From the Associated Press:

But it was another incident, one to which he was a party, that had a most profound effect on the biracial teenager.

Toot had asked her husband for a ride to work because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money the day before. When Stanley refused, his grandson couldn’t understand why.

“She’s been bothered by men before,” his grandfather explained, according to the memoir. “Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason why she’s bothered.”

Obama described the words as “like a fist in my stomach.” It was a life-changing moment for him.

“Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would,” he writes. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”

Obama referred to the incident again this spring when racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced him to make what many now consider a seminal speech on race relations in America.

“I can no more disown him,” he told an audience in Philadelphia in March, “than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Charles Payne [retired assistant director of the U. of Chicago library] says his sister’s response to the reference was “like, ’Oh, well.”’ But his reaction was that Obama shouldn’t have shared that anecdote.

“She was really a very liberal person; liberal in politics and, I think, liberal in thinking,” says the brother, who has worked hard on his great-nephew’s campaign. “Frankly … that story, when it was in the book, I felt didn’t need to be in there.”[‘Toot’: Obama grandmother a force that shaped him]

It’s bad enough that Obama wrote that in 1995. It’s grotesque that Sen. Obama dragged up that absurd story about his dying grandmother in 2008 in order to justify his comparison of Rev. Wright to her.

Alberta’s Colby Cosh writes

Last week’s column for [Canada's National Post] featured a Paul Harvey-esque disclosure about a white supremacist in Barack Obama’s family tree. Although there has been some general discussion concerning Obama’s genealogy, of the sort that typically accompanies U.S. presidential elections, I think I am the first journalist anywhere to dig up and publish this particular datum. It’s of no more than idle interest, but idle interest is the columnist’s business; you’d think someone would have had a rummage.

Rummaging Obama is almost unknown among American papers–Obama’s half-brother and his aunt were both discovered by overseas papers, although the aunt is living illegally in Boston.

Colby Cosh wrote in the National Post, (Links added by me) that

The strange part about this narrative is that Obama’s black ancestors aren’t even African-American; he is the son of a dynamic, brilliant Kenyan economist and politician he hardly ever knew. His black identity comes from outside American history. And reporters have barely scratched the surface of his white maternal ancestry, the part of him, so to speak, that lies fully within America, complete with all the contradictions and horrors of its past.

And here’s another strange fact: It is easier to show Barack Obama’s descent from slave-owning American colonists than it is to establish any genealogical connection between himself and American slaves. In many ways, a WASP family-tree snob of the 19th century would probably be more impressed with Obama’s mother’s background than with John McCain’s people. (Both candidates can claim direct descent from King Edward I.) A 2007 investigation by the Baltimore Sun [See family tree] found that Obama’s direct maternal ancestors included slaveowners from the time of William and Mary right down to the eve of the U.S. Civil War, a war in which he had family on both sides.

And the closer you look, the weirder things get.

Take the case of Joseph Samuel Wright (1819-1894), a man who shared an era with Abraham Lincoln and who, like Lincoln, was born in Kentucky and followed the fast-moving frontier west. Wright appears in the historical record as a delegate to the Arkansas constitutional convention of 1868, which met after the rebel state was readmitted to the Union. The federal government had recently passed the Reconstruction Acts, which required the refractory states to enfranchise liberated adult black men. At that time those states still lived under the threat of military intervention by the Union Army, and with Confederate combatants not yet allowed to vote, their politics were dominated by anti-racist Republicans and by the hated “carpetbagger” opportunists from the North.

The constitution framed by the 1868 convention complied with federal law, and arguably went further, outlawing race discrimination, introducing public education for all, and counting blacks as equal to whites in distributing electoral power. Joseph Wright did not take an active part in the debates, but he was part of a group that subscribed to a memorandum opposing the draft constitution on the grounds that it “enfranchises a class of inhabitants totally incapable of self-government” and “will deliver over to stolid and brutish ignorance the political control of the State,” and “encourages the social equality of the white and black races.”

This state constitution was ratified, but like all the immediate work of post-war Reconstruction in the South, it was destined not to survive long. Native Arkansas Republicans soon broke off from their party, which led to the extraordinary sequence of events known as the “Brooks-Baxter War.” By 1874, the state had two rival claimants for the governorship, each with his own military encampment and army. In the end, the liberal-Republican side of the contest lost, Arkansas blacks were subjected to what The New York Times described as a “cold-blooded massacre,” and the egalitarian 1868 constitution was overturned.

But God will have his little jokes. Joseph Samuel Wright, who would have been aghast at the idea of a black American president, eventually moved to Kansas, where his descendants would include a great-great-granddaughter named Ann Dunham–now better known as the precocious, bright radical who moved with her parents to Hawaii and had a baby named Barack Obama Jr.[Colby Cosh: Obama's family tree might have hung him from a limb, National Post Full Comment, October 24, 2008, ]

Of course, it’s quite possible that Obama has slaveowning ancestors on the other side of his family, since Keny, where his father camr from, didn’t officially abolish slavery, under a British protectorate, until 1907, and since Kenyan independence, (1963) slavery has been coming back.

In 2004, the Department of State found that

“Kenya is a country of origin, destination, and transit for victims trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. Victims are trafficked from South Asian and East Asian countries and the Middle East through Kenya to European destinations for sexual exploitation. Asian nationals, principally Indians, Bangladeshi, and Nepalese, are trafficked into Kenya and coerced into bonded labor in the construction and garment industries. Kenyan children are trafficked internally from rural areas to urban centers and coastal areas into involuntary servitude, including work as street vendors and day laborers, and into prostitution. Women and children are trafficked from Burundi and Rwanda to coastal areas in Kenya for sexual exploitation in the growing sex tourism industry. “

A little background on Obama’s maternal grandmother Madelyn’s family.

Madelyn Payne came from a respectable, relatively well-off family with some brainpower. Her sister Margaret is a now-retired professor of statistics living in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her brother Charley was an engineer for awhile, then attended graduate school at the U. of Chicago, where he ended up working for the rest of his career, becoming the assistant director of the massive UC library, and played a role in introducing computer technology to libraries. This U. of Chicago connection might have helped Madelyn’s daughter Ann get accepted at age 15 by the U. of Chicago, which used to take smart 15-year-olds frequently, such as geneticist James D. Watson, composer Philip Glass, and one of the Leopold & Loeb guys. (Ann eventually got her BA at the U. of Hawaii in math, then a Ph.D. in anthropology.)

Madelyn’s big mistake in life was falling in love with an unsuitable salesman from a dubious background named Stan Dunham, much to her parents’ regret. Madelyn paid for her rebellion with a lifetime of hard work. She didn’t particularly want to be a feminist role model (her ambitions were more to be a genteel housewife with time for volunteer work and bridge), but her erratic husband didn’t leave her much choice except to be one of the first women to climb the career ladder to executive rank in Honolulu’s banking industry.

So, the Paynes were a family with a fair amount of analytical ability.

In all the hoopla about Obama’s racial background, have people noticed a geographical first in a U.S. presidential election?

For the first time in history, neither of the principal presidential candidates was born in the “Continental United States“,also known as the “Contiguous United States”, the “Coterminous United States”, the “Conterminous United States”, the “Lower 48″ or the acronym “CONUS”.
John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, and Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Therefore neither was born in the Continental United States.

With characteristic cowardice and stupidity, the McCain campaign has flinched from commenting on the Obama /Illegal Immigrant Aunt scandal. Not even to ask how come an illegal immigrant is living in Public Housing, or query if Obama could really be so cold-hearted not to know or care about the circumstances of a relative he featured so warmly in his autobiography:

The McCain campaign has declined to make an election issue of reports that Zeituni Onyango, Barack Obama’s aunt, has been living in Boston illegally. “It’s a family matter,” says Mark Salter, one of McCain’s closest advisers, before declining further comment.

McCain Campaign Avoids Obama’s Aunt Posted by michaelscherer Time Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 4:07 pm

Of course, it is a family matter if you think of America as a family. The family question to be asked is why is our home being illegally swamped by Third World aliens with no cultural affinity at all to historic America?

McCain does not think of America as family.

But it is very definitely a public policy issue too. Embarrassing of course to McCain, given his appalling record on the immigration issue, but surely the Born-Again secure-the-borders-first McCain could have asked how she got into America, and, also, is it really plausible she made no effort to contact a relative whom she had actually met who was a US Senator?

Once again, apparently the GOP establishment prefers to lose an election rather than adopt an election and policy line the Rank and File overwhelmingly wants. (This benefited Obama in his first and only Senate campaign as well.)

However, there is another interesting aspect to this matter: the likely behavior of a President Obama. We already know he favors more Black immigration.

Steve Sailer in his indispensable book about Obama discusses Africa’s “Big Man” syndrome defined as

excessive generosity to impress distant relatives and hanger-ons

(P63)

quoting Theodore Dalrymple:

They were expected to provide for an ever expanding circle of family … and people from their village,
tribe, and province.

(P77)

and noting that when Obama visited Kenya in 1988:

his relatives quickly begin to expect him to ante up cash as his Big Man father had…They’d have preferred if he was personally rich and could give them money out of his own pocket…

(P216)

Given the cold-heartedness noted above, I expect Obama’s Kenyan relatives will not be fully satisfied in an Obama Presidency - but who knows?

In any case, politically viable American Blacks will unquestionably be another matter. And unlike George Bush’s omnipresent Neoconservatives, they will be visible.

I find I am quite looking forward to an Obama Administration. As Peter Brimelow has remarked, ethnicity is destiny in American politics. Right now the natural bastion of Founding-Stock Americans, the Republican Party, is run by men too stupid, cowardly (and sometimes disloyal) for it to fulfill its function. After the four-year O.J. Simpson trial the Obama White House promises to be (don’t believe me? Read Steve Sailer’s book) with its inevitable anti-white atrocities everything will change.

VDARE.com’s facilitating “Triangulation” will have served its purpose.

Another marker on the downward spiral of Mexico. Is the top cop receiving a cartel paycheck or is he merely disgusted with the ubiquity of corruption? Either way, the place is in the sewer and turning to crap.

The top officer of Mexico’s federal police force has quit amid allegations that drug gangs have infiltrated senior levels of crime-fighting agencies, according to a resignation statement posted Saturday.

Acting federal police Commissioner Gerardo Garay said he was stepping aside “to place myself at the orders of legal judicial authorities to clear up any accusation against me.”

Garay did not say what accusations he was referring to, nor were federal officials available Saturday to comment on the resignation. But the newspaper Reform reported Saturday that prosecutors are looking into whether the federal police assigned to the Mexico City airport had aided drug traffickers.

A top operator of the Sinaloa drug cartel was arrested in Mexico City on Oct. 20 following a gunbattle with police, and prosecutors say the man was in charge of trafficking cocaine and methamphetamine through the capital’s international airport. [Mexico's top federal police chief quits amid probe San Francisco Chronicle, November 1, 2008]

The New York Times had an oddly chipper item today, In Mexico, Sorting Out Good Guys From Bad. It seems that some narco types looks like thugs and others wear suits. What a journalistic revelation.

There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to jail, wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.

Among the greatest challenges in Mexico’s drug war is the fact that the traffickers fit no type. Their ranks include men and women, the young and the old. And they can work anywhere: in remote drug labs, as part of roving assassination squads, even within the upper reaches of the government.

Brilliant, or what?

There is some interesting stuff tucked away at the end, which contains irony which I am sure was unintended, regarding the rule of law.

In Tuesday’s speech, a clearly frustrated Mr. Calderon said that the fight to clean up Mexico depended on citizens putting their country first and respecting the law above all else. He suggested that the small bribes so often demanded by the officer on the beat, and accepted by the public as normal, for infractions real and imagined, were not disconnected from the government official receiving millions of dollars in drug profits.

“We need a stronger society, a society that lives the principle of legality with conviction, that encourages, promotes, spreads and educates its children with values,” Mr. Calderón said. In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Mexico as a nation of laws–woo hoo!