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White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said Thursday that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's job is "very safe" in the wake of a letter penned by a surprising political couple requesting the Justice Department to investigate him. Liberal blogger Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake.com and Grover Norquist, the head of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, yesterday penned a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder asking for an investigation for Emanuel for his role on the board of Freddie Mac earlier this decade. The couple allege that Emanuel's position is a reason why Justice has not investigated the public-private...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.

I have yet to see or hear a definitive plan to sink the monstrosity of a health control bill. The absence of a sound, practical solution to providing care instead of control is nowhere to be seen. My gut tells me the GOP is afraid of the wrong people. Instead of fearing their electorate the Republican faction is waxing conciliatory and believe the correct action is to humbly submit what they believe to be acceptable compromises to the health control bill! Could Senator Mitch McConnell be playing both ends against the middle? If the Republicans really mean to push, they...

Today, Michael Bloomberg's coalition against illegal guns placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post urging lawmakers to prevent suspects on a federally maintained "terror watch list" from being allowed to purchase guns. "500 mayors agree with the Obama and Bush Administrations: stop terror suspects from getting guns," the ad says. It's also been an issue that Rahm Emanuel voiced support for back in 2007, according to this video clip. "We got to make this a number one issue, as a test vote, and take it into the election." He added, "If it's between that terrorist list and the NRA,...

As bright sunlight now pushes the mighty midget craft to DC, I continue my counseling of the PJ’d Prez. Somewhere along the trip, I have an epiphany. I decide the situation was hopeless. It’s time to accept the facts as they were and deal with their hideous reality. I no longer hold any hope that Barack Hussein Obama is capable of change. The evidence of his hatred for the USA is overwhelming. Weinbaum: “Mr. President, I know this may come as a shock, but most of America , including many former backers and several who are twittering, think you hate...

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on Tuesday defended US President Barack Obama's Middle East policies, saying that efforts to engage Iran through dialogue and earnest attempts to jump-start the peace process were bearing fruit. "A year ago, Iran was united in its nuclear ambitions and the world was divided in its response," Emanuel said while addressing the Jewish Federations of North America's General Assembly in Washington. "Today, thanks to the work of the president, there is strong and international consensus against a nuclear armed Iran. That is the goal of America."

My phone rang at 3:00 AM., Wednesday. Groggily answering, I heard Hillary’s scratchy voice. She said they were sending AF1 to pick me up at a local airport to take me back to DC for an urgent visit with President Obama. I was sworn to secrecy. After guaranteeing her that I didn’t know where Bill was, I dressed. A limo awaited me. Man her campaign ads about those 3:00 AM phone calls were true. When I arrived at the airport, searching for that huge 747, passing one super jet after another, the government driver pulled up to a Cessna single...

Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, the architects of the Democrats’ historic take-back of Congress in 2006, talk to each other nearly every day in abrupt, Morse code bursts stripped of hellos, goodbyes and thank-yous. On the surface, everything seems normal. But Schumer and Emanuel — whose relationship hovers somewhere between a business partnership and a sibling rivalry — are now finding themselves on opposite sides of an internal Democratic argument on health care reform.  Schumer, a New York Democratic senator, is pushing a proposal that allows states to opt out of a public option. Emanuel, who left the House to...

Obama fans are in a tight spot. As the White House turns ever harsher and more divisive, supporters are scrambling to explain why President Obama sounds so very different from Campaigner Obama. There are two possible explanations, neither of which is flattering. The first is that Obama was insincere on the campaign trail. The second is that his advisors – David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel -- are in control. The latter view is bound to take hold and it will not boost the president’s flagging popularity ratings. Many who voted for President Obama feel deceived. When he said in Florida...

Slam dunk, or nothing-but-net three-pointer? Either way, Chuck Todd has surely scored some points in the battle over Pres. Obama's all-male White House basketball games. The NBC News political director/chief WH correspondent got off his shot while discussing the issue with Andrea Mitchell—whose sympathies were clearly with the distaff side—during the 1PM hour slot on MSNBC today. View video here.

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he's put a horse's head in Roger Ailes' bed. Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn't scare easily. The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And chief of staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led (by) and following Fox." Meaning? If Fox runs...

*snip* Turns out that when the former governor instituted a state-hiring freeze back in 2003, it was just a ruse so that he could do favors for a bunch of politically connected buddies. He ended up hiring just over 2,500 people during the so-called freeze. But these weren’t ordinary applicants; politicians, including then-state-senator Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, pushed all the job seekers on Blago. None of the politicians in the report are accused of doing anything wrong -- leaning on clout is the status quo in Springfield -- but the report does illustrate the insider game that occurs...

"His father was a great friend of my father." The reference to William Ayers' father was how Mayor Richard M. Daley began his defense of Barack Obama for his association with the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist. Daley's father, of course, was Richard M. Daley, mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976. Ayers' father was head of Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago-based utility, from 1964 to 1980. You bet they were great friends. That's governance, Chicago style. The head of government is friends with the heads of every big business, lobby and union, and together they make decisions on...

They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way. –Jim Malone, "The Untouchables" When Barack Obama promised to deliver "a new kind of politics" to Washington, most folk didn't picture Rahm Emanuel with a baseball bat. These days, the capital would make David Mamet, who wrote Malone's memorable movie dialogue, proud. A White House set on kneecapping its opponents isn't, of course, entirely new. (See: Nixon) What is a little novel is the public and bare-knuckle way in which the Obama...

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn says that her comment about Chairman Mao as one of her "favorite political philosophers" has been badly distorted. Perhaps she meant to say that Mao is one of her favorite media strategists. It is telling what Dunn regards as a reassuring defense: that she was only extolling Mao's can-do attitude and that her admiration for it came from Lee Atwater. "The Mao quote is one I picked up from the late Republican strategist," she said. So now the reviled creator of the Willie Horton ad is someone Democrats feel they can safely hide behind?...

Obama team member David Axelrod spoke on George Stephanopoulos’ This Week and went so far as to claim that FOXNews is “really not news,” but rather was opinionated entertainment dressed as news. Obviously, like all Americans, Axelrod and his Nobel Peace Prize-winning employer are entitled to their opinions about FOX, but what makes the episode even more comical is the fact that the “legitimate” news agencies fell for a hoax the day after Axelrod lambasted Rupert Murdoch’s network. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, a group of activists posing as U.S. Chamber of Commerce officials sent out a press...

Buried in the administration's multiple inflammatory statements on Fox News may be their strategy in all of this. In fact, Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, and Rahm Emanuel made hints at it in their statements. Here's the pertinent portion from Axelrod. The bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way. We’re going to appear on their shows. We’re going to participate, but understanding that they represent a point of view.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs singled out specific shows on the Fox News network for criticism ... ... Tuesday morning, continuing a public feud between the White House and the cable network that gained new momentum over the weekend. Meeting with reporters in his office for an off-camera question-and-answer session, Gibbs parried questions about the White House's harsh criticism of the cable news network, leveled on several Sunday shows by officials including White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod. Asked if it was fair for the White House to label Fox an illegitimate news...

Here is video of Karl Rove reacting to accusations by Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who claimed virtually nothing has been done in Afghanistan in eight years of U.S. presence there. Emanuel claimed they were having to start from scratch in Afghanistan. Rove pointed out in a picture of Obama's "War Council," that David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs are present at the meeting. Rove said that is "highly unusual." In his years in the Bush White House, he said he never attended a war cabinet meeting. He also said it is unwise to put your press secretary in a...

The White House escalated its offensive against Fox News on Sunday by urging other news organizations to stop "following Fox" and instead join the administration's attempt to marginalize the channel. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN that President Obama does not want "the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox." Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is "not a news organization." "Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way," Axelrod counseled ABC's...

Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel raised the question of whether the U.S. has a credible Afghan partner it can work with in Afghanistan. "Do you have a credible Afghan partner for this process that can provide the security and the type of services that the Afghan people need?" Emanuel said the Obama White House is asking as it conducts a strategy review before answering Gen. Stanley McChrystal's request for more troops. Washington faces "a much more complex decision" than just troop level, Emanuel told CNN's John King. "It's clear that basically...

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel Sunday made one of the most absurd comments to date about the Administration's fight with the Fox News Channel. In his "State of the Union" interview with CNN's John King, Emanuel said, "It's not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.

One of President Obama's top advisers said Sunday the Bush administration failed to ask critical questions about the war in Afghanistan, leaving the Obama administration starting from scratch -- and leaving the war "adrift." "The president is asking the questions that have never been asked on the civilian side, the political side, the military side and the strategic side," White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN's "State of the Union."

October 9, 2009 Young Hamlet’s Agony Will he listen to Emanuel and Biden or Petraeus and McChrystal? Charles Krauthammer. The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious — particularly about things like war, about which until January 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious. When the Iraq War (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly anti-war. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they...

Republicans have been ready with criticism for President Barack Obama's overnight journey to Copenhagen, where the president today pressed Chicago's case for the 2016 Olympic Summer Games -- playing booster, as the Republican National Committee put it this morning, for Obama's "Chicago Fat Cat Friends.'' RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri and then House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio all have questioned the president's priorities.

t has long been claimed that Rahm Emanuel wanted to find someone to keep his congressional seat warm while he served as President Obama's chief of staff. Now, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned that Emanuel wanted then-Gov. Rod Blagojevich to appoint Cook County Commissioner Forrest Claypool to his 5th Congressional District seat. Claypool would serve one or two terms and then be considered for a place in Obama's Cabinet, according to sources familiar with Emanuel's proposal. That would give Emanuel the option of returning to Congress, where he could vie to become House speaker.

Obama advisor champions rationed health careBy Kate Randall 15 September 2009 Ezekiel J. Emanuel is a close advisor to the Obama administration on issues of health care policy. He currently serves as a special advisor on health policy to the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and is the chair of the Department of Bioethics at the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health. He has authored several books, including most recently Healthcare Guaranteed: A Simple, Secure Solution for America, which elaborates his plan for restructuring the US health care system. [1] In March, Emanuel,...

The single most damning story about President Obama so far is one we know courtesy of his national security adviser, Jim Jones. Visiting the newly installed military commanders in Afghanistan in late June, Jones told General Stanley McChrystal that if he requested more troops any time soon, Obama would have a "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot" (i.e., "What the f--") moment. Jones then, in an interview, made the claim--denied by everyone else involved--that military leaders had agreed that when the president earlier sent 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, "there would be a year from the time the decision was made before they would...

WASHINGTON (CNN) — CNN's Deirdre Walsh reports that Republican Rep. Joe Wilson called the White House Wednesday night to apologize for his outburst during President Obama's speech, and spoke with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 302 No. 1, July 1, 2009 The Obligation to Participate in Biomedical Research G. Owen Schaefer, BA; Ezekiel J. Emanuel, MD, PhD; Alan Wertheimer, PhD JAMA. 2009;302(1):67-72. Abstract: The current prevailing view is that participation in biomedical research is above and beyond the call of duty. While some commentators have offered reasons against this, we propose a novel public goods argument for an obligation to participate in biomedical research. Biomedical knowledge is a public good, available to any individual even if that individual does not contribute to it. Participation in research is a...

Ezekiel Emanuel is upset.  The president's health care czar sees the growing resistance to his vision, to his brave new world of government-run "communitarian" health care in which politicians and bureaucrats control one-sixth of the economy and 100% of our bodies. He doesn't quite understand how it all came apart on him, but he does know who started the unraveling: Sarah Palin. Where does she get off attacking him? Sarah Palin, it seems forever Sarah Palin. And he wonders, as have so many others, what it takes to put a stake through her heart?  People should listen to him, not...

"You can't avoid these questions," Dr. Emanuel said in an Aug. 16 Washington Post interview. "We had a big controversy in the United States when there was a limited number of dialysis machines. In Seattle, they appointed what they called a 'God committee' to choose who should get it, and that committee was eventually abandoned. Society ended up paying the whole bill for dialysis instead of having people make those decisions." Dr. Emanuel argues that to make such decisions, the focus cannot be only on the worth of the individual. He proposes adding the communitarian perspective to ensure that medical...

Every 10 years, the federal government undertakes a constitutionally mandated count of the American population to determine the apportionment of elected representatives among the 50 states, and, given the political stakes, it has always been a lodestone for controversy. In recent decades, the blasts and the blows have been mostly about the counting - or undercounting, as the case may be - of minorities. The squalls this year are blowing in from three different directions, and two of them are based on constitutional complaints. First fury up, a charge that President Barack Obama has made a power grab by transferring...

Below Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck explains the Apollo Alliance on his July 28 show. Beck mentions the Obama administration’s “stimulus” blueprint, “The New Apollo Program: Clean Energy, Good Jobs,” which you can read here.

The guy who was supposed to control Congress -- isn'tIs Rahm Emanuel both the most politically savvy -- yet fundamentally inept -- White House chief of staff in history? Quite possibly. According to a New York Times Magazine piece earlier this summer, President Obama's staff was constructed precisely to give the administration more of a say in how policies were crafted coming out of the legislative side of Capitol Hill: The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration...

There was a time when rushing a thousand-page bill through Congress so fast that no one has time to read it would have provoked public outrage. But now, this has been attempted twice in the first 6 months of a new administration. The fact that they got away with it before, with the "stimulus" bill, may have led them to believe that they could get away with it again. But the first bill simply spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The current "health care" bill threatens to take life-and-death decisions out of the hands of individuals and their doctors, transferring...

As Barack Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel is arguably the second most powerful man in America. It's a job tailor-made for the unflappable—but that's not a description anyone would ever apply to Emanuel, not even when he was a political rookie raising money for Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. If donors didn't agree to quintuple their normal contributions, Emanuel scolded them for their stinginess and hung up the phone. Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, who has known Emanuel for decades, contends the method displayed a level of chutzpah that "redefined the term." And it worked. Emanuel broke all fund-raising records....

Wow, Glenn Beck goes after President Obama's chief of staff. How long will he remain on the air? There are important new links in Beck's story to the Obama elite and who they are. Also, notice former Democratic pollster Pat Caddell at Beck's side. Welcome to the fight, Pat. vodep at sote

I was listening to the radio this morning and heard the news stories about Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel trying to play the CYA game with respect to his support of health care rationing. I couldn't believe my ears. One journalist seemed to actually believe Dr. Emanuel's claim that he had changed his stance on rationing "five to seven years ago." Call me skeptical but January 31, 2009 was not "five to seven years ago" and what he wrote in The Lancet doesn't square with his claims about not supporting health care rationing. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel Tries To Tap-Dance His Way Out...

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the medical ethicist and oncologist who advises President Obama, does not own a television, and if you catch him in a typically energized moment, when his mind speeds even faster than his mouth, he is likely to blurt out something like, "I hate the Internet." So it took him several days in late July to discover he had been singled out by opponents of health-care reform as a "deadly doctor," who, according to an opinion column in the New York Post, wanted to limit medical care for "a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

We previously compared Obamacare to the German Aktion T4, in which "life unworthy of living" was to be eliminated through denial of medical care or even palliatives such as Zyklon B. In fairness to the health care bill HR 3200, of which we downloaded a complete copy, the section on end of life counseling does not mandate or even encourage euthanasia. ...However, Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm Emanuel's brother, with close ties to Barack Obama) is on written record as advocating denial of "discretionary" medical care to patients with dementia such as Alzheimer's Disease: a position entirely consistent with Germany's Aktion T4...

Leave it to Democratic Party operatives to describe citizen protesters as acting like “organized mobs.” Such an unimaginative contradiction in terms surely indicates a new level of desperation in the liberal camp. Then again, the same smirking liberal pointmen introduced the phrase “tea-bagging” to a general population heretofore blessedly ignorant of that particular sexual fetish. (Shamefully, even Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin has used the expression in public. It’s another indication of the degree to which civil discourse has degenerated — no small thanks to Durbin’s own comparison of U.S. soldiers to “Nazis” on the Senate floor. But back to...

Nancy Pelosi upped the ante in the health care debate when she responded to a media question in the following manner: Interviewer: Do you think there’s legitimate grassroot opposition going on here? Pelosi: "I think they’re Astroturf… You be the judge. "They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare." That being in addition to her reference to town hall protesters as "simply un-American."Well, first of all, Nancy Pelosi calls health care opponents "Astroturf," and the propagandist mainstream media have duly found evidence of one or two emails from conservative groups instructing opponents of health care...

Representative Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) sent a letter of complaint against White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s “mob-like” threats against Administration opponents. “Telling governors and legislators that ‘bad things’ might happen to those who ‘don’t play ball’ with the Administration is dialog right out of a gangster movie,” Issa wrote. “It has no place in a free society.”

Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from Southern California, has sent a stern letter to Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff of the Chicago Way White House. Issa's letter asks Emanuel to stop using Chicago-style political rough stuff against Republican critics of President Barack Obama's gazillion-dollar economic stimulus program. *snip* "These tactics have been characterized as a 'fist to the nose' and a message to 'back off,' " wrote Issa to Emanuel. "While this type of scare tactic might work in Chicago, it will not work to intimidate me or other members of the United States Congress."

Three House committees just choked down the bitter pill of a compromise version of a healthcare reform bill, HR 3200. But for vulnerable patients -- and taxpayers -- the cure may be worse than the disease. Problematic policy recommendations by proponents of rationing and socializing costs may be part of why the bill is so unpalatable to opponents of government intervention in healthcare decision making. President Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, is himself advised by Ezekiel Emanuel -- brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. In addition to serving as a Special...

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, has a message for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: “While this type of scare tactic may work In Chicago, it will not work to intimidate me or other Members of the United States Congress.” It's not quite a young Ellot Ness glowering at Al Capone on the steps of a ritzy Chicago hotel, but it may be the next best thing and it could mark a turning point in President Obama's relations with the Congress that is dominated by members of his own party. The occasion for Issa's comment, which was contained in a...

LAS VEGAS—U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has introduced a bill to prevent federal agencies from ruling out tourist destinations as places to hold official meetings. The Democrat from Nevada introduced the bill on Wednesday, called the Protecting Resort Cities from Discrimination Act of 2009. The bill follows outrage from Reid and other lawmakers last week after reports that agencies, acting on guidance dating back to last year and before, were avoiding locations with reputations as tourist destinations because of their reputations. Earlier this week, Reid told cabinet secretaries and the heads of all federal agencies to get in line...

The House investigative committee’s top-ranking Republican wants White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel to answer for allegations that he used “Chicago-style scare tactics” to intimidate lawmakers who say the economic stimulus has failed. In a letter sent to Emanuel on Tuesday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee ranking member Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) demanded to know how involved the chief of staff was in an effort to “threaten” Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer after Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said the president’s Recovery Act was a failure. According to reports, Emanuel directed four Cabinet secretaries to send what Issa characterized as “threatening...