Obama's Replacement

Obama has named his replacement as Senator- long-time friend Valerie Jarrett. She's not someone I'm familiar with at all but here's what I came up through Google.

Since 1995, Jarrett has been a high ranking executive at Habitat Co., a real estate firm tasked by a federal judge to ensure the CHA ends segregation in public housing.

Under the Plan for Transformation, the city has lost more than 13,000 housing units for the poor at a time when low-income families face one of the worse housing crises in recent history. After years of neglect and abandonment, many residents doubt that Jarrett and CHA officials have their interests at heart.

Jarrett has pushed to integrate new developments by limiting the number of residents, mostly poor and black, who can live in the new communities. From the beginning, that stance clashed with efforts by residents and housing advocates to ensure the number of units set aside for the poor was as large as possible.

And this-

Jarrett has been part of Obama's inner circle since his days as an Illinois state senator. She identifies herself as a Chicago businesswoman, but according to Obama campaign advisers, she is much more than that.

She is Iranian-American, for one thing, and the Obama campaign has sought to keep her ties to Iran from press views, as it has also sought to keep her political background and deep and tangled business and personal relationship to the Obama family from sight. For example, while it's true that Jarrett is a business executive, she also has been a well-known political operative for Chicago Democrats back to her days working in the background as an adviser to late Chicago mayor Harold Washington, as well as the Daley family.

"She knows where are all the bodies have been buried in the past 30 or so years of Chicago politics and she knows all the tricks," says one longtime Democrat political consultant in Chicago. "If Obama had a political and financial godmother, it would be Valerie."

Jarrett is the chief executive of Habitat Co., which developed and managed large housing projects in and around Chicago -- and in Obama's state legislative district -- that were subsidized by federal and state housing dollars, and which were ultimately seized by federal authorities for what were unlivable conditions. While overseeing the company that managed these housing facilities, Jarrett also worked with long-time Obama friend and convicted felon Tony Rezko in raising money for Obama's political career.

Some more from Marathon Pundit. And from Doug Ross.