Wasting Money the Obama Way & the Evils of Valerie Jarrett February 12, 2012
Posted by geoff in News.trackback
I cruised by HuffPo this morning and saw Valerie Jarrett’s unveiling the White House’s latest plan to waste money:
Last week, the Obama Administration launched the Equal Pay App Challenge. We’re inviting software developers to help women ensure that they’re being paid fairly — which in turn will help restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.Right now, if you’re a woman in the workforce, it can be surprisingly difficult to answer basic questions about equal pay: what’s the typical salary for someone in your position? Should you be asking for more at the negotiating table? What are your fundamental legal rights?
When the Equal Pay App Challenge is over, you’ll have information that helps you answer these questions, available right on your smartphone or computer.
I’m all for equal pay, but I don’t think women who can’t be bothered to do online research are going to suddenly be empowered by a cellphone app. And if they are, well, that’s kind of pathetic. As an employer, I’d be looking for someone who is savvy enough to manage her career without waiting for the federal government to spoon feed her.
Of course one can argue with the pay inequality statistics, where the true number appears to be much closer to $0.91 for every $1.00 that men make. And one could further argue that career interruptions due to childrearing have an effect that hasn’t been adequately treated in these studies. But I’d rather talk about something else.
See, there’s this Ulsterman guy who runs a blog called The Ulsterman Report (H/T NiceDeb). He claims to have an inside source high up in the Democratic Party (White House Insider) and a second highly placed source on Wall Street (Wall Street Insider). He conducts interviews with these sources (who probably don’t really exist), where they tell him how hugely evil and incompetent the President is.
This wouldn’t be worth commenting on, save that the observations and predictions that these “sources” make seem uncannily accurate. I’d recommend reading through the archives of the interviews to see if you are as impressed as I am.
The story line of the White House Insider is that Obama/Jarrett have the same sort of relationship that liberals thought Bush/Cheney or Bush/Rove had. A weak, disengaged man who was being directed behind the scenes. Essentially a puppet. And Jarrett is supposedly running the White House with a nasty combination of a domineering hand and a radical agenda.
This all came out before Jodi Kantor’s book which said some of the same things, lending a little credibility to the rest of White House Insider’s claims.
So go check him out and see if you agree that Valerie Jarrett is almost single-handedly tanking the country.
The Ulsterman Report link goes to the Time article again. Personally I do think that Obumbles is clearly way in over his head and is being “managed”. Badly.
Fixt.
Read all of the WHI and WSI interviews, and then with benefit of hindsight, match up the inside accounts and predictions with actual events. It’s impressive.
The accounts of the actual power alignments in the White House ring true, and allow one to make sense of the Potemkin images fed to the press. The portraits of the various WH personalities are psychologically consistent and unobvious until fitted into the revealed framework.
It’s clear that Ulsterman himself, in the voice and diction of his own writing, is utterly distinct from his insiders, and that they are the real deal. Either that, or Ulsterman possesses the same ear and gift for authentic vernacular and pitch-perfect dialog that Mark Twain had, and purposely hides it at all other times.
I’m going with the first assessment.