Humorist Andy Borowitz praises Donald Trump for his tribute to the Unknown Podiatrist.

QUEENS, NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—In what has become a Memorial Day tradition for him, on Monday Donald J. Trump laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Podiatrist.  

Trump made his annual pilgrimage to pay homage to the heroic doctors who issued bogus diagnoses to ensure that their privileged patients never answered the call of duty. 

In an emotional tribute, Trump thanked the fallen foot specialists who bravely risked their medical licenses so that others facing military service could be free. 

Choking back tears, he said, “They gave everything so people like me could give nothing.”

Actually, Trump’s podiatrist is not unknown.

The New York Times published an article in 2018 stating that the daughters of the Trump podiatrist claimed that their father, Dr. Larry Braunstein, had given Trump the bone spur diagnosis to help him evade the draft. It was a favor to his landlord, Fred Trump, Donald’s father.

The podiatrist, Dr. Larry Braunstein, died in 2007. But his daughters say their father often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to his father.

Not long after the Trump released a video of Trump interrupting Stephen Colbert’s final show and throwing Colbert into a dumpster, a Twitter member posted a corrected video.

https://x.com/paulleyticks/status/2058235678048268648?s=43

The corrected video begins the same way, with Trump walking onto the set of Colbert’s final show and attempting to throw him into a dumpster.

But in the new version, Colbert turns and throws Trump into the dumpster and slams it shut.

The dumpster is labeled “PEDO DUMPSTER.”

Almost everyone knows the zany rhyming of Dr. Seuss. Bruce Baker applied Dr. Seuss’s special blend of wit and rhyme to explore the topic of school choice. It’s very clever! And a good explanation of why the public good promotes well-being for everyone, not just the private goods that benefit consumers. Bruce Baker is chairman of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami and one of the nation’s leading authorities on school finance.

He wrote the following parody of a Dr. Seuss poem:

In the town of Ka-Boodle by Lake Sneetchy Creek,
The folks all paid taxes each month and each week.
For schools and for sidewalks and fire trucks so red,
And libraries full of good books to be read.

But then came the Chortlers from Voucher Von Vee,
Who shouted, “That money belongs to each wee
Little child with a backpack! It follows them round!
Just stuff it in pockets and spread it around!”

“The money’s the CHILD’S!” cried the Bellowing Band.
“It does not belong to the schools or the land!
Just hand every parent a sack full of cash,
And schools can all scramble and boomity-crash!”

Now the Grickle-eyed Mayor scratched hard at his chin.
“That’s not how public goods work, my dear kin.

When taxpayers gather their dollars in pools,
They build mighty systems — like hospitals, schools.
The money’s not owned by one youngster named Ned
Who doodles green Yoppets and sleeps in his bed.

It pays for the buses! The pipes! The big roofs!
The science lab beakers! The gymnasium hoops!
The playgrounds! The band room! The boilers downstairs!
The nurses and counselors helping with cares!

And some of these things were bought long years ago
With debts that will linger through sunshine and snow.
So taxpayers all — even old Uncle Zed,
Whose children are forty and mostly bald-headed —
Still pay for the schools because everyone gains
From communities filled with smart citizens’ brains!”

“But what about choice?” cried the Chortlers once more.
“Shouldn’t each family shop school like a store?”

“Ah yes,” said the Mayor, “but schools are not socks.
They’re not jars of pickles or purple mail-box locks.
A public good works when folks plan it together,
Through rainstorms and hard times and wild Wumbus weather.

If every last dollar just fled with each child,
Whole systems would wobble and grow rather wild.
You still must heat buildings and run every route
Even when one little Who-zit skips out.”

The Chortlers grew quieter. Some scratched their knees.
One murmured, “Public goods aren’t private fees…”

And down by Lake Sneetchy, beneath truffula skies,
The townsfolk grew slightly more thoughtful and wise.

For schools are not gadgets to auction or trade.
They’re promises communities carefully made.
And taxes, though grumbly, when pooled with some care,
Can build things no single small person could bear.

Things are looking bad these days. We have a rightwing lunatic as President who thinks he’s a king. We are entangled in a war with religious fanatics who are gleefully tearing down the global economy by closing passage through a crucial, narrow waterway. We have a Congress that is supine and subservient to our Mad King. Prices of everything are spiraling up because of aforementioned war.

Time for some cheerful news! Watch this brief clip made by the four astronauts aboard Artemis 2, which has already gone further into space than anyone else. They passed the old record of near 250,000 miles, and they will see the dark side of the moon. That’s happening about now.

They are having a good time.

The writers at Wonkette put a humorous spin on everything crazy that’s happening these days. This column is an example of what they do. It’s about the time RFK Jr. cut off a raccoon’s penis. Sounds not credible, but that’s the case with most of the stories about him.

Gary Legum writes:

Consider the raccoon penis.

We’ve had the dead bear he drove around in his van before dumping it in Central Park like he was Gentle Ben if Gentle Ben had been a serial killer. We’ve learned about how he chainsawed the head off a dead whale that had washed up on a beach, strapped it to the roof of his family’s minivan, and drove hundreds of miles home while his children in the back seat were being sprayed with whale juice. We heard about the whitewater rafting trip in Peru in the early 1980s, where he reportedly was served boiled rat by a peasant and made a show of plucking one of the dead rat’s eyeballs out of its head and swallowing it.

To all these tales of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s creepy interactions with animals, we must now add this from The New York Post:

In his diary, he writes about cutting off the penis of a road-killed raccoon in 2001, while his “kids waited patiently in the car,” so that he could examine it later.

We’re all aware by this point that RFK Jr. is one of the weirdest dudes to ever get pushed out of a Kennedy’s vagina. Which is saying something, because a lot of people have been pushed out of Kennedy vaginas.

But this one really got us. He castrated a dead raccoon so he could examine its penis. For what? Venereal diseases? Did he suspect the raccoon had a dose of the clap? Did he want to compare its size to other raccoon penises he had picked up in his travels? Was he writing a dissertation on what environmental factors might account for any variance in the size of raccoon penises across a broad spectrum of subspecies and habitats?

In Desperate Bid To Prove His Normality, RFK Jr. Confesses To Dumping Corpse Of Gentle BenGARY LEGUM·AUGUST 5, 2024Read full story

Then we found ourselves wondering what he did with the raccoon penis when he finished examining it for … whatever. Did he feed it to one of his hawks? Mount it over his fireplace? Does Cheryl Hines think she’s shooting a new episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm every time she walks into her living room and sees the raccoon’s dong on a plaque over the mantelpiece like an unholy mashup of a Billy Bass and a German Expressionist film? Because Larry and Cheryl David being invited to some rando’s home for dinner and finding out his hobby is taxidermy and he’s got a raccoon penis hanging in a place of pride in his house very much sounds like a Curb plot.

This fascinating account of RFK Jr.’s encounter with Procyonidae genitalia is in an excerpt of an upcoming biography titled RFK Jr: The Fall and Rise, by Isabel Vincent. In 2013, Vincent was for some reason given access to diaries RFK Jr. had been keeping for a couple of decades. She has now dug through over 1,200 pages of America’s looniest Health and Human Services Secretary detailing his rebellious childhood and his battles with addiction to both drugs and banging women who were not his wife.

It is a pathetic and rough story that in no way mitigates even an ounce of the harm Kennedy has spent the last year inflicting on America’s health.

An Open Letter To RFK Jr. From The Whale Head On The Roof Of His MinivanGARY LEGUM·SEPTEMBER 16, 2024Read full story

This excerpt focuses on three men who were sort of father figures to Kennedy after his own father was assassinated in 1968. One, Lem Billings, was a lifelong friend of John F. Kennedy. He took the young RFK Jr. on trips, stepped in as a parent when Ethel Kennedy was so appalled by her son that she could barely be around him, and later shot heroin with him in Billings’ apartment, which in the 1970s was a sort of “flophouse” for Kennedy scions.

The second father figure was Skip Lazell, a biology teacher at the Palfrey School when RFK Jr. attended. Lazell was a right-winger and a member of the John Birch Society:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the group also believed that the fluoridation of drinking water was a Communist plot and had no trust in vaccines. They promoted “health freedom” and opposed mandatory vaccinations.

Bobby, a future critic of vaccines who believes that some are linked to high rates of autism, has called fluoride “a dangerous neurotoxin” and claimed that it has been linked to a host of maladies, including thyroid disease, arthritis, and bone breaks.

Imagine if Palfrey, an “experimental” school in the 1960s for misfits and underachievers, had hired a biology teacher who wasn’t a fluoride-phobic wingnut who saw Communists around every corner. If it had, maybe America in 2026 wouldn’t be enjoying declining vaccine rates and widespread resurgences of the measles and whooping cough. What a world.

The third father figure was a man named Robert Trivers. He was a professor at Harvard, a school RFK Jr. got into only because he’s a Kennedy. Trivers was an evolutionary biologist and a member of the Black Panther Party despite the minor detail that he was white. And oh yeah, he was later buddies with Jeffrey Epstein, who fronted him $40,000 for his research.

It’s cool, Trivers knew how to reciprocate this kindness:

Trivers also defended Epstein over charges that he paid for sex with underage girls (Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution-related charges), saying, “By the time they’re 14 or 15, they’re like grown women were 60 years ago, so I don’t see these acts as so heinous,” he said to Reuters.

If anyone needs us, we’ll be in the decontamination chamber until 2050 or so.

Joyce Vance was a federal prosecutor. She lives in Alabama. She finds humor in Kristi Noem’s change of jobs.

She wrote:

I am neither Andy Borowitz nor The Onion. But I know when something is so weird that it’s funny. 

Like Kristi Noem’s last tweet as DHS Secretary. The one where she thanked Donald Trump for appointing her to be “the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.” Some folks would have been upset to be fired while they were in the middle of speaking publicly about their future plans in the position. But not Kristi. She’s apparently made her peace with becoming an underling to. Rubio and Hegseth. 

But that’s not the funny part.

The Tweet goes on for a really long time and convinces me Twitter needs to restore character limits, even for fancy Blue Check Cabinet Secretaries—maybe especially them. Before she’s done, we learn that she has learned that the Western Hemisphere is absolutely critical for U.S. security. Kudos to her for figuring that out.

Noem also advises that “we have located 145,000 children. I need to know more about this. Where did she find these kids? Were they missing? Who are they? 145,000 is a lot of kids.

Maybe these are kids like Liam Ramos up in Minnesota, who her agents took into custody with his Spider-Man backpack on and his blue bunny ears hat? Maybe that’s what “located” means? That she took kids away from their schools and their friends and their families and stuck them into her people-warehouses with concentration camp-like conditions, where many kids, we read, are getting seriously ill and even requiring emergency care. Maybe “located” means traumatized for the rest of their lives? That’s definitely not the funny part.

My favorite part of the tweet is the claim that Noem “revitalized the Coast Guard.” 

I’m not sure what all Kristi Noem did for the Coast Guard. I do know that she bought a new training facility for them. Oh, and as DHS Secretary, she insisted she needed more secure housing, so she booted the Commandant of the Coast Guard out of their residence and took it over for herself. It’s described as a “spacious waterfront residence” in Washington, D.C., on Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling. Because the Coast Guard, of course, operates on the nation’s and international waterways. As for the new training facility Noem purchased, I’m sure you can see it in your mind’s eye, a beautiful property on the water with plenty of opportunity to train sailors.

But nope, that’s not it. Kristi Noem‘s new Coast Guard facility is in Birmingham, Alabama. I live here, so I can tell you with authority that it’s landlocked. The ocean is five hours away on Mobile Bay. We do have some lovely rivers and lakes here. The new training facility isn’t located on them, either.

So why put the Coast Guard here? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense. The facility Noem purchased was a small private college, Birmingham Southern, that went bankrupt about two years ago and has been vacant since May of 2024. The campus has been on the market since then. 

It was Alabama Senator Katie Britt who announcedthat Birmingham Southern had been selected as the site for the Coast Guard’s new training center. Britt chairs the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds DHS and the Coast Guard. “This is a huge day for Birmingham, our great state, and the U.S. Coast Guard,” said Britt. “This move will save the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars,” added Alabama’s other Senator, Tommy Tuberville.

Al.Com reported that “ the purchase price was undisclosed.” The school, which has been empty for two years, was characterized as being in Turnkey condition. 

Explaining the unusual location of the facility, Master Chief Petty Officer Phillip N. Waldron saidthe Coast Guard had urgent need of a new facility and that the inland location wouldn’t be a problem. “That’s one of the things that I think we had to kind of get out of the mindset of, ourselves,” he said. “When we look at the whole purpose of a training center, we didn’t necessarily need it to be on the water. What we needed [for] it was to be a place that had the adequate facilities that we can train folks to be able to go do that out on the water.” 

Maybe it will work out okay when new Coast Guardsmen “do that out on the water.” After all, this is the agency that spent $2.25 million to buy 25 Chevrolet Tahoes emblazoned with the ICE logo, which someone figured out after they arrived couldn’t be used by an agency that’s so concerned about publicizing its work that agents wear masks.

Semper Paratus, as the Coast Guard’s motto says. Always ready.

Noem said in a statement after the location of the facility was announced, “This next generation of heroes deserves training centers and support facilities worthy of their mission, and that is exactly what they are going to have in Alabama.”

Go get ‘em, Shield of America!

The humorist Andy Borowitz said this today:

I commented:

That’s funny to blame the educational system for electing Trump. Trump is trying to destroy public education because he says it is too “woke” and is turning children into radical communists.

Which is it?