When he first took the national stage, with his electrifying keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2004, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, briefly summarized his unusual life story, with its biracial themes and trans-continental setting. "I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story," he said, adding: "In no other country on earth is my story even possible."
That story, of course, would become even more astonishing, and profoundly American, four years later, when its teller would be elected president of the United States. But the first time Obama related his life story -- and in the greatest detail -- was with the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
The book, which won wide critical acclaim and rose to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, recounted the complex tale that is by now familiar to most Americans: the young Obama's racial confusion as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a dark-skinned, absentee father from Kenya; his mother's remarriage to, and eventual split from, the boy's Indonesian stepfather, with a spell in a Muslim school in Jakarta; the boy's rearing by white grandparents in Hawaii, who sent him to a private school there; his journeys through Occidental College and Columbia University, marked by a shifting intellectual worldview and numerous romances, some of them inter-racial; his path-breaking stint as the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review; and his exploits as a community organizer and Chicago lawyer with a deepening interest in politics.
In the introduction, Obama openly admitted changing some people's names and compressing both characters and chronology, mostly for the sake of narrative flow. Over the years, the president’s biographers have made inroads piecing together which characters were based on which real-life individuals, and which events were compressed or conflated.
That process has now reached a kind of zenith, with the publication last month of Barack Obama: The Story, a deeply researched, 600-page study of the president's ancestry and early life by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss. The result reflects the hyper-scrutiny that attaches to our chief executives. It also offers a window into how much of the life story of this self-made man may have been made up.
By some counts, The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams fails to align with the facts as Maraniss reports them. Case in point: Maraniss confirmed that Mr. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., a volatile bigamist, and not the other way around, as related in Dreams.
Dreams also related the tale of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was said to have been detained and tortured in a prison outside Nairobi for six months because of his brave defiance of British colonialists. But after a half-dozen interviews and other research, Maraniss deemed the tale "unlikely."
Maraniss did not respond to several calls requesting an interview, but Fox News caught up with him outside a Washington book signing.  "I think there's a difference between a memoir and the serious, rigorous factual history of a biography," he said. "Some of what he did was the result of mythologies that were passed along from his family, and some were for the purposes of advancing themes in his book which had more to do with finding his racial identity."
In an Oval Office interview prior to the publication of The Story, Maraniss handed the president a copy of Maraniss's introduction, which conveyed the degree to which The Story would be challenging various scenes in Obama's memoir.  The president confirmed Maraniss's research and offered sometimes guarded explanations for those instances when he had chosen to employ an approach in Dreams that was less than strictly factual. READ MORE

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Seeing Freedom

By JEFFREY H. ANDERSON
On the day that the Supreme Court released its Obamacare ruling, my daughter and I had the opportunity to visit the Reagan Ranch. Located in the mountains in the Central Coast region of California, the ranch is where President Reagan spent nearly one out of every eight days of his presidency. As you might imagine, it’s a wonderful place.
The Gipper went for growth

Part of why it’s wonderful is that it’s not remotely ostentatious or extravagant. The modest 1,800-square-foot house is not a home fit for a king but for a citizen in a republic. It’s republican through and through. Moreover, the land’s open expanses and the house’s American Western décor beautifully capture the spirit of liberty. To think of Mikhail Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth visiting (as they did) and seeing the president of the United States living in such a humble yet alluring place, is a satisfying thought.  The Founders would have been proud.
Reagan reportedly liked to sit on the patio in front of his home and take in the panoramic view of the trees, the pastures, and the hillsides. From there, he said, he could “see freedom.” It’s nearly impossible to imagine President Obama saying such a thing. He’d presumably instead be looking to “see equality” — although it wouldn't be easy to spot from Martha's Vineyard.
Despite its clear historical significance, the Reagan Ranch almost wasn’t preserved for posterity. Once Reagan’s Alzheimer’s had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer enjoy the ranch, Nancy Reagan put it up for sale on the open market, and it was nearly purchased — and carved up — by a commercial developer. At that point, the Young America’s Foundation stepped up and raised the money to buy it and preserve it, and Nancy left behind almost all of the Reagan furnishings so that the ranch could appear as it was when they were there.

The primary mission of the Young America’s Foundation is to teach college and high school students about the principles of limited government and liberty that Reagan so ably espoused and advanced, and the YAF regularly takes students who are enrolled in its classes up to visit the ranch. Many of these classes are taught at an impressive new facility and museum, the Reagan Ranch Center, in downtown Santa Barbara. The Reagan Ranch itself, located in a remote area and accessible only by a more or less single-lane winding road, isn’t open to the general public. But the Reagan Ranch Center is, and it’s well worth a visit.
One of the Center’s exhibits shows Reagan signing his momentous 1981 tax cut into law — outside, at the ranch. It shows a clip of the president, at a time when the highest marginal tax rate was 70 percent (having been even higher until JFK signed legislation cutting it to that level), saying, “The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.” The highest marginal tax rate eventually dropped to 28 percent, and the economy boomed. The contrasts with Obama could hardly be clearer. READ MORE

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La revolución energética y sus descontentos





Con todas las tristes noticias económicas que están apareciendo últimamente, una luz brillante apareció en el radar la semana pasada: Estados Unidos está listo para ser el centro proverbial del universo de la energía.
Un reciente estudio del investigador asociado de Harvard Leonardo Maugeri encontró que las increíbles reservas de arenas bituminosas de Estados Unidos representan “la revolución más importante en el sector petrolero en décadas”.

Gracias a la revolución tecnológica provocada por el uso combinado de la perforación horizontal y la fracturación hidráulica, Estados Unidos ahora está explotando sus gigantescos y virtualmente intactos campos petrolíferos de arenas bituminosas y de formaciones compactas, cuya producción (aunque todavía se encuentra en sus inicios) ya se está disparando en Dakota del Norte y en Texas.

Pocos americanos son más conscientes de las posibilidades de esta revolución energética que aquellos que viven en las ciudades ubicadas encima de las mayores formaciones de arenas bituminosas de la nación. La Fundación Heritage viajó hasta Willison, Dakota del Norte, situada sobre la gigantesca formación bituminosa de Bakken, para oír de primera mano cómo allí el auge del petróleo ha mejorado las vidas de sus residentes.
Pero hay fuerzas tratando de socavar el auge del petróleo de Dakota del Norte. “El aspecto que más nos preocupa sería el gobierno federal y las regulaciones”, explicó el alcalde de Willison Ward Koeser, “particularmente la Agencia de Protección Ambiental (EPA)”.
Las inquietudes de Koeser no son ilógicas. La EPA tiene en su historial el establecer erróneamente como objetivo a las compañías que usan la fracturación hidráulica debido a una supuesta contaminación medioambiental. Cuando un alto cargo de la Agencia, el administrador de la Región VI de la EPA Al Armendáriz, comparó su filosofía del cumplimiento de la ley con las crucifixiones romanas, el historial de la agencia de acciones en el cumplimiento de la ley contra los perforadores de petróleo y gas (ambos usan la fracturación hidráulica para extraer los recursos de las arenas bituminosas) desmintió la posterior disculpa y retractación de Armendáriz.
Armendáriz precisamente consiguió un empleo en el Club Sierra, un grupo ambientalista radical que ha emprendido una enorme campaña contra la extracción de gas natural a partir de arenas bituminosas sólo unos años después de defender el gas natural como la alternativa más limpia frente al carbón y el petróleo.
La emergente hostilidad de la izquierda por la fracturación hidráulica tiene el potencial de desbaratar la sorprendente oportunidad económica que representan las arenas bituminosas. Así que no debería suponer ninguna sorpresa el que la consecuencia política de esa hostilidad sea darse la razón a ellos mismos en lugares como Pensilvania Occidental, que se encuentra sobre enormes reservas de gas recuperable de arenas bituminosas.
Stuart Rothenberg, del Roll Call, informó durante el fin de semana que Pensilvania, que durante los últimos 20 años se ha movido hacia la izquierda en términos de sus patrones de voto, de repente es más competitiva. “Pensilvania Occidental se parece cada vez más a Virginia Occidental o al sureste de Ohio”, observa Rothenberg.
Rothenberg, pensando debidamente en el análisis político, no supo atar los cabos sueltos: Pensilvania Occidental, el sureste de Ohio y Virginia Occidental son todos estados (o partes de estados) primordiales para la producción energética. Las formaciones de arenas bituminosas de Utica, Marcellus y Devonian, por ejemplo, representan oportunidades económicas primordiales en esos estados.
Desde la perspectiva federal, por tanto, una política de energía sensata al menos se abstendría de desmotivar de forma activa esas oportunidades, como ha sugerido el analista de la Fundación Heritage Nick Loris:

Una política de energía decidida que abra el acceso, proporcione un oportuno proceso de permisos así como una revisión medioambiental y judicial y deje en suspenso las nuevas regulaciones medioambientales de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental (EPA) haría mucho bien para ayudar a reducir los precios de la energía, crear empleos y aportar ingresos al gobierno que está asfixiado financieramente y que ha acumulado [más de] $15 billones de deuda.

Pero los ecologistas de izquierda continúan luchando contra el auge del petróleo y del gas natural en el país. Ese auge tiene potencial no sólo para revitalizar ciertos sectores de la economía americana, sino para infundir vitalidad económica en algunas de las comunidades económicamente más angustiadas de la nación. No se sorprenda cuando estas comunidades hagan frente a la extralimitación regulatoria y a la histeria medioambiental.