F.Y.I.: Oh! B.O. Bio

Yesterday my colleague and I were discussing our state's junior senator and we both discovered that BO's bio is a little hard to remember.

That knowing the Basic Bio of Barck is important we both agreed upon. My guess is that most of you don't know it as well as we should, so GT12 is just going to swipe Wikipedia's info:

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. (born in Alego, a village in Nyanza Province, Kenya) and Ann Dunham (born in Wichita, Kansas). His parents met while both were attending the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was enrolled as a foreign student.[5]

When Obama was two years old, his parents separated and later divorced; his father went to Harvard to pursue PhD studies, eventually returning to Kenya.[6] His mother was remarried to an Indonesian foreign student, Lolo Soetoro, with whom she had one daughter. The family moved to Jakarta where Obama attended parochial schools from ages 6 to 10.[7] He then returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents.[8] He was enrolled in the fifth grade at Punahou School, a large, private college preparatory school in Honolulu, which he attended through 12th grade, graduating in 1979.[9][10] His father died in a car accident in Kenya when Obama was 21 years old.[11] Obama's mother died of cancer a few months after the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.[12]

In Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his experiences growing up in his mother's white American middle class family. His knowledge about his absent black Kenyan father came mainly through family stories and photographs. Of his early childhood, Obama wrote: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[13] As a young adult, he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. Obama writes about using marijuana and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind," later noting "I inhaled, frequently, that was the point."[14]

After high school, Obama studied for two years at Occidental College in California and then transferred to Columbia University where he majored in political science with a specialization in international relations. After receiving his Bachelors of Arts degree in 1983, Obama worked for one year at Business International Corporation.[15] In 1985, he moved to Chicago to direct a non-profit project assisting local churches to organize job training programs for residents of poor neighborhoods.[16][17]

Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. In February 1990, he gained national recognition for becoming the first African American to be elected president of the Harvard Law Review.[18] He obtained his Juris Doctor degree magna cum laude from Harvard in 1991.[17] On returning to Chicago, Obama directed a voter registration drive, then worked for the civil rights law firm Miner, Barnhill & Galland, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1993 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004.[17]

For Wiki-comments on his policy history continue reading here.