Tag: Obama

Obama Foundation executives earn lavish salaries as fundraising plummets, and it defaults on agreement with city

The cenotaph-like monument to Barack Obama being built on prime lakefront property that used to be a park in Chicago is running into financial problems.  But the top executives there are feeling no pain, earning salaries far higher than those at other presidential foundations.  Fundraising is down so much that the foundation appears to have defaulted on an agreement with the City of Chicago made as a condition of receiving acres of land in Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, and repurposed as the site of the monument (which is not a presidential library under the control of the National Archives).

A substantial analysis of the salaries and finances of the Obama Foundation done by A.D. Quig of the Chicago Tribune reveals that the ten top executives there earn far more than their counterparts at other presidential foundations, and they top the pay levels at all but one of Chicago’s major cultural institutions.

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Testimony from Lois Lerner in IRS targeting scandal to be released

Judicial Watch announced today that a federal court ordered the release of testimony of Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Holly Paz, her top aide and former IRS director of Office of Rulings and Agreements. 

Both IRS officials played key roles in the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups and individuals opposed to Obama policies in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.

The ruling in the U.S. District Court Southern District of Ohio Western Division unsealing the case records comes in the lawsuit (NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The Internal Revenue Service, et al. (No. 1:13-cv-00341)).

Lerner’s and Paz’s depositions were sealed by Judge Barrett in April 2017, after Lerner’s and Paz’s lawyers claimed the two officials were receiving threats. The court finally ordered the unsealing of the depositions four years after plaintiffs requested the depositions be unsealed and only after plaintiffs filed for a writ of mandamus to force action in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

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King Hypocrite Obama to Install Massive 2,500 Gallons Propane Tank for his Seaside Home in Martha’s Vineyard

Hypocrisy at its best!

Instead of installing windmills and solar panels for someone so concerned about global warming, former President Barack Obama has ordered the installation of three massive propane gas tanks, two sized at 1,000 gallons and another one at 500 gallons, at his Martha’s Vineyard estate which sits along the “rising” seashore.

According to a report from The Martha’s Vineyard Times, the office of the select board of Edgartown, Massachusetts approved an application for a 2,500-gallon commercial propane tank for 79 Turkeyland Cove Road in Katama, a property owned by former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama.

These three propane tanks were to be installed above ground on the Obamas’ property, in contrast with the initial report that it will be buried.

“We’ve never had a private propane tank come to us,” select board member Arthur Smadbeck told the MV Times.

The select board office confirmed to The Daily Caller News Foundation that the tanks are to be used for “residential purposes.”

Filling the massive propane tanks with gas could reportedly cost up to $75,000.

Propane gas is a type of liquefied petroleum gas, and it is mostly produced as a by-product of natural gas processing, per Sharp Energy. It is known for being one of the cleanest burning fuels available and was used as a clean fuel many years before the recent interest in green energy pushed by Democrats including Barack Obama.

Propane is a fossil fuel and is listed as an approved clean alternative fuel under the Clean Air Act of 1990.

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Obama: We have to “detoxify” the “scourge of disinformation and conspiracy theories and hate online”

Former US President Barack Obama made a fresh push for online censorship during an appearance at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit by calling for crackdowns on content that he deems to be “disinformation,” “hate,” or a “conspiracy theory.”

Before Obama took the stage, 2022 Obama Foundation Leader Sarah-Josephine Hjorth hinted at what was to come by railing against “fake news and misinformation.”

“While the increase in use of smartphones and social media first came with the whisper of renewed democratic participation, fake news and misinformation dominate the digital landscape and result in an erosion of the fabric of truth and polarization,” Hjorth said.

Shortly after taking the stage, Obama continued this theme by invoking the January 6 Capitol riot and tying it to “misinformation and conspiracy theories.”

“In my own country, the forces that unleashed mob violence on our Capitol are still churning out misinformation and conspiracy theories,” Obama said.

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Disclosed: How Obama Administration Officials Conducted Shadow Diplomacy With Iran To Undermine Trump

Senior Obama administration officials engaged in a secret meeting with Iran in 2018 as part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document.

As the Trump administration worked to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, a delegation of “U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City, according to a State Department memo unearthed this week as part of a lawsuit brought to compel the release of this information. The meeting took place around the same time John Kerry was reported to be working behind-the-scenes with Iranian officials to salvage the 2015 nuclear accord.

The internal memo, which is marked unclassified, details how these former U.S. ambassadors conducted shadow diplomacy with Iran’s top envoy surrounding “nuclear weapons, potential prisoner swaps, [the] Afghanistan withdrawal, and negotiations with the Taliban,” according to the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a legal advocacy group that sued the State Department to obtain the internal memo.

The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive, even as former president Donald Trump and his administration worked to isolate the regime, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo told the Free Beacon in exclusive remarks. Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

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Tulsi Gabbard suggests Obama behind ‘Ministry of Truth,’ says Biden just ‘front man’

Former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard suggested that former President Barack Obama is behind the effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, which she likened to George Orwell’s famed “Ministry of Truth.”

“Biden is just a front man,” Gabbard said on Twitter Sunday. “Obama, April 21: social media censors ‘don’t go far enough,’ so the government needs to step in to do the job. Six days later, Homeland Security rolls out the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (aka Disinformation Governance Board).”

Gabbard, a Democrat, was referencing Obama’s speech at Stanford University last week, where he argued tech companies have a hard time moderating content on their own and called for more oversight.

“Now the good news is that almost all the big tech platforms now acknowledge some responsibility for content on their platforms, and they’re investing in large team of people to monitor it,” Obama said during the speech. “Given the sheer volume of content, this strategy can feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole.”

Obama said he believes employees at the companies “are sincere” in trying to moderate violent content and hate speech, but argued more needs to be done to help the companies limit such posts.

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Governments Worldwide are Working in Lockstep to bring in Digital I.D. & Social Credit System as EU agrees to Expand Online Censorship with ‘Digital Services Act’

Under pressure applied by both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the European Union is working to expand online censorship to an extreme Orwellian level, as well as strictly regulate speech during what authorities deem to be times of crisis (we always seem to be in the middle of a “crisis”), and remove online anonymity by forcing the public to have a digital identity.

But these plans aren’t unique to the EU. They are also currently being rolled out in the UK and Africa, proving Governments worldwide are working in lockstep to bring in a digital identity and social credit system right under your nose.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both lobbied for the EU to back the censorship bill known as the ‘Digital Services Act‘ on Thursday, April 21st, 2022.

From France 24, “EU agrees on new legislation to tame internet ‘Wild West’ “:

The Digital Services Act (DSA) — the second part of a massive project to regulate tech companies — aims to ensure tougher consequences for platforms and websites that host a long list of banned content ranging from hate speech to disinformation and child sexual abuse images.

[…] Tech giants have been repeatedly called out for failing to police their platforms — a New Zealand terrorist attack that was live-streamed on Facebook in 2019 caused global outrage, and the chaotic insurrection in the US last year was promoted online.

The dark side of the internet also includes e-commerce platforms filled with counterfeit or defective products.

[…] The regulation will require platforms to swiftly remove illegal content as soon as they are aware of its existence. Social networks would have to suspend users who frequently breach the law.

The DSA will force e-commerce sites to verify the identity of suppliers before proposing their products.

[…] The European Commission will oversee yearly audits [of Big Tech firms] and be able to impose fines of up to six percent of their annual sales for repeated infringements.

Looking over the outline of the new agreement it’s striking how they seamlessly conflate child sexual abuse material with “illegal hate speech.”

Both are jumbled together as “illegal content.”

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