Liberal Mag: White House Keeps An Enemies List
Photo Credit: Daily Caller
In a profile in the New Republic of Valerie Jarrett, who is considered Obama’s most influential White House adviser, Noam Scheiber writes of the existence of an enemies list — or as he termed it, “a shit list.”
“Valerie Jarrett is not above keeping a shit list—or as hers was titled, a ‘least constructive’ list,” the article reveals. “One progressive activist recalls Jarrett holding the document during a meeting and noticing her own name on it, along with the names of others in the room. ‘It was kind of an honor,’ the activist told me. This was not out of character for Jarrett. The woman who once resisted [Rahm] Emanuel’s commandment against rewarding bad behavior has often gone out of her way to suppress dissent among ideological allies and others who question the president.”
Surely sensing the political toxicity of such a revelation, a White House official pushed back on the report.
Read more from this story HERE.
Heads he wins, tails you lose. As Gabe Malor says, this deadline is completely unserious: It’d be bad enough for Republicans to pass a weak immigration bill next year, but that at least would have the virtue of giving the GOP’s new crop of senators a crack at voting on it. Trying to sneak a bill through the lame-duck session, before Cory Gardner, Joni Ernst, and the rest of the freshmen have a say, would mean all-out war at this point between Boehner, McConnell, and the base. Joe Biden at least seems to understand that. That’s why he floated a mid-February deadline at Friday’s White House summit with the GOP before Obama gave him a death stare that shut him up. I think Obama understands it too, actually. His ultimatum here is likely born not out of ignorance of Boehner’s predicament but a new determination to make Republicans pay politically after they swamped him last Tuesday. Issuing executive amnesty so soon after a landslide is an act of supreme defiance of the election results, in keeping with last week’s “I’m listening to all the people who didn’t vote” press conference. And it’s also a middle finger to congressional Democrats who spent the last six months giving him the “Barack who?” treatment on the stump. If executive amnesty puts them in a tough spot too, screw ‘em. Besides, the only Dems left in Congress at this point are in states or districts so blue that they won’t lose in 2016 no matter how crazy he gets. He’s now fully entered the YOLO phase of his presidency.
When Mario Gandolfo went for a walk along the Pacific Ocean shoreline in Nome, Alaska on Nov. 4, he was looking for sea glass. But he found something quite different: A World War II military dog tag washed into his hand.