It’s moronic exchanges like this one between White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and rambling Indian magazine editor Shoma Chaudhury — who slobbers all over President Obama for his “womanly” leadership — that should make every rational woman cringe.

First, there’s the nauseating gender identity politics pandering.

Second, there’s the snort-worthy detachment from reality (the Chicago thug-in-chief is “bringing the temperature down”?).

Third, there’s the embarrassing non-question question of a “journalist” unabashedly engaging in the obscene ego stroke of a government official.

This is the danger of thinking with your ovaries instead of your brain:

If you can’t watch neuron-impairing feminist drivel this early in the morning, I’ve transcribed the above clip for you:

Chaudhury: The criticism of the Obama administration seems to be particularly “male,” you know? When you say ‘why aren’t you fighting back, why aren’t you policing?’ I think we’ve been talking about having women in leadership positions, and Obama’s attitude to leadership is really a very womanly one, you know, which is consensual, which is thought through, which calms the temperature down of the world, and it’s very important to remember that, you know.

Jarrett: Thank you. I’m going to tell him you said that. I think he’ll be very pleased to hear that that’s how you describe it. And I think I’m going to use that in terms of taking the temperature down. Because it has to come down if you are actually going to listen to one another, you have to take a lot of the heat out of the discourse. I think he’s very good at doing that, thank you.

Uh-huh.

Examples of Obama’s “womanly leadership” on the domestic front: “Punch back twice as hard” and Shut up and get out of the way.

I suppose this is what Chaudhury means by “womanly leadership:”

As for “bringing down the temperature,” I guess Ms. Chaudhury missed this:

Dozens of Indonesian Muslim students protested in front of the US embassy Friday against US President Barack Obama’s visit later this month to the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

The around 50 protestors, who were coordinated by a Muslim university student body, shouted “Reject Obama… God is greater,” and threw their shoes at posters of Obama, copying a protest in Iraq against former US president George W. Bush.

Obama, who is hugely popular in Indonesia as he spent several years of his childhood in Jakarta in the late 1960s, is expected to visit the country for three days starting from March 20.

“Just like Bush, he is a war president and an enemy of Islam,” protest coordinator Fikri Ahmad Irhamul told AFP.

“He sent thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan, and many of our Muslim brothers have died because of him,” Irhamul said.

Small protests were also held in other cities across Indonesia.

And this via Yahoo News Photos/AP:

And this from Hamas’s flag-burning brigade last year:

Looks pretty hot to me.

Three words: Boo-freaking-hoo.

Didn’t take long to play the woman card and the race card, did it?

I see an NAACP “National Treasure” Award in Desiree’s future…

Liberals are funny.

Everything is a “national security” issue to them…except, well, national security.

Global warming is a national security issue.

Health care reform is a national security issue.

And now, First Lady Michelle Obama is pushing her anti-obesity platform as a national security issue. Via CNSNews (hat tip: Doug Powers):

At a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the launch of the ‘Let’s Move’ campaign to end childhood obesity in the United States, an epidemic she said is costly and a threat to national security.

“A recent study put the health care cost of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion a year,” Mrs. Obama said. “This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

The ceremony, attended by many officials of President Barack Obama’s cabinet, followed the signing earlier in the day of a presidential memorandum establishing a task force to study the problem and make recommendations after 90 days.

Obama announced a long list of goals she said she hopes the “Let’s Move” campaign will accomplish, including many that can be done “in a generation.”

As I reported last week, the underlying security that this campaign is really concerned with is fattening Big Labor membership rolls and payrolls.

Union security, not national security.

My column looks beyond the obsequious and superficial headlines about First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign — and shows you which left-wing forces are driving her aggressive public policy initiative (so aggressive, as I noted the other day, that she paraded her poor daughters’ body mass index in public for the cause).

Remember: Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children.

***

SEIU fatcats behind First Lady’s anti-obesity campaign
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take First Lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple – as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union Address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students’ physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode – leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the Surgeon General, and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.

For decades, this Great Society relic has been criticized by school administrators for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal “boondoggle” in a seminal essay for the education journal, Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP’s responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as “starving the children.” While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives, and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed up by the White House’s most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the First Lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC [the federal Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program] is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity, and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added).” There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits, and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats’ health care takeover bill).

The SEIU’s front group, “Campaign for Quality Services,” is clamoring for “the right to sick days and training” for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of “putting our kids at risk” during flu season by resisting the SEIU’s sick day coverage demands. “Without sick days, I can’t take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school,” an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind p.r. efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J. lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with…It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”

Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.” Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

Charm City Moms: A blog for Maryland parents by The Baltimore Sun’s Kate Shatzkin

The Obama children and child obesity

President Barack Obama is in Baltimore today, but it’s his wife’s last pronouncement on her campaign against childhood obesity that’s caught my attention. As the president did several months ago in an education speech, First Lady Michelle Obama has taken a personal tack — divulging some private information about her children — to drive home her point about early intervention in kids’ health.

In remarks at a YMCA in Virginia, Obama said her daughters’ pediatrician warned her — some time ago, apparently — that the girls were getting “off track” in terms of body-mass index…

…The personal aspect brings the story home and helps us remember how important the message is.

On the other hand, I do wonder about the kids’ privacy factor here, and how disclosures like these could open the door to unwanted scrutiny for the first daughters…

Hasn’t stopped POTUS and FLOTUS before.

Flashback: Leave Obama’s kids alone…except when POTUS & FLOTUS need them for Obamacare

Who is Ellie Light?

I predict you’ll start seeing the question as a popular bumper sticker soon (a la “Who is John Galt?”…and voila, someone has already made a t-shirt!).

It’s a handy rhetorical rejoinder the next time the White House or your nutroots neighbors and co-workers try to tar the Tea Party or any other grass-roots revolts against President Obama as phony, top-down operations.

When Obama’s Soros-funded, Big Labor-directed, K Street-organized goons engage in classic projection and you need a glib way to call out the pot calling the kettle black, just snap back:

Who is Ellie Light?

A Cleveland Plain Dealer blog first broke the story over the weekend of a “suspicious” letter-writer named “Ellie Light” who submitted more than a dozen pro-Obama letters to the editors in recent weeks using addresses from Philadelphia to California and all points in between. Open-source-optimizing blogger Patterico has added much more information on both “Donald Trump Astroturfing” (“a letter published in multiple places from one person claiming to live in multiple cities”) and “David Axelrod Astroturfing” (“identical letters published in multiple places claiming to be from different people”).

Kudos to the Plain Dealer for smoking out the initial ringer and Patterico and his readers/tipsters for delving deeper. But so much for the rest of the vaunted gate-keepers of the Fourth Estate, eh?

The bogus letters are just the latest example of Obama theater — doctors in costumes, town hall stage props, trumped-up Obamacare anecdotes, kiddie proxies, etc., etc., etc.

Underscoring this administration’s dependence on centrally planned, teleprompter-dependent perpetual campaigns of manufactured support, the other half of Obama’s Astroturf Twin Power — David Plouffe — will soon rejoin Chicago cronies David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and the rest to rescue the Democrats in a new expanded role as outside White House adviser.

A reminder from my August 21, 2009 column on Corporate Shills for Hope and Change:

Money from pharmaceutical firms and health care companies is dirty, evil, and corrupting – except when key members of Team Obama are pocketing it. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs derides grass-roots opponents of socialized health care as industry-funded lackeys with questionable motives and conflicts of interest. But what about the corporate shills at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

Two weeks ago, the White House embraced $150 million in drug industry ads supporting Obamacare. This week, Bloomberg News reported that White House senior adviser and chief campaign strategist David Axelrod’s former public relations firm, AKPD Message and Media, has raked in some $24 million in ad contracts supporting Obamacare – along with another p.r. firm, GMMB, run by other Obama strategists.

The ads are funded by Big Pharma, the AARP, AMA, and the powerhouse Services Employees International Union (whose Purple Shirts dumped $80 million in independent expenditures to get Obama and the Democrat majority elected). In trademark Axelrod-ian style, the special interest coalition adopted faux grass-roots names – first under the banner of “Healthy Economy Now” and more recently as “Americans for Stable Quality Care.”

Because, well, “Corporate Shills for Hope and Change” doesn’t have quite the same ring of authenticity.

Astroturf master Axelrod was president and sole shareholder of AKPD from 1985 until last December, when he resigned to take his White House position. His son, Michael, works there. So does former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. Axelrod is prominently featured on AKPD’s website, from a founder’s quote on the front page (“CHANGE IS SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR”) to the glamorous election night photos of Plouffe and Axelrod with the Obamas. AKPD still consults with Axelrod on “strategy and research” for the Democratic National Committee. The firm owes Axelrod $2 million, due in annual installments of $350,000, $650,000, $400,000 and $600,000.

That Axelrod and his old firm benefit mutually from their respective roles selling Obamacare should be gobsmackingly obvious. Axelrod pushes the White House plan on TV news shows. AKPD derives mega-income from ad contracts selling the White House-endorsed plan. The windfall allows AKPD to settle its debts with Axelrod, whose name, face, and high-powered ties are critical to future wheel-greasing for AKPD — and future salary-earning for Axelrod’s son and close associates.

The ‘Turf Gang: Gibbs, Plouffe, Obama, and Axelrod

Plouffe authored an op-ed for the Washington Post over the weekend crusading to save the Demcare government takeover. His Washington Post byline does not mention his position at AKPD and does not disclose his financial conflicts of interests in promoting Demcare while serving as senior adviser to AKPD, which raked in an estimated $24 million in drug industry ads supporting Demcare along with Obama-tied p.r. firm GMMB.

Another MSM failure to keep readers fully informed:

David Plouffe, campaign manager of Obama for America and Obama-Biden 2008, is the author of “Audacity to Win.”

On a related note, check out this recent Craigslist advertisement in the Astroturf gang’s hometown of Chicago soliciting paid canvassers for a Democratic National Committee-tied entity:

Background on Grassroots Campaign Inc. :

Grassroots Campaigns (GCI) is an independent organization that does strategic consulting, fundraising, and field organizing for good causes and candidates. We specialize in building and running face-to-face outreach operations in neighborhoods and in high-traffic public venues to build support for groups, issues, and campaigns.

GCI was founded in December of 2003, and by April of 2004 had opened offices in 40 cities throughout the country. By July 2004, we had over 2,000 staff knocking on doors and talking to voters on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. With continued work on behalf of MoveOn PAC in October, we added a volunteer force of 50,000 individuals canvassing their neighborhoods in 17 of the most hotly contested swing states of the 2004 Presidential Election. Since 2004, we’ve continued to partner with groups and campaigns to advance good issues, raise money for progressive causes, help take back Congress, and build activism at the grassroots level.

The people at GCI are seasoned organizing and fundraising professionals with a commitment to positive reforms. Our staff has over 150 years of professional experience. They have:
• Designed and implemented electoral, initiative, legislative, corporate, small donor fundraising, and petition gathering campaigns;
• Put together organization membership drives and raised over $500 million;
• Ran conferences of a couple hundred to a couple thousand college students;
• Trained thousands of professional organizers and campaign staff;
• Worked with scores of different groups on the national, regional, state, Congressional, local, and campus levels;
• Recruited and trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers;
• Helped launch or run over a dozen different organizations;
• Sat on the boards of directors for many groups and campaign steering committees.

Via Slate from 2004, GCI’s “for-profit canvassing” is seen as the “DNC’s secret weapon:”

Voters this fall in Democratic strongholds are witnessing an increasingly common sight. Staked out on busy sidewalks in at least 38 American cities, political activists carrying credit-card authorization forms are drumming up donations for the campaign to defeat George W. Bush. Outfitted in T-shirts emblazoned with star-spangled Democratic National Committee logos, these earnest young men and women come across as grass-roots volunteers of the most enthusiastic sort. Little old ladies interrupt their strolls to thank them for their hard work.

But appearances can be deceiving. The organization behind these fund-raisers is Grassroots Campaigns Inc., a for-profit company that counts the Democratic National Committee as one of its flagship clients. It’s a safe bet that few pedestrians talked into donating $149—”the price of a bus ticket from Washington, D.C., to Crawford, Texas”—realize that once these canvassers beat their daily quota, they keep up to 30 percent of the take.

In the rapidly shifting terrain of political fund raising, Grassroots Campaigns Inc. has emerged as a juggernaut.

“Appearances can be deceiving.”

Pretty much sums up the last year of the Obama White House — and the year to come with Axelrod, Plouffe, Gibbs, Jarrett & Co. working hard with their ringers and stagehands to put message over matter.

Who is Ellie Light?

***

Reader Bill e-mails about the Craigslist/DNC paid canvassing ad…

The ad offers a salary of $24k per year and says that the hours would be 80-100 per week.

Assuming 80 hours (the lower end)

$24,000/ 50 weeks (assuming 2 weeks paid vacation) = $480 per week
$480 / 80 hrs. = $6 per hour
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

I wonder if these community organizers will be advocating for an increase in that?

Here’s the big lie about the Cadillac tax exemption for Big Labor. The Dems say the tax will take effect in 2018. Bullcrap. Andy Stern and every other union boss will spend the next eight years ensuring that the excise tax never touches their empire. There’s no such thing as a temporary entitlement — or a temporary buy-off.

Phony fruits in the Obama White House garden
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

Hold on to your hoe. It turns out that the fruits and veggies used in a special edition of the popular Food Network TV show “Iron Chef America” featuring the First Lady did not, in fact, come from the White House garden. Could there be a more deliciously fitting symbol of Obama White House fakery than Garden-Gate?

Some may shrug at this tempest in a colander. But as we approach the one-year anniversary of the Hope and Change inauguration, the First Lady’s little horticultural hoax serves as a handy metaphor for a cornucopia of Obama fraud. They’ve stocked health care town halls with partisan goons and benefactors. They’ve provided lab coat to doctor donors to make their health care lobbying look more authentic. And they’ve treated soldiers, in President Obama’s own words, as “pretty good photo ops.”

Ringers are what’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

East Wing apologists are whirling like KitchenAid salad spinners over the Iron Chef-fuffle: “Due to the production delay between the shoot at the White House and the shoot at Food Network, the produce used in Kitchen Stadium during the ‘Super Chef Battle’ was not actually from the White House garden,” admitted a Food Network spokeswoman. But, they stress, the replacement produce consisted of the exact same types of sweet potatoes, tomatillos, broccoli, and fennel purportedly picked from the White House garden.

It’s the haute cuisine version of disgraced CBS News fabricator Dan Rather’s fake-but-accurate card. But this is just the latest Potemkin produce from a Potemkin presidency.

To wit: White House number-crunchers and Democrat fuzzy mathematicians have been cooking the books on stimulus jobs numbers and government health care takeover costs. They desperately ditched the “jobs saved or created” recipe for a jobs-funded concoction to salvage the illusion of economic recovery. They’ve inflated deficit reduction estimates and downplayed doctor reimbursement cuts. And they’ve done so behind a locked kitchen door.

Candidate Barack Obama whipped up a nutritious package of transparency pledges that has fallen flatter than a one-egg soufflé. Open government, he told us, was good for Washington and good for America – and the president promised to give us heaping doses of it on C-SPAN. But not a camera was in sight for the past week’s backroom health care among the White House, Democrat leaders, and left-wing special interests.

Now, President Obama is poised to deliver juicy tax exemptions for unions while squeezing middle-class taxpayers, employers, investors, and drugmakers to subsidize expanded government health care.

The liberal press became unhinged when former President George W. Bush posed with an artificial turkey on a surprise Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad in 2003. But on Thursday, when President Obama served up a fake populist turkey of a $90 billion bank tax – dubbed the “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” – much of the press corps dutifully chewed and swallowed. Feigning outrage at the very financial sector that loaded his campaign coffers and provided him with crony Treasury appointees, Obama demanded “our money” back.

But the tax will not apply to the Enron-rivaling financial black holes of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (it would “not be productive,” says a White House filled with Fannie & Freddie-enriched advisors). Or to the bailed-out auto companies. Or to the bevy of non-banks that have soaked up taxpayer bailout money. Gobble, gobble, gobble.

Nor will any of the incompetent or complicit financial regulators who practiced self-admittedly “inadequate” oversight before the meltdown and during the government bailout structuring be fined or penalized (we’re looking at you, Tim Geithner).

With Year Two of the Obama administration barely under way, even its most loyal subjects are beginning to realize that Hope and Change were phony fruits. He promised new politics. We got the same old crony capitalism. He promised public accountability. We got the back of the hand. How ya like them rotten apples now?

They stage their health care town halls.

They hand out lab coats to make their doctor donors look authentic.

They treat soldiers as “pretty good photo ops.”

So, this Iron Chef revelation about Michelle Obama’s produce is entirely in keeping with Obama Theater:

For months, the Food Network ran ads about a forthcoming episode of “Iron Chef America,” its flagship chefs plus secret ingredient versus time competition. The show would take place at the White House garden, with Michelle Obama making a cameo and plugging her responsible-eating initiative. The network promised it would be its biggest episode ever.

The buildup matched the reality: The Jan. 3 “Iron Chef America” drew 7.6 million viewers, the highest-rated show in network history. In it, superstar chef Mario Batali teamed with Emeril Lagasse, and Bobby Flay with White House chef Cristeta Comerford to cook five dishes using the secret ingredient: produce from the White House garden.

Except for one thing: As first reported on AOL’s Politics Daily blog, the fruits and vegetables used on the show weren’t from the White House. They were stunt produce. Ringers.

At the beginning of the two-hour special, the chefs were shown picking sweet potatoes, broccoli, fennel and tomatillos from the White House garden. Then the chefs were seen walking into Kitchen Stadium, produce in hand. One problem: The show is filmed in New York City.

No doubt they’ll argue it was “Fake but accurate.”

Back on June 12, I detected Michelle Obama’s fingerprints all over the Americorps IG scandal and flagged the First Lady’s former chief of staff-turned-Americorps senior adviser, Jackie Norris.

So, this is no surprise via Byron York:

Congressional investigators looking into the abrupt firing of AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin have discovered that the head of AmeriCorps met with a top aide to First Lady Michelle Obama the day before Walpin was removed.

According to Republican investigators, Alan Solomont, then the chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, had denied meeting with Jackie Norris, at the time the First Lady’s chief of staff. But recently-released White House visitor logs show that Solomont met with Norris on June 9 of this year (as well as on two earlier occasions). President Obama fired Walpin on June 10 after an intense dispute over Walpin’s aggressive investigation of misuse of AmeriCorps money by Obama political ally Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, California.

After being presented with the visitor logs, investigators say, Solomont explained that he met with Norris to discuss Corporation business but did not discuss the Walpin matter. When pressed, Solomont said he might have made an offhand comment, or a mention in passing, about the Walpin affair, but that he and Norris did not have a discussion about it.

Solomont’s explanations have left both Rep. Darrell Issa, ranking Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Sen. Charles Grassley, top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, frustrated and vowing to continue their investigation of the Walpin matter. In a letter to Solomont, sent Friday, Issa wrote that he has “serious questions about the veracity of your…testimony.”

The latest development in Blago-gate is no surprise, either:

Rod Blagojevich’s lawyers want the FBI to give up details of interviews conducted last year of President Obama, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and others as part of the investigation into the former governor.

In a Friday filing, Blagojevich attorneys also asked for information regarding first lady Michelle Obama. However, a source said late Friday that the FBI never interviewed the first lady.

Rod Blagojevich’s lawyers want the FBI to give up details of interviews conducted last year with President Obama (from top left), Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett and Rahm Emanuel. A source said Friday, the FBI never interviewed the first lady.

Then-President-elect Obama, Emanuel and Jarrett sat down with the FBI about a year ago — just after Blagojevich was arrested on charges of trying to sell Obama’s recently vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.

Obama revealed he was interviewed in a report he made public last December.

The defense request, filed in federal court, asks for “notes, transcripts and reports” of interviews with the Obamas, Emanuel, Jarrett and union chiefs Thomas Balanoff and Andy Stern.

Wherever there’s a Chicago-flavored stench, Michelle Obama’s name and those of her closest Windy City confidantes are sure to follow.

Too bad the rest of the dinosaur media is so mesmerized by the FLOTUS’s belts and dog stories. There are far more fascinating stories to uncover.

It’s another sympathetic MSM puff piece on the Friend of Valerie Jarrett/Obama bundler-turned-White House social secretary…from the notorious lefty fashion writer Robin Givhan at the Washington Post.

Shorter version: “She’s glamorous!”

Rogers will not show up to the House hearing on Crashergate.

In an attempt to put out the security fire, the White House announced “new” policies to prevent another party-crashing fiasco. Well, not “new.” Just the same old policies that had been in place during the last administration that Rogers flippantly ditched.

As expected and predicted, Team Obama isn’t throwing senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett’s close Chicago pal under the bus. The AFP headline: “White House backs top aide over ‘gatecrash’ flap.”

One Democrat thinks she should attend the hearing, via Jonathan Tilove:

Rich Masters, a former top policy and communications adviser to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who now does crisis public relations for a living, said he would advise Rogers to appear at Thursday’s hearing.

“From a PR perspective, it is always advisable to be as open and honest as possible about these things,” he said. “It’s clear mistakes were made, but if she does not appear, you run the risk of you being the scapegoat.”

But at least she’ll be the best-dressed scapegoat in Washington, yes?

***

Update: White House invokes separation of powers to protect Rogers from testifying. The Crashergate couple won’t be accepting the invite either.

…while grifter couple Michaele and Tareq Salahi snuck in the back and circumvented security to gain access to President Obama…

Readers of this blog and of Culture of Corruption are already quite familiar with Desiree Rogers.

She’s the intimate Chicago fund-raising crony of Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett who was once married to fellow Obama crony and frequent White House visitor John Rogers, chief executive of multi-billion-dollar Ariel Capital Management. They both bundled hundreds of thousands in donations for Team Obama before Desiree was appointed to head the White House social secretary’s office — an office smack dab in the middle of the Crasher-gate scandal that is smellier than week-old Thanksgiving turkey. More on that in a moment.

First, let me bring you up to speed on Desiree Rogers’s tastes, White House qualifications, and desires.

Tastes: Desiree likes to party. White House qualifications: She’s rolling in dough. Desires: She loves getting her picture taken in high-fashion magazines. Frequently with senior White House advisor and Chicago gal pal Valerie Jarrett or a favorite designer by her side:

Which all helps explain why the camera hog was striking a pose at the front door of the State Dinner last week instead of doing her job and overseeing the event behind the scenes. Via Newsweek:

The White House staff member whose job was to supervise the guest list for state dinners and clear invitees into the events says she was stripped of most of her responsibilities earlier this year, prompting her to resign last June.

The account of Cathy Hargraves, who formerly served as White House “assistant for arrangements,” raises new questions about whether changes that she says were made by President Obama’s social secretary, Desiree Rogers, may have contributed to the security lapses that permitted Virginia socialites Michele and Tareq Salahi to crash the state dinner for India’s prime minister last week and get themselves photographed with the president.

Hargraves tells Declassified in an exclusive interview that, while she had originally been hired as a White House political appointee in 2001, she landed a new position on the White House residence staff in 2006 and was specifically detailed to the social office to work on state dinners.

Her job duties included overseeing the invitations for guests at state dinners and keeping track of RSVPs, she says. On the evening of state dinners, she says, she physically stood at the East Gate portico entrance and greeted each of the guests as they arrived, checking their names off a computerized printout of those who had been invited.

But when she met with Rogers last February and went over her job responsibilities, she says, the new social secretary told her, “We don’t feel we have a need for that anymore.” Rogers’s explanation, according to Hargraves: “In these economic times, I don’t think we’re going to have very many lavish expensive dinners. It wouldn’t look very good.”

Pure, unadulterated B.S.

Diva Rogers clearly wanted to get rid of the Bush-era carry-over — and she obnoxiously invoked fiscal restraint to rationalize cutting corners on security.

Guess what, babe? This doesn’t look very good:

During President George W. Bush’s administration, it was standard procedure to have someone from the White House social office at the gate for state dinners and other events with large groups of visitors, according to a former senior Bush aide who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to be seen as criticizing the Obama White House.

The social office is most knowledgeable about the guest list and could have been called in case of any uncertainty, this official said…White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers, asked by The Associated Press on Thursday whether personnel from her office were at the checkpoint said, “We were not.”

As I noted in Chapter 2 of Culture of Corruption, Rogers sees herself not merely as a party planner, but as the overseer of the White House “strategy for events.” While she pays lip service to exercising restraint in Washington (“As we go through our struggle, there is a need to be prudent”), Rogers defended the lavish “Camelot” scene that quickly became an Obama hallmark in the economically-stressed first 100 days. The celebrity-filled cocktail nights and conga lines are a means to end, she explained to National Public Radio:

“My belief is that we don’t always get everything accomplished over a meeting table,”” Rogers says. “Many times it’s over cocktails, it’s over dinner and so the other piece to our work will be what kind of events can we create?”

Fittingly, Ms. Rogers’ personal motto is laissez les bon temps rouler: Let the good times roll. With her savvy fundraising skills, she helped keep Team Obama rolling in dough during the 2008 presidential campaign. According to left-wing watchdog Public Citizen, Rogers bundled more than $200,000 for Obama and contributed $28,500 to committees supporting her good friend. A Harvard MBA and former Allstate Financial executive, Rogers spent 2004 to -2008 as head of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, a $1.1 billion natural gas utility in Chicago. During her tenure, the utility’s parent company was sued for artificially inflating gas prices; a settlement with Illinois regulators required the firm to refund $100 million to consumers. Separate actions resulted in fines of $500,000 for a backlog of overdue meter safety inspections and $1 million for failing to properly inspect distribution pipes. In April 2009, financial disclosure forms revealed that Rogers “collected more than $1 million for her work as president of two gas companies for part of 2008. Later, she earned a $350,000 salary from Allstate Financial as president of its social-networking division, and $150,000 in board fees from Equity Residential, a real-estate investment trust in which she also holds at least $250,000 in stock.”

Rogers has known Mr. and Mrs. O for more than a decade. How did they meet? Ivy League connections – —the same connections that Michelle Obama griped would keep her “on the periphery.” Rogers’ ex-husband, John W. Rogers, Jr., played basketball with Michelle O’s brother, Craig Robinson, at Princeton. As I’ve mentioned previously, Mr. Rogers also served as a campaign finance bundler for Team Obama. The Rogerses were among 79 top fundraisers who, according to the Washington Post, tapped their personal networks to raise at least $200,000 each. The bundlers recruited a total of more than 27,000 donors to write maximum-limit checks for $2,300 each.

True to their faux populist form, Mrs. Obama has heaped praise on her dear friend Desiree’s “phenomenal job” of creating a “People’s House.” Rogers told Vogue (the magazine of everyday people like Rogers, Jarrett, and Mrs. Obama): “[My purpose] is helping people visualize what the Obama presidency is about, the feelings Americans voted for—inclusion, transparency, embracing people you might never otherwise learn about—and also translating the splendor, that sweetness, that comfort of the White House to everyone.”

“Embracing people you might never otherwise learn about.” Well, that’s certainly one way to describe the Crashergate fiasco!

While members of Congress focus their ire on the crashers and the Secret Service becomes a scapegoat, the sunlight needs to be directed once again at Barack Obama himself and the Chicago team embedded in the East Wing and West Wing that puts garish self-service above competent public service.

Valerie Jarrett suffered no consequences after her Van Jones and Obama-lympics fiascos. Neither, alas, will the White House socialite who allowed the undocumented visitors and their intruding reality TV camera crew to party hardy in the “People’s House” uninvited. The negligence of the president’s closest personnel is a reflection of, not a departure from, the White House governing stylebook.

Besides, as you well know: Barack Obama could no more disown his Windy City moneybag pals Desiree and John Rogers than he could disown his own teleprompter.

Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett won’t let him.

***

Cover girl Desiree Rogers bragging to the WSJ magazine: “We have the best brand on earth — the Obama brand…Our possibilities are endless.”

***

Update: The House homeland security panel says it will hold a hearing on Crashgate. More from The Hill.

Question Desiree Rogers.

Turkeys of the year
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

As we gather ‘round the Thanksgiving table, bow our heads in prayer, and feast on the holiday bird, it is only fitting to take a moment to fete the unforgettable turkeys of 2009.

1. The stimulus. Back in February, I wrote that if the trillion-dollar stimulus plan were a Thanksgiving dinner entree, it would be a Turbaconducken — the heart attack-inducing dish of roasted chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey, all wrapped in endless slabs of bacon. And so it has come to pass. After the Democrat majority larded up the massive spending package with earmarks and bribes, President Obama declared it pork-free and has stubbornly touted its job creation benefits for out-of-work Americans.

Reality check? The Washington Examiner reports that more than ten percent of the jobs the Obama administration claimed were “created or saved” by the stimulus are doubtful or imaginary. ABC News uncovered countless examples of bogus congressional districts listed as stimulus beneficiaries by the Obama stimulus tracking website, Recovery.gov. The money has been lavished on shady beauty schools in New Hampshire, prison inmates in Texas, and wind companies in Spain and China. Just this week, a California audit found that the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation overstated the number of jobs saved by federal stimulus dollars by upwards of 13,000.

While this Generational Theft Act continues to soak up our tax dollars and add to our children and grandchildren’s debt, the Democrat majority is in the government kitchen cooking up a second stimulus turkey to provide federal infrastructure money to public-sector unions. Gobble, gobble.

2. President O-bow-ma. The candidate who pledged to restore America’s standing in the world couldn’t figure out how to stay standing in front of world leaders. In April, he crouched before Saudi King Abdullah. This month, he provoked global derision when he broke protocol and performed a spineless blunder in front of the Japanese emperor.

The kowtower-in-chief’s body language reflected the administration’s broader foreign policy prostrations – including scrapping missile defense in the Czech Republic and Poland, canceling a meeting with the Dalai Lama to appease China, sitting on its hands this summer during the Iranian election protests, and unveiling the 9/11 show trials in New York City that will provide a circus platform to jihadis and international Bush-haters.

The Left complained that George W. Bush was too much of a cowboy on the global stage. It’s better than having a waterboy.

3. Green jobs czar Van Jones. This deep-fried turkey was recruited by Team Obama’s Chicago consigliere Valerie Jarrett, who boasted about recruiting the Marxist rabble-rouser from Oakland. He openly crusaded to free Philadelphia Death Row cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, bashed capitalism with radical revolutionary rhetoric, and signed a 9/11 conspiracy petition that he meekly disavowed in a botched attempt to save his job. Jones is now at the Center for American Progress, run by Obama transition official and Democrat operative John Podesta.

The other turkey in the story, Val Jarrett, escaped unscathed and went on to push the Obamas into their failed crony campaign for the Olympics 2016 bid in Copenhagen – a taxpayer-funded, hubris-infused debacle that ties with Van Jones for third biggest turkey of the year. Rio got the Games.

Photoshop: Paul Croteau

America got a closer look at the pay-for-play patrons, power brokers, and developers in the Windy City that have put an indelible Chicago stamp on the Potomac.

4. The New York Times. Scooped by Fox News, conservative blogs, and talk radio on the exploding ACORN scandal, the paper whitewashed its own role in covering up the community organizing criminal racket’s financial shenanigans last fall when it cut off a reporter’s investigation a few weeks before Election Day. Jill Abramson, the Times’ managing editor for news, acknowledged that her staff was “slow off the mark” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” They assigned a new “opinion media monitor” to track the competition, but refused to identify the watchdog for fear that he/she would get too many mean, intrusive e-mails and phone calls.

More recently, the paper’s website demonstrated that it’s real motto is “All the inconvenient news that’s fit to suppress.” The Times’ lead environmental blogger, Andrew Revkin, haughtily refused to reprint damning e-mails leaked by a hacker in the burgeoning “ClimateGate” scandal. The documents reveal a long trail of manipulated data, but Revkin balked at the ill-gotten trove. The blabbermouths at the Times had no problem exposing national security secrets to undermine George W. Bush. But shed light on scientific hoaxes that undermine Al Gore? Unethical!

5. Tea Party-bashers. Millions of ordinary, peaceful Americans joined the Tea Party movement to revolt against big government, backroom deals, and the Beltway culture of corruption. For their exercise of free speech and free assembly, they were smeared nationwide.

Hollywood has-been Janeane Garafolo called them “racist, backward motherf**kers.” SEIU labor thug Dennis Rivera accused them of “terrorist tactics.”

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper used a vulgar sexual epithet to describe them. Team Obama’s astroturfers declared all-out war on them.

For refusing to sit down and shut up in the face of such unhinged bigotry, and for exposing the foulness of the political fowl, I have two words for them: Thank you.

–

All is not lost in the Ivory Tower!

In September/October, Stanford Magazine ran a lavish softball profile of Valerie Jarrett (Stanford ‘78) on her role as Barack Obama’s confidante (h/t – reader Ed R.):

Jarrett has been an ever-present figure throughout Obama’s improbable ascent and has become a star in her own right. She appears regularly on national television advocating the president’s position on an array of issues. She was profiled in July on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, and earlier in Vogue. She is that rare political appointee who becomes a public figure, known to millions despite working in what would typically be a behind-the-scenes role.

Political savvy, extraordinary personal skills and intense loyalty established Jarrett as a central member of Obama’s inner circle long before she arrived at the White House. She was co-manager of the presidential campaign, but more appropriately she was its guiding light—the person in every room who best knew the Illinois senator, and who held the most sway. Considered a candidate for Obama’s vacated Senate seat, Jarrett declined the opportunity. “I want her inside the White House,” Obama insisted. “She is family,” the president told the Times; “. . . she is someone I trust completely.”

The piece appeared in the wake of the Jarrett-engineered Van Jones debacle and the Obama/Jarrett/Chicago crony Olympics flop. Like the massive New York Times profile published earlier this year, the Stanford Magazine piece was mum on Jarrett’s hardball days and failed developer record as a slum lord.

But Stanford alumni made sure the magazine’s readership knew the rest of the story.

In the November/December issue of Stanford Magazine, letter-writers filled in the blanks left by the puff piece. Just speaking truth to power, Val!

When I saw the cover photograph of Valerie Jarrett, I was reminded of the school fight song referring to “Stanford Red.” I am quite dismayed that this radical leftist is featured (“I Want Her Inside the White House,” September/October). She is, as you might recall, the one who recruited the self-avowed communist, Van Jones, to be part of President Obama’s inner circle. [Jones was special advisor on green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality from March 2009 until his resignation in September.]

Some have also likened her to a slumlord, er, lady. According to the Boston Globe’s Binyamin Appelbaum on June 27, 2008, Grove Parc Plaza, a slum housing project in the very district that Obama represented for eight years, is 20 percent uninhabitable because of “unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. 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. . . . 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.”

As Appelbaum reported, “Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the [federal] subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.” Among those [profiting] was convicted felon, Antoin “Tony” Rezko. Need I go on?

I located this information with a few mouse clicks. You could have done so as well. How far left has the Farm become? Is this cover an indication? Valerie Jarrett has no business being lauded by our magazine, despite her connection with Stanford and the current administration. Shame!

Ward S. De Witt, ‘62
Missoula, Montana

How timely to see Valerie Jarrett on the cover. You have highlighted the woman who has just been exposed as one of the most vocal advocates for Van Jones, an avowed communist and public supporter of a cop-killing murderer [death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal], now exposed and removed from government.

What a great lesson: Valerie’s Stanford education did not provide her with a moral compass sufficient to recognize that Jones would be bad news in any administration. I’m left wondering if Jarrett, or Stanford, can recognize the immoral shamefulness of her actions?

As a senior mentor in India once told me, “An educated scoundrel is still a scoundrel.” How true it is.

Pete Holzmann, ‘79
Black Forest, Colorado

You cannot imagine my dismay to learn that the architect of the Van Jones debacle is a Stanford graduate.

Tom Flood, ‘66
Danville, California

The ill timing of the Valerie Jarrett cover story was really quite ironic. Far from being a canard of the right, the Van Jones affair is troubling on many levels. In his own words, Jones, a self-proclaimed communist, attributed his conversion to people he met during his incarceration: “I met all these radical people of color, I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. It was like ‘this is what I need to be a part of.’ I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In 1994, Jones was one of the founders of STORM. Among other things, he accused “white polluters and environmentalists” of deliberately poisoning people of color. There is much more, all of which can be easily sourced, but to the point of Jarrett, it was she who, last month, told conferees, “Ooh, Van Jones. We were so delighted to recruit him to the White House. We were watching him . . . for as long as he’s been active out in Oakland.”

Jarrett’s role in the circumvention of confirmation proceedings through the appointment of “czars” is profoundly disturbing. Sen. Robert Byrd, among others, has warned of the danger of these “czar” appointments. The concentration of power in the executive branch, coupled with the circumvention of the confirmation process, is a serious threat to our nation and our way of life.

I hope that this story doesn’t end with the glowing endorsement of the September/October STANFORD.

Thomas A. Keiser
Wexford, Pennsylvania

Yes,the truth is out there — and it’s getting harder for the White House media police to bottle it all up.

In another business-as-usual Friday night document dump, the White House released logs on 110 White House visitors and trumpeted “transparency like you’ve never seen before.”

The self-congratulatory announcement conveniently omits that Obama originally blocked the logs’ release and only disclosed them under threat of lawsuit.

Also, this “unprecedented” disclosure is severely limited:

Most of the visitors from Inauguration Day to September will never be released by the White House under this voluntary disclosure — unless the public can guess their names. The White House policy doesn’t allow members of the public or press to ask for “everyone who visited health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle,” or everyone who visited on May 4, or everyone from the American Medical Association. Only individual names can be checked.

The list released at 4:30 p.m. Friday includes just about 110 names with 481 visits. Those names were among those requested by members of the public so far, for visits during the period from Inauguration Day through July. (That’s why we know of visits by the wrong Bill Ayers, the wrong Angela Davis, etc., but we don’t know of visits by countless unnamed lobbyists.) Members of the public who used the White House online form to check names did not receive a personal reply indicating whether or not the request was received, or whether the name appeared on the list, so the system provides no feedback…A request for the complete records of all visitors from the first months of the administration, filed by msnbc.com, was rejected by the White House, and an appeal is pending. The news organization requested the names of all visitors to the Obama White House beginning with Inauguration Day. Msnbc.com has filed an administrative appeal with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Secret Service.

Let’s dive into the data dump.

*ANDY STERN. If you’ve been following my reporting and Culture of Corruption work on Obama’s special friends at the SEIU, you won’t be surprised to learn that one of the most frequent visitor knocking on Barry’s door over the past several months was…SEIU president Andy Stern.

They really just need to set up a cot for him at 1600 Pennsylvania. Stern clocked in with 22 visits, including seven with the president, one with the vice president, and meetings with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Biden chief of staff Ron Klain, OMB director Peter Orszag, health czar aide Jennifer Cannistra, and Valerie Jarrett’s high-powered aide and Chicago fund-raiser Tina Tchen.

As I’ve noted from Day One, Big Labor’s investment in Obama has paid off mightily.

*GEORGE SOROS. And let there be no doubt that other far Left kingpins have easy access to this White House. Billionaire George Soros dropped in on David Lipton, Obama’s special assistant for international economic affairs and a longtime Treasury bureaucrat in past Democrat administrations whose contact with Soros goes back to at least 1998.

Soros visited Lipton on February 25, just a few days after he made international headlines for statements at Columbia University about the global financial collapse, and again on March 25, the day he was quoted around the world gloating about “having a very good crisis.”

Soros also met with National Economic Council director Larry Summers and Valerie Jarrett’s gal Tina Tchen.

Inquiring minds want to know: Did Petrobras come up?

*JEFFREY IMMELT. GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt popped in for meetings with OMB director Peter Orszag and economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. Immelt serves on Obama’s economic advisory board. He also promoted smart grid programs at the White House — and then turned around at touted them on GE’s broadcast subsidiaries at NBC, CNBC and MSNBC. The perks of a left-wing corporate “news” empire.

*RACE HUSTLERS. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson checked in for various events ranging from poetry readings to congressional luaus to education and SCOTUS meetings, but “Malik H. Shabazz” in the visitor log is not the same Malik Zulu Shabazz who heads up the thug racketeers at the New Black Panther Party.

*HEALTH CARE LOBBYISTS. While far Left groups harass and demonize evil health insurance lobbyists, they’re more than welcome at the White House. UnitedHealth lobbyist Steve Elmendorf is listed five times and Alston & Bird “resource” (the kinder, gentler euphemism for lobbyist) Tom Daschle is listed 11 times.

*PAUL KRUGMAN. The NYT columnist spent two hours with Obama on April 27. Gen. McChrystal got 30 minutes.

*PHILIP GARA LAMARCHE. Another far Leftist philanthropist with repeat access to the White House, he’s listed nine times (two under “Gara LaMarche” and seven under “Philip G LaMarche.” LaMarche is President and CEO of The Atlantic Philanthropies. As I reported in June, LaMarche is a George Soros acolyte whose charity pitched in $10 million to help fund the astroturf Health Care Action Now group. LaMarche met with Valerie Jarrett for hours-long meetings on two disclosed occasions. Last year, LaMarche’s group donated $18 million to a Chicago charity headed by Jarrett.

*SCOTT LEVENSON. Matthew Vadum notes the visit by ACORN spokesman Levenson with SEIU/ACORN operative-turned-White House political director Patrick Gaspard.

Membership in radical Left circles has its privileges.

Yes, the woman who bragged about recruiting Marxist rabble-rouser Van Jones is lambasting conservatives for spurning radical leftist ACORN/Big Labor embracer Dede Scozzafava:

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the rise of a Conservative Party challenger in a closely watched upstate New York House election shows that the Republican Party leadership is “becoming more and more extreme, and more and more marginalized.”

“It’s rather telling when the Republican Party forces out a moderate Republican and it says, I think, a great deal about where the Republican Party leadership is right now,” Jarrett said when asked about the GOP candidates’ decision to suspend her campaign, making it more likely the Conservative will win Tuesday’s special election.

No, Ms. Jarrett, you will not be allowed to dictate what “moooooderate” Republicanism is.

There is nothing moderate about Scozzafava.

And there is nothing mainstream about you.

Just speaking truth to power.

Now, that’s enough to give you the real heebie-jeebies.

***

Related NY-23 news: TCOT Report has the latest on the Scozzafava/Hoffman tango.

A Hot Air reader volunteers for Hoffman. More scary extremism!