As President Obama and his family continue their tour of Africa, the White House put out a Fact Sheet entitled “U.S. Support for Strengthening Democratic Institutions, Rule of Law, and Human Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa.” One of the first items highlighted by the White House is a $53 million program in Kenya that helps young people ”obtain National identification cards, a prerequisite to voter registration.”
Civil society and independent media play a critical role in any vibrant democracy. Across sub-Saharan Africa, the United States supports efforts to ensure civil society organizations and independent media can organize, advocate, and raise awareness with governments and the private sector to improve political processes, transparency, and government performance. Examples include:
• In Kenya, the $53 million Yes Youth Can program empowers nearly one million Kenyan youth to use their voices for advocacy in national and local policy-making, while also creating economic opportunities. In advance of Kenya’s March 2013 general elections, Yes Youth Can’s “My ID My Life” campaign helped 500,000 youth obtain National identification cards, a prerequisite to voter registration, and carried out a successful nationwide campaign with Kenyan civic organizations to elicit peace pledges from all presidential aspirants. [emphasis added]
Keep reading...http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/wh-touts-kenyan-program-obtain-national-id-cards-voter-registration_737990.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts
Friday, June 28, 2013
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Dreams from His Mother: Dinesh D’Souza on Obama
Dreams from His Mother: A Review of D’Souza, Dinesh (2010) The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Washington, D.C., Regnery.
Periodically there’s a rant about Obama and what he’s really up to but originality fades quickly. D’Souza is an exception, one praised by Newt Gingrich and damned by Robert Gibbs. D’Souza can be hard to read not because of his writing but because his perspective is so unique. He needed three tries to write this book and I needed three tries to read it but I all the while experienced “I’ll be damned, he’s right.”
Obama is first an “anti-colonialist” and second, a “socialist,” someone interested less in saving the poor but more in the accumulation of power. He is not “black” as an American black, descended from slaves. He took on that color and its traditions in order to acquire power. And ninety-one percent of American blacks still defend him as if he cared about them. He doesn’t. Remember, his view is internationalist and most of the world’s poor would be happy to share the flat-screens and hot dogs and beans enjoyed by American blacks. (Obama currently uses black support to chase his ambitions: Expect, therefore, blacks to be the especially angry once they discover his motives!)
He had a relatively privileged rearing in Hawaii, Indonesia, and again, Hawaii before coming to America when he was about seventeen years old. No surprise, his father and grandfather were anti-colonialist rebels in Kenya and his mother, “Stanley” Duncan (named after her father, she much later changed her first name to “Ann”) was also an anti-colonialist before she met Barack’s father. Once in America, Obama sought contacts with other foreign students and instruction from anti-colonialists such as Fanon, Said, Unger, and Ayers-Dohrn. And his curriculum and life at Columbia, about which he remains secretive, could have given him goals for taxes, regulation, reining in American business, and our access to fuel.
As an anti-colonialist, Obama’s goals for America involve the concentration of power in Washington, encouraging energy development in Asia and in the southern hemisphere (including Mexico and Brazil) while interfering with domestic production in the United States, disarming America’s military, imposing competitive handicaps on American business, and weakening our traditional alliances with Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Israel, and a non-committal war and withdrawal from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Colonialist” is usually applied to Europeans and Americans who take labor and resources from underdeveloped countries, typically in Africa and Asia and is often seen as a “boot-to the-throat” of developing nations. For example, the Dutch, Germans, French, and English disrupted traditional African cultures in ways that profited the Dutch, Germans, French, and English but not the Africans.
Obama may be an American citizen but was reared in Hawaii and Indonesia. Hawaii, a state, however, was also a recent, not particularly happy addition to our union.
The Dreams from His Mother
Living creatures collect, build, and arrange their environments. Furthermore, the case of humans, heritability increases from our conception to our deaths for most traits that have been investigated because we find friends, mates, and properties that align with our biology. We each become more unique with each passing decade and live on self-chosen islands of similar people.
The influences of natural parents remain strong even if we are separated from them early and never see them again! Obama’s natural father was a political activist, writer, socialist, and anti-colonialist in Kenya. Obama, in elementary school, really saw the man only once when he gave a talk to one of Obama’s classes. Everyone, teachers and students and especially Obama, were inspired by that presentation. The second contact occurred when Obama was 26 and visited the man’s grave in Kenya. Dad, labeled as “straaaaange” by one of Ann’s relatives, was a polygamist (eight children from three wives plus a fourth wife-to-be), a political failure, an alcoholic, an erratic driver who died when drunk and colliding with a tree trunk, and who called himself “Doctor” when he had no degrees.
Ann “Stanley” Duncan Obama Soetero was also strange. She accepted a man’s name while growing up, was a political activist in Hawaii and Indonesia, thrived best when she lived in primitive conditions, and furiously denied that whites were “her people.” She took Obama away from the influence of her second husband, Lolo Soetero, because he, with time, became ever more pro-American. Obama’s anti-American beliefs are perhaps more a gift from his mother than from his father!
Obama – “Dangerously Delusional”: Mark Steyn
Dinesh D’Souza is Obama’s age and shares his background. D’Souza was reared in India and surrounded by colonialism’s legacies. D’Souza eventually became President of King’s College in Manhattan, has written ten books, and is pro-American and pro-colonialism. Although his grandfather was a coolie laying railroad track in Kenya, D’Souza finds that most nations have benefited from their European intruders.
Similar backgrounds for these two men had different outcomes but psychiatry gives us a clue for this puzzle: “Paranoid Schizophrenia” may be applied to individuals with strongly-held, culturally atypical beliefs. This form of schizophrenia is not characterized by word salad, confusion, bizarre costumes, ambivalence, and blatant, bizarre emotional displays but by unusual persistence in very specific things. These people become angry, strident, and sometimes violent when contradicted. These folks get into creative religions, political movements, diets, and extraterrestrial visitors. (Mr. Gore comes to mind as well as our president, people you know in the next block, and people who call Coast to Coast.)
Thus, Obama’s aloofness, alienation, and love for power are consistent with his parents’ background as are some of his exploits – voting “present” in the Congress, the bird and columns he brought into his campaign, his speech in Berlin, his frequent vacations, self-referential thinking, bending facts to fit his story, spending habits, teleprompters, his missing label pin and missing hand over his heart during the pledge, and his impressive collection of secretive, scheming associates who were and are also anti-colonialists.
These traits can be aggravated by cocaine.
Bottom line from D’Souza: “Be very afraid.”
Bibliography:
American Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (4th Ed.) Washington, D.C.
D’Souza, Dinesh (2010) The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Washington, D.C., Regnery.
Plomin, R. (1994) Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rushton JP (2005) Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory. Nations & Nationalism. 11(4), 489-507.
http://www.deadcatsandclippings.com/?page_id=712
Periodically there’s a rant about Obama and what he’s really up to but originality fades quickly. D’Souza is an exception, one praised by Newt Gingrich and damned by Robert Gibbs. D’Souza can be hard to read not because of his writing but because his perspective is so unique. He needed three tries to write this book and I needed three tries to read it but I all the while experienced “I’ll be damned, he’s right.”
Obama is first an “anti-colonialist” and second, a “socialist,” someone interested less in saving the poor but more in the accumulation of power. He is not “black” as an American black, descended from slaves. He took on that color and its traditions in order to acquire power. And ninety-one percent of American blacks still defend him as if he cared about them. He doesn’t. Remember, his view is internationalist and most of the world’s poor would be happy to share the flat-screens and hot dogs and beans enjoyed by American blacks. (Obama currently uses black support to chase his ambitions: Expect, therefore, blacks to be the especially angry once they discover his motives!)
He had a relatively privileged rearing in Hawaii, Indonesia, and again, Hawaii before coming to America when he was about seventeen years old. No surprise, his father and grandfather were anti-colonialist rebels in Kenya and his mother, “Stanley” Duncan (named after her father, she much later changed her first name to “Ann”) was also an anti-colonialist before she met Barack’s father. Once in America, Obama sought contacts with other foreign students and instruction from anti-colonialists such as Fanon, Said, Unger, and Ayers-Dohrn. And his curriculum and life at Columbia, about which he remains secretive, could have given him goals for taxes, regulation, reining in American business, and our access to fuel.
As an anti-colonialist, Obama’s goals for America involve the concentration of power in Washington, encouraging energy development in Asia and in the southern hemisphere (including Mexico and Brazil) while interfering with domestic production in the United States, disarming America’s military, imposing competitive handicaps on American business, and weakening our traditional alliances with Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Israel, and a non-committal war and withdrawal from Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Colonialist” is usually applied to Europeans and Americans who take labor and resources from underdeveloped countries, typically in Africa and Asia and is often seen as a “boot-to the-throat” of developing nations. For example, the Dutch, Germans, French, and English disrupted traditional African cultures in ways that profited the Dutch, Germans, French, and English but not the Africans.
Obama may be an American citizen but was reared in Hawaii and Indonesia. Hawaii, a state, however, was also a recent, not particularly happy addition to our union.
The Dreams from His Mother
Living creatures collect, build, and arrange their environments. Furthermore, the case of humans, heritability increases from our conception to our deaths for most traits that have been investigated because we find friends, mates, and properties that align with our biology. We each become more unique with each passing decade and live on self-chosen islands of similar people.
The influences of natural parents remain strong even if we are separated from them early and never see them again! Obama’s natural father was a political activist, writer, socialist, and anti-colonialist in Kenya. Obama, in elementary school, really saw the man only once when he gave a talk to one of Obama’s classes. Everyone, teachers and students and especially Obama, were inspired by that presentation. The second contact occurred when Obama was 26 and visited the man’s grave in Kenya. Dad, labeled as “straaaaange” by one of Ann’s relatives, was a polygamist (eight children from three wives plus a fourth wife-to-be), a political failure, an alcoholic, an erratic driver who died when drunk and colliding with a tree trunk, and who called himself “Doctor” when he had no degrees.
Ann “Stanley” Duncan Obama Soetero was also strange. She accepted a man’s name while growing up, was a political activist in Hawaii and Indonesia, thrived best when she lived in primitive conditions, and furiously denied that whites were “her people.” She took Obama away from the influence of her second husband, Lolo Soetero, because he, with time, became ever more pro-American. Obama’s anti-American beliefs are perhaps more a gift from his mother than from his father!
Obama – “Dangerously Delusional”: Mark Steyn
Dinesh D’Souza is Obama’s age and shares his background. D’Souza was reared in India and surrounded by colonialism’s legacies. D’Souza eventually became President of King’s College in Manhattan, has written ten books, and is pro-American and pro-colonialism. Although his grandfather was a coolie laying railroad track in Kenya, D’Souza finds that most nations have benefited from their European intruders.
Similar backgrounds for these two men had different outcomes but psychiatry gives us a clue for this puzzle: “Paranoid Schizophrenia” may be applied to individuals with strongly-held, culturally atypical beliefs. This form of schizophrenia is not characterized by word salad, confusion, bizarre costumes, ambivalence, and blatant, bizarre emotional displays but by unusual persistence in very specific things. These people become angry, strident, and sometimes violent when contradicted. These folks get into creative religions, political movements, diets, and extraterrestrial visitors. (Mr. Gore comes to mind as well as our president, people you know in the next block, and people who call Coast to Coast.)
Thus, Obama’s aloofness, alienation, and love for power are consistent with his parents’ background as are some of his exploits – voting “present” in the Congress, the bird and columns he brought into his campaign, his speech in Berlin, his frequent vacations, self-referential thinking, bending facts to fit his story, spending habits, teleprompters, his missing label pin and missing hand over his heart during the pledge, and his impressive collection of secretive, scheming associates who were and are also anti-colonialists.
These traits can be aggravated by cocaine.
Bottom line from D’Souza: “Be very afraid.”
Bibliography:
American Psychiatric Association (1994) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. (4th Ed.) Washington, D.C.
D’Souza, Dinesh (2010) The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Washington, D.C., Regnery.
Plomin, R. (1994) Genetics and Experience: The Interplay between Nature and Nurture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Rushton JP (2005) Ethnic nationalism, evolutionary psychology, and Genetic Similarity Theory. Nations & Nationalism. 11(4), 489-507.
http://www.deadcatsandclippings.com/?page_id=712
Thursday, July 22, 2010
GOP Lawmaker Blasts White House for $23M Spent on Kenya Constitution Vote
By Tess Civantos
Published July 21, 2010 on FoxNews.com
A Republican lawmaker is accusing the White House of “unconscionable” and “illegal” acts for its role in Kenya's referendum on a new constitution, which would legalize abortion in the country for the first time.
Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey cited a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which estimated that more than $23 million in U.S. taxpayer funds have been spent on the referendum, and Smith and other conservatives have complained that at least some of that money has been spent in sport of the proposed constitution, possibly violating U.S. law.
“Under no circumstances should the U.S. government take sides,” Smith said at a news conference Wednesday. “Yet that is precisely what the Obama administration has done.”
He and other lawmakers accuse the Obama administration of offering incentives to Kenya to approve the controversial new constitution, promising that passage would “allow money to flow” into the nation's coffers. A federal law known as the Siljander Amendment makes it illegal for the U.S. government to lobby on abortion in other countries.
“We were unable to get any information prior to asking for those (USAID) reports,” Smith said. “There’s been no transparency in this process.”
Smith had been joined by Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida in requesting the federal investigation into the administration's spending on the referendum.
“U.S. law is being violated with impunity,” Smith told FoxNews.com. “We shouldn’t be pushing for other the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’ camp, but instead, we’re bankrolling the ‘yes’ campaign.”
One group that has received almost $3 million from the U.S. government, Development Alternatives, openly supported “advocating for efforts to eventually legalize abortion in Kenya,” Smith said. Another group, The Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review in Kenya, changed the wording of the Kenyan constitution’s abortion clause to make abortion more widely accessible – and has received over $180,000 from the U.S.
Thanks to these findings, nine of the more than 200 organizations in Kenya that received money from the U.S. have been suspended from receiving assistance, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Katya Thomas in Nairobi told the AP Friday.
But the congressmen are asking for more. They want the White House to be held accountable for its role.
“If violations of the law have occurred, which on the face of it they have, the information must be brought before law enforcement,” Smith said. “Not even presidents are above the law.”
The federal probe also found that the Kenyan constitution was not actually written by Kenyans, but by “U.S.-funded NGOs, working in concert with Planned Parenthood,” Smith said.
According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s website, Planned Parenthood supports the Kenyan groups that wrote the abortion clause – the Kenyan Federation of Women Lawyers and its parent organization the Kenyan Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance.
Planned Parenthood’s website states that it sought “to improve maternal health conditions in Kenya by securing reproductive health laws and policies that promote women's health,” its motivation for becoming involved in the constitutional revision process.
But some Kenyans think that the role of American organizations like Planned Parenthood in drafting the Kenyan constitution compromises Kenyan sovereignty and assaults its cultural heritage.
Theresa Okafor, CEO of Kenya’s Life League, said in a speech that the proposed constitution is “a conspiracy to strip Africa of its cherished values by international organizations like Planned Parenthood and the United Nations.”
“Africans regard every child as a blessing,” Okafor said. “Amidst biting poverty, the birth of a child is celebrated with pomp and pageantry. Children are treasures in Africa.”
Because abortion has never been an issue in Kenya until now, the country lacks an organized anti-abortion movement on the scale seen in the United States. But a number of church groups are mobilizing against the proposed constitution, as are some Kenyans who want to preserve the traditional culture of family values.
In March 2003, a group of young professionals formed the Life League, one of Kenya’s first pro-life organizations. In 2009, the Life League and 20 other Kenyan pro-life and pro-family groups united to form the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage – a heritage which they believe the abortion provision attacks.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/21/gop-lawmaker-blasts-white-house-m-spent-kenya-constitution-vote/
Published July 21, 2010 on FoxNews.com
A Republican lawmaker is accusing the White House of “unconscionable” and “illegal” acts for its role in Kenya's referendum on a new constitution, which would legalize abortion in the country for the first time.
Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey cited a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which estimated that more than $23 million in U.S. taxpayer funds have been spent on the referendum, and Smith and other conservatives have complained that at least some of that money has been spent in sport of the proposed constitution, possibly violating U.S. law.
“Under no circumstances should the U.S. government take sides,” Smith said at a news conference Wednesday. “Yet that is precisely what the Obama administration has done.”
He and other lawmakers accuse the Obama administration of offering incentives to Kenya to approve the controversial new constitution, promising that passage would “allow money to flow” into the nation's coffers. A federal law known as the Siljander Amendment makes it illegal for the U.S. government to lobby on abortion in other countries.
“We were unable to get any information prior to asking for those (USAID) reports,” Smith said. “There’s been no transparency in this process.”
Smith had been joined by Reps. Darrell Issa of California and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida in requesting the federal investigation into the administration's spending on the referendum.
“U.S. law is being violated with impunity,” Smith told FoxNews.com. “We shouldn’t be pushing for other the ‘yes’ or the ‘no’ camp, but instead, we’re bankrolling the ‘yes’ campaign.”
One group that has received almost $3 million from the U.S. government, Development Alternatives, openly supported “advocating for efforts to eventually legalize abortion in Kenya,” Smith said. Another group, The Committee of Experts on Constitutional Review in Kenya, changed the wording of the Kenyan constitution’s abortion clause to make abortion more widely accessible – and has received over $180,000 from the U.S.
Thanks to these findings, nine of the more than 200 organizations in Kenya that received money from the U.S. have been suspended from receiving assistance, the U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Katya Thomas in Nairobi told the AP Friday.
But the congressmen are asking for more. They want the White House to be held accountable for its role.
“If violations of the law have occurred, which on the face of it they have, the information must be brought before law enforcement,” Smith said. “Not even presidents are above the law.”
The federal probe also found that the Kenyan constitution was not actually written by Kenyans, but by “U.S.-funded NGOs, working in concert with Planned Parenthood,” Smith said.
According to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s website, Planned Parenthood supports the Kenyan groups that wrote the abortion clause – the Kenyan Federation of Women Lawyers and its parent organization the Kenyan Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance.
Planned Parenthood’s website states that it sought “to improve maternal health conditions in Kenya by securing reproductive health laws and policies that promote women's health,” its motivation for becoming involved in the constitutional revision process.
But some Kenyans think that the role of American organizations like Planned Parenthood in drafting the Kenyan constitution compromises Kenyan sovereignty and assaults its cultural heritage.
Theresa Okafor, CEO of Kenya’s Life League, said in a speech that the proposed constitution is “a conspiracy to strip Africa of its cherished values by international organizations like Planned Parenthood and the United Nations.”
“Africans regard every child as a blessing,” Okafor said. “Amidst biting poverty, the birth of a child is celebrated with pomp and pageantry. Children are treasures in Africa.”
Because abortion has never been an issue in Kenya until now, the country lacks an organized anti-abortion movement on the scale seen in the United States. But a number of church groups are mobilizing against the proposed constitution, as are some Kenyans who want to preserve the traditional culture of family values.
In March 2003, a group of young professionals formed the Life League, one of Kenya’s first pro-life organizations. In 2009, the Life League and 20 other Kenyan pro-life and pro-family groups united to form the Foundation for African Cultural Heritage – a heritage which they believe the abortion provision attacks.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/21/gop-lawmaker-blasts-white-house-m-spent-kenya-constitution-vote/
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