Please watch this episode of “The Daily Show,” which aired on April 15. Jon Stewart is in rare form! Trump’s description of the Battle of Gettysburg is a classic. Don’t miss it ..read more

Public Schools First in North Carolina finds it strange that the legislature can’t find the money to raise teachers’ salaries but easily finds money to fund vouchers for the rich. Its latest notice says: This week House majority leader Tim Moore announced that a legislative short session priority would be to increase funding for vouchers for the coming year by around $300 million to ensure that the state could fund vouchers for all families who applied. More than half of the applications came from families with incomes too high to have been eligible last year. Our March 9 newsle ..read more

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, an excellent Never Trumper site. He noticed a curious phenomenon. Whenever there’s good economic news, the mainstream media worries that good economics news is bad news for Biden? What? He writes: We’ve reached the ne plus ultra of Here Is Some Good News and Also Why It’s Bad for Biden headline writing. I present to you an April 13 story in the Washington Post by Abha Bhattarai and Tyler Pager. (Don’t click the link yet.) The piece is about the current economic indicators we’re seeing in the March reports: Job growth ..read more

Republican leaders, including Trump and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, were appalled when Arizona’s Supreme Court overturned the state’s 15-week abortion and upheld an 1864 abortion ban. Democrats wanted to introduce a bill to repeal the 1864 law. But today Republicans refused to consider their motion. CNN reported: The Republican-controlled Arizona House of Representatives once again failed to advance a repeal of the state’s 160-year-old abortion banWednesday, days after the state Supreme Court roiled state politics by reviving the law. The vote is a blow to reproducti ..read more

In Florida, it is never too soon to learn about the dangers of Communism! Governor DeSantis just signed a bill to teach about Communism in schools from K-12. Some questions: 1) Will students learn about the dangers of Communism or the dangers of dictatorship? 2)Will students learn only about Communism only in Cuba or will they also learn about it in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, and elsewhere? 3) Will they learn about the dangers of fascism and study the Nazis and their ideology? 4) Will students learn about dictatorship, whether Communist or fascist, and the ideology and practices the ..read more

Jay Kuo interviewed John D. Gartner, psychologist and psychotherapist, who leads a group called Duty to Warn. The group consists of mental health professionals who are concerned about Trump’s cognitive decline. Gartner told Kuo: there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia.  I’m offering excerpts from this fascinating interview. Kuo asks, Gartner answers: We hear a lot about Biden’s age and gaffes, to the point where most Americans cite Biden’s age but not Trump’s as a big issue for the election, even though they are only three years apart ..read more

Carol Burris writes here about a charter scandal in South Carolina. Carol is the executive director of the Network for Public Education. She writes: Last week, an excellent investigative report on a for-profit-run charter chain appeared in South Carolina’s Post and Courier. Entitled How a Florida principal with a controversial history became a SC charter school kingpin, it was written by Hillary Flynn and Maura Turcotte. These reporters put extraordinary care and diligent research into the piece.  I know because, over the course of a year, Flynn would call me from time to t ..read more

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer. He writes: When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio. Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just ..read more

Ray Stern of The Arizona Republic reports that the two houses of the legislature are so closely divided that Democrats would throw out the 1864 ban on abortion with the help of only a few Republicans. Even Trump crony Kari Lake is embarrassed by the 1864 ban. Arizona Democrats, aided by a pair of Republicans in each chamber of the Legislature, appear to have the votes to pass a bill repealing the state’s 1864 abortion ban. Almost anything is possible with a vote of 31 out of 60 in the state House, or 16 out of 30 in the state Senate. Lawmakers say they expect to see a vote on the repeal when t ..read more

Nebraska voucher advocates are trying to head off a referendum because they know they will lose. Senator Lou Ann Linehan has introduced a bill intended to fund vouchers and block a referendum, thus preventing Nebraskans from voting on whether they want vouchers. Senator Linehan is working with Betsy DeVos’s advocacy group American Federation for Children. Of course, they don’t want to let the public decide! Vouchers will lose! In every state referendum on school vouchers, they have always been defeated. The public wants public tax dollars to go to public schools! The public does not want to su ..read more