I kind of miss Arne Duncan. I miss reading the goofy things he said when he was Secretary of Education. Miguel Cardona doesn’t say anything so I can’t see what he is thinking. I seem to recall running contests for Arne’s funniest line. Some people liked his claim that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans (because it wiped out the NOLA public schools and enabled “reformers” to turn NOLA into an all-charter district.) My favorite happened when he visited a second grade classroom in NYC and said that he wanted to be able to look into their eyes and know that they were college-bound. Others preferred his statement that parents didn’t like standardized testing because they didn’t want to know how far behind their kids are. There were so many great choices.
Hess: I’m curious if there’s a time or issue during your tenure as secretary where you wish you could’ve had a do-over?
Duncan: I think the teacher-evaluation issue was one that I had hoped we could make more progress on, but teachers just felt beaten up over it. We had the union leaders on board, but they couldn’t convince their members that this would help them and strengthen their profession.
Gosh! Teachers could not be convinced to support value-added evaluation. Could it have been because this tactic failed to achieve its goals but demoralized teachers? Because the American Association of Statisticians said that the approach was inherently flawed because home effects are far more powerful than teacher effects? Because research funded by the Gates Foundation discovered no academic gains when VAM was implemented but teacher demoralization and teacher exodus increased? Because VAM was successful nowhere?
Andy Borowitz is a humorist who wrote for The New Yorker for years. He now has his own blog. This is a recent entry:
MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—A study published by the University of Minnesota Medical School on Friday “strongly indicates” that people who are exposed to Sen. JD Vance lose all interest in activity that would lead to reproduction.
According to Dr. Davis Logsdon, who supervised the study, “Research subjects exposed to JD Vance became less likely to reproduce and more inclined to acquire a cat.”
Logsdon said the responses of study participants became “even more pronounced” when they were shown an image of Vance in drag.
In that situation, he said, the participants exhibited a range of behaviors from “recoiling in horror” to “attempting to flee.”
“Taken as a whole, this research suggests that JD Vance might not be the best messenger for his own pro-reproduction stance,” the researcher said. “He could, however, be an effective promoter of abstinence.”
The Mouse That Roared was a 1955 novel made into an uproarious comedy starring the great Peter Sellers in 1959. It is the story of a tiny pre-industrial nation—Grand Fenwick—whose economy has collapsed and whose leaders decide to invade the U.S. because the U.S. always rebuilds the economy of nations it defeats.
Grand Fenwick sends a fleet of 24 soldiers armed with longbows to New York City, and due to a series of miscommunications, accidentally conquers the U.S.
Something like that appears to be unfolding in the grinding war between Ukraine and Russia. After 30 months of absorbing withering attacks on its towns, cities, infrastructure, and people, Ukraine has invaded Russia.
Russia, of course, cries “unfair!” Only Russia can invade, not Ukraine. But invade they did, and the Ukrainians met little resistance.
Thinking like the writer of “The Mouse That Roared,” what if?
What if the Ukrainians pushed their way to Moscow (as the Wagner Group did last year)?
What if they took control of the Kremlin?
What if they captured Putin?
What if Zelensky became the president of Russia and launched a democratic revolution?
The Daily Beast wrote about a photograph of JD Vance that is circulating on the web. It apparently was taken while he was at Yale Law School. Thus far, he has not denied that it was he.
On Twitter, “Sofa Loren” is trending. That’s the name attached to the photos of JD in drag. And now he wants to criminalize drag queen performances.
Although Republicans have demonized drag queens in the past few years, guys dressing up in drag has a long history. Aside from Ivy League men’s colleges, where drag performances were not unusual and a source of great fun, there was a press event in NYC in 2000 when Rudy Giuliani dressed up in drag; he was accosted by his good friend Donald Trump, who kissed his “breasts.”
I don’t care if men want to dress up for drag shows, but I am disgusted when they hypocritically attack drag queens. As Tim Walz says, “Mind your own damn business.”
It’s the summer of weird Republicans. GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump repeatedly mentions Hannibal Lecter at his rallies, speaking about the fictional cannibal as though he were a real person. “He’s a lovely man. He’d love to have you for dinner,” must be one of the strangest things a candidate has said while trying to attract votes. Meanwhile, Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has made news with his bizarre opinions, including a 2021 remark that Americans with children should be able to vote more times in an election than their childless compatriots. Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate for president who met with Trump to discuss the possibility of dropping out of the race, admitted to dumping a bear carcass in Central Park a decade ago. (“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” he claimed.)
“These guys are just weird,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said last week on “Morning Joe.” That label has stuck ever since, to the right’s frustration and fury. Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has seized the messaging advantages of “weird,” and on Tuesday she even named Walz to the ticket.
When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs.
For scholars of authoritarianism, the success of “weird” is no surprise. That’s because humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics. Behind the facade of their omnipotence, most strongmen are brittle and insecure personalities. They don’t mind being called evil, but being ridiculed is a different matter.
When fringe beliefs become mainstream, it’s easy to accept a political environment where the surreal and the extreme are everyday affairs. That’s how we get to Fox News host Jesse Watters telling viewers that “scientists” believe that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.” The misogyny and transgender phobia that may have inspired this proclamation are no joke, but the opportunity for satire at the ridiculous statement should not be missed.
Strongmen have their own sadistic sense of humor, which is amply displayed in the awful authoritarian spectacles staged by their governments. The Nazis enjoyed making Communists who entered Dachau concentration camp in 1933, like Hans Beimler, wear signs that said “A hearty welcome!” But they cannot take a joke when they are the targets. That’s why they have to surround themselves with sycophants and lackeys, and their enablers know their prestige must be policed. When a man brought his pet rabbit named Mussolini to a bar in fascist Italy, thinking others would enjoy seeing him order it around, he was quickly arrested and served a year in confinement.
Chilean graphic artist Guillo Bastías discovered the price of puncturing the leader’s personality cult with humor when the magazine Apsi published his caricature of dictator Augusto Pinochet as Louis XIVin 1987. The regime sent the magazine’s editors to jail for “extremism”: That’s how threatening humor can be as a truth-telling vehicle, in this case about how Pinochet saw the scope of his power.
Satire shifts our perception of things and people, helping us to see them in a new light that is often unflattering to them. And it reminds us that what we are living through is out of the ordinary. As Bastías told me in 2018, he wanted to reassure Chileans suffering under the dictatorship that there were people who were “refusing to accept the disinformation and lies … refusing to accept the abnormal as normal.”
And so we are back to “weird” as a strategy of disruption, and how thankful we can be that our democratic rights afford us freedom of speech to level such critiques at the powerful without fear of detention or worse. That is how artist Robin Bell was able to stage his projections on the front of Trump International Hotel, like a May 2017 work that read “Pay Trump Bribes Here.” While Bell worked in very different circumstances than Guillo, he, too, saw his work as a way of reminding people that “what we are experiencing is not normal.”
Humor can have a crucial role in the work of mobilization and civic education to keep those democratic rights. “Laughtivism,” as Serbian democracy activist Srdja Popovic has called it, views humor as more effective than anger in highly polarized situations. When we laugh together, fear and distrust lessen, which is the opposite of what authoritarians want. That, too, is why such leaders can’t take a joke.
PHILADELPHIA (The Borowitz Report)—Responding to Vice President Harris’s choice of Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, Donald J. Trump claimed that the Minnesota governor “was never white before.”
“I saw him on television many, many times, and, quite frankly, he was never white,” Trump said. “Then, he suddenly became white.”
Hinting that “there’s something going on,” Trump said that Walz’s “last-minute decision to become white” was “something that should be looked into.”
Asked what Walz was before he became white, Trump responded, “I think Walz is some kind of a dance. So what is he, white or a dance? I respect either one, but he obviously doesn’t
Gymnast Simone Biles dinged former President Trump on Friday by tweeting “I love my Black job” after her latest Olympic gold medal win.
Taking a victory lap after her winning performance at the Paris Games, Biles trolled Trump for his controversial claims that undocumented immigrants are taking so-called “Black jobs” from Americans.
“Iconic photo of the GOAT mastering her black job and collecting gold medals,” Davila tweeted.
Biles won the all-around gold medal on Thursday, her second of the Paris Games. It raised her career haul to nine gold medals, and she could add even more honors with three more finals looming in coming days.
Trump doubled down on the comment Wednesday during a forum with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists in which he also falsely claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris only recently “became Black.”
“A Black job is anybody that has a job,” Trump said at the NABJ event, drawing derisive groans from the crowd.
The spat with Trump isn’t the first tangle between Biles and his right-wing supporters.
Biles’ 2021 decision to withdraw from competition sparked an unusual backlash from Trump’s MAGA allies who suggested she should suck it up and compete regardless of her health concerns.
“I think it reflects pretty poorly on our … society that we try to praise people, not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments,” said Vance, who was launching an ultimately successful run for U.S. Senate.
Democrats seized on the remarks this week to take shots at Vance, who has stumbled badly in his debut on the national stage with comments deriding Americans who don’t have children.
“The audacity of JD Vance to go after the GOAT @Simone_Biles as if he isn’t the most unpopular V.P. pick in decades,” tweeted Aida Ross, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee.
Andy Borowitz is a humorist, probably the best in the country. He notes here that President Biden has exercised the new power of immunity for his official actions granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court. Very likely the rightwing majority created that “one person is above the law” exemption with the expectation that Trump would be the next president. Maybe they will reverse their decision when Kamala Harris is elected President.
Borowitz writes:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Using the sweeping presidential immunity recently granted him by the U.S. Supreme Court, President Biden on Tuesday replaced Judge Aileen Cannon with his dog, Commander.
The legal community’s initial reaction to the appointment was favorable, with most experts agreeing that Judge Commander is an improvement over Judge Cannon.
In his first official act, the German Shepherd reversed Cannon’s ruling on the Trump documents case by eating it.
President Biden had no comment on Commander’s decision, other than, “Good boy.” In a positive development for Judge Cannon, a GoFundMe has been established to send her to law school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 