Free Republic

John Podesta was the fourth Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton; he also headed the Obama transition team. Today he is George Soros’ point man at the liberal think tank, Center for American Progress. In a recent interview at the Clinton Global Imitative Conference, Podesta explains that it is the high standards and tough vetting process that makes it so difficult to get the best NGO and business executives to work for the federal government. Podesta said, “We are denying the government some really spectacular talent” (See Video interview here) Consider a small list of the spectacular talent Podesta helped...

A liberal think tank with close ties to President Barack Obama says the administration and Congress should consider raising taxes on Americans to help close federal budget deficits, an opening salvo in what is likely to be a protracted debate on tax policy. In a draft report, the Center for American Progress says the size of projected budget gaps requires considering options including tax increases as well as curbs on annual spending and entitlement programs supported by Democrats. Such ideas could pose problems for Mr. Obama, who pledged during the campaign to not increase taxes on families making less than...

This week’s Washington Times column: A telling event occurred on Sept. 15, Day 6 of the drip, drip, drip ACORN video rollout. President Obama met for lunch with former President Bill Clinton at trendy Il Mulino in New York City. For the second consecutive day, the New York Post featured the ACORN scandal on its cover – complete with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in their outrageous “pimp and ho” costumes. Does anyone think the president and the former president were unaware that the city in which they were dining was mesmerized by the ACORN scandal – especially since ACORN...

John Podesta compared the nation’s current budget crisis to the situation former President Bill Clinton faced in 1993 and said some form of a value-added tax is “more plausible today than it ever has been.” “There’s going to have to be revenue in this budget,” said Podesta, Clinton’s former chief of staff and co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s transition team, said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing today.

( Surprise: ACORN audit to be conducted by panel full of leftists and cronies.) From this profoundly warped announcement (via ABC who engages in daily, early-morning information huddles with the Obama “White House”) from ACORN itself, it’s announced that ACORN is, uhh, going to “investigate” ACORN, with this group of Lefties-at-hire to go onto the media-stage and do the “Let’s Investigate” routine: In a press release, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis says, that as “a result of the indefensible action of a handful of our employees,” the group will immediately stop accepting anyone into ACORN office for service programs, will conduct...

Activist group ACORN started in 1970 to help the poor in Arkansas and quickly went national, growing into a multimillion-dollar conglomerate with a mission so far-flung that schools now bear its name, two radio stations are affiliates and a man it backed is the president. Oh yeah, it's also the unwilling star of a hot Internet video featuring a couple dressed as a hooker and her pimp. SNIP Many Democrats used to advertise their ACORN connections. Now, however, the Democratic-led Senate has voted to cut off its grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Democrat-dominated House...

UPDATED: ACORN, calling the actions of some of its employees "indefensible," has suspended advising new clients as part of its service programs and is setting up an independent review to see what happened.

In a lead story published this past weekend on Frontpagemag.com, conservative thinker and best-selling author David Horowitz likens President Barack Obama to the "Manchurian Candidate" — a tool of the far left fostering the implementation of its radical agenda. In the 1959 book "The Manchurian Candidate" by Richard Condon — which has been made into two movies — an American soldier is captured during the Korean War, taken to Manchuria in China, and brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for the communists. He becomes part of a plot to kill a U.S. presidential nominee to aid the ascension of the...

For fallen White House aides, the rallying cry apparently is John Podesta to the rescue! The Obama administration’s former green jobs czar Van Jones is headed back to Podesta’s Center for American Progress after stepping down from his White House post four days ago amid controversy over his leftist affiliations, the Daily News has learned. Dubbed a radical environmentalist by his right-wing critics, Jones was linked to a group that had insisted the Bush administration was aware the 9/11 attacks had been planned, but did nothing to stop the terrorist plot. His supporters counter that Jones is one of the...

Van Jones is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country. He has chosen to resign because he believed he was serving as a distraction to the president's agenda. I respect that decision. Van was working to build a common ground agenda for all Americans, and I am confident he will continue that work. Unfortunately, his critics on the right could find no common ground with him. Clearly, Van was the subject of a right-wing smear campaign shrouded in hypocrisy. Van's chief tormentor Glenn Beck, who spent weeks engaged...

Obama transition chief and head of the leftist Center for American Progress, John Podesta, laid in to Glenn Beck tonight with a spirited but after the fact defense of former Obama administration official Van Jones that was posted tonight at Think Progress:Van Jones is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country. He has chosen to resign because he believed he was serving as a distraction to the president’s agenda. I respect that decision. Van was working to build a common ground agenda for all Americans, and I am...

Social Connections, Political Savvy and Boundless Energy Have Made Heather Podesta The It Girl of a New Generation Of Lobbyists The chairman beams. So many people just dying to see him, the business guys, the pols, the lobbyists -- lots and lots of lobbyists. They circle Charlie Rangel -- birthday boy, Democrat and, of course, House Ways and Means chairman -- circles like rings on a tree planted in the party room here at Tavern on the Green. Simple math: the more powerful the pol, the more rings on the tree. This is a very thick tree. Not a problem,...

-snip- We've had the Summer of Love. We've had the Summer of the Shark. Now, get ready for the Summer of the Lobbyist. In a glum economy, the lobbying business feels kind of bubbly. Every new Obama proposal comes with acres of fine print for corporate powers, interests groups and lobbyists to haggle over, profitably. Three gargantuan legislative challenges -- health care, the environment, the economy -- crisscrossing at once on Capitol Hill. Major health-care interests alone are spending $1.4 million this year lobbying Congress . . . per day, according to Common Cause, a government watchdog group. A lobbyist's...

I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the formation of some sort of world government is plausible. A “world government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations. It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body of laws. Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible.” Barack Obama... In...

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.

Louis Caldera, the former White House Military Office chief who quit last month after approving that bizarre Air Force One photo op over Manhattan that frightened countless New Yorkers, has landed a job. He'll be a senior fellow focusing on higher education and national security matters at the Center for American Progress, run by John Podesta, a co-chairman of Obama's transition team. Obama aides said at the time that the president was furious about the April 27 flyover, which included an Air Force One understudy and two F-16 military fighter aircraft flying over the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan,...

John Podesta, the head of a left-leaning think tank who ran the Obama transition team, is calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, a federal judge and former Bush administration official who wrote one of the “torture memos” made public last week. In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-Mich.), Podesta says that since he has "issued opinions that violate the Constitution and concealed relevant aspects of his legal views and professional conduct from the Senate, Bybee has neither the legal nor moral authority to sit in judgment of others."...

Americans don't need the NRA to tell them that the Barack Obama-Joe Biden administration could spell oblivion for their freedoms: Americans are telling us! Even during the poorest holiday spending season in almost 40 years, with consumer confidence in a freefall, Americans bought guns like they were going out of style —or going to be banned. The month Obama was elected, FBI background checks for firearm purchases increased by 42 percent over 2007, setting an all-time record for purchases in a month. Right-to-carry permit applications soared from coast to coast. It's easy to see why. After spending millions of dollars...

The prestigious job of U.S. ambassador to China is open — but several high-profile Washington insiders have reportedly already turned down the post. John Podesta, the Center for American Progress president who headed Barack Obama’s transition team, and former Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel have both rejected offers to represent the U.S. in Beijing, sources told Foreign Policy magazine’s The Cable Web site. “Some people think ambassador jobs are beneath them,” one source said. “Others think the process to get confirmed is too big a pain. Some people don’t want to move to China.” Clark T. Randt left the post in...

                  George Soros Perhaps the action tank run by Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff John Podesta should be a little more circumspect before throwing stones.Think Progress, a Center for American Progress Action Fund blog, parrots House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's clumsy talking points on the recent tea party protests across the nation. Pelosi said the movement "is funded by the high end - we call call it astroturf, it's not really a grassroots movement..." CAP has been beating the class-warfare drum and demonizing Wall Street and the capitalist system itself in order to promote President Obama's nakedly statist agenda.Now...

MOSCOW. (Andrei Kislyakov, for RIA Novosti) - So do UFOs with little green men inside exist or not? CNN supposedly filmed a UFO moving at a great speed from the right to the left during the inauguration of President Barack Obama. (But those who watched the replay say it was a bird.) After that, former President Clinton's White House Chief John Podesta, now one of Obama's closest associates, demanded that the thick UFO files be made public. The number of UFO sightings has dramatically increased in recent times. According to Britain's Ministry of Defense, there were supposedly 285 UFO sightings...

<p>WASHINGTON - At least 80 wealthy liberals have pledged to contribute at least $1 million each to fund a network of think tanks and advocacy groups, to compete with the potent conservative infrastructure built up during the last three decades.</p>

One of President Obama's Anti Free Speech guru's John Podesta was won a victory against truth and Bill O' Reilly. An affiliate of the George Soros-funded think tank and pressure group, Center for American Progress (CAP), has emulated the tactics of Media Matters for America by becoming a media critic. John Podesta, former Bill Clinton "hit man" and leader of the Obama transition team has taken on the roll of shutting up any non liberal commentators. He is now leading the charge to get advertisers to pull out of O' Reilly's show. And they got their first victory, UPS:

An affiliate of the George Soros-funded think tank and pressure group, Center for American Progress (CAP), is now in the media-bias analysis business. Claiming to be outraged at the aggressive news-gathering techniques of Bill O'Reilly's team, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) lobbying organization that grew out of CAP, rejoiced Friday after getting UPS to stop advertising on "The O'Reilly Factor." **** CAP is funded by Soros's Democracy Alliance, a billionaire's club that is funding a drive to turn America into a European-style socialist country. CAP, run by Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, is...

Fair-minded conservatives were aghast in President George W. Bush's second term when the left-wing character assassination machine went into high gear to destroy Jeff Gannon. Gannon, also known as James Dale Guckert, asked questions that annoyed liberals because they were based on a right-wing political perspective. Liberals were outraged. How dare the White House allow a conservative in who didn't constantly bash President Bush. The nerve! Partisan, ideologically-driven people shouldn't be allowed into White House press briefings, they howled in unison. [...] Now comes the revelation that at least one partisan ideologically-driven leftist is being welcomed to White House media...

Here is video of former Clinton adviser John Podesta talking about President Obama's plan for National Health Care today on Fox News. Podesta was participating in the Health Care Summit being held at the White House today. Podesta asserts that Health Care in America is inferior to other Western nations, which I think is a very suspect assertion. People flock to the United States for health care for the most serious of illnesses, and a great deal of the cost of health care in America is tied to the cost of medicine and drugs, most of which are being developed...

The Democrats Just love being in power, and way before election day they were working on their goal of STAYING in power. One of their tactics is cutting off all public debate about what the party is doing. The want to turn off the only medium that presents a dissenting opinion, talk radio. Last week the White House announced that they would not support reimplementation of the fairness doctrine, here's why: The President is doing an end-around to cut off dissent, its called "localism." By changing the interpretation of the phrase "Radio and television stations are required to serve the...

Newly confirmed Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has long had an interest in UFOs and the existence of extraterrestrial life. She was given an informal briefing in August 1995 by billionaire philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller, on the best available UFO evidence. An August 4, 1995, memo by President Clinton’s Science Advisor, Dr Jack Gibbons, confirmed that the Clintons would be vacationing with Rockefeller at his Teton Ranch in Wyoming that summer, and they would discuss UFOs: You will probably see Mr Rockefeller on your vacation in the Tetons. He will want to talk with you about his interest in extrasensory perception,...

THE PODESTA CLAN: A D.C. DYNASTY With Obama bemoaning the prevalence of lobbyists in Washington, weekly family dinners at the Podesta households occasionally have grown awkward. Lobbying power couple Tony and Heather Podesta take turns hosting meals with Tony's brother, Obama transition boss John Podesta, and his wife, Mary, a mutual funds association lawyer. Now, sometimes, "we'll say something, and John won't respond. There'll be silence," says Heather, who changes the subject to wine or contemporary art. "Frankly, we're counting the days until the end of the transition so things can go back to normal." (snip) PATTON BOGGS: LOBBYING ICON...

Judicial Watch claims today that they have documented proof that Barack Obama lied when he said he had no contacts with Rod Blagojevich. The letter they gained from a Freedom of Information query certainly does show that Obama acknowledged meeting with Blagojevich, but it falls far short of indicating any sort of discussion on replacing Obama in the Senate: Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the office of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich through the Freedom of Information Act related to Blagojevich’s contacts with President-elect Obama and...

Radical leftist George Soros has long been dedicated to destroying traditional values in America. The convicted insider trader and major funder of the Center for American Progress, whose president, John Podesta, is a co-chair of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, has now personally contributed $50,000 to the Obama Presidential Inaugural Committee, according to Accuracy in Media.

George Soros’s secretive donors’ collaborative, the Democracy Alliance (DA), is trying to fund a permanent political infrastructure of nonprofit think tanks, media outlets, leadership schools, and activist groups to compete with the conservative movement. The DA has put its imprimatur on the Democratic Party and the progressive movement by steering hundreds of millions of dollars to liberal nonprofits. The DA helped Democrats give Republicans a shellacking in November. Now it’s organizing state-level chapters in at least 19 states, and once-conservative Colorado, which hosts the Democracy Alliance’s most successful state affiliate, has turned Democrat blue. Moreover, the DA-funded “Secretary of State...

Obama invites Americans to take a "Seat at the Table" Dec 6 06:25 PM US/Eastern US president-elect Barack Obama on Saturday took a cyber-step towards greater transparency and interactive government with a new feature on his official transition website called "Seat at the Table." The initiative calls for the proceedings of meetings between the Obama transition team and outside organizations to be published on the transition website, Change.gov, and to allow members of the public to comment on them. "In past transitions, meetings like this have been held behind closed doors," said John Podesta, co-chair of the transition team. "Not...

Desperate to see the US emulate the British Government and disclose reported "contact" with UFOs, the enthusiasts have written to Mr Obama to ask that his administration comes clean about the contents of America's "X-Files". They believe they have good prospects of success after public statements of support from both John Podesta, who is running Mr Obama's White House transition team, and Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico - a UFO sighting hotspot - who is expected to secure a cabinet post. In the letter to Mr Obama, the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee calls on the President-Elect to...

Well, we know John McCain is unlikely to be named Barack Obama's White House chief of staff since Rahm Emanuel is already there, talking nice and cutting throats in true Chicago style. But the meeting of the recent rivals in the Windy City did seem to go well today, at least in public. Which is what really matters in all this symbolic hoo-haa of a new administration's formation. This meeting was briefly public, very public, with a trio of U.S. flags to prove it in Obama's downtown Chicago transition office. As opposed to the president-elect's more recent secretive meetings with...

The Warren Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law is teaming up with a group of liberal philanthropists to help minorities and women win jobs in President-elect Barack Obama’s administration. The Diversity in Democracy Project, also dubbed the Talent Bank Project, has already collected about 1,000 resumes as of Friday, according to Steve Phillips, a San Francisco employment lawyer and donor to progressive causes. “The enthusiasm is off the charts,” says Phillips, who also presides over PowerPAC, a nonprofit advocacy and political organization that has also chipped in with Phillips and others to pay for...

WASHINGTON POST: Ex-Lobbyists Have Key Obama Roles. "Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to change Washington, vowing to upend the K Street lobbying culture he encountered when he joined the U.S. Senate. But more than a dozen members of President-elect Obama's fast-growing transition team have worked as federally registered lobbyists within the past four years. They include former lobbyists for the nation's trial lawyers association, mortgage giant Fannie Mae, drug companies such as Amgen, high-tech firms such as Microsoft, labor unions and the liberal advocacy group Center for American Progress." Plus this artful phraseology: In a 2007 speech, he said...

Barack Obama has created a stir by proclaiming that he heads “The Office of President-Elect” — an office that does not officially exist. At his first news conference on Nov. 7, Obama stood at a podium bearing a sign that read: “Office of the President-Elect. Also, his Web site, Change.gov, bears the words “Office of the President-Elect” at the top of its home page. Writer Larry Anderson referred to the “made-up little title” on the American Thinker Web site, and declared: “I nearly busted a gut ... “Once again, [Obama] can’t wait to invest himself with the trappings of office.”

Gore says no to 'Climate Czar' role Tom LoBianco (Contact) and S.A. Miller (Contact) President-elect Barack Obama's transition team is flirting with creating a White House "Climate Czar," but climate change crusader Al Gore says he doesn't want the job. The Obama team declined to comment on such a post, even as environmentalists and power industry executives say it's being widely discussed inside the transition offices as a way to spur a clean energy industry, which Mr. Obama has promised will ween the U.S. from foreign oil and create millions of "green jobs." Obama transition chief John Podesta promoted a...

ADMIN: If this graph is too large please feel free to take it down.

An Academic Bill of Rights, whose principles are drawn entirely from the academic freedom principles articulated by John Dewey and Arthur O. Lovejoy for the American Association of University Professors, is characterized by Podesta and his hirelings as a “Radical Right-wing Agenda.”

It's standard fare for a president to make a bipartisan gesture by including one member of the opposing party in his cabinet - just as it's always the case (lest we forget) that every president-elect vows to change the tone in Washington and reach out magnanimously to his vanquished opponents. But John Podesta, the former Bill Clinton former chief of staff who's spearheading the transition for the 44th president, said today that there would be independents and Republicans in Barack Obama's cabinet and "not just at a token level".

The troubles of the ailing auto industry are quickly becoming a major focus for President-Elect Barack Obama's young administration. As Congress and President Bush debate an industry bailout, sources indicate that Obama may favor creating a White House office, headed by an "auto industry czar," to oversee reforming the troubled American auto industry. The Detroit News reports that both "Bush and Obama are signaling they may favor appointment of an auto czar to oversee the government's efforts to funnel emergency assistance to automakers." Congressional leaders and members of both the outgoing and incoming administrations have all said that automakers might...

Obama's Transition Focuses on Reassuring the Middle Class So far, Obama and aides have gone out of their way to maintain support from the key group By Kenneth T. Walsh Posted November 10, 2008 It's all about reassurance. John Podesta, cochair of Obama's transition organization, said the new administration is reviewing President Bush's executive orders on oil and gas drilling, stem cell research, and other issues for possible reversal. The new administration's moves are likely to please environmentalists, stem cell research advocates, and other groups that have been critical of George W. Bush's policies. Podesta told Fox News that Obama...

WALLACE: Your transition team has reportedly already identified a number of areas where he could issue executive orders ... What's at the top of the list? PODESTA: Well, I think across the — I think across the board... WALLACE: ... could be — like, for instance, stem cell research, he could end the federal restriction on that by executive order, correct? PODESTA: I think across the board, on stem cell research, ... They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah that they're going to try to do right as they...

"The Wicker-Dickey Amendment cannot be changed by Presidential sleight of hand or wave of pen."R. Alta Charo, World Stem Cell Summit, Madison Wisconsin, September, 2008 See video, at time marker 11:18/01:01:29. John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and the leader of the transitional team for the newly invented "Office of the President Elect," told Chris Matthews of Fox News Sunday (transcript here) that Barack Obama intends to do what he can to change the US policy on "stem cells" by the use of the Presidential Executive Order (EO). In light of current law (the Dickey Amendment)...

"There's a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we'll see the president do that," Podesta said. "I think that he feels like he has a real mandate for change. We need to get off the course that the Bush administration has set." Executive orders "have the power of law and they can cover just about anything," Tobias said in a telephone interview. On drilling, the federal Bureau of Land Management is opening about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling. Bush administration officials...

CAP’s John Podesta Confirms He’ll Lead Obama Transition The bulk of the money has come from Democratic Party owner and financial speculator George Soros. This is not surprising. Echoing a Nation magazine report, we noted a year and a half ago that the aggressive think tank is viewed as a kind of left-wing “shadow government,” or government-in-waiting. Insurance tycoon Peter B. Lewis, and Herb and Marion Sandler, the financial innovators who somehow convinced Wachovia to buy their now-troubled financial institution. John Podesta, head of the liberal Center for American Progress, confirmed he will be heading President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team....

WALLACE: But the question, of course, is what kind of change. I want to put up something that the liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in a column in the New York Times this week. Let's put it up. He wrote, "This year's presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies, and the progressive philosophy won." Do you agree? PODESTA: Yes, I do. I think that the program that that - again, that was - that - that the Obama-Biden ticket put forth in the campaign focused on providing opportunity for everyone, focused on the common good. And I think...