Free Republic

Peeling lead paint. Roach infestations. Blinking electricity. Mold. These are just some of the dangerous conditions that Daniel Ohebshalomthe Big Apple’s “worst landlord,” has allegedly ignored in two of his Washington Heights apartment buildings, city housing officials said Monday. The nearly 700 open violations between the buildings at 705 and 709 170th Street earned Ohebshalom an open arrest warrant, a two-month vacation at Rikers Island and fines of more than $3 million, the officials said. “The worst landlord in New York City is Daniel Ohebshalom,” Commissioner Adolfo Carrión Jr. of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development...

Ukrainian president Zelensky just admitted that American troops will be needed to keep Ukraine from total collapse. At the same time NATO announces Ukraine will become a member of the alliance before too long. This is a non-starter for Russian President Putin. Colonel Douglas MacGregor joins Redacted host Clayton Morris for the very latest developments. Video at link.

by Sam RostonValerie Jarrett, president of the Obama Foundation, is under brutal fire on social media for her “knife fight” tweet, follwing the police shooting of a 16-year old Black girl in Columbus, OH on Tuesday.The former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted Wednesday after the Columbus police bodycam footage was released showing the teen girl, who was fatally shot, swinging a knife at another girl and about to stab another girl.As we reported on Tuesday, Bryant knocked down and attempted to stab one woman, and totally ignored police warnings before attemting to stab another unarmed woman right in...

While on vacation in Hawaii this month, President Obama played golf with Allison Davis, a former business partner of Tony Rezko who also helped give Obama his start in the legal profession. Rezko is the former Obama associate and fundraiser who was convicted of corruption and fraud and currently sits in prison. Davis, who is male, partnered with Rezko on a series of government-funded low and mixed income housing development projects in Chicago. While Davis himself has never been charged with wrongdoing, a number of the projects were high-priced failures that resulted in poor living conditions for residents. According to...

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else. But it’s not safe to live here. About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a...

  The Barack Obama career tree is decorated with ornaments of failure. Most notable among the early disasters is Grove Parc. Grove Parc was a housing project in Obama's district in Chicago. Obama used it as a springboard for his political ambitions. He enmeshed himself with the slumlords Valerie Jarrett and Tony Rezko and subsequently Obama got campaign funding while Jarrett and Rezko got wealthy. The residents suffered for it. Back in 2012 I said this would be the blueprint for the Obama Presidency: Grove Parc was the blueprint for the Obama Presidency. It’s a shame that no one in...

Valerie Jarrett is the most powerful figure in the White House, rivalling President Obama in the scope of her influence over the fate of the Republic. Her personal Secret Service detail attests to the importance of her role in our government – in a position that is unelected and unconfirmed by the Senate. She has served as godmother of Barack Obama’s political and personal life, from introducing him to his future wife Michelle Robinson to integrating him into Chicago’s political machine and power structure. Professor Paul Kengor provides fascinating details about her background, and that of other key members of...

The media have identified the problem with the Obama presidency and want her tarred and feathered. Or just fired. Or sidelined. Or made an ambassador to some faraway land. Her name is Valerie Jarrett. White House aide and longtime Chicago pal of Barack and Michelle Obama has been a target roughly from the day she stepped foot in Washington. But now, in the wake of the Democrats’ midterm wipeout, the press is really unloading on her. She has become the scapegoat-in-chief. The notion that a single staff person is responsible for most of the administration’s shortcomings over the last six...

Cicero's Prognosis -- by --THE HONORABLE MILLARD F. CALDWELL Justice - Supreme Court Tallahassee, Florida Presented at the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Inc. October 7-9, 1965, Columbus, Ohio Reprinted March, 1996 The Roman Republic, the foremost power of its day, had reached its zenith. Its leadership had attained unbounded wealth and unstinted power. The rulers were intolerant of restraint, indifferent to the demands of the middle class, and contemptuous of the Constitution which was designed to curb their ambitions. The time was some 70 years before the birth of Christ. Young Marcus...

On NBC on Sunday, Meet the Press had a segment on Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. “Our Cynthia McFadden was granted unique access and spent a day behind the scenes with Valerie Jarrett at the White House,” host David Gregory said introducing the segment. Strangely, inside her office is this photo with figures bowing before a picture of Jarrett.

President Obama’s aides went to extraordinary lengths to uncover the identity of a senior official who was using Twitter to make snarky comments about White House staffers. Suspicion gradually centered on Jofi Joseph, the point man on nuclear nonproliferation at the National Security Council. So at a meeting in which everyone was in on the scam an inaccurate but innocuous news tidbit was revealed. When Joseph used his anonymous Twitter handle #natlsecwonk to broadcast the tidbit he was caught and promptly fired. He was not fired for revealing any secrets, but for making disparaging comments about thin-skinned administration players ranging...

How 'bout a little refresher re. Obama political Godfather  and actual (16-count!) convicted felon Tony Rezko...? The Syrian-born Rezko is an infamous Chicago slumlord, fast-food restauranteur, and sleazy political operator who played a key role in the Blagojevich case- as well as the unlikley ascension to power of Barrack Hussein Obama.Obama's longtime ally, friend, and top fundraiser was found guilty of 16/24 counts of felony influence peddling back in June 2008. Of course the story was mostly buried/detached from his bud Barry in the run-up to that year's most unfortunate (for us) presidential election whilst the jury convicted Rezko of wire...

In March 1994, a year before "Dreams" was published, Obama was the lead defense attorney on an obscure case in Cook County Court that has heretofore escaped examination by the national media. In this case, Obama defended a Chicago slumlord and powerful political ally who was charged with a long list of offenses against poor residents. The defendant was the Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corp., controlled by Bishop Arthur Brazier, a South Side Chicago preacher and political operator. Brazier's burgeoning real estate empire included a low-income housing project at 6223 South University. Today, Map Quest describes the Woodlawn neighborhood as...

If for nothing else, Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas will be remembered for an anecdote from 2010. After he spent hours disputing an allegation in the French media that Michelle Obama thought life in the White House was “hell,” press secretary Robert Gibbs encountered senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. She told him the first lady was unhappy with his work. Gibbs exploded in a rage, informing Jarrett that she didn’t “know what the f— you’re talking about” and that if Mrs. Obama was displeased, well, “f— her too.” Subsequent relations between the senior adviser and press secretary were strained. Gibbs told Kantor...

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – How would you like to not pay your rent, year after year, and get away with it? A Brooklyn woman has done just that for the past six years. Artist Margaret Maugenest, 60, stopped paying rent for several years, but instead of getting evicted, the state’s highest court said she was justified, CBS 2′s John Slattery reported. “Yeah, I feel very good about that, John. I feel very relieved,” Maugenest told Slattery. Since 1984, Maugenest has lived in a loft — a converted manufacturing building on Nevins Street in Gowanus – with rent of less than...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — President Barack Obama would veto a House Republican bill that requires Congress to add a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution before raising the country’s debt limit, the White House said Monday, as action in the debt-ceiling debate moved to Capitol Hill. The House GOP’s “Cut, Cap and Balance Act” “would undercut the government’s “ability to meet its core commitments to seniors, middle-class families and the most vulnerable, while reducing our ability to invest in our future,” the White House said in a policy statement about the bill, which would also cut spending from the 2012 budget and...

A northern New Jersey apartment building owned by the imam planning an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero in New York has been put into temporary custodial receivership. Olivieri's decision means the tenants October rent payments will be used to eliminate bedbugs from four apartments, cap sewer lines in the basement and ...

The bedbug-infested building owned by the imam embroiled in controversy over his request to build a mosque near the World Trade Center site has been placed into temporary custodial receivership by Hudson County Judge Thomas Olivieri, who cited a lack of improvements as the reason for his decision. According to Tuesday's decision, the custodial receiver, Raymond Bulin, will be in charge of using the October rent money to eliminate bedbugs from four apartments, cap sewer lines in the basement and improve the fire escape ladder. The building, located at 2206 Central Ave., is owned by Feisal Abdul Rauf, who was...

The developer of the proposed mosque near Ground Zero has begun repaying the $270,000 he owes in property taxes. Sharif el-Gamal walked into the Department of Finance payment center at 66 John St. on Wednesday and said he wanted to settle his tax bill, a department spokesman said. He paid $35,449.17 -- 15 percent of what his real-estate firm, Soho Properties, owed -- and said that the remaining $236,327.81 would then be taken care of in eight quarterly payments.

Joy Tiz ©2010 It would seem that the left has vetted their favorite religious figure with the same diligence they used on their presidential candidate. Faisal Abdul Rauf, leader of the Victory Mosque movement has a long history of fraud and chicanery. Pamela Geller explores Rauf’s resume: "He has been exposed as a rat and vermin slumlord whose tenants live without basic services like hot water. He scammed New Jersey politicians and got taxpayer dollars for rehabilitation of his infested, dilapidated buildings in Union City and Palisades Park, but still his victimized tenants live in squalor." At last finding a...