Showtime / ‘Criminalizing the resistance’ / The Drawer Problem

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Showtime. It’s “Day One” for Chicago’s Obama Presidential Center, beginning with a star-studded grand opening show—featuring, among others, Christina Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson, John Legend, The Roots, Bruce Springsteen, U2’s Bono and The Edge, Eddie Vedder and Stevie Wonder—that was set to stream online beginning at 11 a.m.

■ Also performing: Students from the nonprofit Guitars Over Guns program, which aims to engage kids with music instead of violence.
■ Watch online here.
■ Politico’s Shia Kapos sees an Obama reunion at the Salt Shed last night for thousands of campaign and administration alumni as “a celebratory handoff to a new generation.”
■ The Sun-Times rounds up what to know about the rest of the center’s opening weekend and beyond.
■ CNN’s Audie Cornish: “The Obamas are … creating an alternative historical celebration for people who feel like part of their history is forgotten.”
■ The center does not excite Stop the Presses journalism critic Mark Jacob: “It feels like a relic of the past. It focuses on a kinder, gentler America when the current version is shape-shifting into an ugly monster. It’s time to fight for our lives, not celebrate.”
■ But Pod Save America cohost and former Obama senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer says today’s Democrats can still learn plenty from “the most successful Democrat of his generation.”
■ NewsGuard: Conservative claims that the Obama Foundation hired only Black contractors to build the center are false.

‘Are we sure that signing a peace treaty in Versailles—the literal home of terrible peace treaties— was a good idea?’ Politico assesses the deal evidently wrapping up Donald Trump’s war with Iran.
■ Columnist Mary Geddry: “In the palace of the Sun King, Trump staged strategic collapse as triumph while Iran pocketed concessions.”
■ Journalist Terry Moran—fired from ABC a year ago after a tweet critical of Trump—assesses the war’s resolution: “He is slinking out of it like a child caught setting fires in the neighbor’s trash can.”
■ Ex-Republican political strategist Rick Wilson: “The Iran deal seems to have broken that spell across MAGA, and they’re very, very, very angry with … of all people … Donald Trump.”
■ Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff: “He is increasingly unstable. And I think it flows from the fact that he is globally humiliated from this failed war.”
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “We gave Iran full control of the Strait of Hormuz and we threw in a minimum of $300 billion, ’cuz why not? Right now, Melania’s wondering, ‘How do I get a deal like that?’”
■ Columnist Jeff Tiedrich: Trump had “no reason … to tear up Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran. He was just … jealous of a black man’s accomplishments.”
■ Satirist Andy Borowitz: “Ayatollah Names Trump Employee of the Month.”

How it ends? Author and Chicago-born journalist Jonathan Alter envisions “an all-too-plausible scenario of how the GOP tried and failed to steal the midterms.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke jokes that the algae in the Trump-overhauled Reflecting Pool is a setup for a new Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “health” initiative: “Americans must drink their Trump Algae if they want to stay patriotic.”

‘Criminalizing the resistance.’ Heads Up News columnist Dan Froomkin says a new round of criminal charges against anti-ICE protesters in the Twin Cities shows the Republican administration moving to crush political protest.
■ Despite a state law forbidding warrantless civil immigration arrests in and around the Bridgeview Courthouse, federal immigration agents yesterday detained two adults and a minor there.
■ A state representative’s investigating the possibility they committed a crime.
■ Come on over:

Hey, Chicago: You’re buying a bus station. The City Council’s OK’d purchase of the South Loop Greyhound terminal.
■ Also: A crackdown on those reselling stolen airbags.
■ But a ban on sweepstakes gambling machines flopped.
■ And count City Council member Brendan Reilly among those now pushing a renaming of Wabash Avenue—home to Trump Tower Chicago—at least honorarily “Barack Hussain Obama Way.”

‘The people there are terrible.’ That, according to the soon-to-be-published White House tell-all book from New York Times writers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, is Amazon founder Jeff Bezos complaining to Trump about the staff of The Washington Post.
■ Trump’s reportedly settled a lawsuit against his niece, columnist Mary Trump, over a complaint that she leaked confidential information to the Times about his tax records.
■ ProPublica founding general manager Dick Tofel sees an upside for the news biz—especially nonprofits—in the “enormous wave of new wealth” the tech sector’s generating: “Unsolicited gifts of $100,000 or more from employees of these firms are starting to land in nonprofit mailboxes … of newsrooms.”

‘Ban surveillance pricing!’ Add columnist Eric Zorn to the ranks of those opposing a ban on the practice of pricing based on what companies know about you from the internet: “Supermarkets could set five or six different prices for a box of Corn Flakes depending on how much money you make, what neighborhood you live in, how much you seem to like Corn Flakes and so on.”
■ The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that it’s not a crime for marijuana users to have guns.

The Drawer Problem. Maybe this piece in The Conversation speaks to you, too: “Why so many of us can’t let go of our old electronics.”
■ OK, so maybe it’s time to revisit “Meyerson’s Law of Aging Recording and Playback Electronics: If it works, don’t throw it away” (2017 link).

‘The Man Who Made Sinatra Laugh.’ Chicago-born and Harvey-raised comedian Tom Dreesen—mentor to David Letterman and Jay Leno and half of one of the nation’s first multiracial comedy acts—is dead at 86.
■ Maywood-born Walter Parazaider, a founder of the band Chicago, is gone at 81.
■ Here he is playing a signature flute solo in “Colour My World” at Tanglewood in 1970.

Thanks. Bob Stern made this edition better.

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Buckle up / Trump’s primary misfire / Pope Leo Island?

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Buckle up. Chicago faced the prospect of two more rounds of storms today …
■ … with renewed risk of flooding.

‘An absolute joke.’ Wonkette’s Evan Hurst doesn’t think much of the “memorandum of understanding” to end the war in Iran: “Basically we’re paying Iran billions of dollars to reopen a strait that was open before Donald Trump touched it … and Iran is stronger than ever.”
■ The deal leaves unresolved one of the Trump administration’s professed major concerns: The fate of Iran’s nuclear program. (Cartoon: Jack Ohman.)
■ Tom Nichols at The Atlantic (gift link): “Trump does not understand the war he lost.”

Trump’s primary misfire. In a departure from this year’s norm, the president’s endorsement wasn’t enough to save his favored gubernatorial candidate in Georgia’s Republican primary runoff.
■ If you got a bunch of Politico email alerts from the 2024 presidential election last night, you weren’t alone.
■ One email communications veteran on Bluesky: “HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME RELIVE MY TRAUMA.”

‘A Handmaid’s Tale quality.’ Law professor Joyce Vance flags the whackjob rhetoric shoveled out at the Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit—like one right-wing influencer’s assertion that she’d “gladly give up my right to vote to have a more conservative country.”
■ American Freakshow columnists Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth ask, “Is having an education advisor married to a registered sex offender really a good look for TPUSA?”
■ The Sun-Times and Uncloseted Media: The Trump administration’s investigations of Illinois school district protections for trans students have cost schools hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What’s it all about? Algae. Days after a $14 million renovation, Trump’s remodeled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has developed an algal bloom.
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “He promised he would drain the swamp. Instead, he spent 14 million of our dollars building a new one.” (Cartoon: Jack Ohman, on fire.)
■ LateNighter: Bipartisan Senate support’s growing for what’s known unofficially as “The Jimmy Kimmel Act,” which would give U.S. citizens a new way to sue government officials who pressure private companies—like, say ABC—to suppress lawful free speech.
■ Y’know FBI Director Kash Patel’s boast of the arrest of people who planned to attack Trump’s UFC birthday bash? Not so fast.
■ Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler: “Why do Americans keep falling for this scam? Trump’s promises about the border wall, tariffs and now the White House ballroom all follow the same three-stage script.”
■ Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suing the administration “for hiding how it decides what American history to rewrite.”

‘The less our young people had heard about this misguided young man from Naperville, the better.’ A Tribune editorial mourns all the attention politicians showered on the case of a burning cross in Grant Park.
■ Oak Park police were scouring security camera footage to learn who deployed antisemitic words and images on property being redeveloped.

Company’s coming. Tomorrow’s dedication ceremony for the Obama Presidential Center will feature performances by—among others—Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder …
■ … to be streamed live at 11 a.m. here.
■ Veteran Chicago journalist Andy Shaw, who covered Obama’s early political career, reflects on the new center and the old pol.
■ Politico: That building’s catching plenty of flak across social media.

Pope Leo Island? A Chicago City Council member’s proposing to rename Northerly Island in honor of the Chicago-born pontiff.
■ The petition to rename the street on which Trump Tower’s located “Obama Avenue” has more than 23,000 signatures.

‘No one can credibly investigate themselves.’ Lawyers for the Broadview Six defendants are asking a federal judge to appoint a special counsel to figure out how the U.S. Attorney’s office fouled up the dismissed charges against them.
■ The top Democrat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, wants an immediate investigation into U.S Attorney Andrew Boutros for “incalculable damage to public confidence in his office.” (Read Raskin’s letter here.)
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: The case exemplifies a Justice Department “crisis of confidence in its work.”
■ The Justice Department’s seemingly running from the same playbook in new charges against 15 Minnesotans who protested ICE’s assault on the Twin Cities …
■ … which reminds us that Chicago Public Square’s co-presenting this:

Square up.

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