Barack Obama just told a Michigan crowd that Iran is in a STRONGER strategic position than before the war. Fine. Let's grade that claim. Then I have one question about what he wants for America if THAT is his definition of strong. @BarackObama, show your work. Here is the strong position, graded. Dear Lord, save us from the high-IQ stupid. The rial has hit record lows above 2 million to the dollar. Iran's own statistics agency put inflation at 88.6 percent year over year in June. The United States says it hit their navy and their nuclear sites. And the Strait of Hormuz? Iran could always threaten it. Nothing new there. Slight oversight, Mr. President! Now apply that standard to my school. The roof caves in, the heat dies, the library floods, and I tell my staff we are in a stronger position than September. I'd be fired by lunch. This is not a radical idea. Speaking of buildings, you have opinions about those too, Mr. Obama. On Saturday, October 24, you stood in Cleveland Public Auditorium at a rally for Sherrod Brown and Amy Acton and said of the current White House: "I don't know if you've noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV." Then came the line that got the clips: "He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory." Good line. I'll give him that. Now let's grade the architecture critic. I served in Iraq, so the Saddam comparison lands a little differently for me than it did in Cleveland. His palaces were paid for by a regime with mass graves. A ballroom is a lot of things, but that isn't one of them. Anyway, let's take a walk through Jackson Park. The Obama Presidential Center is a gray, mostly windowless tower standing 225 feet tall. Some Chicagoans call it the Obamalisk. Others call it a Tower of Babel. One resident described it as a rock dropped into a landscape of trees and flowers. A commentator I watched this week said it looks like Darth Vader's tomb, and then topped himself with "manufacturing warehouse." I'll leave the credit with him. The Obama Foundation says the windows are limited on purpose because sunlight damages artwork and artifacts, and that the shape is meant to evoke four hands coming together. Fair enough on the sunlight. Artifacts do fade. But think about it for a second. The man who promised the most transparent administration in history built a library where windows are a hazard. And a gold ballroom is tacky, apparently, while a windowless tower on a 99-year lease of public parkland is four hands coming together. Same hobby. Same taste in things the neighbors didn't ask for. Different jersey. Quinn's Law Number Seven: it's different when you're a Democrat. Now the lawsuits. A group called Protect Our Parks sued. They argued the city illegally handed public parkland in Jackson Park to the Obama Foundation, which holds a 99-year lease on about 19 acres, and that the project would harm the park's environmental and historic character. I grade everybody, including people on my side of an argument, so here is the straight version. Federal Judge Robert Blakey dismissed the public-trust claims in March 2022, reasoning that the center would confer a public benefit. A second suit, over the federal environmental and historic reviews, ended in a ruling for the defendants in November 2022. The Seventh Circuit affirmed on April 8, 2024. The courts sided with the Obama Foundation. The eyesore was legal. Passing a court is a different test than passing the eye test. Plenty of things clear inspection and still look like something my beagle dragged under the porch and left for three days. Then there is the money. The cost estimate climbed from about $500 million in 2017 to roughly $850 million, and the opening slid from 2021 to this year. The contractors are where I slow down, because that is where the internet is sprinting. The commentator told his audience that Obama stiffed Black contractors and still owes them money. Here is what the record supports. In January 2025, Robert McGee, owner of the Chicago concrete and rebar firm II in One, sued the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti for roughly $40 million in costs he says his joint venture covered. He alleges the firm called his minority-owned company unqualified while calling non-minority-owned contractors qualified. Thornton Tomasetti denies it and blames the subcontractors' own performance. Neither Mr. Obama nor the Foundation is a defendant. Then in June, La Voce di New York, citing the New York Post, reported subcontractors claiming losses from hundreds of thousands of dollars to several million, with the owner of Adamson Plumbing saying his approaches $4 million. The Foundation says it paid its general contractor, Lakeside Alliance, which was responsible for hiring and paying the subs, and that it has no outstanding payment dispute with Lakeside. No court has ruled on any of it. So "stiffed" is an allegation about a chain of contracts, not a finding about Barack Obama, and I'm not going to hand it to you as one. But Omar Shareef of the African American Contractors Association says this project was promised to uplift minority contractors, and minority contractors are the ones in the headlines waiting on money. Somebody should grade that. And the neighbors? In August 2025, Alderwoman Jeanette Taylor warned that the project would bring gentrification and displacement, and pointed out that Chicago never signed a Community Benefits Agreement. A resident named Kyana Butler said her two-bedroom went from $800 a month to $1,800. That is a 125 percent jump, by her account. Apply the Obama definition of a stronger position to her family and they are thriving. Her rent is stronger. Her landlord is in a much stronger strategic position. Which brings me back to Michigan. Same speech, different gift. Obama said Abdul El-Sayed will "finish the job" we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee affordable healthcare to every American. Finish the job. Sixteen years later. If the ACA had solved healthcare, there would be no job left to finish. The quiet part just went out loud. And the candidate standing next to him agrees with me... In 2012, Abdul El-Sayed called the ACA a "watered-down reform that kowtows to the interests of healthcare lobbies." His words, not mine. Obama is campaigning for the man who graded his signature law and wrote the review himself. Those subsidy expiration dates everyone keeps screaming about? Democrats wrote them into the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Zero Republican votes for either. A "finish the job" promise sixteen years late is about as useful as a parachute that opens on impact. Now back to Iran, because the same rally had a claim I want on the board. Obama said his nuclear deal kept Iran from getting nukes. Many of that deal's limits had expiration dates written right into the text. And in January 2016, the United States sent Iran $400 million in cash as part of a $1.7 billion settlement. That is not a wall, Mr. Obama. That is a snollygoster's idea of a deterrent. To be fair, a war is not a spreadsheet, and nobody who has been near one calls it simple. If the claim is that Iran's leadership survived, a person can say that out loud. A leadership surviving is a different fact than a country getting stronger. What that country has to spend is a collapsing currency, 88.6 percent inflation, and a military the U.S. says it struck. Calling that a stronger strategic position is grading on a curve nobody in my classroom has ever seen. So, Mr. President, here is my question. If those numbers count as strength, what does better off look like for the rest of us? We were told "if you like your plan, you can keep it." PolitiFact named that its 2013 Lie of the Year. Now Democrats explain healthcare, Iran, and architecture to us as if they are muddying the water to make it look deep, and the fix keeps needing a sequel. When somebody tells you a thing is stronger, ask what changed and who is paying for it. A school with no roof isn't stronger. A currency at 2 million to the dollar isn't stronger. A healthcare law that needs another job to finish isn't stronger. And a gray tower with no windows, built on public land, that passed every court it faced and still has the neighbors asking when the benefits arrive? I'll mark it Incomplete. Same grade for Iran, same grade for healthcare. Show your work, Mr. Obama. But what do I know, I'm only a retired Army medic who served in Iraq and a teacher who checks sources. No rush, though.