This just in from NBC Chicago. Recently released e-mails are now showing that Emanuel Rahm traded favors with disgraced politician Rod Blagojevich. Earlier today a newspaper in Britain released a report saying that Rahm was considering stepping down from his position in the White House. Perhaps these are connected?

By JOHN O’CONNER, NBC Chicago

President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, then a congressman in Illinois, apparently attempted to trade favors with embattled Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich while he was in office, according to newly disclosed e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.

Emanuel agreed to sign a letter to the Chicago Tribune supporting Blagojevich in the face of a scathing editorial by the newspaper that ridiculed the governor for self-promotion. Within hours, Emanuel’s own staff asked for a favor of its own: The release of a delayed $2 million grant to a school in his district.

The 2006 discussion occurred with Blagojevich’s top aide, Deputy Gov. Bradley Tusk, and doesn’t appear to cross legal lines;  Emanuel couldn’t speed up the distribution of the funds. But it offers a peek at ties between two high-profile Illinois politicians — one now the president’s right-hand man, the other facing years in prison if convicted of political corruption.

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The Sunday Telegraph

 Rahm Emanuel Expected to Quit White House

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, is expected to leave his job later this year after growing tired of the "idealism" of Barack Obama’s inner circle.

Washington insiders say he will quit within six to eight months in frustration at their unwillingness to "bang heads together" to get policy pushed through.

Mr Emanuel, 50, enjoys a good working relationship with Mr Obama but they are understood to have reached an understanding that differences over style mean he will serve only half the full four-year term.

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By Andrew Malcolm, LA Times

 Emanuel lives rent free in a BP advisers house

In case you were tempted to buy the faux Washington outrage at BP and its gulf oil spill in recent days, here’s a story that reveals a little-known corporate political connection and the quiet way the inner political circles intersect, protect and care for one another in the nation’s capital. And Chicago.

We already knew that BP and its folks were significant contributors to the record $750-million war chest of Barack Obama’s 2007-08 campaign.

Now, we learn the details of a connection of Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayoral wannabe, current Obama chief of staff, ex-representative, ex-Clinton money man and ex-Windy City political machine go-fer.

Shortly after Obama’s happy inaugural,  eyebrows rose slightly upon word that, as a House member, Emanuel had lived the last five years rent-free in a D.C. apartment of Democratic colleague Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and her husband, Stanley Greenberg.

For an ordinary American, that would likely raise some obvious tax liability questions. But like Emanuel, the guy overseeing the Internal Revenue Service now is another Obama insider, Tim Geithner, who had his own outstanding tax problems but skated through confirmation anyway by the Democratic-controlled Congress.

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By Kirsten Powers, NY Post

 Rahm needs to go

The flap over the job offers to Joe Sestak in Pennsylva nia and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado shows that it’s time to move electoral politics out of the White House. Rahm Emanuel, this means you.

President Obama’s first step should be to shutter the Office of Political Affairs. Then he should jettison the various political henchmen — starting with Rahm — who’ve infested the West Wing and put them on the Democratic National Committee, where they belong.

Since President Ronald Reagan created it, the Office of Political Affairs has become a taxpayer-funded campaign office that has helped administrations of all stripes consolidate their power.

Its current head, Patrick Gaspard, has used his perch to try to push Gov. Paterson from running this fall (Paterson later forced himself out), to push Doug Wilder to support Creigh Deeds in the Virginia gubernatorial race (Deeds would up losing the general) — and to persuade GOP state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava to endorse the Democrat after she lost her primary in the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District (which helped keep the seat in Democratic hands).

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

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By Wayne Allen Root, Fox Nation

Obama is creating a crisis so he can institute marxism

Rahm Emanuel cynically said, “You never want a crisis to go to waste.” It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Barack Obama’s presidency.

Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of ‘83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they’re alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival … and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

– Universal health care. The health care bill had very little to do with health care. It had everything to do with unionizing millions of hospital and health care workers, as well as adding 15,000 to 20,000 new IRS agents (who will join government employee unions). Obama doesn’t care that giving free health care to 30 million Americans will add trillions to the national debt. What he does care about is that it cements the dependence of those 30 million voters to Democrats and big government. Who but a socialist revolutionary would pass this reckless spending bill in the middle of a depression?

– Cap and trade. Like health care legislation having nothing to do with health care, cap and trade has nothing to do with global warming. It has everything to do with redistribution of income, government control of the economy and a criminal payoff to Obama’s biggest contributors. Those powerful and wealthy unions and contributors (like GE, which owns NBC, MSNBC and CNBC) can then be counted on to support everything Obama wants. They will kick-back hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions to Obama and the Democratic Party to keep them in power. The bonus is that all the new taxes on Americans with bigger cars, bigger homes and businesses helps Obama “spread the wealth around.”

– Make Puerto Rico a state. Why? Who’s asking for a 51st state? Who’s asking for millions of new welfare recipients and government entitlement addicts in the middle of a depression? Certainly not American taxpayers. But this has been Obama’s plan all along. His goal is to add two new Democrat senators, five Democrat congressman and a million loyal Democratic voters who are dependent on big government.

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Liberty Pundits

 more electoral interference from the Obama administration

The bulk of the stories concerning Steve Israel deciding not to run against Gillibrand are that Steve had an epiphany when Obama called Israel, and asked that he focus on his role in House rather than run for Senate against Gillibrand.

It seems, however, that Rahm was more closely involved.

There was first a meeting at the White House.  Closed door. Just Rahm and Israel. 

Remember the issue is using “official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate.”

So there’s two stories out there.  The first is ugly.  Most of this strong arming seems to be pure election politics, but catch the last phrase:

Israel was given an ultimatum: if he proceeded with the Senate race, the White House would go to great pains to shut off every dollar in the state. With Schumer’s help, the administration would make sure all the big Democratic donors and institutional players kept their distance. They would show no restraint, even campaigning against him and raising money in Israel’s own home turf. Obama himself would come out to campaign in New York City, cutting off at the knees the downstate, Manhattan-focused appeal Israel would have needed to run to Gillibrand’s left. And perhaps most damning of all, given whom the math dictated Israel would have needed in his column, Emanuel indicated that the nation’s first black president was prepared to barnstorm through New York’s black neighborhoods hand-in-hand with the junior senator, employing his appeal to African-Americans to a political degree he usually avoids. Oh, and as for Israel having any role shaping policy in the House while all this was going on? Forget it.

But Rahm, the White House Chief of Staff, would see to it that the House of Representatives shut this House member out of any “role shaping policy”?  Rahm would, in short, interfere with the House member’s official duties if said House member chose to run for the US Senate.

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By TIM GRIEVE, Politico

"Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill," Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. "And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots."

A spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) rejected Massa’s charge out of hand.

"That’s completely false,” said Katie Grant. “There is zero merit to that accusation."

Massa insisted that he did not know the basis of a House ethics committee investigation into his conduct until after he announced his retirement last Wednesday, and he took Hoyer to task for going public with information related to the probe before it is completed.

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Newsmax

 The battle is on for control of the White House

In the days of the old Pravda, one could determine who was winning secret Politburo power struggles by just looking at the official Soviet newspaper. Those winning simply got better press.

Perhaps it may be no different here in the United States.

This week two of the heaviest guns in American media, The Washington Post and The New York Times, unloaded their missiles at Obama adviser David Axelrod while heralding White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel as a centrist and pragmatist.

This Sunday’s New York Times, for example, features Axelrod and describes him as the ideological courtier advising the president into darkness as Emanuel remains the level-headed counselor.

Here’s an excerpt from “Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him”:

“Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. ‘I’ve heard him be called a “Moonie,”’ dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, ‘the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.

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By Christina Lamb, Times Online

Obama's Mafia has come to a standstill

WHEN President Barack Obama’s secret service codename was revealed as Renegade and his wife Michelle’s as Renaissance, the names seemed perfect for a first couple who had come to Washington to shake things up.

More than a year into the Obama administration, with healthcare yet to be reformed, Wall Street banks continuing to pay huge bonuses and Guantanamo Bay prison still open, that mood of hope has turned to disillusion. Obama’s policy of engagement has yielded no progress in the Middle East or Iran; the war in Afghanistan continues to exact a big toll in lives and dollars; while the heaviest snow in Washington for 90 years seems to have stymied any hope of climate change legislation.

The president and his team now find themselves under fire for mishandling Congress from everyone from senior Democrats to social columnists. Critics say that by failing to move on from the “us versus them” feeling of the Obama election campaign, they have united an opposition that was in disarray. The result is legislative paralysis despite the biggest Democratic majority in 30 years.

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