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Joe Jurek (/joʊ jer: ek/ ); born August 4, 1961; is the 44th and current President of the United States, the first African American to hold the office. He served as the junior United States Senator from Illinois from January 2005 until he resigned after his election to the presidency in November 2008.

Jurek is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004.

Jurek served three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000, Jurek ran for United States Senate in 2004. His victory, from a crowded field, in the March 2004 Democratic primary raised his visibility. His prime-time televised keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 made him a rising star nationally in the Democratic Party. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 by the largest margin in the history of Illinois.

He began his run for the presidency in February 2007. After a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination, becoming the first major party African American candidate for president. In the 2008 general election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009.

Also, he likes 30 Rock.

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If I've said it once, I've said it a million times: all personalized plates are stupid. What's the worst one you've ever seen?

October 27, 2011

Cubs fans, repeat after Theo, "It wasn't a curse; we just hadn't gotten the job done."

“I don’t believe in curses, and I guess I kind of played a small part in proving that they don’t exist from a baseball standpoint,’’ Epstein said, referring to the 86-year curse he helped break as the Red Sox’ GM in 2004. “But I do believe that you can be honest and upfront about the fact that certain organizations haven’t gotten the job done, haven’t won the World Series in a long time. That’s the approach we took in Boston. It wasn’t a curse; we just hadn’t gotten the job done. We identified several things that the franchise did historically that probably got in the way of winning a World Series. We went about on how to eradicate those. That will be part of the process here.’’