Andy Borowitz, a humorist for The New Yorker, writes today that Mike Pence is seriously considering a run for the Presidency–in 1820.

According to several prominent Republican donors, Pence is already laying the groundwork for such a campaign, outlining what he believes are the most serious challenges facing 1820 America.

He offered a sneak preview of a potential 1820 stump speech, in which he unleashed a brutal attack on the Bill of Rights’ author, James Madison, and called for the development of the telegraph key.

This satire reminds us that Trump has no ideology; he just does whatever he thinks will appease his evangelical base. Pence, however, is deeply ideological. He is no joke.

This article appeared in The Washington Post. It is about H.R. McMaster, who is Trump’s much-admired National Security Advisor.

In the midst of a detailed discussion of the challenges in Afghanistan and the difficulty of both projecting American strength and detaching from foreign wars, the following paragraphs appear:

Among his biggest challenges was holding the attention of the president. In classified briefings, Trump would frequently flit between subjects. “We moved very quickly from news to intelligence to policy with very little clarity on which lanes we were in,” said a U.S. official who took part in the briefings. “McMaster would act like the tangents didn’t happen and go back to Point 2 on his card.”

“I call the president the two-minute man,” said one Trump confidant. “The president has patience for a half-page.”

Is it his age? Is it his very poor education in a private school? Or is it that he is not interested in foreign policy? Maybe if they were discussing the Miss Universe pageant or golf, he could stay focused for more than two minutes.

Regular readers of this blog know that we are following Phyllis Bush, retired Indiana teacher and a member of the Board of the Network for Public Education. Phyllis was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year, and she decided to fight it head on, with humor, the best medical treatment she could find, and true grit.

In this post, she describes her birthday, which was always a joyous occasion.

No self-pity, but a heap of determination and insight.

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way, published this overview of voucher research.

The results are in, and they show that vouchers don’t help children learn more. The most recent studies find that students are actually set back academically by vouchers. Indiana has the nation’s largest voucher program. The latest study said that students lose ground in the first two years or so. After three or four years in a voucher school, they catch up with their peers in public school. But that finding, which seemed to show that vouchers are not so harmful after all, was not what it appeared. In fact, after two years, the weakest students had dropped out and returned to public schools. So only the strongest students remained after four years.

Almost every private school that participates in Indiana’s program is religiously affiliated. As a rule, Americans don’t want tax money to subsidize religious schools.

Voucher advocates have generally dropped the claim that vouchers “save” children or that nonpublic schools are superior to public schools. Instead, they have retreated to advocating for choice. Consumerism is their fallback position. Choice for the sake of choice.

Sometime last fall I wrote a post about the risk of the election being hacked. This was based on my experience on a federal commission appointed to study what went wrong in the 2000 election and to make recommendations about how to avoid another fiasco. The commission was chaired by former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. One of the issues we investigated was the reliability of voting machines. Everyone wanted to get rid of the “hanging chads” that marred the voting in Florida.

The obvious answer was to switch to electronic machines. No hanging chads. No uncertainty. We commissioned a study of voting machines. The most foolproof machine was the mechanical one that was used in New York City and other places. The voter goes into a booth with a curtain. When he pulls a giant lever, the curtain closes. He or she pulls little levers to cast a ballot. When the voter pulls the big lever to open the curtain, his vote is recorded. Nothing ambiguous. However, this machine was becoming obsolete, the manufacturer was not making them anymore as demand for electronic machines grew.

The experts told us that the electronic machines were susceptible to hacking but no one took that seriously. Who would hack an election?

Now we learn that hacking machines is easy. The more they are networked, the easier it is.

“LAS VEGAS – One of the nation’s largest cybersecurity conferences is inviting attendees to get hands-on experience hacking a slew of voting machines, demonstrating to researchers how easy the process can be.

“It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it,” said security consultant Thomas Richards, glancing at a Premier Election Solutions machine currently in use in Georgia.

“The DEF CON cybersecurity conference is held annually in Las Vegas. This year, for the first time, the conference is hosting a “Voting Machine Village,” where attendees can try to hack a number of systems and help catch vulnerabilities.

“The conference acquired 30 machines for hackers to toy with. Every voting machine in the village was hacked.”

I long for the good old days when we could lead our lives without wondering what the president had done or said. Generally, weeks went by without my giving much thought to the president’s activities.

All that has changed. Now that we have a president who is given to impulsive actions, surprising tweets, and off-the-cuff remarks that reverse longstanding policy, it is impossible to ignore him. This is what he wants. Constant attention. All eyes on him. It’s like watching a train wreck in real time but it is nonstop.

Donald Trump is a loop that plays over and over.

Read the full transcript of his interview with the Wall Street Journal in Politico, which was first to get it. CNN posted a summary of the interview. See if you can find a coherent sentence or a coherent thought process.

The latest story I read is too amazing to ignore. Trump doesn’t seem to draw a distinction between his wish and external reality. He promised to end the war in Afghanistan, this guy who never served in the military. But it is not over yet, and he wants to fire the top commander there.

And it gets worse.

“During the July 19 meeting, Trump repeatedly suggested that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford replace Gen. John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, because he is not winning the war, the officials said. Trump has not met Nicholson, and the Pentagon has been considering extending his time in Afghanistan.

“Over nearly two hours in the situation room, according to the officials, Trump complained about NATO allies, inquired about the United States getting a piece of Afghan’s mineral wealth and repeatedly said the top U.S. general there should be fired. He also startled the room with a story that seemed to compare their advice to that of a paid consultant who cost a tony New York restaurateur profits by offering bad advice.”

He told them to end the war, and they didn’t. He doesn’t understand why they didn’t do what he told them to do. As to mineral wealth in Afghanistan, I recall that he said during the campaign that the U.S. Should have seized Iraq’s oil to compensate for our efforts on their behalf. At the time, many people said that to do so would have been a war crime. Apparently he hasn’t abandoned the idea of seizing another country’s natural resources as war booty.

Parents have so many choices about where to send their child to school and so little information.

The Onion offers a useful guide to choosing the right school here.

Just as there is a growing concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the population, there is a growing concentration of wealth in the corporate world.

Only 30 Corporations earn half the total profit of all U.S. companies.

“There were 4,819 public US companies in 1975. Forty years on, that number has fallen by more than a fifth, hitting 3,766 in 2015. This peculiar dwindling is but one of the dramatic changes in US public corporations described in a new study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
How else, then, have they evolved? Increasingly, it seems, through survival of the biggest. Not only are there fewer public companies; those that remain are older—and dominated by an ever-shrinking number of ever-growing behemoths….

“Of course, the bigger and richer the market Goliaths get, the harder it is for the Davids of the US economy to lethally bean them—and the need for R&D to compete may have exacerbated this. Companies drowning in cash can easily afford patents and the investments to develop those. Or, as seems to be happening, to buy the company with the patent. If you can’t beat Goliath, join him.”

I posted the EdNext annual poll results at 9 a.m.

I had to remove it because it is embargoed until August 15. I apologize for breaking the embargo.

I will post it again on August 15.