Thursday, July 19, 2012
Politics discussion
Politics are very important and as black people we should always pay attention to those who wan't to represent us. I welcome all discussions of Politics we may not always agree but please be civil.
First Lady Michelle Obama
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (born January 17, 1964) is the wife of the 44th and incumbent President of the United States, Barack Obama, and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Obama attended Princeton Universityand Harvard Law School before returning to Chicago and to work at the law firm Sidley Austin, where she met her future husband. Subsequently, she worked as part of the staff of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, and for the University of Chicago Medical Center.
Throughout 2007 and 2008, she helped campaign for her husband's presidential bid and delivered a keynote address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. She is the mother of two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and is the sister of Craig Robinson, men's basketball coach at Oregon State University. As the wife of a Senator, and later the First Lady, she has become a fashion icon and role model for women, and an advocate for poverty awareness, nutrition and healthy eating.[1][2]
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Family and education
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson was born on January 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois, to Fraser Robinson III,[3] a city water plant employee and Democraticprecinct captain, and Marian (née Shields), a secretary at Spiegel's catalog store.[4] Her mother was a full-time homemaker until Michelle entered high school.[5] The Robinson and Shields families can trace their roots[6] to pre-Civil War African Americans in the American South. Specifically, her roots can be traced to the Gullah people from South Carolina's Lowcountry region.[7] Her paternal great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an Americanslave in the state of South Carolina,[8][9] where some of her paternal family still reside.[10][11] Her maternal great-great-great grandmother, Melvinia Shields, also a slave, became pregnant by a white man. His name and the nature of their union have been lost. She gave birth to Michelle's biracial maternal great-great grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields.[12]
Michelle grew up in a two-story house on Euclid Street in Chicago's South Shore community area. Her parents rented a small apartment on the house's second floor from her great-aunt, who lived downstairs.[4][13][14][15] She was raised in what she describes as a "conventional" home, with "the mother at home, the father works, you have dinner around the table".[16] The family entertained together by playing games such as Monopoly and by reading.[17] They attended services at nearby South Shore Methodist Church.[13] The Robinsons used to vacation in a rustic cabin in White Cloud, Michigan.[13] She and her brother, Craig (who is 21 months older), skipped the second grade. By sixth grade, Michelle joined a gifted class at Bryn Mawr Elementary School (later renamed Bouchet Academy).[18]
She attended Whitney Young High School,[19] Chicago's first magnet high school, where she was a classmate of Jesse Jackson's daughter Santita.[17] The round trip commute from the Robinsons' South Side home to the Near West Side, where the school was located, took three hours.[20]She was on the honor roll for four years, took advanced placement classes, a member of the National Honor Society and served as student counciltreasurer.[4] Michelle graduated in 1981 as the salutatorian of her class.[20]
Michelle was inspired to follow her brother to Princeton University;[5] Craig graduated in 1983. At Princeton, she challenged the teaching methodology for French because she felt that it should be more conversational.[21] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."[22][23] "I remember being shocked," she says, "by college students who drove BMWs. I didn't even know parents who drove BMWs."[20] While at Princeton, she got involved with the Third World Center (now known as the Carl A. Fields Center), an academic and cultural group that supported minority students, running their day care center which also included after school tutoring.[24] Robinson majored in sociology and minored inAfrican American studies and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1985.[4][25] She earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[26] At Harvard she participated in demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who were members of minorities[27] and worked for the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, assisting low-income tenants with housing cases.[28] She is the third First Lady with a postgraduate degree, after her two immediate predecessors, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush.[29] In July 2008, Obama accepted the invitation to become an honorary member of the 100-year-old black sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, which had no active undergraduate chapter at Princeton when she attended.[30]
She met Barack Obama when they were among the few African Americans at their law firm, Sidley Austin (she has sometimes said only two, although others have pointed out there were others in different departments),[31] and she was assigned to mentor him as a summer associate.[32] Their relationship started with a business lunch and then a community organization meeting where he first impressed her.[33] The couple's first date was to the Spike Lee movie Do the Right Thing.[34] They married in October 1992,[33] and have two daughters, Malia Ann (born 1998) and Natasha (known as Sasha, born 2001).[35] After his election to the U.S. Senate, the Obama family continued to live on Chicago's South Side, choosing to remain there rather than moving to Washington, D.C. Throughout her husband's 2008 campaign for President of the United States, she made a "commitment to be away overnight only once a week — to campaign only two days a week and be home by the end of the second day" for their two children.[36] She is the first cousin, once removed, of Rabbi Capers C. Funnye Jr., one of the country’s most prominent black rabbis.
She once requested that her then-fiancé meet her prospective boss, Valerie Jarrett, when considering her first career move.[16] Now, Jarrett is one of her husband’s closest advisors.[37][38] The marital relationship has had its ebbs and flows; the combination of an evolving family life and beginning political career led to many arguments about balancing work and family. Barack Obama wrote in his second book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, that "Tired and stressed, we had little time for conversation, much less romance".[39] However, despite their family obligations and careers, they continue to attempt to schedule date nights.[40]
The Obamas' daughters attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, a private school.[41] As a member of the school's board, Michelle fought to maintain diversity in the school when other board members connected with the University of Chicago tried to reserve more slots for children of the university faculty. This resulted in a plan to expand the school.[5] Malia and Sasha now attend Sidwell Friends School in Washington, after also considering Georgetown Day School.[42][43] Michelle stated in an interview on The Ellen DeGeneres Show that they do not intend to have any more children.[44] The Obamas have received advice from past first ladies Laura Bush, Rosalynn Carter and Hillary Rodham Clinton about raising children in the White House.[43] Marian Robinson, Michelle's mother, has moved into the White House to assist with child care.[45]
Career
Following law school, she was an associate at the Chicago office of the law firm Sidley Austin, where she first met her future husband. At the firm, she worked on marketing and intellectual property.[4] She continues to hold her law license, but as she no longer needs it for her work, it has been on a voluntary inactive status since 1993.[46][47]
In 1991, she held public sector positions in the Chicago city government as an Assistant to the Mayor, and as Assistant Commissioner of Planning and Development. In 1993, she became Executive Director for the Chicago office of Public Allies, a non-profit organization encouraging young people to work on social issues in nonprofit groups and government agencies.[19] She worked there nearly four years and set fundraising records for the organization that still stood 12 years after she left.[17]
In 1996, she served as the Associate Dean of Student Services at the University of Chicago, where she developed the University's Community Service Center.[48] In 2002, she began working for the University of Chicago Hospitals, first as executive director for community affairs and, beginning May 2005, as Vice President for Community and External Affairs.[49] She continued to hold the University of Chicago Hospitals position during the primary campaign, but cut back to part time in order to spend time with her daughters as well as work for her husband's election;[50] she subsequently took a leave of absence from her job.[51] According to the couple’s 2006 income tax return, her salary was $273,618 from the University of Chicago Hospitals, while her husband had a salary of $157,082 from the United States Senate. The Obamas' total income, however, was $991,296, which included $51,200 she earned as a member of the board of directors of TreeHouse Foods, and investments and royalties from his books.[52]
She served as a salaried board member of TreeHouse Foods, Inc. (NYSE: THS),[53] a major Wal-Mart supplier with whom she cut ties immediately after her husband made comments critical of Wal-Mart at an AFL-CIO forum in Trenton, New Jersey, on May 14, 2007.[54] She serves on the board of directors of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.[55]
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School board district 2
Pernell Mitchell is running
I happen to know him personally he's a family man and a good person
I think he will represent Lake County well.
Post your thoughts and please be civil
I happen to know him personally he's a family man and a good person
I think he will represent Lake County well.
Post your thoughts and please be civil
New Voters
I first saw Barack Obama in 2004 he was chosen to be the speaker at the DNC convention that year
And i have to say i really was impressed by his speech but had no idea he would one day run for president.
When he announced he was running for President i was very skeptical. not because he decided to run but i knew how those in the media would handle it. They would treat his run as a novelty the same way they treated Shirley Chisolm Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Barack Obama running for president brought out alot of positive things young people and people who have never voted came out and voted.
People who were never interested in politics started paying attention
And even if you don't like Barack Obama you have to admit that was a good thing.
And i have to say i really was impressed by his speech but had no idea he would one day run for president.
When he announced he was running for President i was very skeptical. not because he decided to run but i knew how those in the media would handle it. They would treat his run as a novelty the same way they treated Shirley Chisolm Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Barack Obama running for president brought out alot of positive things young people and people who have never voted came out and voted.
People who were never interested in politics started paying attention
And even if you don't like Barack Obama you have to admit that was a good thing.
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