More This & That & Whatever.... The Best Of Intellectual Froglegs

[Warph]

*** >> OPEN LETTER TO THE FORUM... READ & HEED, PEOPLE << ***

How To Be On The Right Side Of History

You won't hear about the problems below in the news, and you certainly won't hear about the solutions. Numbers don't lie, and the numbers are telling us that things will get much worse before it gets any better, so taking certain steps that makes sense no matter what happens makes sense, right?

The Problems: Corrupt Governments, Fraudulent Central Banks, Insolvent Banks, Dying Fiat Currencies, Inflation, Insecure Gold Storage, The Rise of the Police State, Illegal Surveillance, Food Crises, Capital Controls, Wage and Price Controls, People Controls, And More.

The Solutions: Internationalization, International Diversification, Offshore Banking, Residency and Second Citizenships, Moving Your IRA Offshore, International Investing, Resilient Communities, Investing in Productive Farmland, And More.

"History Doesn't Happen In The Past... History Happens Now"

by Dr. Robert Owens

The parasite has out grown its host and it can't live on its own. We are witnessing the convergence of multiple mistake streams combining into one river of destruction. We have a ruling clique concerned only with maintaining its power supported by a dependent class that wants what it wants now not later. And they are employing public sector unions that want to negotiate feather-bed contracts with the same people they help elect. All empowered by a mass of low information voters who either don't pay any attention to what is going on or accept anything they see, hear or absorb from the Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media, late night talk shows or the Daily Show as real news.

America has been dumbed down so far it is acting stupid. We have been assaulted by so many outrageous actions we are becoming numb. Every day the drip, drip, drip of this Administration's unconstitutional activities and the constant drumbeat of the media covering-up instead of exposing and advocating instead of investigating makes us so tired of the fight we want to just throw up our hands and retreat into our families and our personal lives. This is just what the Progressives have been working for the last one hundred years. They have educated generations who have educated generations until most people have no idea how things were let alone how things should be.

The loss of historical perspective forces people to live in the now, and the now can always be changed. The lack of intellectual understanding causes people to rely upon emotion, and emotions can always be swayed. When people listen with the intent to respond instead of to understand conversations become two-way monologues between self-absorbed cyphers incapable of joining together in any meaningful way. Our Progressive education has cultivated a nation of couch potatoes who aren't aware that the Republic of their forefathers is being transformed before their eyes into a centrally-planned utopian experiment in social engineering.

Turn off the game, open a book, go online, and do something that will raise your awareness of what America is supposed to be. Look at our government and what they are doing and see what America is becoming. Think about it. Today in the name of security the government of the people, by the people and for the people is watching and listening to everything that is said and done while the one person who stands up and tells us they are doing it is a traitor, a felon, and must be stopped at all costs.

Yet with all this watching, all this listening even with warnings from multiple sources our vaunted security apparatus couldn't stop the Boston bombers. Despite the constant surveillance we are told endlessly that there is no way to identify the millions of illegal aliens who are swamping our system. In the face of obvious signs and numerous warnings a Muslim fundamentalist can climb on a table shouting "Allah Akbar!" shoot dozens of people, and this isn't terrorism while according to the news anchors of one network Senator Ted Cruz is a terrorist, and according to others so are the Americans involved in the Tea Party. Open your eyes and realize this country has been hijacked, the constitution is a dead letter, and if we don't do something soon nothing will happen.

How long have we waited for someone to rise up and lead the cause of freedom, to call a spade a spade and point out the fact that the Progressives are leading us away from freedom and towards totalitarianism? How long have we waited for someone in Washington to speak plainly and to point out that the 'Emperor has no clothes?'

Finally there are a few in the Senate and in the House willing to lay it all on the line to speak up and be counted. The Progressive Republicans are joining with their fellow travelers across the aisle to denounce them, malign their names and attempt to marginalize them. The Corporations Once Known as the Mainstream Media are predictably showing praise on the RINOs for becoming statesmen for attacking the true conservatives while they pile on with vindictive abandon.

It is time to support the cause with our time, talent and treasure. Join with others and work, march, organize. Do whatever you can to accomplish all you can in the cause of freedom. Write, speak, share, and do everything you can to influence everyone you can that freedom isn't free. It is worth saving, and it is time to stand up or be counted out. Give to those organizations and leaders who are in the forefront of the fight.

We will either rise to the occasion or we will sink beneath the waves of oppression as man's greatest experiment in personal freedom, and individual liberty and economic opportunity descends back into the well of human suffering and statist control from which it emerged in 1776.

This is a call to action to be all that we can be now before we morph forever into what someone else has decided we should be. America, it's time to be America again, or watch as our children and grandchildren find themselves in the USSA and never even know there was ever anything else. The flags will still wave, the names will remain the same, but this will no longer be the America we have known.

Keep the faith. Keep the peace. We shall overcome.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion. His books include; 'The Constitution Failed, The Azusa Street Revival, America Won the Vietnam War, and NEVER FORGET!' You can follow Dr. Owens on Twitter and Facebook
Website: http://drrobertowens.com

[Bullwinkle]

      Though I'd rather be in the Rockies and never know what the rest of the world is doing. I'm not ready for that.

       I am , however , ready to repel all boarders.

[Warph]

      Though I'd rather be in the Rockies and never know what the rest of the world is doing. I'm not ready for that.

       I am , however , ready to repel all boarders.

LOL... Well hang on, Obi-Wan and I'll get my blaster and join you...

[Warph]

Who Is Valerie Jarrett & Is She The One That Gave The "Stand Down" Order In Benghazi?

Valerie Jarret is Obama's top advisor and for the most part, that is all the majority of people know about her at all. Now we are going to show you what many have asked, and we will show you just who Valerie Jarrett really is, where she came from, what her alliances are, what her background is, what she thinks and most of all, what type of individual she really is. Once we lay out who she is, we must ask ourselves if Valerie Jarrett is the one that gave the 'stand down' order to those who were in Benghazi to help and rescue Americans under attack as Barack Obama slept.

To begin with, Valerie Jarrett was born in 1956 in Shiraz, Iran, where her father worked as a doctor at a children's hospital. When she was 5, her family moved to London for just 1 year then to the "elite" Hyde Park of Chicago, which was considered to be one of the better neighborhoods. It is also the very same place that Louis Farrakhan, Bill Ayers, and of course Barack Obama lived. However, this is of little concern as to where Valerie Jarrett got her political influence.

According to Discover The Networks:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.com/

A man named, Robert Taylor, was Jarrett's maternal grandfather and her political background could be established with him, but in the 1940′s Communism was frowned upon and Mr. Taylor was involved in such Communist fronts as the American Peace Mobilization and the Chicago Civil Liberties Committee. Now another person whom, was also a member of these groups and was a "mentor" for Barack Obama was the Communist journalist, none other than Frank Marshall Davis. Now here we can show a direct link to Communist influences to both Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett both of who had very close associations with Communist Party members. It was Jarrett's mother Barbara Taylor Bowman who co-founded the Chicago-based graduate school in child development known as the Erikson Institute, which was named after Erik Erikson a notable psychoanalyst. In 1950 Erikson became a hero to the left by choosing to resign from his professorship at the University of California rather than sign an anti-communist loyalty oath as the school required. Indicative of the Erikson Institute's radical political orientation is the fact that its board of trustees has included, in addition to Bowman, such figures as Tom Ayers (father of the former Weather Underground terrorist and lifelong Marxist Bill Ayers) and Bernardine Dohrn (longtime wife of Bill Ayers). Bill Ayers, for his part, called Bowman "a neighbor and friend" in his 1997 book A Kind and Just Parent, noting that his neighbors also included Louis Farrakhan and "writer Barack Obama."

Here we can see the many types of association that may well have influenced Valerie Jarrett. One can also see the influence of Communism, of which her family seemed to be involved. Jarrett's family also had direct links to Frank Marshal Davis, a mentor for Barack Obama who was on the FBI watch list due to his aggressive background in Communism. Her affiliation with Communism did not stop there because it seems that the man she married also had a family deeply rooted in the Communist ideology.

"In 1983 she married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of the Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. Vernon Jarrett was a pioneering black journalist who in the 1940s wrote columns for the communist-influenced Chicago Defender extolling Communist poet Langston Hughes and lifelong Stalinists W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. Also in the 1940s, Mr. Jarrett was a leader of the Chicago chapter of American Youth for Democracy—youth wing of the Communist Party USA. He also served on a publicity committee for the Packinghouse Workers Union, a Chicago-based entity dominated by the CPUSA. In each of these endeavors, Mr. Jarrett had close contact with Frank Marshall Davis."

With all the Communist influence in her background, it could be easily stated that she was a type of "closet" Communist, since she has really not come directly out front and made that statement. However, just like Obama, her background is heavily influenced with Communist type. There are deep-rooted problems with Valerie Jarrett and her family that seem to have some sort of communist ideology, either linked directly to them or they are a part of it. We need only go to Discover the Networks to find the links and her base of thought when it comes to where she may have obtained the ideologies she now seems to be using.

"He freelanced at Kansas City's The Call from 1954-58, then returned to Chicago to become the first nationally syndicated black columnist for the Chicago Tribune, and still later wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times. Mr. Jarrett once sat on a union publicity committee (for the communist-controlled Packinghouse Workers Union) with Frank Marshall Davis, the Communist poet who occasionally counseled the young Barack Obama. When Vernon Jarrett died in 2004, he was saluted in the pages of People's Weekly Worker, the house organ of the Communist Party USA."

Some people have asked just how in the world does Valerie Jarrett hold the ear of a President and just how did she come to that level of status? According to her profile:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2418

"Valerie Jarrett entered Chicago politics in 1987 as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development in the administration of Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor. Jarrett's father-in-law, whom The Washington Post called "a key influence in [Harold] Washington's decision to run for the Chicago mayoralty," may have facilitated Valerie's rise through Chicago's political ranks.

After Washington's death in 1987, Valerie Jarrett worked for his successor, Richard M. Daley, whom she served as Deputy Chief of Staff. In 1991 Jarrett and her colleague Susan Sher recruited to Chicago's City Hall Michelle Robinson (the future Michelle Obama), who at the time was engaged to Barack Obama. Jarrett quickly became a trusted confidante of both the Obamas."

Here we can see that Valerie Jarrett became a close friend and confidant of the Obamas even before they got married. It has to be noted that Valerie Jarrett also had close ties with people that some found to be a bit too much. In particular, we mean one of the strongest Communists to ever be placed into a position by any president. The name of the individual is none other than Van Jones. It was due to the influence of Valerie Jarrett that Van Jones got the job of "Green Jobs Czar". She then gushed about Jones at the Netroots Nation conference saying:

"We were so delighted to be able to recruit him [Van Jones] into the White House. We were watching him...for as long as he's been active out in Oakland. And all the creative ideas he has. And so now, we have captured that, and we have all that energy in the White House."

Valerie Jarrett was also instrumental in obtaining and creating new jobs for Obama's friends, as well as hers. It was early in 2009 when she lobbied Obama to create the office of Chief Diversity Officer within the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a position filled soon thereafter by Mark Lloyd, an Alinskyite and a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress

However, Valerie Jarrett made it clear that only two people could get Barack Obama to do what they wanted him to do and both of those people have deep backgrounds in the Communist party through their families. Valerie Jarrett herself and Michelle Obama, whose parents were also involved with the Communist Party or linked to them, are those two people.

Chicago parking lot entrepreneur Martin Nesbitt claims that Jarrett establishes both Michelle and Barack Obama's "whole notion of authenticity." According to Nesbitt, Jarrett is like a little inner voice that tells them, for instance: "That's not you. You wouldn't say that. Somebody else is saying that. Barack Obama wouldn't say that." Jarrett told Vogue magazine, "I kind of know what makes them [the Obamas] who they are.

But this is only a small part of just how much influence Valerie Jarrett has upon the Obama's and she is very quick to say that. Below are just a few examples of the influence that Valerie Jarrett holds over the Obama's.

"After Obama's inauguration in January 2009, Jarrett successfully pushed to loosen restrictions barring government officials from meeting with lobbyists, a rule enshrined in Obama's executive memo on the Recovery Act, for fear that other "legitimate" concerns – raised by "civil rights organizations whose directors happen to be registered lobbyists – will not be heard."

Jarrett also helped recruit Obama's Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who supports the Fairness Doctrine, has argued that Americans should "celebrate tax day," and believes that animals should have legal standing to sue humans.

In his 2012 book, Leading From Behind, author Richard Miniter reveals that Jarrett, prior to the May 2011 U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, had repeatedly urged President Obama not to take out the al Qaeda leader, prompting Obama to cancel the mission on three separate occasions.

In July 2009, Obama told
New York Times reporter Robert Draper, "I trust her completely ... She is family." Obama trusts Jarrett "to speak for me, particularly when we're dealing with delicate issues." When asked, the President admitted that he runs every decision by her.
"We have kind of a mind meld," Jarrett said of herself and Obama. "And chances are, what he wants to do is what I'd want to do."

In October 2012 it was revealed that for several months, Jarrett, who had no experience in international negotiations, had been leading secret negotiations with representatives of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in an effort to develop normalized relations between the U.S. and Iran.

Now we can see the type of person Valerie Jarrett is and the kind of influence she has upon the Obama's and with some making statements that Valerie Jarrett may have been the person that gave the "Stand Down" order to the people that could have saved the 4 men in Benghazi while Obama went to sleep, or whatever he did. Valerie Jarrett does have that type of power, and knowing her background would make it seem that maybe Obama just does not have an agenda, but follows what Valerie Jarrett tells him to do blindly since he has no other idea.

Should our nation be under this type of 'blind" power, or should we be a nation of "free" people?

[Warph]

Ten Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder

By J. Christian Adams - 2012

Americans have come to view Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. as a symbol of the radicalism and dishonesty of the Obama administration. No wonder: Holder's policies have endangered the security of the nation and undermined the integrity of our elections. He has overseen a deliberate attack on the Second Amendment and has provided Congress with dishonest testimony about it. He has fostered racial division. The damage he has done is profound and all the more dangerous for being virtually ignored by the mainstream media.

Simply put, Eric Holder is a threat to American liberty and security.

He has qualified himself to join Harry M. Daugherty and John Mitchell as the most disgraceful of attorneys general. But even Daugherty's Teapot Dome mischief and Mitchell's stonewalling defense of a felonious president cannot match the injury to the rule of law and American national security that Eric Holder has caused in his brief three years in office. The havoc he has created goes far beyond corruption on any single issue. The damage he has done crosses all components of the Department of Justice, and has trickled down to infect the systems of law and legal jurisprudence throughout the country.

Some have blamed Holder's nightmare record as attorney general on gross incompetence. Charles Krauthammer, for example, called him one of the "most incompetent attorneys general in U.S. history." In fact, however, Holder has known exactly what he wanted to do and has done it. It is his radicalism, not his ineptitude, that has determined his decisions at the Justice Department.

An early warning of Holder's social radicalism could be seen in a 1995 speech, preserved on C‑SPAN, where he advocated "brainwashing" (his word) Americans to make them oppose possession of guns. Evidence of his racial radicalism is a clipping that he claims to have been carrying around in his wallet for decades, containing a quote from Reverend Samuel Proctor: "No matter how affluent, educated and mobile [a black person] becomes, his race defines him more particularly than anything else. Black people have a common cause that requires attending to." Holder once explained why these words were so dear to him: "It really says that ... I am not the tall U.S. attorney, I am not the thin United States attorney. I am the black United States attorney. And he [Proctor] was saying that no matter how successful you are, there's a common cause that bonds the black United States attorney with the black criminal or the black doctor with the black homeless person." Holder did not indicate whether or when this common cause should trump a commitment to colorblind justice, but his actions have supplied the answer.

While other agencies, such as the EPA or the Department of Labor, may flex enormous power, it is ultimately the Justice Department that sets legal policy and decides what other agencies may do or not do. As attorney general, Holder has been the battering ram for the "fundamental transformation of America" that Barack Obama has been promising since he was inaugurated. Holder's radicalism and particularly the radicalism of his political appointees and career civil service attorney hires have been the agents of change in the Obama administration. And as other aspects of the president's agenda have become mired in "politics as usual," the Justice Department has continued, day by day and case by case, to pursue Holder's mission to make this country into a different place.

The media may have ignored this story, but those who see the radicalization of Justice up close have expressed deep concern. Even moderate, usually reserved members of Congress have threatened Holder with impeachment. Representative James Sensenbrenner, for instance, hardly a bomb thrower, told The Hill that Holder's impeachment might be the only recourse in the face of stubborn stonewalling of congressional inquiries. And silent contempt of Congress is the least of the attorney general's sins.
Impeachment isn't something to be lightly pursued. It is a congressional power best left to gather dust, except when there is evidence of extreme lawlessness and dishonesty that endanger the Constitution. But Eric Holder has done more than mislead the American people; he has done more than provide false testimony to Congress. He has tried to transform the federal agency intended to be above politics into an institution advocating radical change and extreme remedies.

Here are Ten Reasons Why Eric Holder Should Be Impeached:

http://frontpagemag.com/upload/pamphlets/Holder.pdf

[Warph]

***Seven More Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder***

August 6, 2013 By J. Christian Adams

Power is never vested in just one man. Even the powers of the man in the Oval Office depend on internal checks and balances. A president alone cannot violate the law. His cabinet has to aid him in that task. The man who stands at Obama's side, the man who aids and abets his lawbreaking more than any other, is Attorney General Eric Holder.

Holder is the man who is truly accountable for Obama's lawlessness because it is his responsibility to hold Obama accountable. Instead Holder has descended into entirely new areas of lawnessness. Instead of acting to enforce the law, he has become the enemy of the law.

Over a year ago, I penned Ten Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder.  In that David Horowitz Freedom Center pamphlet, I documented how Attorney General Eric Holder has corroded the rule of law, abused power and deserved to be impeached.  Since the publication of the pamphlet, Holder has provided multiple new reasons why he is unfit to serve as Attorney General.

Instead of moderating, instead of adopting a more centrist approach after the publication of that pamphlet in Spring 2012, Holder has radicalized even further.

This should be unsurprising to anyone who has followed Holder's career.  Holder is driven by a radical progressive view of the law, and by contempt for conservatives.  He is hostile to the rule of law, at least as traditionally understood by Americans.

Holder once said to a gathering of the American Constitution Society the "nation must be convinced that it is a progressive future that holds the greatest promise for equality and the continuation of those policies that serve to support the greatest number of our people."  Progressivism, with all of its bending of the plain meaning of words, of ends justifying means and its hostility toward constitutional restraints on the power of government, enchants our Attorney Gneral.

Projecting, he also said conservatives "have made a mockery of the rule of law."

But Holder's record demonstrates it is he who has made a mockery out of the rule of law.  His tenure at the Justice Department overflows with abuse of power, appeals to racial division, and disregard of the constitutional balance of powers.

Seven More Reasons to Impeach Eric Holder

No.#1 - Taking Sides in George Zimmerman Trial and Federal Threats

Soon after George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin in Florida on February 26, 2012, Eric Holder took the side of the racial mob calling for vengeance for Trayvon Martin.  After the shooting, the racialist anti-Semite head of the New Black Panther Party – Malik Zulu Shabazz – and a gang of uniformed New Black Panther Party members, were calling for the seizure of George Zimmerman.  Just after the black panther rallies, Rev. Al Sharpton travelled to Florida to agitate for George Zimmerman's arrest.

Eric Holder's Justice Department did not stand silently by.  Instead, they devoted time and resources to aid the racial mob, including the New Black Panther Party.

A little known component of the Justice Department, the Community Relations Service, or "CRS," travelled to Florida and helped the protesters.  For example, CRS helped to facilitate a police escort for college students to travel forty miles to participate in a rally seeking the arrest of George Zimmerman.

DOJ documents reveal thousands of dollars in travel costs and manpower devoted to helping the mob seeking the seizure of George Zimmerman off the street.  The New Black Panther Party produced wanted posters for Zimmerman and offered an award for his illegal seizure.  One member of the New Black Panthers said the bounty would be paid if Zimmerman were seized, "dead or alive."

DOJ officials met privately with protesters and gave them advice how to conduct their protests.  Other components of Holder's Justice Department met with the Sanford police and elected officials and strongly "suggested" that the city take a second look at charging Zimmerman.

The DOJ Community Relations Service is supposed to act as a neutral party to provide a buffer during heated disputes.  They aren't supposed to take sides.  But a black teenager was dead, and the shooter was a "white-Hispanic," according to NBC News, and therefore Holder took sides.

The rest is history.  Because of DOJ and New Black Panther pressure, that "second look" by law enforcement officials led to the prosecution of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin.  Even Al Sharpton admitted to Tom Joyner that everyone knew the case lacked merit. But in the age of Holder and Obama, the law isn't used like it once was.  The law is no longer the great leveler.  Instead, it is a weapon for those in power to satisfy the demands of their racially inflamed faction, to prosecute a man who exercised self-defense against a bloody and unwarranted physical attack.  The law, to Holder, is a means to punish those on the wrong side of the racial divide, a divide Holder has helped to create.

Holder erased any doubt about his racial radicalism soon after the jury acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges.  Holder appeared before a number of racially homogeneous audiences, including the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta, and announced that the Justice Department would consider civil rights charges against George Zimmerman.  Never mind that the Federal Bureau of Investigation already concluded that Zimmerman did not act with any racial animus toward Trayvon, an necessary element under the federal law.

But law doesn't matter to Holder the same way it matters to the rest of us.  Law is what once protected us from people like Holder.  But to Holder, law is a nuisance to be cast aside when he seeks applause from the all-black sorority audience at the Delta Sigma Theta convention.  Gaining approval from, and fostering excitement in, a racial faction is more important to this attorney general than whether an American should face down the federal government because he is a disfavored "white-Hispanic" to that racial faction.

No.#2 - Failure to Indict Black Panthers

Holder's involvement in the Zimmerman matter was not confined to the outrageous meddling by the DOJ, as we have seen.  Holder also failed to act against crimes in Florida possibly committed by the racial mob demanding action against Zimmerman.

Holder announced to the loud applause of the Delta Sigma Theta convention that his DOJ may charge George Zimmerman with federal civil rights charges.  As usual, Holder has given the New Black Panther Party a pass on the same civil rights laws.

When the New Black Panther Party conspired to have George Zimmerman seized off the streets, dead or alive, they likely violated the exact same law under which Holder may yet charge Zimmerman.  Section 245 of Title 18 protects people from being attacked or seized off the streets in part because of their race.  And the Panthers made no secret of their racial hostility toward Zimmerman.  Section 249 of Title 18, another civil rights law Holder will use to investigate Zimmerman, prohibits conspiracies to harm someone with a racial animus.

These federal civil rights laws could be used against the New Black Panther Party for actions they took during the mob protests in Florida even easier than they can be used against George Zimmerman.

But will Attorney General Holder announce the opening of an investigation against Malik Zulu Shabazz and his anti-Semites in the New Black Panther Party? Of course not, because we know well Holder's reluctance to enforce the law against them.

No.#3 - Contempt of Congress

Eric Holder has demonstrated contempt for the rule of law, but also contempt for Congress.  Holder's contempt for the legitimate constitutional oversight authority of the Congress is so extreme, that the House of Representatives voted to find him in contempt of Congress on June 28, 2012. Even House Democrats voted to find Holder in contempt of Congress.

After the vote, House Speaker John Boehner said, "But no Justice Department is above the law and no Justice Department is above the Constitution, which each of us has sworn to uphold."

Unfortunately, Holder's Justice Department behaves as if it is above the law, and appears to show no loyalty to the Constitution, oath or no oath to uphold it.

The contempt vote by the House was preceded by many months of attempting to obtain documents to find out the truth about the Fast and Furious gunrunning program concocted and managed by Holder's Justice Department.   In Fast and Furious, the Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms allowed guns to be purchased in the United States for ultimate transportation into Mexico by drug cartels.  In Mexico, these guns were used to kill hundreds of Mexicans, and were also found where U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered.

While the DOJ was allowing guns to flow into Mexico, President Obama was complaining that American guns were killing Mexicans, and advocated for restrictions on the Second Amendment.  Naturally, Obama never bothered to tell anyone that Holder's own Justice Department was responsible for the flow of weapons.

When the House Oversight Committee sought to obtain Justice Department documents about who developed this bloody scheme, Holder obstructed Congress.  The historic contempt finding against Holder formalizes what many Front Page readers have long known about the Attorney General of the United States: that he holds in low regard American traditions, norms and institutions.

No.#4 - Failure to Prosecute IRS Officials

Attorney General Holder has failed to prosecute a single IRS official that feloniously leaked private tax information of Tea Party and conservative groups to the media.  IRS officials have been shown to not only improperly have targeted conservative groups for heightened scrutiny for IRS 501(c)(3) tax exemption applications, but to have actually leaked the information contained in those applications to the political enemies of the applicants.

Consider IRS official Cindy Thomas.  Thomas is the manager of exempt organizations at the IRS office in Cincinnati.  Thomas illegally released the tax applications of nine conservative groups to the left-wing website ProPublica, an organization that includes President Obama's old friend, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates.

Other leaks included information leaks against pro-marriage groups to radical gay-marriage groups.  Information contained in the IRS 501(c)(3) applications ended up in the hands of radical groups dedicated to defeating the pro-marriage groups.

These actions by IRS officials are federal felonies.  Holder has an obligation to have them investigated and charged, but instead has done nothing.  The victims of IRS abuse haven't even been interviewed by the FBI.  FBI Director Robert Muller was completely unaware of the status of any DOJ investigation in testimony before Congress.  He couldn't even name who was investigating the matter.

Moreover, prosecution of IRS leakers would be a simple matter.  Leaking information constitutes the crime.  It doesn't not require the complicated burden of proving racial animus, as any federal prosecution of George Zimmerman would entail

Simply, for charges not to have been filed against an IRS official by now means Holder doesn't seem to care much about the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

No.#5 - DOJ Vendetta Against Fox News and James Rosen

Eric Holder authorized a criminal investigation against James Rosen of Fox News.  This provides an example where progressives often engage in projection.  During the Nixon years, the left would claim Nixon had a vendetta against certain reporters and used law enforcement against them.  We find the fulfillment of that plot in the age of Obama and Holder through the DOJ actions against Fox News.

James Rosen had reported on various national security issues.  These revelations angered the White House and the Justice Department launched a criminal investigation in response to the reports.  They sought to discover the sources behind Rosen's reporting.

Under DOJ guidelines, the Attorney General must personally approve any subpoenas of news reporters.  When I was at the Justice Department, I sought and obtained the personal approval of the Attorney General in a matter I was investigating.  But before a subpoena can issue against a reporter, DOJ rules require a number of steps.

First, the DOJ must seek the information through less restrictive means.  So if it could identify the leaker without subpoenaing the papers of James Rosen, DOJ rules required them to do so. Second, the DOJ is supposed to try to work out an arrangement with the news organization.  But the Justice Department kept the investigation of Fox News secret, and so therefore never tried to "work out" any resolution.

Eric Holder was supposed to sign off on any press subpoena under DOJ guidelines.  This requirement ensures accountability and protects Americans from an out of control administrative state that can seek press subpoenas as a routine matter.  Yet Holder delegated this authority in the Rosen matter to a deputy.  He said, without a trace of irony, that the reason he did so is because the investigation also included interviews to determine if Holder himself was the source of the leak!

But merely authorizing criminal investigations against Fox News reporter James Rosen wasn't the worst thing Eric Holder's Justice Department would do in the saga.  The worst was yet to come.

No.#6 - Perjury Before Congress on Rosen Investigation

Eric Holder also lied before Congress about the Rosen matter.  On May 15, 2013, Holder was asked if he knew anything about investigations of reporters by his DOJ.

"With regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material, that is not something that I have ever been involved, heard of, or would think would be a wise policy," Holder said.

When Holder gave this testimony, he was "involved" in and "heard of" potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material.   Holder knew about various investigations of journalists and was involved in them.  His under-oath testimony before Congress was demonstrably false and misleading.  The House Judiciary Committee would issue a report reaching the same conclusion.

Eric Holder cannot be trusted to tell the truth, even when under oath and when the entire nation is watching him.

No.#7 - Manipulation of 2012 Elections and Opposition to Election Integrity

The gravest and most long lasting damage that Eric Holder has done to the nation is his manipulation of the electoral process, particularly before the 2012 presidential election.

Eric Holder allowed that election to take place with over 4,000,000 ineligible voters on the rolls.  The left-leaning Pew Foundation issued a report showing that voter rolls around the country were polluted with dead and ineligible voters.  Holder is obliged to enforce federal laws which require states to remove these ineligible voters from the rolls before a federal election.

Instead, Holder has a philosophical objection to these laws and he refuses to enforce them.  Failure to remove ineligible voters allows people to vote multiple times in multiple states.  It allows dead voters to remain on the rolls to be voted by family members or others who know they have died.  Felons who have not been removed from the rolls will also be allowed to cast illegal ballots.  Since Holder alone has power to prosecute federal election crimes, we cannot count on him to do anything about voter fraud in federal elections.

Consider Meloweese Richardson in Cincinnati, Ohio.  Richardson admitted on camera to news reporters that she voted multiple times for President Obama in 2012 and 2008.  She voted in the names of people who spent time at her house as well as family members.  She was unapologetic.

Voting twice for president is a federal crime.

Yet, to this day, Eric Holder has not prosecuted Richardson for violation of federal law.  After all, she voted for the President, and some people get breaks from this Attorney General, and others get threats.  It all depends on who you are or what you look like, not how you behaved.  It is true that Ohio brought charges against Richardson. But there are federal issues at stake separate from the state concerns.

The arrogance of Melowese Richardson is a symbol of what a nation with Attorney General Eric Holder will produce. Her brash unrepentant arrogance for voting six times for President Obama sounds like Eric Holder's unrepentant testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Fast and Furious.

Like Richardson, even after Holder is found to be contemptuous of the law, there are no apologies.  At her sentencing, Richardson blustered that she did it all for her beloved President out of a deep allegiance.  Holder acts contemptuously toward Congress and the rule of law for the same reason.  It is all about power, power for President Obama and his revolutionary transformation of America.

Meloweese Richardson didn't care if the law was perverted as long as President Obama held power – and neither does Holder.  If IRS officials committed federal crimes to target Tea Party groups, so be it.  They are the enemies of the progressive President and deserve a pass.  If the New Black Panthers violated federal civil rights laws, so be it.  They were fighting to stoke racial tensions and threaten an innocent man because of his race.  If Holder's DOJ intimidates Fox News, so be it.  Fox News provides the most objective coverage of the Obama administration and deserve the pain.

Eric Holder is the Ivy League schooled lawyer representing the hopes and dreams of the progressive mob and race hustlers.  He displays the same contempt for the law as does the mob calling for racial vengeance. He is skilled at using power and position to protect political friends and harm political enemies.  Holder's version of justice is foreign to these American shores, and to our American age.



Eric Holder is a menace to the rule of law and the individual liberty it protects.  He should not only be run out of his office, but hounded forever by liberty-loving Americans exposing his behavior until he is bereft of clients after he leaves the Justice Department.

[Warph]

19 Illegal Immigration Facts You'll Never Read in Legacy Media

by Michael Snyder
Saturday, August 10, 2013

Should we roll out the red carpet and allow millions upon millions of thieves, rapists, gang members and drug dealers to come waltzing into this country any time they would like? Should we broadcast a message to the rest of the world that anyone that can find a way to enter this country and somehow get to a "sanctuary city" can sign up for a plethora of welfare benefits and live a life of leisure at the expense of hard working American citizens?

Yes, those questions sound absurd, but what I have just described will essentially be official U.S. government policy if the immigration bill going through Congress becomes law. And unfortunately, Democrats now say that they have the Republican votes that they need to get "immigration reform" through the House of Representatives. If this amnesty bill becomes law, it will encourage even more illegal immigration and it will be one more step toward making the U.S. border essentially meaningless.

Right now, we desperately need the American people to contact their representatives in Congress and demand that they vote against this bill. Sadly, this is not likely to happen because most Americans have absolutely no idea how negatively illegal immigration is affecting this nation.

The following are 19 very disturbing facts about illegal immigration that every American should know...

#1 57 percent of all households that are led by an immigrant (legal or illegal) are enrolled in at least one welfare program.

#2 According to one study, the cost to U.S. taxpayers of legalizing current illegal immigrants would be approximately 6.3 trillion dollars over the next 50 years.

#3 The Obama administration has distributed flyers that tell illegal immigrants that their immigration status will not be checked when they apply for food stamps.

#4 The Department of Homeland Security says that it has lost track of a million people that have entered this country but that appear never to have left.

#5 One out of every five children living in Los Angeles County has a parent that is in the country illegally.

#6 In one recent year, taxpayers in Los Angeles County spent 600 million dollars on welfare for children of illegal immigrants.

#7 Thanks to illegal immigration, California's overstretched health care system is on the verge of collapse. Dozens of California hospitals and emergency rooms have shut down over the past decade because they could not afford to stay open after being endlessly swamped by illegal immigrants who were simply not able to pay for the services that they were receiving. As a result, the remainder of the health care system in the state of California is now beyond overloaded. This had led to brutally long waits, diverted ambulances and even unnecessary patient deaths. At this point, the state of California now ranks dead last out of all 50 states in the number of emergency rooms per million people.

#8 It has been estimated that U.S. taxpayers spend $12,000,000,000 a year on primary and secondary school education for the children of illegal immigrants.

#9 It is estimated that illegal aliens make up approximately 30 percent of the population in federal, state and local prisons and that the total cost of incarcerating them is more than $1.6 billion annually.

#10 The federal government actually has a website that teaches immigrants how to sign up for welfare programs once they arrive in the United States.

#11 The Obama administration recently introduced the very first "unmanned" border station along the Texas-Mexico border.

#12 The Obama administration has sued individual states such as Arizona that have tried to crack down on illegal immigration.

#13 According to the FBI, there are approximately 1.4 million gang members living in our cities. Illegal immigration has been one of the primary factors that has fueled the growth of these gangs.

#14 As I have written about previously, there are only about 200 police officers assigned to Chicago's Gang Enforcement Unit to handle the estimated 100,000 gang members living in the city.

#15 Mexican drug cartels make approximately 6.6 billion dollars a year "exporting" illegal drugs to the United States.

#16 It is an open secret that Mexican drug cartels are openly conducting military operations inside the United States. The handful of border patrol agents that we have guarding the border are massively outgunned and outmanned.

#17 According to the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels were actively operating in 50 different U.S. cities in 2006. By 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 1,286.

#18 Overall, more than 55,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico since 2006. That same level of violence will eventually show up in major U.S. cities unless something dramatic is done about illegal immigration.

#19 It is being projected that the Senate immigration bill will bring 33 million more people to the United States over the next decade.


One of the very few things that the federal government is actually required to do by the U.S. Constitution is to defend our borders, and unfortunately the Obama administration has willingly chosen to leave our borders completely wide open. In fact, you can go down to the Texas border right now and watch illegal immigrants hop right across the Rio Grande.

Several retired Border Patrol agents recently drafted an open letter to the American people on the subject of illegal immigration, and what they had to say was quite startling. The following is an excerpt from that letter that was in a recent Breitbart article...

"Transnational criminal enterprises have annually invested millions of dollars to create and staff international drug and human smuggling networks inside the United States; thus it is no surprise that they continue to accelerate their efforts to get trusted representatives in place as a means to guarantee continued success," the Border Patrol agents wrote.

"We must never lose sight of the fact that the United States is the market place for the bulk of transnational criminal businesses engaged in human trafficking and the smuggling, distribution and sale of illegal drugs. Organized crime on this scale we are speaking about cannot exist without political protection."

According to those retired border agents, by refusing to secure our border the Obama administration is openly facilitating the trafficking of drugs into the United States...

"Most heroin, cocaine, meth, and marijuana marketed in the United States is produced outside of our country, and then smuggled into the United States," they wrote. "The placement of trusted foreign employees inside the United States is imperative to insure success in continuing to supply the demand, and returning the profits to the foreign organization. Members of these vicious transnational crime syndicates are already well established in more than 2,000 American cities and their numbers are increasing as networks expand and demands accelerate. These transnational criminals present a real and present danger to all Americans, and they live among us."

Sadly, in politically correct America you can't even talk about the problem of illegal immigration these days without being labeled as a "racist".


For the record, I believe that all people deserve love and respect no matter what they look like or where they are born. God created us all and He loves us all very much. I have long been a very strong advocate for racial reconciliation in this country, and I will continue to be.

And there are tens of millions of Latino-Americans in this country that are hard working, law-abiding citizens. They have done things the right way, and it is extremely unfortunate that they often get lumped in with millions of illegal immigrants that willingly choose to break our laws.

Unfortunately, we have a system of immigration today that greatly rewards lawless behavior. We have made coming into this country through the front door exceedingly difficult, but we have left the back door completely wide open.

So hard working, law-abiding people that want to do things the right way are kept out, but those that want to come here and commit crimes or abuse the system are free to come on over any time that they would like.

What sense does that make?

Our immigration system is completely broken, but these days we cannot even have a rational debate about these issues. In politically correct America, illegal immigrants have become a "favored class" of people that you are never supposed to say anything bad about.

In fact, one activist recently went out and actually got people to sign a petition that said that we should let illegal immigrants out of prison no matter what crimes they have committed...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjEh0QfM-WE

What in the world is happening to this country?

[Warph]

The Name Of Jesus Has Become A Dirty Word In Politically Correct America

By Michael Snyder, on July 25th, 2013

In the United States today, there are very few words that provoke as much outrage as the name of Jesus.  It is being banned from graduation ceremonies, chaplains all over America are being forbidden from using His name in their prayers, and many school officials all over the nation have become absolutely fanatical about eliminating every trace of Christian expression from their schools.  One elementary school in North Carolina even ordered a little six-year-old girl to remove the word "God" from a poem that she had written to honor her grandfathers.  Political correctness is spreading like a cancer in this country, and our "freedom of religion" is rapidly being transformed into a guarantee of "freedom from religion" for those that hate the Christian faith.

Without a doubt, there is a war on the Christian faith in America today.  It is being waged in classrooms, courtrooms and churches all over the nation.

The following is an excerpt from a speech that Rand Paul gave earlier this year...

There is a war on Christianity, not just from liberal elites here at home, but worldwide.

And your government, or more correctly, you, the taxpayer, are funding it.

Evidence of this war on Christianity is everywhere these days.  The following are just a few examples...

-An elementary school in North Carolina ordered a little six-year-old girl to remove the word "God" from a poem that she wrote to honor her two grandfathers that had served in the Vietnam War.

-The Ohio Statehouse banned Christian pastors from using the name of Jesus when they open up the daily sessions with prayer.

-The use of the name of Jesus was also forbidden in all prayers opening sessions of the North Carolina State-House.

-Last year, a federal appeals court ruled that prayers before commission meetings in Forsyth County, North Carolina that included the name of Jesus were unconstitutional.

-Earlier this year, a Florida Atlantic University student that refused to stomp on the name of Jesus was banned from class.

-A student at Sonoma State University was ordered to take off a cross that she was wearing because someone "could be offended".

-A teacher in New Jersey was fired for giving his own Bible to a student that did not own one.

-An open air preacher in Illinois was recently threatened with arrest for "scaring people" with the message of the gospel.

-A high school track team was disqualified earlier this year because one of the runners "made a gesture thanking God" once he had crossed the finish line.

-Volunteer chaplains for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department have been banned from using the name of Jesus in their public prayers.  Sadly, this is not an isolated incident.  Chaplains all over the nation are now being banned from using the name of Jesus.

-In recent months, daredevil Nik Wallenda has walked a tightrope across Niagara Falls and has walked a tightrope across the Grand Canyon, and yet both times the mainstream media has gone out of the way to keep the name of Jesus out of news reports...

Despite Nik Wallenda's frequent mentions of God the Father and Jesus during his high-wire crossing of Niagara Falls Friday night, an ABC News blog documenting virtually every moment of the achievement makes no mention of his verbal thanks to the Creator.

Wallenda, 33, the great grandson of legendary tightrope walker Karl Wallenda, walked across Niagara Falls on a high wire, as hundreds watched on TV at a block party in his Florida hometown of Sarasota, Fla., and millions of others tuned in for ABC television coverage.

Wallenda was fitted with a microphone during his tension-filled, 25-minute saunter at 200 feet high, and he could be heard praising God numerous times as he walked the length of four football fields from New York to Canada.
A recently released 140 page report entitled "The Survey of Religious Hostility in America" included some more examples of how Christianity is being systematically oppressed in America today...

•A federal judge threatened 'incarceration' to a high school valedictorian unless she removed references to Jesus from her graduation speech.
•City officials prohibited senior citizens from praying over their meals, listening to religious messages or singing gospel songs at a senior activities center.
•A public school official prevented a student from handing out flyers inviting her classmates to an event at her church.
•A public university's law school banned a Christian organization because it required its officers to adhere to a statement of faith that the university disagreed with.
•The U.S. Department of Justice argued before the Supreme Court that the federal government can tell churches and synagogues which pastors and rabbis it can hire and fire.
•The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs banned the mention of God from veterans' funerals, overriding the wishes of the deceased's families.
•A federal judge held that prayers before a state House of Representatives could be to Allah but not to Jesus.
Are you starting to get the picture?

And one of the biggest battlegrounds for religious freedom in America at the moment is the U.S. military.

Right now, there are some very powerful forces that are trying to eradicate all expressions of the Christian faith from the U.S. military.  It has gotten so bad that a 23 year Air Force veteran was recently ordered to remove his Bible from his desk, and the Air Force recently came out and announced that service members are only allowed to talk about their faith if it "does not make others uncomfortable".

The U.S. military is a far different institution than it once was.  Today, political correctness rules the U.S. military.

If you doubt this, just check out this example...

Lt. Col. Kenneth Reyes is a Christian chaplain currently serving in the U.S. Air Force. He is stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. As an ordained clergyman whose duties are to provide religious instruction and spiritual counseling, he has a page on the base's website called "Chaplain's Corner."

Reyes recently wrote an essay entitled, "No Atheists in Foxholes: Chaplains Gave All in World War II." This common saying is attributed to a Catholic priest in World War II, made famous when President Dwight D. Eisenhower said during a 1954 speech: "I am delighted that our veterans are sponsoring a movement to increase our awareness of God in our daily lives. In battle, they learned a great truth that there are no atheists in the foxholes."

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation was absolutely outraged when they heard about this.  They demanded that the commander of the base, Col. Brian Duffy, do something about the "anti-secular diatribe" that Reyes had authored.

In the old days, a base commander would have had a good chuckle and then would have told the MRFF where to stick their complaint, but the old days are gone.

These days, base commanders cower subserviently before politically correct organizations such as the MRFF.  Just check out what happened next...

Nonetheless, only five hours after MRFF's complaint, the essay was removed from the website. Duffy has profusely apologized to MRFF for not stopping this religious leader from sharing religious thoughts.

But this response—which again appears to be a violation of Reyes's First Amendment rights—is insufficient for MRFF. They said, "Faith based hate, is hate all the same," and, "Lt. Col. Reyes must be appropriately punished." (Emphasis added).

And thanks to the MRFF, special edition Bibles for service members have been banned from being sold on military bases...

Bowing to a complaint from a religious watchdog group, the Pentagon will no longer give consent for a publisher to use the official emblems of the military services on a line of Bibles sold on base exchanges.

The group claimed victory, but an association of former military chaplains is demanding that Congress overturn the Defense Department's decision.

The Bibles, branded for each of four services as "The Soldier's Bible," "The Sailor's Bible" and so on, are published by LifeWay Christian Resources' Holman Bible Publishers, a subsidiary of the Southern Baptist Bible Convention, said Chris Rodda, the senior research director for the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

The MRFF is a very insidious organization.  It is headed up by a man named Mikey Weinstein.  He has called Christians "human monsters" and "enemies of the United States Constitution".  Weinstein is convinced that sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ while in the military is "sedition and treason" and should be punished as such.

You would think that people like Weinstein would be dismissed as lunatics, but unfortunately under the Obama administration he has been brought in as a special adviser to the Pentagon.

What a crazy world that we live in.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama himself has remained completely silent as a totally innocent American citizen is being tortured in an Iranian prison.  If that prisoner was a liberal activist, Obama would be moving heaven and earth to get him released.  But because he is a Christian, we haven't heard a peep out of Obama, and many Christian leaders want an explanation...

One of the nation's most prominent evangelical leaders wants to know why President Obama has remained silent as Iran tortures an American pastor held captive in one of the Islamic republic's most notorious prisons.

Franklin Graham, the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan's Purse, told Fox News the imprisonment and torture of Pastor Saeed Abedini is a blatant example of "religious intolerance."

"Many in the international community are expressing outrage over this blatant example of religious intolerance," Graham said. "I ask that our government do the same and demand that Pastor Saeed Abedini be released and allowed to return home to his wife and family in the United States."

We are rapidly moving toward a time when followers of Jesus will be treated as second class citizens in America.  The following are some other examples of this trend...

•A War Games scenario at Fort Leavenworth that identified Christian groups and Evangelical groups as being potential threats;
•A 2009 Dept. of Homeland Security memorandum that identified future threats to national security coming from Evangelicals and pro-life groups;
•A West Point study released by the U.S. Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center that linked pro-lifers to terrorism;
•Evangelical leader Franklin Graham was uninvited from the Pentagon's National Day of Prayer service because of his comments about Islam;
•Christian prayers were banned at the funeral services for veterans at Houston's National Cemetery;
•Bibles were banned at Walter Reed Army Medical Center – a decision that was later rescinded;
•Christian crosses and a steeple were removed from a chapel in Afghanistan because the military said the icons disrespected other religions

This is not what America is supposed to be about.

How quickly we have turned our backs on the values of our founders.

In a recent article, Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin tried to remind us of how far we have drifted from what our founders intended...

It's a good thing that George Washington is dead and military history effectively banished from our campuses. Otherwise, we might remember the general order Washington issued upon taking command of the embattled Continental Army–and in Boston, no less. The general "requires and expects of all officers and soldiers a punctual attendance at Divine services, to implore the blessing of Heaven upon the means used for our safety and defense." In the same way, any assistant professor of government hoping to achieve tenure will likely skim over certain sections of the first president's Farewell Address, which reads: "Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports."

Will America be able to stand if we continue to try to push every shred of the Christian faith out of public life?

[Warph]

More on Valerie Jarrett:

Obama's keeper: Valerie Jarrett -  You may not recognize her face, or her name.  Yet Valerie Jarrett is arguably the most powerful person in the White House apart from the President.

by Robert Draper

On 25 January 2008, the day before the South Carolina Democratic primary, Barack Obama endured a gruelling succession of campaign events across the state. When his staff informed him the evening would conclude with a brief show-up at the Pink Ice Ball, a gala for the African-American sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha, Obama flatly refused to attend. "We're not gonna change anybody's mind," he said.

Rick Wade, a senior adviser, Stacey Brayboy, the state campaign manager, and Anton Gunn, the state political director, took turns to beseech their boss. The gala, they told Obama, would be attended by more than 2,000 college-educated African-American women, a constituent group that was originally sceptical of the candidate's "blackness". They would be in and out in five minutes. Obama's irritation grew. "Man, it's late, I'm tired," he snapped. The three knew what their only option was at this point. "If you want him to do something," Gunn would later tell me, "there are two people he's not going to say no to: Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama."

At the day's penultimate event, a rally in Columbia, Gunn, Brayboy and Wade pleaded their case to Jarrett, the Obamas' long-time friend and consigliere. Jarrett informed Michelle of the situation and when the candidate stepped offstage from the rally, Obama's wife told him he had one last stop to make before they called it a night.

"I told Anton I'm not going to any Pink Ice Ball!" Obama barked. Then Jarrett glided over to the fuming candidate. Her voice was very quiet and very direct.

"Barack," she insisted, "you want to win, don't you?"

Scowling, Obama affirmed that he did.

"Well then. You need to go to Pink Ice."

"And he shuts up," Gunn recalls, "and gets on the bus."

Among the narrative threads that are weaved, almost uninterrupted, throughout the history of the American presidency, is the inevitable presence in the White House of The One Who Gets the Boss. Karen Hughes got George W Bush. Bruce Lindsey got Bill Clinton. And so on, back to Thomas Jefferson's lifelong reliance on the counsel of James Madison.

Valerie Jarrett is a Washington outsider with a Washingtonian's mind-deadening job title: senior adviser and assistant to the President for intergovernmental affairs and public engagement. Roughly translated, she is Obama's intermediary to the outside world. But the 52-year-old Jarrett is also the President's closest friend in the White House, and it is not lost on her colleagues that when senior staff meetings in the Oval Office break up, she often stays behind with the boss.

Over a four-month period of reporting, I struggled to understand Jarrett's ineffable raison d'être in the Obama White House. Perhaps proving that nothing succeeds like failure, my plaintive queries were unexpectedly rewarded one afternoon by a telephone call from the President himself.

"Well, Valerie is one of my oldest friends," Obama began. "Over time, I think our relationship evolved to the point where she's like a sibling to me ... I trust her completely." As his surrogate, Jarrett is trusted "to speak for me, particularly when we're dealing with delicate issues".

After our conversation, I began to reflect on Jarrett's portfolio. Broadly speaking, it consists of "outreach" – endless meetings, conferences and speeches. She functions as Obama's de facto conduit to the business community. Among the President's economic team, only Jarrett, the former president of a Chicago real estate development firm, has actually run a multimillion-dollar business. Her street cred with the private sector is an obvious asset to a president confronting a major recession.

Jarrett also serves as the White House's unofficial champion of minority issues. This may seem superfluous, given that a black man inhabits the Oval Office – until it's noted that Obama's inner circle consists largely of white males, same as it ever was.

Jarrett's shared experience with Obama is about race – and on a deeper level, about the coexistence, in the post-King African-American psyche, of conscience and ambition, activism and accommodation. Their identity rests on that fulcrum; it is, as Barack Obama would say, who they are.

Authenticity has a lot to do with place, of course. The Obamas and Valerie Jarrett experienced first-hand the hard-won progress of a Chicago beset with racial and class divisions during the administrations of Harold Washington, who was the city's first black mayor, and Richard M Daley. "There was a certain sense we all shared that people can change, communities can change, cities can change," Jarrett said when I asked her to talk about what Chicago means to her and the Obamas.

Still, she told me, what Chicago provided Obama with most of all was family – beginning, of course, with Michelle Robinson. "My guess is that Michelle's childhood was his idea of perfection," Jarrett said. "It allowed him to anchor himself with her and with her family. To me, that's the most special thing about Chicago for him." It didn't take long for Jarrett to become part of Obama's patchwork family. As Daley's deputy chief of staff, Jarrett was already one of the city's power brokers in 1991 when her friend and co-worker, Susan Sher, suggested that she take a look at the resumé of a promising young African-American lawyer named Michelle Robinson. The applicant made an impression on Jarrett and vice versa.

In less than a year, Michelle's fiancé began to confide in Valerie Jarrett. He showed her pages from a book he was writing. That book, Dreams From My Father, explored Barack Obama's inner struggle. "He talked about how hard it was – things he hadn't dealt with yet," she recalled. "'It isn't just a matter of writing a simple story,' I told him. 'You've got to deal with the fact that your father left you at a very young age. And you lived in a variety of different settings at an age where it could've been discombobulating. Your grandparents are white and you look black. Your friends in Hawaii all are different-looking and that's great – but you come to the mainland, and things are much more black and white, literally.'"

[...]

Jarrett was born of African-American parents in Shiraz, Iran, where her physician father was running a hospital as part of an American aid programme. Obama's fabled "exoticism" was therefore comprehensible to her, the President told me. "She and I both are constantly looking for links and bridges between cultures and peoples," he said.

Obama, as his memoir would reveal, sought connection to the heroes of the civil rights movement. Jarrett's struggle had been of a different sort: how to measure up to the role models that filled her life. Her father, Dr James Bowman, was an eminent pathologist. Equally influential was her mother, Barbara, a childhood-development expert.

The fast track laid out for Valerie Bowman – a Massachusetts boarding school, then Stanford, then a law degree at Michigan, then marriage and work at a corporate law firm – was one she pursued with neither resistance nor zeal, "kind of like an automaton", she told me.

Eventually she quit both her marriage and her job, and in 1987, as the mother of a two- year-old daughter, she went to work for Mayor Washington's corporation counsel, Chicago's chief legal officer handling civil claims.

Over the next 15 years, her upward trajectory would outpace even Obama's. Jarrett's unhappy years as a real estate lawyer now paid off in a city law department responsible for maintaining Chicago's business base. Washington died of a heart attack in 1987, but her work ethic and supple intelligence distinguished Jarrett in the eyes of Richard M Daley, who took office two years later. The new mayor promoted her to deputy chief of staff – and later to the post of planning commissioner, thereby baptising Jarrett in the racially-charged torrent of urban affairs.

From 1991 until 1995, she presided over a rancorous but largely-successful makeover of the city's landscape. Meanwhile, she was raising her daughter and developing a social life that revolved around an intimate community of like-minded black urban professionals who, like Jarrett, sought advancement not only for themselves but for the local African-American community. Chief among them were the Obamas. Jarrett brought Michelle into the Daley administration, attended their wedding, threw a book-signing party for the Dreams From My Father author and generally assumed a big-sisterly presence in the young couple's lives such that "I don't think either of them made major decisions without talking to her", according to Susan Sher.

As Obama told me: "We've seen each other through ups and downs." For Jarrett, one such low point came in 1995, when she began to lose the mayor's support. Wounded, Jarrett bolted for the property development firm Habitat – only to have Daley ask her to keep a foot in the public sector by offering her the post of chairwoman at the Chicago Transit Board. She accepted. Soon other boards beckoned, including the University of Chicago Medical Center and the Chicago Stock Exchange. Habitat made her an executive vice president. By 2002, it was as if the city had awakened one morning to find that Valerie Jarrett had taken over.

Over the ensuing five years, the role Jarrett played in Obama's political ascent was important but also confined. For his senatorial campaign, she made key introductions to the donor community. She was among the handful of close advisers who met at the close of 2006 to carry on a rolling discussion of the risks entailed in a presidential run. And during the first six months of Obama's presidential campaign, Jarrett remained in constant contact with him but otherwise stayed in Chicago to run Habitat – she had become chief executive in January – and the Chicago Stock Exchange.

That arrangement began to change on the evening of July 17 2007, when Obama convened a meeting at Jarrett's Chicago town house. The presidential campaign was not gaining traction in the national polls. "Lots of things were bubbling up, and no one was really handling issues that would arise, either in Chicago (at headquarters) or on the road," says Penny Pritzker, who was one of the meeting's participants and the finance chairwoman of the campaign. "You needed another smart, capable, really close adviser involved who could play a bridging role. Valerie was the perfect solution."

Not everyone agrees with Pritzker. She never actually moved into headquarters, "and that was good and that was bad", says the White House senior adviser, Pete Rouse, who at that time was Senator Obama's chief of staff. Jarrett's ambiguous role particularly annoyed the campaign manager, David Plouffe. Jarrett and Plouffe tangled over issues ranging from where the campaign should be spending its money to where the candidate should be spending his time.

Today Plouffe offers unqualified praise for Jarrett's work as a campaign surrogate but says, "She wasn't terribly involved in strategic issues." This is probably true – but only because the campaign did not consider the matter of race to be a "strategic issue". On this subject, Jarrett consistently and forcibly weighed in.

It was Jarrett, several aides say, who helped convince otherwise sceptical senior staff that Michelle Obama should go to South Carolina in November 2007 and give a speech addressing fears in the African-American community that harm might come to the black candidate. It was Jarrett who strongly encouraged Barack Obama to give his race speech. Numerous campaign officials credit Jarrett, along with the communications director Anita Dunn and Stephanie Cutter, Michelle Obama's chief of staff, for helping to rehabilitate Mrs Obama's "angry black woman" image.

A few days after the election, the president-elect told his new chief of staff Rahm Emanuel: "I want her inside the White House."

When the subject is Valerie Jarrett, it's fair to say that Emanuel's words fall short of effusive. Their opposing qualities – deliberateness and sensitivity in Jarrett; speed and brutal practicality in Emanuel – may reside harmonically in Barack Obama. But what the two aides represent isn't simply a function of velocity or decibel level. While both of them obviously want the President to succeed, Emanuel's criteria for "success" are straightforward. Jarrett, according to Cecilia Munoz, Jarrett's director of intergovernmental affairs, is "very focused on why he ran in the first place" – a psychological calculation that only Jarrett would presume to undertake and which therefore is bound to drive others nuts.

[...]

"Where's my picture?" Valerie Jarrett exclaimed, addressing no one in particular. She stood up from the conference-room table in her office and walked over to the bookshelf. "They brought these to me today."

The image was odd. It featured five figures seated on the couches and chairs of the Oval Office: the President; Jarrett; the Reverend Al Sharpton; the former Republican House speaker, Newt Gingrich; and the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Standing over me, Jarrett said: "I love that photo."

That unlikely meeting had been arranged by Jarrett. Sharpton, Gingrich and Bloomberg were part of a group convening in Washington to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the landmark Brown v Board of Education school desegregation decision by promulgating education as a civil right.

"I liked the idea of getting this odd quartet together to come around an issue," Jarrett told me. "Because it would show the American people that this is what the President is about, getting unlikely combinations together."

I asked: "If you hadn't suggested that this meeting take place, do you think anyone else would have suggested it?"

Jarrett looked across the table at her friend, the White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who had dropped in on the interview. Dunn stopped taking notes and flashed Jarrett a look of abiding doubt.

"Probably not," Jarrett then murmured.

"Probably not?" exclaimed Dunn, who had been virtually silent until now. "Absolutely not!"

Dunn's outburst was delivered with a depth of appreciation that I had not picked up on elsewhere in the West Wing. Though Dunn is white, her words reminded me of the interviews I conducted with several African-Americans who had served at high levels in the Obama campaign. To them, Valerie Jarrett was something of a heroine.

Without Jarrett, these officials said they believed, their opinions and the often-legitimate concerns voiced by black leaders like Sharpton would have been thoroughly disregarded by the white-dominated senior staff. "There's a cultural nuance that they just didn't get," one such African-American staff member told me. "And the landscape of our campaign is littered with hundreds of stories where she intervened and voices got heard and decisions got made that might've gone a different way."

As to just how much difference Valerie Jarrett's various interventions had made, the staff member admitted he couldn't say. It wasn't for him to judge, anyway. That was between Obama and Jarrett.

[Warph]

"Morality is a highly misunderstood component of human nature.  Some people believe they can create moral guidelines from thin air based on their personal biases and prejudices.  Some people believe that morality comes from the force of bureaucracy and government law.  Still, others believe that there is no such thing; that morality is a facade created by men in order to better grease the wheels of society.

All of these world views discount the powerful scientific and psychological evidence surrounding Natural Law... the laws that human beings form internally due to inherent conscience regardless of environmental circumstances.  When a person finally grasps inborn morality, the whole of the world comes into focus.  The reality is that we are not born "good" or "evil."  Rather, we are all born with the capacity for good AND evil, and this internal battle stays with us until the end of our days.

Every waking moment we are given a choice, a test of our free will, to be ruled by desire and fear, or to do what we know at our very core is right.  When a man silences his inner voice, the results can be terrible for him and those around him.  When an entire culture silences its inner voice, the results can be catastrophic..."