Greetings! Welcome, dear reader, to Friday, June 19, 2026. It's Juneteenth, of course. It's also Garfield The Cat Day, National Day of Prayer for Law Enforcement Officers, National Eat an Oreo Day, National Flip Flop Day, National FreeBSD Day, National Martini Day, National Pets in Film Day, and National Take Back the Lunch Break Day.
1903: New York Central Railroad begins building Grand Central Terminal.
1934: Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created.
1937: Second of two legendary recording sessions by Delta Blues musician Robert Johnson with producer Don Law at the Vitagraph Studios, Dallas, Texas.
1944: Heavy air raid on U.S. fleet at Guam "Turkey Shoot."
1956: Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin end their partnership after 10 years and 16 films.
1964: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes the Senate 73-27.
1971: Carole King starts a five-week run at No. 1 on the U.S. singles chart with the double A-sided single "It's Too Late / I Feel The Earth Move."
Birthdays today include: Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist, and Christian philosopher, later to have a computer programming language named after him; Wallis Simpson, American divorcee whom British King Edward VIII abdicated his throne to marry; Moe Howard, actor and comedian (The 3 Stooges); Lou Gehrig, New York Yankee first baseman; Mildred Natwick, actress (Barefoot in the Park, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon); Alan Cranston (Democrat senator from California, 1969-1993); Pat Buttram, actor (Mr. Haney in Green Acres); Tommy Devito, baritone vocalist and guitarist (Four Seasons); Al Wilson, soul singer ("Show and Tell"); Salman Rushdie, British-Indian novelist; Paula Abdul, singer-songwriter; and Laura Ingraham, attorney and television personality (The Ingraham Angle).
If today's your day, enjoy your day.
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By way of YouTube and insufferable boredom, I finally caught up last night with the coverage of the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago — and naturally, a few thoughts came out of that lamentable waste of time. Being Juneteenth, a day marking that day in history when slavery was stamped out in the U.S. territories after a Republican president outlawed it, it seems appropriate for me to open up on this subject.
First: Barack Obama spent eight years loudly declaring his administration the most transparent in American history. His team said it so often and with such sincerity that you almost forgot it was happening while his Justice Department prosecuted more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined. And yet, when the time came to erect a monument to that glorious transparency, the architects produced… a building with no windows. This is one of those situations where the truth is funnier than anything professional comedy writers could concoct, regardless of the amount of alcohol consumed.
Think about it. The transparency president built an opaque box. I'd call it ironic, but irony implies unintentional contrast, as if this were the message that was intended. This, on the other hand, feels more like a confession rendered in concrete.
The second thing: the aesthetic of the thing. Stand that building next to a Soviet-era cultural ministry, and you'd need a scorecard to tell them apart. The brutalist massing, the monumental scale designed to make the individual feel appropriately small, the self-serious geometries that scream The State Has Arrived — it's all there. The Soviets built structures meant to awe citizens into compliance. The connection to Obama’s left-leaning seems undeniable. The only thing that will make the thing more normal is some spray-painted graffiti, which is never far off in Chicago, anyway.
Now, I'm not suggesting anything about intent. The record of Obama’s presidency speaks to a presence that couldn’t organize a Kool-Aid stand except by accident and with millions of taxpayer dollars. How else to explain Obamacare and the website that never did get the kinks worked out, for example?
I'm merely observing that the people who designed a monument to a president famous for his rhetoric about openness and inclusion produced something that looks like it houses the Ministry of Truth and lets in approximately zero sunlight.
But sure. Very on-brand. Very transparent.
Then there's the contractor situation. This actually breaks down into several distinct stories, and every single one of them is a disaster, pretty much like the Obama Administration itself.
Fox News Digital reports that multiple subcontractors who helped build the 19.3-acre campus on Chicago's South Side now face financial ruin, scrambling to recover millions they claim nobody paid them before the grand opening party cranked up. Fox identified firm after firm claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. Champagne for the celebrities, bankruptcy paperwork for the builders. Yep, very inspiring.
Now, here's the part that deserves its own slow clap. The stiffed contractors aren't just any contractors; they're largely the minority-owned and local businesses the Obama Foundation spent years loudly celebrating as the whole point of the project. The Foundation plastered minority business inclusion across every press release like a bumper sticker, made it a defining goal of the entire endeavor — and then apparently forgot to cut the checks to the very people it claimed to champion. Outstanding work. Please trust me when I tell you I'm not shocked by all this.
Engineering News-Record confirms that union trade contractors say the Foundation stopped paying for change orders and other completed work — and then stopped communicating altogether. The subcontractors chased payment through prime contractor Lakeside Alliance, a joint venture that itself included Turner Construction and several minority-owned firms, and apparently hit a wall of silence. Nothing says "community investment" quite like ghosting the community. Oh, and funny how the legacy media hasn't touched that subject, isn't it?
And then there's the endowment situation, which one commenter in Yahoo News summarized with admirable succinctness and precision:
The fact that they have created this probably unsustainable edifice to an ego and then, eventually, if it goes under, who's going to be caught with the bill time and time again? It's the taxpayers of the city, citizens of Chicago and the state of Illinois.
More like when it goes under.
So, let’s take inventory. A monument to Obama, in which black people get stiffed and see their businesses collapse, the building can only be described as an eyesore for which the taxpayers will end up footing the bill. And when it comes to that, and the demands go out for the taxpayers to foot the bills, does anyone doubt that the slightest taxpayer resistance will be regarded as "racist"?
Yep. It totally fits.
Thought of the day: Interesting how the same folks who have been crying about a "living wage" are the ones saying farms can’t run without cheap illegal labor.
VIP members: Hit the heart, and I'd like to hear your comments on today's topic.
You're almost to the weekend. Don't blow it. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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