(Behind The) Scenes at the Obama White House

The image is from Swampland, and if you click the link, go to the image and click to enlarge. Then scroll left to find Valerie Jarrett with the First Family. You can see Jarrett at left below as well, where she's partially visible:

If you didn't read it, don't miss Ben Johnson's essay at FrontPage Mag, "Valerie Jarrett: The Next Van Jones."

Note as well that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is standing with Jarrett, and he's almost fully obscured in the picture above. And recall from the campaign last year, Stanley Kurtz was doing phenomenal research into Barack Obama's Chicago background and radical roots. An especially good piece was Kurtz's essay at the Weekly Standard, "Barack Obama's Lost Years: The Senator's Tenure as a State Legislator Reveals Him To Be An Old-Fashioned, Big Government, Race-Conscious Liberal." The piece is worth skimming over again, but the summary's worth citing:

The real Obama? ... Fundamentally, he is a big-government redistributionist who wants above all to aid the poor, particularly the African-American poor. Obama is eager to do so both through race-specific programs and through broad-based social-welfare legislation. "Living wage" legislation may be economically counterproductive, and Obama-backed housing experiments may have ended disastrously, yet Obama is committed to large-scale government solutions to the problem of poverty. Obama's early campaigns are filled with declarations of his sense of mission-a mission rooted in his community organizing days and manifest in his early legislative battles. Recent political back flips notwithstanding, Barack Obama does have an ideological core ...

Those "community organizing days" are from Obama's radical ACORN activism. We're seeing just now how that stuff's working out. See Charles Lipson, "Independent prosecutor for ACORN."

Oh, for your added pleasure, don't miss Jim Treacher's uproarious parody of the Swampland images, "I Find Your Lack of Grace Disturbing."