Former longtime Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob remarked on Twitter: "One of the weirdest things about this Roseanne fiasco is that she went after Valerie Jarrett, who was probably the least controversial big shot in the Obama administration, a consummate technocrat, comfortable in the background, someone who tried to stay above the fray." Natasha Korecki's Illinois Playbook in Politico
Grove Parc is one of the outstanding examples of this problem. It sits on the border of Obama's district. It is 504 apartments of subsidized housing, fully renovated in the early 1990s, that have fallen into such disrepair that the plan now is to demolish them and start all over again. It was built by a nonprofit led by a number of Obama's supporters. It was managed during the period of its greatest decline by a company called The Habitat Company, which is led by Valerie Jarrett, who is the senior advisor to Obama's presidential campaign, and it is, as I said, in his district, so it struck us as sort of emblematic of the issue that we wanted to write about. NPR 2009
From the moment that Democrats like former mayor Richie Daley learned by public housing/public lands and Federal Dollars was the Comstock Load of the New Millenium, Valerie Jarrett has made millions of dollars for herself and the Cook County oligarchs who have destroyed the City, County and State, but are no where near done.
Long after the smoke concerning Valerie Jarrett's nefarious abuse of poor people in Chicago's most under-served communities wafted out over the lakefront, the fire burns in Altgeld Gardens, Parc Grove and along Chicago's south shore lakefront neighborhoods, but the Watchdogs of Chicago, the invested political news media has yet to present the true nature of Ms. Jarrett's larcenous investments.
The woman who acted as the White House shadow governement for eight years and engineered the disasterous Iranian payoff of pallets of billions of dollars continues the grift and oozes nonsense on CNN, MSNBC and in the pages of Chicago's two daily propaganda rags.
I never saw the new Roseanne Show. Hardly recall her old show.
I have witnessed the Valerie Jarrett Media Circus for far too long. When does the real 'teaching moment' begin on this powerful grifter and slum lord?
Barack Obama began his political career as a community organizer on the south side. It would be difficult to imagine that he was not swept up into the mythology against Burge and his men taking shape on the south side at the very time he was honing his political skills and building his power base.
After all, Obama’s political base is tied to both factions that came together in the wrongful conviction movement. One facet of Obama’s political power is clearly the black caucus of the south side. Obama also clearly has ties to the white, upper middle-class radical faction of the wrongful conviction movement as well, for his friendship and alliance with former Weather Underground terrorists and PLO allies like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers has been well documented.
And like both these factions, Obama shares their intense antipathy to law enforcement and the criminal justice system, an antipathy born out throughout his presidency. Author and CPD Officer Martin Preib 2016
Can't agree more. President Obama will go down in history as the first Black President, the first Abortion President, the Gay Marriage President, The Transgender Bathroom President and the President who ordered the strike on Osama Bin Laden. That is pretty much all that he accomplished in eight long, self-congratulatory and mediocre years.
I voted for Donald Trump. I am a Democrat, a Catholic, skilled trades pro-labor, anti-Communist and anti-Corporatist voter. The last eight years and last thirty years here in Chicago and Cook County have proven to be the foundation poured and set for an oligarchy. This is a Banana Republic that uses Marxist-Progressive rhetoric to mask corporate state economics that employs TIFS, Zoning, Untouchable Slum Real Estate moguls with a backdoor key to the White House, Banks, blue-stocking law firms, University and 501(c)3 treasure houses, a supine disinterested media and villainous political grifters to turn millions into billions, while retaining the votes and good will of the very people they looting, marginalizing and murdering.
Yep, urban Thug homicides and Police memes about racism are the shiny objects used to distract the masses from their evaporating pensions, unsafe neighborhoods and wretched public schools.
America was becoming the Banana Republic that is Chicago and Cook County, Illinois.
I voted for Donald Trump in the hope that all of this might slow its pace.
Stocks are nuts and going up, up and up - confounding George Will, David Brooks and Michael Moore
Well, to read the Chicago papers and the go-a-longs who write for them, Trump has violated every sensibility, and endangers everything.
Trump talks to Russians, but has yet to sit down with Chance the Rapper
Trump bad mouths ChiRaq - for real?
Trump has a big building named after him, but the street sign is gone
Trump never barbecued with Bill Ayers
Trump has no slum properties with Valerie Jarrett, Allison Davis, or Judson Miner
Can't speak French
It has been noted that 88% of the media coverage has been negative since January 20th. Here in Chicago it must run as high 99%.
That is cool. If I felt in harmony with Bruce Dold, or Birkenstock hemp sandals at the Sun Times, I rush over to see Dr. Harshad Mehta at Little Company about the levels of loco weed in my Wheaties.
As it is, I feel confident that things will be better for helots me and my neighbors. Things might be a bit prickly for the once comfortable, smug, thoughtlessly arrogant and venal elites in this Hick burg.
City of Chicago employees have had their pensions looted by elected officials from RMD (Richie of Mass Destruction) to RIE (Rahm Ignores Everything)
I am a City of Chicago employee. I am not the enemy, I am not the problem. You, the Government, have been raiding my pension fund whenever you need money. You, the Government, mismanaged your money. I also pay into my retirement every paycheck. I follow the rules you set up and we agreed to. Now you want to blame me for our State's/City's money woes and steal from my retirement benefits? If you are a public employee/retiree please copy and paste as your status. Facebook:
And President Trump had absolutely nothing to do with any of the above.
Still, Chicago's two papers remain thick with Trump Toxicology teases. Even the epic-ly empty Michael Sneed is offering rhetoric lessons to President 45 and Rahm Emanuel, who stood with the owners of Parkway Gardens in 2013, the privatized real estate development of a former HUD housing project, a pet Valerie Jarrett project,** remains bullet proof in both papers.
The State of the Union will be whoopee cushion for the media.
Chicago will keep on keepin' on.
Wonder what March will bring?
Now, who lives in La-La Land?
*Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and a member of his finance committee. Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems."Government is just not as good at owning and managing as the private sector because the incentives are not there," said Jarrett, whose company manages more than 23,000 apartments. "I would argue that someone living in a poor neighborhood that isn't 100 percent public housing is by definition better off." Boston Globe 2008
**Valerie JarrettWho Am I?
Chicago Medical Center As Well.” (Jay Newton-Small, “Campaign Insider,” Time, 4/7/08)
“Chicago Is In The Running For The 2016 Olympics … One Of Obama’s Top Advisers, Valerie Jarrett, Is The Vice Chair Of Chicago’s Bid Committee.” (Lynn Sweet, “McCain, Obama, Clinton All Push Bush On China Games,” Chicago Sun-Times, 4/10/08)
Under A Plan Devised By The City Of Chicago And Habitat Co., “The City Has Lost More Than 13,000 Housing Units For The Poor.” (Jason Grotto and Laurie Cohen, “Obama Adviser Shapes City Housing Policy,” Chicago Tribune, 7/5/08)
•”Habitat Has Earned $6.8 Million In Fees And $10.8 Million In Administrative Expenses Since The Plan Started In 2000, According To The U.S. Department Of Housing And Urban Development.” (Jason Grotto and Laurie Cohen, “Obama Adviser Shapes City Housing Policy,” Chicago Tribune, 7/5/08)
“Jarrett Is The Chief Executive Of Habitat Co., Which Managed Grove Parc Plaza From 2001 Until This Winter And Co-Managed An Even Larger Subsidized Complex In Chicago That Was Seized By The Federal Government In 2006, After City Inspectors Found Widespread Problems.” (Binyamin Appelbaum, “Grim Proving Ground For Obama’s Housing Policy,” The Boston Globe, 6/27/08)
•”In 2006, Federal Inspectors Graded The Condition Of [Grove Parc] An 11 On A 100-Point Scale – A Score So Bad The Buildings Now Face Demolition.” (Binyamin Appelbaum, “Grim Proving Ground For Obama’s Housing Policy,” The Boston Globe, 6/27/08)
“[Jarrett] Has Also Served As Chair Of Both The Chicago Transit Board And The Chicago Stock Exchange.” (Jay Newton-Small, “Campaign Insider,” Time, 4/7/08)
“[M]ayor Richard Daley Thursday Announced The Merger Of The City’s Planning Department And Economic Development Department, To Be Headed By Valerie Jarrett, His Former Deputy Chief Of Staff.” (Robert Davis, “Daley Merges Planning, Economic Development Staffs,” Chicago Tribune, 10/11/91)
For eight years, President Obama basked in the glow of the artificial light created by his Team of Brand Obama craftsmen and directed the affairs of the nation at the behest of Valerie Jarrett the de facto Chief Executive from January 2009-January 20, 2017.
President Obama parted with high poll numbers, no sense of obligation and a Presidential Library next door to Tiger Woods' Jackson Park Golf Mecca. The New York Times praised the commands of Valerie Jarrett:
WASHINGTON — President Obama was in a bind, and his chief of staff could not figure out how he had ended up there. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were up in arms last fall over a proposal to require employers to provide health insurance that covered birth control. But caving in to the church’s demands for a broad exemption in the name of religious liberty would pit the president against a crucial constituency, women’s groups, who saw the coverage as basic preventive care. Worried about the political and legal implications, the chief of staff, William M. Daley, reached out to the proposal’s author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? “You are way out there on a limb on this,” he recalls telling her. “It was then made clear to me that, no, there were senior White House officials who had been involved and supported this,” said Mr. Daley, who left his post early this year.
What he did not realize was that while he was trying to put out what he considered a fire, the person fanning the flames was sitting just one flight up from him: Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ first friend, the proposal’s chief patron and a tenacious White House operator who would ultimately outmaneuver not only Mr. Daley but also the vice president in her effort to include the broadest possible contraception coverage in the administration’s health care overhaul.
A Chicagoan who helped Mr. Obama navigate his rise through that city’s aggressive politics, Ms. Jarrett came to Washington with no national experience. But her unmatched access to the Obamas has made her a driving force in some of the most significant domestic policy decisions of the president’s first term, her persuasive power only amplified by Mr. Obama’s insular management style.
From the first, her official job has been somewhat vague. But nearly four years on, with Mr. Obama poised to accept his party’s renomination this week, her standing is clear, to her many admirers and detractors alike. “She is the single most influential person in the Obama White House,” said one former senior White House official, who like many would speak candidly only on condition of anonymity.
“She’s there to try to promote what she understands to be what the president wants,” the former aide said. “Ultimately the president makes his own decisions. The question that is hard to get inside of, the black box, is whether she is really influencing him or merely executing decisions he’s made. That’s like asking, ‘Is the light on in the refrigerator when the door is closed?’ ”
Gee, only today the New York Times, beefed about Steve Bannon doing exactl;y what Frau Jarrett had done for eight years of thigh-tingling Obama-licious policy.
Plenty of presidents have had prominent political advisers, and some of those advisers have been suspected of quietly setting policy behind the scenes (recall Karl Rove or, if your memory stretches back far enough, Dick Morris). But we’ve never witnessed a political aide move as brazenly to consolidate power as Stephen Bannon — nor have we seen one do quite so much damage so quickly to his putative boss’s popular standing or pretenses of competence. Mr. Bannon supercharged Breitbart News as a platform for inciting the alt-right, did the same with the Trump campaign and is now repeating the act with the Trump White House itself. That was perhaps to be expected, though the speed with which President Trump has moved to alienate Mexicans (by declaring they would pay for a border wall), Jews (by disregarding their unique experience of the Holocaust) and Muslims (the ban) has been impressive. Mr. Trump never showed much inclination to reach beyond the minority base of voters that delivered his Electoral College victory, and Mr. Bannon, whose fingerprints were on each of those initiatives, is helping make sure he doesn’t. But a new executive order, politicizing the process for national security decisions, suggests Mr. Bannon is positioning himself not merely as a Svengali but as the de facto president.
Yeah, what are you gonna do?
Me? Steve Bannon is not a slum Lord; nor is he friendly with the mullahs in Tehran.
Obama wears a Shinola watch; of course he does. "While the main reason for President Obama's visit to Detroit on Wednesday was to shine a light on the recuperating auto industry, he also made a point of stopping by the city's finest watchmaker. Since 2011, Shinola has been crafting American-made timepieces in the Motor City, helping transform its image and neighborhoods along the way. "Esquire. President Obama is waiting to help destroy Israel and burnish his progressive legacy.
"Does Mr. Obama want to be remembered as the President who criminalized Israeli citizenship," asks the Wall Street Journal
Yeah, I think that he would be perfectly fine with that. He and Israel's Prime Minister have not been two for a four-some.
Israeli diplomats gird for the possibility that President Obama may try to force a diplomatic resolution for Israel and the Palestinians at the United Nations. The White House has been unusually tight-lipped about what, if anything, it might have in mind. But our sources say the White House has asked the State Department to develop an options menu for the President’s final weeks.
One possibility would be to sponsor, or at least allow, a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction, perhaps alongside new IRS regulations revoking the tax-exempt status of people or entities involved in settlement building. The Administration vetoed such a resolution in 2011 on grounds that it “risks hardening the position of both sides,” which remains true.
But condemning the settlements has always been a popular way of scoring points against the Jewish state, not least at the State Department, and an antisettlement resolution might burnish Mr. Obama’s progressive brand for his post presidency. Wall Street Journal
Have I mentioned that I am of Irish Catholic descent?
No Shinola, Sherlock. I am as Catholic as Tim Kaine, maybe more so. I know American Catholics who hate Jews and really hate Israel. I never understood that? These days, the salt-water Irish I chat with who have come to America from Kerry, Clare, Mayo. Galway and Derry, really seem to hate Israel. To a person they are very well educated, hard working, fair-minded and generous, but they all seem tained with the Noam Chomsky contrarian mindset, so fashionably sophisticated and European.
That I follow, but can not for the life of me understand.
The Irish and the Jews have had a long and firm grip on one another's suffering, history and contribution to Western Civilization. The Israeli Defense Forces, fighting for the nation's existence, was formed on the tactics and strategies of the Irish Republican Army of 1921.
Not only were many of the Zionist military tactics in 1940’s Britain and Palestine drawn from pre-war IRA bombing campaigns in Britain but the Irgun was re-organized “on IRA lines”, according to Walton, by Robert Briscoe, father of Fianna Fail TD and Mayor of Dublin Ben Briscoe, who travelled secretly to Britain in the pre-war years to meet and advise Irgun representatives.
Briscoe Senior, himself a Fianna Fail TD for many years, had impeccable IRA credentials. He accompanied Eamonn de Valera to the USA on a lengthy fund-raising trip during the Anglo-Irish war and also was sent by Michael Collins to Germany in 1919 to procure arms for the IRA. A former Chief of Staff of the IRA’s boy scouts, na Fianna Eireann, Eamonn Martin was Briscoe’s best man at his wedding and he hated the British, describing himself in a memoir as a self-appointed professor holding “the chair of subversive activities against England”.
Another Irish Jew who strongly supported both Irish Republican and Zionist terrorism was Isaac Herzog, the former Chief Rabbi of Ireland who emigrated to Palestine in 1936 where he was appointed to the chief rabbinate, the most powerful clerical position in the Jewish world. MI5 kept him under close surveillance and asked the Irish police to keep tabs on Briscoe.
He wrote in his memoirs that he elected himself “to a full Professorship with the Chair of Subversive Activities against England,”
(See more at: )
These facts have been Progressively white-out-ed and erased from historical considerations. Note well, British MI-5 after WWII was run by the Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five's Marxist affections and the Soviets were no friend of Israel.
Over the years, younger Irish people ( under 75) came to believe that Palestinians never slaughtered Jews in 1920s, that the Grand Mufti was a Quaker and that the survivors of Holocaust were everything Hitler said they were in the Nuremberg Laws. They forgot that Sean MacStiophan and Menachim Begin were pals. This was the result of the Irish Government's BBC culture that sprouted post-DeValera.
However, even after Kim Philby was proven to be a Soviet mole, the Old Boy OxBridge affections for Animal Farm rooted in academia and the BBC nestled in Old Blighty and Old Erin's bogs.
Israel morphed from a harbor from the Holocaust to Nazi Germany in the memes of the elites.
Irish politicians are seem unanimously anti-Israel: Michale Higgins, Enda Kenny, Mary Robinson & etc. Yanks are as bad.
America apes every Etonian fashion from Carnaby Street and Beatlemania to a World Without Borders and the Garden of Gaza. aways a few years behind. The Brit anarchists were burning tires under viaducts, while Kurt Cobain was learning to string his own Silvertone. Long before Occupy and the Battle of Seattle, Sophisticates, love Occupy and Black Lives Matter.
I am not that sophisticated.
I know Jews, love Jews, admire Jews and hung around with Jews. From Danny Levy, Little Flower High School Class of 1970 to Phil Scharf, second violin Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to Si and Shirley Blitzstein who hired Catholic kids from Leo, Brother Rice and Little Flower at Mr. Lee's in the old Evergreen Plaza, I have known only honesty, humor, talent and American patriotism from my Jewish friends and neighbors.
President Obama is sophisticated,
His cabinet is full of sophisticates, like Valerie Jarrett who has done more for Persian hegemony in the world than Cyrus and his Celtic United Nations Ambassador Samantha Powers, who only recently took the side of Israel against the emerging nations dictators and sheiks.
“When we see bias, injustice or the continuation of strife within the United Nations, it is not because the UN created all of this, it is because the UN gathers governments and gathers problems, and being in the UN doesn’t change the biases of those governments,” she said.
Power, whose visit was seen by some analysts as a sign of renewed US interest in jump-starting peace talks, admitted that the situation was not ripe for new negotiations, though the US would continue to pursue a two-state solution.
“I would expect that pursuit to continue, and right now we hope the parties will take steps to move them closer again to restart negotiations, which is not a position they are in now,” she said. “We will dedicate ourselves to that as long as we are in office.”
Power also expressed hope that students participating in the Model UN would soon be able to sit behind a “Palestine placard,” backing the importance of a two-state solution.
“You must strive to wade side by side into the toughest issues, because it is you and your children and the generations following them who will reap the benefits of the peace you’ve built, or else endure the suffering of ongoing strife,” she urged the students.
Things change. Putin is about to shell Aleppo into dust, the Presidential election is seven days away, Iran and Valerie Jarrett want to make sure President Obama rolls up the carpet on Israel before he leaves office.
The worst option would be an effort to introduce a resolution at the U.N. Security Council setting “parameters” for a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The French have been eager to do this for some time, and one option for the Administration would be to let the resolution pass simply by refusing to veto it. Or the U.S. could introduce the resolution itself, all the better to take credit for it.
As the old line has it, this would be worse than a crime—it would be a blunder. U.S. policy has long and wisely been that only Israelis and Palestinians can work out a peace agreement between themselves, and that efforts to impose one would be counterproductive. Whatever parameters the U.N. established would be unacceptable to any Israeli government, left or right, thereby destroying whatever is left of a peace camp in Israel.
The Palestinians would seize on those parameters as their birthright, making it impossible for any future Palestinian leader to bargain part of them away in a serious negotiation. Arab states would find their diplomatic hands tied, making it impossible to serve as useful intermediaries between Jerusalem and Ramallah. It could refreeze relations with Israel even as they finally seem to have thawed.
President Obama may be the last man on earth to get the memo, but after decades of fruitless efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict it might be wiser for the U.S. to step back until the Palestinians recognize that peace cannot be imposed from the outside. If Mr. Obama is still seeking a Middle East legacy at this late stage in his presidency, his best move is do nothing to make it worse.
Samantha Powers is an accomplished person who actually wrote her own books and President Obama is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Powers has been in the United Nations since August 2013. Perhaps she has learned to see the world differently. President Obama is the same man who took the Oath of Office in 2009 - the exact same man. Valerie Jarrett never leaves his ears.
Many American Catholics who buy into the Social Justice Warrior facade detest Israel and support the Obama Palestinian gambit. Catholic Activists like Kevin Clark, a member of International Solidarity Movement went Israel and encourage American students to throw themselves in front of IDF bulldozers in Gaza. The blood of Rachel Corrie, for whom the Irish OXFAM Gaza Flotilla flagship was named, is not on the hands of Israel, but on Clark the Social Justice Warrior. This guy is bad and he has the ear of Catholic social justice sheep.
I grew up believing that deeds and not words marked the character of people.
We all can be fooled, tricked, gulled, anesthetized, or made oblivious. A few of us don't mind any of the afore mentioned conditions.
My Irish cousins forgot that Israel is not Nazi Germany. My Catholic coreligionists need to leave moral equivalency to the Unitarians and too many of the other Mainline faiths.
I know that Shinola can be a watch and a swell shoe polish. I know that Israel is our best friend on the planet. President Obama? Not so much.
Hillary don't Te Rogamus. She is the Hors d'oeuvre
Hate to kick a man who's down, but I do not mind it at all that Hillary Clinton is getting heaping helping cosmic Karma. Dharma has that task handled and I am sure the litany of saints are gearing up for some old timey Te Rogamus!
Peccatores, (sinners)
te rogamus, audi nos. Beseach thee, Hear us
Ut nobis parcas,
te rogamus, audi nos.
Ut nobis indulgeas, ( Pardon us)
te rogamus, audi nos.
With the Hors d'oeuvre offered and eaten up, Let's get to the soup!
The real noodles in the pot have yet to boil. By real noodles I mean every head that nodded and went along with the stout marrow bones of political players from the Oval Office to the DOJ.
It is and has been my simple belief that nothing and I mean nothing has happened since January 2009 without the implied, or explicit direction of Valerie Jarrett. We shall see, more of Valerie Jarrett's control over President Obama and his White House over the next score of months.
The surprise disclosure that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are taking a new look at Hillary Clinton’s email use lays bare, just days before the election, tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee.
Investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop that they believe was used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, and underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. . . .
Now here is where it gets really soupy
At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said.
Mr. McCabe then instructed the email investigators to talk to the Weiner investigators and see whether the laptop’s contents could be relevant to the Clinton email probe, these people said. After the investigators spoke, the agents agreed it was potentially relevant.
Mr. Comey was given an update, decided to go forward with the case and notified Congress on Friday, with explosive results. Senior Justice Department officials had warned the FBI that telling Congress would violate policies against overt actions that could affect an election, and some within the FBI have been unhappy at Mr. Comey’s repeated public statements on the probe, going back to his press conference on the subject in July.
The back-and-forth reflects how the bureau is probing several matters related, directly or indirectly, to Mrs. Clinton and her inner circle. . . .Even as the probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.
This sleazy saga began when the Oval Office, State Department, Justice Department and the compliant media tossed out the straw man story of a video offensive to Islam and the massacre in Benghazi. Wasted tax dollars on endless hearings, stalled, ridiculed and contaminated by hacks and the media.
Sad to say, that Rep. Elijah Cummings wasted gallons of fatty outrage, when all it took was a pervert Democrat Congressman and his ex-wife's own Valerie Jarrett side-show on the Clinton Campaign to shed real light on the cockroaches racing from icebox to stove in Washington D.C..
The Justice Department and State Department players are in the soup.
The fish will be Loretta Lynch and maybe others from DOJ past and present
The Entree The Clinton Foundation, The Saudi Royals, George Soros and the Bush Family
The Removes President Obama, Susan Rice and Long John Kerry
The Desert -Valerie Jarrett
"The United States-Philippines alliance is built on a 70-year history of strong people-to-people ties, including a vibrant Filipino- American diaspora and a long list of shared security concerns. So the focus of the Obama administration right now is on the broad relationship with the Philippines and our work together in the many areas of mutual interest to improve the livelihoods of the Filipino people and uphold our shared Democratic values." White House Flak Josh Earnest 10/5/2016
“Both in military, not maybe social, but economics also, America has lost,” he said to the crowd of over 200, later adding, “There are three of us against the world -- China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way.”
More than 250,000 Americans have settled in the Phillipines, many former service men and women opening businesses and putting down roots near Subic Naval Base.
The residents of Olongapo are also fearful that one fine day, Duterte might decide to throw them out of the country because they are Americans. "The biggest fear is that one day he's going to wake up and say 'everybody from the U.S., get out of town' and we'd have to leave our loved ones behind," Jack Walker, a retired Marine sergeant who has lived in the city for five years, said.
President Obama's soaring rhetoric and parsing poetics have created a dire situation in the most important Pacific Rim strategic outpost of American military and economic power.
President Obama surrendered the Philippines without a Bataan, or Corregidor. He does not even know what he has done - he is baffled.
President Obama does not like plain people and especially plain spoken people. He also dislikes with great enthusiasm anyone that Valerie Jarrett tells him to be really bad - a person who might be called 'a colorful guy' who wants to be supported in the fight against Islamist Terrorists, whom Valerie Jarrett identifies as drug dealing Narco-terrorists. Obama and Obama's folks have repeatedly condemned Duterte as a human rights violator for killing Islamist terrorists, whom Obama deems drug traffickers. His State Department and stripped pants boys are and have been baffled:
One U.S. official, who did not want to be identified, said there had been an active internal debate in recent months on how far to go in criticizing Duterte's government on human rights and that the measured tone adopted was not as strong as some aides would have liked.
U.S. attempts to raise questions about Duterte's campaign against drugs, in which more than 3,000 people have been killed since he took office in June, have drawn angry denunciations by Duterte. He has derided Obama as a "a son of bitch" and said he should "go to hell."
"It doesn't seem to help to say anything because the minute you say something, he just lets loose his barrage of obscenities," said Murray Hiebert, deputy director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think for the U.S. to just blast him constantly is probably not very effective."
Obama taunted and painted the popular President of the Philippines into a corner with 'pimp slap diplomacy.' Duterte is a plain man and plain men 'don't play.'
President Duterte, 'colorful guy,' has been insulted by President Obama on many occasions is not baffled at all.
The People of the Philippines who embraced democracy, after decades of American occupation and heroically withstood and welcomed liberation from Japan, sent their sons to Korea, Vietnam and the endless Wars on Islamist Terror are now rioting against America. That is tragic. They are great people. Abusing great people is an American Progressive's past time.
President Obama's White House is and has been Valerie Jarrett's tool in efforts to make Iran a world player. She has won and America has lost another ally. Pooh says, the stripped pants boys:
"There is no question that Duterte is...trying to play the well-worn game of playing us off against the Chinese," another U.S. official said, on condition of anonymity.
State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday that the United States will seek an explanation from Duterte over his "separation" announcement, which he made during a visit to China. But he limited criticism to calling the remarks "baffling" and "inexplicably at odds" with close ties between Washington and Manila.
Plain people do not play. Duterte is pissed and he has not parsed his piss. He will do what he says, he will do.
Someday, soon, many Americans will realize that President Obama had no business taking the oath of office. The Americans living in the Philippines are getting it.
Put this way by a American expatriate in Subic Bay, just off the naval base that Americans controlled until 1992 and began reusing in 2014 to help with the maritime patrols: “I am going to keep safe inside at night for this period. Keeping your nose clean is the solution.”
Treating friends with respect is another good idea.
“Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago housing projects operated by real estate developers and Obama financial backers Rezko and Allison Davis. (Davis is also Obama’s former boss.)…
"The old social actionists are largely men of action, doers, not talkers. The new social actionists are intellectuals...They are masters at manipulating words and sometimes ideas...They are fervent crusaders." Andrew Greeley - "Catholic Social Action"
I rarely agreed with Fr. Andy Greeley. Social change is brought about by people who actually, not virtually, do good. Real people, like Father George Clements and Fr. Dan Mallette actually Marched for Civil Rights with Dr. King, because they followed clerics like Bishop Bernard Shiel who founded CYO - he did not advocate for it. People in the action have little to do with "do-gooders' who never seem to leave the plush Oak Park and Hyde Park dens. It is easier to get behind masters at manipulating words and sometimes ideas.
Newspapers rarely talk about people in the action, other than snag a quote that justifies the words of an Advocate, Activist, or Office Holder. Most columnists go to the pap of preachy, pontificating poltroon's who give good prose, like Claypool, Quigley, Schakowsky, Durbin, Quinn and Mell in Chicago because they are policy people and do-gooders. Pap is easy to read and nod-with-ruminent conviction and chew the cud of vegan issues. A few, like John Kass of the Chicago Tribune, go to people in the action and presents their lives and struggles mired in the bog created by policy wonks.
Investigative journalists, the best anyway, go where facts have ignited a prairie fire. The worst are jigsaw puzzle masters of making facts fit a narrative.
Reporters, investigative reporters, connect the dots hidden from the public. Even those of us who read and remember quite a bit have not the time, nor the opportunity to often go 'beyond' the story. People must do their jobs, raise their kids and the millions of dollars of taxes Progressive thinking political insiders loot from the commonwealth.
I am a pathological reader, I read everything from Cosmo to Commonweal, from Pepsodent tubes to the runic script on top of light bulbs. Love to read.
I also love to read works that have something to do with the truth. Editorial boards tend to present only a prefabricated package of political proselytism - Vote for Kim Foxx, or Mark Kirk is not really Dick Durbin's purse puppy.
The Chicago Sun Times, in my opinion, has the wackiest Editorial policy mandate that seems to have been crafted by retired and bonged-up Weather Underground and Catholic Call to Action cranks. That's just me.
However, I believe that the Sun Times has the best investigative reporters Dan Mihiapoulos, Chris Fusco and Tim Novak, when they are not saddled with editorial constraints, or Andy Shaw and Carol Marin.
Tim Novak is a terrier. He is the only reporter in Chicago to maintain a jeweler's eye on the connections between the political grifters and the Progressive machine emanating from Hyde Park and Kenwood.
The Fifth Floor, Real Estate, TIFs, Big banking, the CHA, Slum Lording, Chicago's Department of Planning and Development and the White House are all players with the peoples pensions.
Sewer deals for Daley cousins seem as nothing compared to Valerie Jarrett.
Today, Tim Novak keeps the heat on the most powerful people plaguing Chicago.
Over the past nine years, two nephews of former Mayor Richard M. Daley have been involved in separate plans to redevelop a rundown warehouse on 15 acres of polluted land in Little Village just north of the Stevenson Expressway.
It hasn’t turned out well for Chicago taxpayers.
First, taxpayers have to make up for $4.2 million in city pension money invested on behalf of teachers, police officers and other city workers that ended up squandered on failed development plans involving Daley’s oldest nephew, Robert G. Vanecko.
Now, taxpayers stand to lose another $4.1 million on the same property at 3348 S. Pulaski Rd. That’s the amount of a property-tax break given to a second redevelopment deal for the site.
This one involves Vanecko’s first cousin, Patrick Daley Thompson, an attorney who helped the developers get the tax cut last year shortly before he was elected alderman of the 11th ward — the family’s power base for six decades.
Well them boys are "in the action." Not for social good, but for profit in the name of Progress. There is so much more and Tim Novak delivers! He connects the dots of the contemporary ledger and double book accounting to the days of yore and actually gives us context that a Chicagoan can sink teeth into and gnaw healthy opinion into being - we are screwed not by the usual suspects, but by the do-gooders!
The story of how the polluted Pulaski Road property became toxic for Chicago taxpayers begins in 2004, when Daley was still mayor. That’s when Vanecko — his sister’s oldest son — went into business with Allison S. Davis, the Chicago attorney who gave President Barack Obama his first job out of Harvard Law School, and Davis’ son Jared Davis.
Operating under the name DV Urban Realty Partners, their idea was to redevelop properties in some of Chicago’s most downtrodden neighborhoods. And they were aiming to get government pension funds to invest $100 million to bankroll their plans.
They had a hard time securing investments from pension funds, though, until the Chicago Teachers Retirement System agreed in early 2005 to put in $25 million of the money it held toward teachers’ retirement pay.
Then, the pension funds for police officers, municipal employees, city laborers and the Chicago Transit Authority also agreed to invest.
Altogether, the Davises and Vanecko wound up with $68 million from five public pension funds.
Man, if the editorial will of Chicago newspapers matched the grit of some of it's reporters, maybe a couple of dollars might be left in the kitty at the end of a Moody's evaluation.
This is meaty wholesome goodness in font! It will put off the vegan offal digestions of 'edgy,whip-smart and Progressive voices in our city.
Eat more Chicago! Thanks for the red meat, Mr. Novak!
If the Obama Administration did anything for the last eight years, and it did plenty and it ain't done, neighbors, it did so only with the sign off of Valerie Jarrett.
Valerie Jarrett is a shadow government and a slum lord millionaire who made piles of greenbacks, including some with Andy Jackson's soon to disappear portrait, when the Hyde Park Mafia goaded Richie Daley and the Feds to tear down the CHA high rises all over Chicagoland.
Allied with Progressive Poobahs and IVI consecrated real estate attorneys Judson Minor and Allison Davis, Valerie Jarrett constructed not only a bank vault stuffed with spondulices, but huge political power for herself. Valerie Jarrett took young Barack Obama to church at Trinity United Church of Christ run by a daffy race hustler -Rev. Jeremiah Wright. There he learned how Church and State operate real estate, banking, 501(c)3 boarded and looted by Leftist boards, the Chicago news media and politicians who can not look past their palms.
Valerie Jarrett was born into the whirlpool of cash, rhetorical and political back-stabbing that is the Progressive cookbook. Hyde Park and the University of Chicago Social Justice crowd of educators and lawyers have been in close quarters combat with U of C's School of Economics, ever since Milton Friedman explained the difference between free market capitalism and pure stupidity.
Valerie Jarrett* operates the White House for President Barack H. Obama, freeing him to smirk, read group thought morsels from a teleprompter, wave, sing old Motown to fawning bootlickers, wow single digit I.Q.'s world wide, never have to exhaust himself with thought.
Not a single American journalist has asked, much less raised any question about Jarrett, much less the Office of Public Engagement Created for her, probably by David Axelrod, so she could make sure that President Obama remained in threatening distance to her.
Most every detail, decision and deconstruction of the Constitution can be explained by asking for every document in the White House to and from Valerie Jarrett.
Frankly, Barack Obama has not a clue about what has happened from the Choom Gang to the present and could care less.
Forget Bubba and Hillary. Forget Lorretta Lynch and Eric "Nation of Cowards" Holder.
Ask Valerie Jarrett.
Start with this - " What in the hell business does a privileged slum lord have occupying space and breathing air in the White House on our dime, anyway?
*Valerie B. Jarrett is a Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama, overseeing the White House Offices of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, and chairing the White House Council on Women and Girls.
Ms. Jarrett has worked throughout her tenure at the White House to mobilize elected officials, business and community leaders, and diverse groups of advocates behind efforts to strengthen and improve access to the middle class, to boost American businesses and our economy, and to champion equality and opportunity for all Americans. From ongoing campaigns to end sexual assault, raise the minimum wage, advocate workplace policies that empower working families, and promote entrepreneurship and early childhood education, Ms. Jarrett has helped the President develop a broad coalition of partners to execute a robust agenda.
Ms. Jarrett came to the White House with a background in both the public and private sectors, having served as the Chief Executive Officer of The Habitat Company in Chicago, Chairman of the Chicago Transit Board, Commissioner of Planning and Development, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
She also served as Co-Chair of the Obama-Biden Presidential Transition Team, and the director of corporate and not-for-profit boards including Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Stock Exchange, Chairman of the University of Chicago Medical Center Board of Trustees, and Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Jarrett received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1978 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981.
No one is more powerful in this nation than Valerie Jarrett - no one. Why? No one with the job of asking questions and getting answers has ever asked - you know, journalists.
Why? Because, she's Valerie Jarrett. But, Why so much power and influence.
Because, as Chicago's only real journalist still on the job with a newspaper in this Rube Burg, John Kass explained to three score Chicago business and charity leaders last Friday, every editor and every columnist but Kass at the Chicago Tribune wet their britches over the very thought of Barack Hussein Obama.
It is very much the same at Chicago Sun Times, which should be able to boast the most talented crew of investigative reporters in this town. Instead, the media micturating minions give Obama and every person who ever made a buck from his careerist activism get a pass.
So, the Pope will need to just take it and like, while he is treated like Ted Nugent at P.E.T.A. brunch.
President Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett says that negative publicity surrounding the Vatican’s unease with some of the guests expected at a White House welcoming ceremony has not soured the excitement of Pope Francis’ first visit to the United States.
“Oh my goodness, no,” Jarrett told ABC News . . .
The Vatican last week expressed discomfort over some of the guests who are expected in attendance -- reportedly concerned by the optics that could be created if the pope is photographed with transgender activists, the first openly gay U.S. Episcopal bishop or a nun who will be on the South Lawn for the ceremony on Wednesday morning.
In the somewhat dated vernacular, The Pope was punk'd and Valerie Jarrett, I believe ordered the guest list.
Valerie Jarrett allowed herself a victim for the wheels of any theoretical bus.
Jarrett admits that the administration has “a lot going on” but says “everybody’s working cooperatively together” – especially the president’s fourth social secretary in six and a half years, Deesha Dyer.
“She's a rock star! Let me tell you she's been planning all of these events for a very long time, both the Pope visit, the state visit with China, as well as the UN -- all of those fall under her portfolio,” Jarrett said. “She probably has not slept in weeks. She'll probably be spending the night here tonight and she's just been performing terrifically."
The fawning boot-lickers of the American news media do as their told and so, sadly, will the gentle, gracious and good-hearted Pope.
The New York Times ran a TV commercial a few years ago in an attempt to capture more subscribers by way of touting the Weekender. The people in the ad are universally obnoxious, prissy, snotty and self-absorbed. To me and nearly every person I come into contact with every day, real people cops, foremen,teachers, City workers and the odd billionaire, all of the actors playing real New York Times readers seem like they were hand-picked by the DNC. One of the 'real readers' is an faux bald obnoxious goof in a turtleneck glasses sweater and horn rimmed who hisses 'It's in the Times and that settles it.'
That settles it. Think no more, search no more, accept a prissy meme and be happy. All is well.
The problem is . . .there are more settled minds in America than is healthy.
Political discourse was fun at one time. Since Obama took the White House and even a little before, chats about culture, religion, science and public policy artists at the City, County, State, National and International levels devolved into this dialog I had with an old friend in July 2008 at a fund raiser for a sick child at 115 Bourbon Street.
" Hey, Hickey! How's your McCain work going?"
I'm not working on McCain's campaign. I plan to vote for him, if he gets the nomination.
" He's nuts! You met Obama; how could you not be for him? You've been a Democrat all your life."
I still am a registered Democrat. Yes, I have met Obama, as head of the Woods Fund, at the Snow Flake Ball before Bobby Rush handed him his ass, at several family parties and when he asked me how the hell I expected him to get into a boxing ring, when there is "No Gate!" Obama is a very dumb guy, but looks like he could open a box of Wheaties without a tutorial and I can not stand the people behind him.
" Oh, like me?"
No. Like Abner Mikva and all of Hyde Park creeps running Richie Daley. Look he is run by Valerie Jarrett who is one of the nastiest vipers on the edge of the public trough.Only today, the Sun Times had the story of Obama's $1.1 million dollar gazebo giveaway to a connected pal in Englewood and we could not get the goof to endorse a grant for us at Leo, the entire time he was in the State Senate. He tossed $100,000 to a campaign worker for a gazebo that doesn't exist. It is in the Sun Times today.
" Awhh, @#$% You and all your right-wing pals!'
My right wing pals? I don't ever drink tea.
That settled any future exchanges unrelated to weather and the robust state of my physical health.
Settled. People who ask you what you think are not even remotely interested in your thoughts - You know the reified things that used to bus us to the conclusive idea, or opinion we hold at moment.
"How do you like my Onion and Garlic Cake with Maple Syrup?"
( generous exploratory mouthful and swallow) Gee, I think I am about to vomit.
" Awhh, @#$% you and your Food Channel pals!"
We are settled. Settled things that require absolutely nothing more than a conclusion.
Climate Change? Settled
Science? Settled.
Donald Trump? He's Really, really, really honest and thoughtful!
Mayor Rahm Emanuel? Fiscal Sophistication and Great for Organized Labor!
Abortion Videos ? Please.
Pension Problems? Politicians are Crooks and Not Our Fault, Because We Only Voted for Them!
Many things, for aught I know, may exist, whereof neither I nor any other man hath or can have any idea or notion whatsoever. Bishop George Berkely Six Irish students on summer Visas died when a balcony collapsed and the New York Times saw fit to make a mockery of their deaths. The kids were accused of rowdy behavior and drunkenness and program for which they had applied was called into question. The New York Times was worried about Berkeley - the college named for the 18th Century Irish Bishop and empiricist philosopher, but George Berkeley has not yet been accused of being 'loaded.'
The New York Times went far beyond the report of the deaths and Ireland demanded an apology and got one from Grey Lady that is similar to Rachel Dolezal's non-apology.
I think the New York Times took a very agitated and worrisome phone call from a political wheel just before print time.
You see political grifters, lawyers, activists and bundlers are deep in real estate.
Chicago readers might remember the death of a little black boy when a rusted gate of slum property fell on him. That property was managed by Cullen Davis, son of Allison Davis - the man who gave Barack Obama his shove into the White House. Valerie Jarrett controls slum properties.
A tall, rusted steel gate that fell and crushed a 3-year-old boy to death at the Cabrini-Green public housing complex failed a building code inspection Monday, said Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Buildings.
The gate at the Cabrini-Green rowhouses in the 900 block of North Cambridge Avenue fell on Curtis Cooper at about 5:30 p.m. Friday; he was pronounced dead less than an hour later in Children's Memorial Hospital. . . .
The CHA property has been managed for about two years by Urban Property Advisors. The firm is run by Cullen Davis, who is the son of influential city developer Allison Davis.
"If Chicago Housing Authority had been monitoring their properties, public housing wouldn't be in the shape it is in now," Steele said. "If they had been monitoring UPA, that gate wouldn't have fell."
UPA manages properties all over Chicago. The Davis family stands to make millions as part of CHA's Plan for Transformation, the city's ambitious effort to demolish high-rise public housing and replace it with mixed-income communities.
UPA Property Manager Ronald O'Neal and CHA spokesman Derek Hill declined to comment on Monday's failed building inspection.
Property is political capital and slum property is pure gold. Note the rotted wooden support beams on the Berkley Building
I hope that Irish journalists crawl into the facts behind the rotten owners of the apartments and the amounts of cash they paid out to politicians -City, State and Federal -and bring the truth to light.
The wood rot begins on the pages of the newspapers providing cover for politicians.
At the end of day, I believe that a politician, political bundlers and the New York Times will have much to explain.
“Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world.
President Obama just doubled-down on folly. He took Susan Rice out of the reach of Congressional scrutiny for any future transparency over the Benghazi massacres last September 11th with an appoint to White House National Security Chief and the nomination of Samantha Power to replace Rice as UN Ambassador for the United States.
President Obama does not break wind without the full and roaring approval of Valerie Jarrett, White House Ministress Without Portfolio Foreign and Domestic. Ms. Jarrett is a Chicago Slum Property Venture Capitalist and someone the newspaper purse-puppies say is really smart. Personally, I don't think Ms. Jarrett could make change without a committee of Alumni from University of Chicago Lab School.
That said, the President trotted out his choices:
Swell. Susan Rice will stay hidden but the OXfAM Anti Semite Ms. Power will buck and wing her way through the nomination process.
Ms. Power helped craft the Libyan mess and the subsequent Benghazi massacre. Ms. Rice talked the talk.
Ms. Rice will do exactly what the Slum Dog Millionaire Jarrett tells her to do, but Ms. Power (Mrs. Cass Sunstein) could be Pandora in pumps for the Administration and world affairs, because she speaks her mind and heart. Samantha Power is in it only top transform America from a world power and moral force into a pinata for Third World fascists who use the war on genocide in order to annihilate Israel and its allies. Ms. Power's war on genocide is the Wannsee Protocols for the Muslim Brotherhood - stop the killings only if it leads to the killing of Jews.
The Irish are strange creatures - loyal,spiritual, generous, lyrical and compassionate; Informers, atheistic, petty, bigoted and selfish. For every Kevin Barry there is a Gypo Nolan, for each Edmund Rice there is a Lord Haw-Haw, for a Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we now a have Samantha Power.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was the greatest Irishman of the last century, in my opinion, scholar, poet-bartender, patriot, statesman and the greatest orator of the times and the man could work a beer glass. Most of all, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was Mick enough to able to waltz through a cow pasture on dark night without soiling his brogans. He like most Paddys knew his meadow muffins from mayonaise. He was America's Ambassodor to the UN and Israel's champion.
Here is Samantha Power -
Her book A Problem from Hell, will also be the title chosen by her biographer.
I always thought that Barack Obama was most inadequate to be President. A back-benching Illinois State Senator should have been the apex of his resume. The nomination of this pedigree'd Turkey-bird*, Samantha Power, to a UN chair made sacred by Narrow Back Paddy Moynihan's rump is proof positive.
*Turkey-bird - endearing term for for Salt Water Irish, FBI ( Foreign Born Irish) - 'His Ol' man was born in Galway . . .a Turkey-bird,'
Narrow-Back - An empirical observation that Americans born of Irish Descent do not work as hard as their bog-trotting parents - ' See Thim Narrabacks in the Aran Jumpers this time a summer, Declan? Jaysus they're a shower, so.'
So if Obama is not fully engaged, who does wield influence in the White House? A lot of Democrats know firsthand that Jarrett, a Chicago mentor to both Barack and Michelle Obama and now officially a senior White House adviser, has enormous influence. She is the only White House staffer in anyone’s memory, other than the chief of staff or national security adviser, to have an around-the-clock Secret Service detail of up to six agents. According to terrorism expert Richard Miniter’s recent book, Leading from Behind: “At the urging of Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama canceled the operation to kill Osama bin Laden on three separate occasions before finally approving” the mission for May 2, 2011. She was instrumental in overriding then–chief of staff Rahm Emanuel when he opposed the Obamacare push, and she was key in steamrolling the bill to passage in 2010. Obama may rue the day, as its chaotic implementation could become the biggest political liability Democrats will face in next year’s midterm elections.
Valerie Jarrett has been prowling Chicago, Illinois and national government for opportunities to enrich herself and amass personal power. I will always think of Valerie Jarrett as a slum property HUD grifter who made good.
Before joining the Obama administration in 2009, Jarrett was president and chief executive officer of the Habitat Company, a real estate development firm founded by major Democratic donor Daniel Levin. Before that, she served three years as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development under Mayor Richard Daley.Jarrett currently owns an 11-percent equity interest in Kingsbury Plaza, a 46-story luxury apartment complex developed by Habitat between 2005 and 2007 at a cost of more than $100 million. She valued the investment at between $1 million and $5 million on her 2011 financial disclosure form, up from $250,001 in 2010. A Jarrett spokesman told the Washington Times that the investment was “a direct result of her 13 years working for Habitat.” Cook County records show the Kingsbury property is worth around $27.2 million, but thanks to a series of legal appeals beginning in 2003, the land and building are assessed at a much lower value for tax purposes. Since 2008, the property has been designated a “special commercial structure” and is taxed at a value of just $6.8 million, or 25 percent of the actual value.
and this old chestnut yet uncracked because Brand Obama made Tony Rezko Chicago's own Man in the Iron Mask.
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents linking Valerie Jarrett, an advisor to Barack Obama and the co-chairman of the President-Elect’s transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin "Tony" Rezko.
According to the documents obtained by Judicial Watch from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago housing projects operated by real estate developers and Obama financial backers Rezko and Allison Davis. (Davis is also Obama’s former boss.) Jarrett was a member of the Board of Directors for the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation along with several Davis and Rezko associates, as well as the Fund for Community Redevelopment and Revitalization, an organization that worked with Rezko and Davis. (According to press reports, housing projects operated by Davis and Rezko have been substandard and beset with code violations. The Chicago Sun Times reported that one Rezko-managed housing project was "riddled with problems — including squalid living conditions…lack of heat, squatters and drug dealers.") As Chief Executive Officer of the Habitat Company Jarrett also managed a controversial housing project located in Obama’s former state senate district called Grove Parc Plaza. According to the Boston Globe the housing complex was considered "uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage…In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale — a score so bad the buildings now face demolition." Ms. Jarrett refused to comment to the Globe on the conditions of the complex. "Like Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett is a product of the corrupt Chicago political machine. And it is no stretch to say that she was a slumlord," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "We have real concerns about Jarrett’s ethics. Washington already has plenty of corruption. We don’t need to import more of it from Chicago." Characterized as "the other side of Barack Obama’s brain" by CBS News, Jarrett first met the Obamas seventeen years ago when she offered Michelle Obama a job. While speculation has arisen that Jarrett could take Obama’s place in the U.S. Senate, the New York Times reported that it is more likely she will become a senior White House adviser, thus continuing her long record of being an important influence and mentor to Barack and Michelle Obama.
The grift is as nothing to Ms. Jarrett as unchecked power to recommend, secure postings and punish the opposition. Thinks of the daffy appointments the Obama White House has foisted upon American history since 2008 - Van Jones, Anita 'Mao' Dunn, Desiree Rogers, Arne 'Mumbles' Duncan, and his NAMBLA Czar Kevin Jennings, Elizabeth" Redman; You're a Whiteman" Warren and Samantha Power.
The Jarrett Policy Wheel was born in Chicago and the local high pockets-political Rubes who played ball with her now eclipsed and back home in the 60600 zip codes:
Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church were up in arms last fall over a proposal to require employers to provide health insurance that covered birth control. But caving in to the church’s demands for a broad exemption in the name of religious liberty would pit the president against a crucial constituency, women’s groups, who saw the coverage as basic preventive care. Worried about the political and legal implications, the chief of staff, William M. Daley, reached out to the proposal’s author, Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary. How, he wondered, had the White House been put in this situation with so little presidential input? “You are way out there on a limb on this,” he recalls telling her. “It was then made clear to me that, no, there were senior White House officials who had been involved and supported this,” said Mr. Daley, who left his post early this year. What he did not realize was that while he was trying to put out what he considered a fire, the person fanning the flames was sitting just one flight up from him: Valerie Jarrett, the Obamas’ first friend, the proposal’s chief patron and a tenacious White House operator who would ultimately outmaneuver not only Mr. Daley but also the vice president in her effort to include the broadest possible contraception coverage in the administration’s health care overhaul.
Then came more Benghazi truths, the IRS Hit Squads and even the Associated Press getting the Tea Party Treatment.
President Obama does not break wind without Valerie Jarrett's say-so. Those winds of change are blowing through the corridors of Congress at the moment. The media is reluctantly admitting it smells it. There will be blow-back wafting to the West Wing from exactly who dealt it.
Dad always said that I couldn't find my butt with both hands. I can. Allow me to add this imperative -“Defend the unborn against abortion even if they persecute you, calumniate you, set traps for you, take you to court or kill you." - Pope Francis to celebrate Pro-life Mass, Vatican
"You stand up for what you believe in, even if it gets in the way of what other people think. You are proud of yourself and your accomplishments and you enjoy letting people know that."
A peach of a guy with all the sweetness one could expect from a life well-spent and in good company: short on brains but a terrific dancer!
Author:
Every Heart and Hand: A Leo High School Story
The Chorito Hog Leg, Book One: A Novel of Guam in Time of War
Obama wears a 
