Young Obama statue to be inaugurated in his Indonesian former neighborhood

Cue inappropriate Muslim bashing in Ben Smith's comments.

JAKARTA, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) -- A statue depicting young figure of the United States President Barrack Obama would be inaugurated in Obama's former neighborhood in Indonesia's capital city of Jakarta, the group called "Friends of Obama" said on Tuesday.

The construction of the statue was initiated by "Friends of Obama", a non-government organization. The statue is erected at a corner of a playground at Menteng Dalam, a suburb area in Jakarta.

The group said in a statement that the 2-meter high statue depicts Obama when he was at the age of 10 years old. At that age Obama studied in an elementary school in the neighborhood when he was under the custody of his mother, Ann-Dunham, who married to an Indonesian, Lolo Soetoro.

Obama's Mother's Dissertation Set for Release

Oh jeebus, you just know that the wingers will dissect this thing 'til it's nothing but word coleslaw. Who wants to bet that their "final analysis" will be something like, "She was a Communist Socialist Marxist!!", sure to include the multiple exclamation points.

Barack Obama knows a little bit about popular writings. On Thursday, his mother's scholarly work may get similar publicity to her son's.

Duke University Press is set to release the doctoral dissertation of Ann Dunham—the president's mother, who died 14 years ago—at the American Anthropological Association conference in Philadelphia. After unveiling Dunham's writings on life in Indonesia, the university press will hold a session devoted to Dunham's life and work, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

The dissertation, which will be published under the title Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, "still definitely has a lot of relevance," Laura Sell, a Duke University Press publicist, told the Duke Chronicle in May. "We sent it out to a lot of pretty high-powered reviewers, who all said it's a worthy work of scholarship and people can learn a lot from it."

Dunham received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii in 1992, but she had worked and studied in the field for more than a decade before that. You can read a fantastic and detailed profile of Dunham's life and influence on her son.

Obama's mother to be focus of documentary

Why does this feel like it could go very badly?

Aloe Entertainment, along with IMG and Schroeder-Ptacek Prods., are bringing the story of Barack Obama's mother to the screen, readying a feature-length doc to be directed by Charles Burnett.

"Stanley Ann Dunham: A Most Generous Spirit" will show how Dunham raised a young Obama in Indonesia and Hawaii as well as her pioneering work in the field of Third World microfinance, which assists small entrepreneurs, mostly women, in developing countries.

"She gave a lot of the backbone to our current president and his compassion to the people," said Mary Aloe, who is executive producing. "With these small-scale economies, she took a concept that was emerging just as women were getting their rights and got them to think outside the box. She is a fascinating woman, and she was ahead of her time."

Audio- Radio Jock Tammy Bruce: Obama "perhaps secretly wishes this nation to be harmed ... his mother certainly did"

There is so much wrong with this...

Confirmed, Mormon Web site shows Obama's mother as baptized after death

By GottaLaff

I leave for a couple of hours and come home to this:

A Provo, Utah newspaper has confirmed our earlier story - a Mormon geneological Web site does in fact list President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as having been baptized into the Mormon faith after her death (and presumably without her, or her son's, consent). The Mormon church has yet to confirm to numerous reporters' inquiries whether they did in fact baptize the President's dead mother last year in the middle of the presidential campaign. If true, and it's looking increasingly likely, this could cause the Mormons quite a bit of trouble politically and in the public relations sphere.

Still unanswered is whether the Mormons also baptized Obama's father.

More from the Provo Herald Extra:

At the same time that Barack Obama sealed the Democratic nomination for president last year, someone in the Provo LDS Church temple was performing a baptism and temple rites for his dead mother.

The move is a serious breech of protocol for church members, who in the past have been criticized for performing such proxy baptisms for victims of the Holocaust.
"Church members are specifically instructed not to submit the names of persons not related to them," reads a statement on the LDS Chuch Web site. "Before performing temple baptisms for a deceased family member born within the last 95 years, members are instructed to get permission from the person's closest living relative."

Officials of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have yet to confirm the incident, but records on their FamilySearch.org genealogical site clearly show that Stanley Ann Dunham received proxy rites in the Provo temple on June 4 and June 8 of 2008. The birth and death dates of the person for whom the rites were performed match those of Obama's mother.

Nancy Pelosi on her thoughts at Obama's inauguration