort to escape his African cultural roots was furthered in part by a desire to escape the legacy of his violent father.  'His self-hatred and tendency toward self-sabotage was passed down and became part of my identity,' he acknowledges in his new book.

'My mother's lily-white skin and my father's ebony-black visage come to symbolize an eternal incompatibility in my mind's eye. For a long time I hated to have anything to do with what my father represented, whether it was him personally, or even the positive aspects of African culture.'

'In violent reaction to him,' he concludes, 'I turned passionately toward Western culture and music, which brought me a measure of solace.'

After earning degrees in physics from Brown and Stanford Universities, Ndesandjo honed his artistic talents in China where he lives with his wife.  He is an accomplished pianist and recording artist who often gives lessons to orphans in the Chinese boom town of Shenzhen.

More criticisms of Barack Sr. surfaced in 2009 when the new president visited China during his first year in the White House.

That's when Ndesandjo published his first book, an autobiographical novel titled 'Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Tale of Love In The East.' It paints Barack Obama Sr. as an abusive drunk who repeatedly beat him and his mother in episode after rage-filled episode.

'There were some thumps as of someone falling,' reads one passage that Ndesandjo wrote in the third-person.  'His father's angry voice raised itself. ... He didn't remember what they were fighting about, but his stomach felt sick and empty.'  'His mother was being attacked and he couldn't protect her. "You bastard!" he remembered her screaming out. And that was just one night. There were many more.'

One of those nights, Ndesandjo writes in 'An Obama's Journey,' resulted in his blitzed father holding a knife to his mother's throat after she obtained a restraining order against him.

'We Obamas have big hands. They can be used to create or to debase,' reads one portion.  'My hands enable me to comfortably reach across twelve keys and play piano well. My father would use his big hands to knock my mother down when he came home from a night of drinking.'

'I would move protectively toward her and clutch her legs, crying,' writes Ndesandjo. 'I know now why I mostly remember her legs, not her torso, or even her face.'

His parents met when Obama Sr. was a graduate student at Harvard University. They moved to Kenya in 1964, where he and his brother David were born. David later died in a motorcycle accident.

Obama Sr. had earlier divorced President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, following Obama's 1961 birth.

Ndesandjo's mother later divorced the elder Barack Obama and married another man, whose surname both mother and son also took.

SOURCE

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Victory over Operation Choke Point

Gun retailers are no longer on a hit list deemed “high risk” by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. after the banking regulator formally withdrew Monday the list it put together that outlined what merchants may be considered risky for banks to do business with as part of the Obama administration’s “Operation Choke Point.”

The agency said its explanatory warning list “led to misunderstandings” about how it’s supervising banks’ ties to third-party payment providers, according to Bloomberg News. The regulator said it never meant to prevent banks from doing financial transactions with the types of businesses on the list.

“Those that are operating with the appropriate systems and controls will not be criticized for providing payment-processing services to businesses operating in compliance with applicable law,” the FDIC said in its updated industry guidelines, issued Monday.

Richard Osterman, the agency’s acting general counsel, admitted to the American Banker newspaper Monday that the list had been “misinterpreted” by financial institutions.

Republican lawmakers have criticized the FDIC for unfairly targeting legitimate businesses that operated in its so-called high-risk category, including gun retailers and payday lenders. The Washington Times reported in May that many banks were dropping businesses in these high-risk industries as the bankers wanted to avoid higher scrutiny from the federal regulator.

The FDIC has been helping the Department of Justice run “Operation Choke Point,” which is intended to combat online fraud by cutting off fraudsters’ access to payment systems. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican, has said the effect of the program has been to squeeze out legitimate businesses.

“If you empower the government to pick winners and losers within lawful enterprises, then there’s no place to stop,” Mr. Issa said this month in an appearance at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Industry advocates pushing to repeal Operation Choke Point said the FDIC did not go far enough Monday.

“Altering a website is window dressing and doesn’t end the unjust practices associated with Operation Choke Point,” said Brian Wise, a senior adviser for the U.S. Consumer Coalition, which is seeking an end to Operation Choke Point.

“While we support the FDIC’s decision to remove the list of ‘high-risk merchants’ from the FDIC website, damage has already been done to countless businesses across the country who have already lost their bank accounts,” he added. “Whether the list is published on the FDIC’s website or not, we expect banks will still be fearful of doing business with these lawful industries.”

SOURCE

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GOVERNMENT HAS GROWN OUT OF CONTROL!

Imagine waking up to the sight of armed police officers raiding your house. You know you’ve done nothing wrong, but yet you are terrified just the same.

You look out your window and see an entire column of police cars and Department of Homeland Security vehicles race towards your house with sirens blazing.

When they arrive, they don’t head for the door, nor do they go after any individual. The go right to your car, lift the hood to read the VIN number, and then tow it away.

For Jennifer Brinkley, this was her reality. What was her crime? She wasn’t a drug dealer and she wasn’t accused of hurting anyone…



No, her crime was that she owned a 1984-5 Land Rover SUV that, according to Homeland Security, violated the Clean Air Act. The above picture shows the model that the government has apparently decided is illegal to own…

This isn’t a joke. Jennifer Brinkley had her North Carolina home raided by Homeland Security because her vintage SUV apparently violated the Clean Air Act.

What the hell is this country coming to???

We have thousands of illegals crossing the border every day, bringing drugs, diseases, and God knows what else into the country. But Obama won’t use Homeland Security resources to seal the border. No, he would rather use the full weight of the Federal Government to shake down a woman for owning an old SUV known for crummy emissions!

Tell Congress to STOP the administration’s wanton targeting of American citizens! Homeland Security should be used to secure the border, not to raid and shakedown citizens!

When police and Homeland Security arrived at Jennifer Brinkley’s home, they compared the VIN on the car to a list they had and determined that the SUV may violate the Clean Air Act.

This is a law that requires all vehicles to maintain a certain emissions standard. But the agents didn’t even test the car’s emissions… they just looked at the VIN and assumed that it wasn’t in compliance.

Not only is this a ridiculous reason to have an armed raid and impound a motor vehicle, but also the officers involved weren’t even sure if the Land Rover did violate the law.

The owner contends that she put $60,000 into restoring the car and that she was close to getting it inspected. Once done, she completely expected it to pass its inspection, including the emissions section of the test.

But before she had a chance to bring her car in to be inspected, Homeland Security swooped in and seized it right out from under her!

Words can’t describe how angry this makes me. This woman had her property seized by government forces sworn to protect her interests. Instead, she had her liberty and property rights trampled on.

To this day, Jennifer Brinkley has no idea where the government has taken her car. According to agents, her car was just one of forty that Homeland Security was seizing on that day alone.

This is what our government has come to… Instead of honoring their oath and defending the American people, government agencies like Homeland Security look for every chance to catch Americans violating some random law or statute.

Why the hell was Homeland Security even involved in the raid? Agents admitted that Jennifer Brinkley had not done anything else wrong, so why was Homeland Security – an agency charged with combatting drug smuggling and terrorism – involved in an EPA raid?

If you look up “out of control government” in a dictionary, this story should show up.

There are so many laws on the books that it is impossible for any average citizen to stay on the right side of the law. Judges will always claim that ignorance of the law is no excuse. But it has gotten to the point that if you actually took the time to read every law on the books, by the time you finished you’d have to start over because laws would have been added and changed!

Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but it is also inexcusable to have entire government agencies built around fining and penalizing citizens for running afoul of the law!

We have a Homeland Security Agency that leaves the border unsecure while it targets an SUV owner for violating emissions standards!

We have an FDA that uses SWAT teams to go after farmers for selling raw milk and unpasteurized cheese products!

We have an EPA that fines homeowners thousands of dollars for creating unlicensed ponds on their property!

We have a Bureau of Land Management that tries to shakedown cattle ranchers to make them pay grazing fees to use public land!

The DOJ has openly admitted to targeting gun stores and forcing banks to drop them as customers!

The government has grown far too big and too powerful! And it is up to us to right the ship!

For a government agency to use an environmental law to seize a $60,000 car should be a shock. But the sad thing is, this happens every day across America. This is merely the symptom of the larger disease…

If it can happen to Jennifer Brinkley, it can happen to anyone.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.

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