[PJMedia] The scandal-plagued Obama Presidential Center in Chicago already stirred up plenty of controversy. Now the money trail surrounding it raises even more uncomfortable questions about how former President Barack Obama’s inner circle is cashing in while taxpayers get screwed over.
I’d be just as happy if the thing runs out of money before it opens, as looks likely to happen to plans for a Biden presidential library.
New federal tax filings reveal the staggering salaries flowing through the Obama Foundation as construction of the $850 million Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park nears completion. The foundation will operate the massive 19.3-acre campus, which sits on publicly owned Chicago parkland. The project includes a museum, an athletic center, and a public library branch. It will not operate as a traditional presidential library overseen by the National Archives.
The land it sits on is a big part of the scheme. The Obama Foundation secured a 99-year agreement with the city, under which the foundation pays just $10 per year to use the plot. That deal alone costs Chicago tens of millions of dollars in potential value while handing over prime public property to a private nonprofit run by a former president.
With such a sweet deal in place, the foundation has been able to pay its officers inflated salaries, the most eye‑popping of which is paid to Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest political confidantes. Jarrett “earned” $740,000 in 2024 as CEO of the Obama Foundation. That salary easily outpaces the compensation paid to leaders at several other presidential foundations.
And she’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Six of the foundation’s 10 highest-paid executives previously held senior roles in the Obama administration or campaign. David Simas, Obama’s former White House political director, earned up to $626,000 annually while leading the foundation from 2017 through 2020. Adewale Adeyemo, another senior Obama official who later became deputy Treasury secretary under Joe Biden, earned about $540,000 as the foundation’s first president.
The list keeps going. Anne Filipic, a former White House public engagement official, earned roughly $400,000 annually. Christina Tchen, former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, also pulled in roughly $400,000 a year. Michael Strautmanis, another Obama campaign and White House aide, earned more than $300,000 annually.
Compensation across the organization has ballooned. Salaries and benefits climbed from $18.5 million in 2018 to $43.7 million in 2024. Staffing expanded to 337 employees.
Illinois Republicans smell the stench of classic Chicago corruption.
Of course.
"Illinois Democrats are truly living their best lives — making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to help design the ugliest building in Chicago," Illinois GOP Chairman Kathy Salvi said. Though, to be fair, it might be the ugliest building in the country. "Their jaw-dropping salaries prove that Illinois’ culture of corruption is alive and well as Barack Obama’s top allies rake in the cash.”
#4
In the end, we could trace the money through all the grift and quid per quo’s to our own wallets. We are paying for this ugly monstrosity. There is one modern building in Rome that none of the locals like. They call it the Memorial to the Wedding Cake of the Typewriter. It is beautiful compared to this.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/12/2026 14:34 Comments ||
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[FoxNews] Thune tees up SAVE America Act for a vote next week, but won't launch the talking filibuster
Senate Republicans know that Trump-backed voter ID legislation is doomed to fail and are trying to find a way to pin the blame on Senate Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., plans to bring the bill to the floor next week, but Republicans won’t take the route of launching into a talking filibuster despite pressure from President Donald Trump and the GOP base to do so.
"We don't have the votes either to proceed, get on a talking filibuster, nor to sustain one if we got on it," Thune said. "But that is just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that. I mean, I understand the president's got a passion to see this issue addressed, as we all do."
While the end result after an exhaustive marathon of debate would allow Republicans to pass the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) America Act at a simple-majority threshold, Thune has time and again warned that the votes aren’t there among Republicans to block Democratic amendments that could completely reshape the bill.
Still, Trump and a sphere of online conservative voices are demanding that the bill pass at any cost. Trump warned that if it does not, Republicans will fall flat in the upcoming midterm election cycle.
"It will guarantee the midterms. If you don’t get it, big trouble," Trump told House Republicans at their annual policy retreat earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are nearly unified in their opposition to the bill.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., reiterated his opposition to the SAVE America Act and charged that it was legislation geared toward "destroying" and "purging" voter rolls across the country.
"This is a bill that destroys the country," Schumer said. "And it is not about showing ID when you show up to vote."
The other option for the GOP would be to nuke the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, which some argue Democrats would do anyway when they eventually regain control of the upper chamber.
There is not an appetite among Republicans to blow up the filibuster either.
"I suggest our first goal will be to try and pass it, but I understand how difficult that is, and I'm sympathetic with the position of not ending the filibuster," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Fox News Digital. "But short of that, our next goal ought to be to make sure the Democrats get blamed, because they're the ones that are truly blocking this."
A likely strategy that Republicans will turn to is in the spirit of the talking filibuster with the marathon of debate and amendment votes that process would yield. A key difference is that Republicans would stack the deck with their own amendments, forcing Democrats to take vote after vote.
Johnson, who, along with Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rick Scott, R-Fla., met with Trump to push for the SAVE America Act, said that instead of a straight up-or-down vote on the bill, Republicans could flood the floor with amendments in a genuine bid to reshape the bill. Then would come a final vote at the end of the amendment flurry.
Those add-ons to the bill would include tweaks that Trump has requested, like nixing mail-in ballots save for certain exceptions, banning men from women’s sports and halting transgender surgical procedures on minors.
"We're getting the Democrats on record voting, ‘Oh, you want to keep mutilating children on the altar of transgenderism,’" Johnson said.
Another route to pass the bill could be through the budget reconciliation process, which Republicans used to ram Trump’s "big, beautiful bill" through Congress last year.
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., has been the most vocal proponent of that tactic. But in order for the SAVE America Act to survive the reconciliation route, it would have to pass muster under the Byrd Rule, which requires that anything crammed into a reconciliation package have a budgetary effect.
Kennedy argued the best way to counter that is to lawyer up.
"It really comes down to what the [Senate] parliamentarian says, and I would get the best minds I could find to try to draft a provision that would survive Byrd," Kennedy said. "When you argue or debate with the parliamentarian, you've got to be ready. You can't just walk in there and pull it out of your orifices."
Posted by: Skidmark ||
03/12/2026 08:55 ||
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[1780 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
[WND] Democrats and other leftists in Minnesota are working again this year on imposing a long list of new demands on those citizens who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights by owning a gun, including a stunning new requirement that gun owners open their homes for government inspections.
The state long has pushed for fences around the Second Amendment to keep citizens from having and owning firearms, and the agenda has been elevated in recent months because of a shooting at Annunciation school, where students Harper Moyski and Fletcher Merkel were shot and killed, apparently by Robin M. Westman, 23, a gunman who earlier had claimed to be transgender.
Westman died by suicide to end the shooting, which injured more than a dozen others.
#3
Minnesota has a lot of hunters. They will either collectively block this electorally or several of them will sue.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
03/12/2026 5:44 Comments ||
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#4
Just another step in the progression of Socialism in the USA.
Just look how far down the Social - Communist path the Far Left, Liberals, Socialists & DINO's have already taken the United States since the late 1960's.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[FoxNews] Thune tees up SAVE America Act for a vote next week, but won't launch the talking filibuster
