Arizona: State Supreme Court Kicks Anti-Voucher Referendum Off the Ballot

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Save Our Schools Arizona enlisted thousands of volunteers to reform the state’s costly, wasteful, and destructive voucher program. They collected almost half a million signatures, but the state Supreme Court ultimately threw the measure off the ballot. This was not a decision on the merits: most members of the Supreme Court were appointed by Koch puppet, Governor Doug Ducey.

The last time vouchers were on the ballot, in 2018, they lost by an overwhelming majority. The legislature proceeded to enact a massive voucher program.

Meanwhile, most kids using the vouchers never attended public schools. Some families used the voucher money to buy frivolities. It is welfare for those who previously paid their own tuition.

Arizona SOS posted the events:

As we reported last week, the fate of the Protect Education Act was in the AZ Supreme Court’s hands. Unfortunately, the Court ruled against Protect Education, and the measure will not be on the November ballot. Here is our statement.

Thousands of SOSAZ volunteers gave this measure their all for 14 weeks, pounding the hot pavement and talking to Arizona voters. This decision has gutted all of us, knowing that the $1 billion voucher program will remain unchecked with no regard to student safety or taxpayer accountability, and knowing that the impacts of the voucher drain on public schools will mean continued school closures, teacher and staff layoffs, and program and resource cuts.

Arizona students deserve so much better – but our state is the tip of the spear when it comes to the war on public education, and we are up against powerful and deep-pocketed special interests that want to see our schools privatized, turned into unregulated private models that can pick and choose their students and profit off of our tax dollars. They don’t want Arizona voters to have a say in this $1 billion, taxpayer-funded voucher program because they know they voters are with us and would have passed Protect Education hands down.

What happened? We believe in full transparency and giving our volunteers who worked so tirelessly the full information, so here is a breakdown. We were so proud to have turned in ~420,000 signatures, which then went through the Secretary of State’s office for their review. Their office removed some signatures due to detached or un-notarized pages, invalid dates, wrong counties, etc., which was a predictable margin that left us with 387,249 signatures.

Then, a 5% sample from each county was sent to that county’s Recorder’s office to determine a validity rate that would be applied to the full county sample. Our validity rates were extremely high, due primarily to our incredible volunteers: Apache 75%, Cochise 89%, Coconino 93%, Gila 95%, Graham 93%, Greenlee 75%, La Paz 100%, Maricopa 73%, Mohave 78%, Navajo 80%, Pima 81.5%, Pinal 82%, Santa Cruz 86%, Yavapai 94%, and Yuma 61%. The statewide validity rate was determined as 75.2% — far higher than most initiatives! — which meant we were left with about 292,820 signatures.

However, the scorched-earth lawsuits from the voucher lobby proved too damaging given the numbers. The lower court threw out many signatures on ticky-tack technicalities, and the Arizona Supreme Court (packed with former Gov. Ducey’s appointees) upheld the lower court’s rulings. The voucher lobbyists suing Protect Education challenged the initiative’s validity on 47 different categories of objections, many focused on picayune details like the phone number or address a paid circulator used when registering with the Secretary of State. By throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink, it became a numbers game. In one example, the court ruled against a paid circulator, who gathered 10,419 signatures, for using a mailbox for her address on her registration form out of fear for her safety. In other words, 10,419 voters were disenfranchised on a technicality. As Gov. Hobbs pointed out, the Republican-controlled state legislature has spent years making citizens’ initiatives increasingly difficult, with strict compliance setting a nearly impossible bar.

The Courts also favored Goldwater on the issue of “duplicate” signatures – which Protect Education rightfully argued double counts the rejection of duplicates. This matters because (due to the fake petition circulated by voucher-pushers) there were over 20,000 duplicate signatures on petitions — people wanted to make sure they signed the right one. Protect Education’s argument was that if the county recorders’ reports result in invalidating ~100,000 signatures and the law says that for every signature removed for being a duplicate one valid signature must be kept, you cannot prove that happened unless every signature is checked. That wasn’t done, the math is off, and this results in a double count of many duplicates.

When all was said and done, the Court rejected around 40,000 signatures, leaving Protect Education ~12,000 signatures short, around 3% of the number we turned in.

This was not the outcome we wanted, but we hold our heads high knowing that we fought a fight that matters deeply, that we are on the right side of history, and that we had hundreds of thousands of conversations with Arizona voters about the critical importance of public education and the devastating impacts of private school vouchers. Those conversations matter, and as we pivot to effecting change in this election and flipping the state legislature, they will make the winning difference.

Prop 145 Also Kicked Off the Ballot: It is a small consolation that Prop 145 (HCR2048, the poison-pill referral designed to block Protect Ed and any effort to regulate vouchers in Arizona, disguised as “military scholarships”) was also kicked off the ballot. A lower court ruled it unconstitutional and the Arizona Supreme Court upheld that ruling this week. A “yes” vote on that measure would have enshrined ESA vouchers into our state constitution, so we are relieved.

📋👟 It’s TIME: Vouchers are not on the ballot, but electing a new legislature that will enact the Protect Education Act’s reforms IS. We must also elect pro-public ed school board members and statewide officials like Dr. Ruiz for Superintendent of Public Instruction, PLUS achieve NO votes on Props 320, 318, and 144.

There are 8 target districts to flip the state legislature to one that is pro-public education – and we only have 11 weeks left to educate voters!!! We are asking our volunteers to “adopt” a district and commit to volunteering there – whether in person (canvassing or driving canvassers), or by phonebanking virtually with us.

  • LD2 (NW Phx, Deer Valley)
  • LD4 (NE Phx, Scottsdale, Paradise Valley)
  • LD9 (Mesa+)
  • LD13 (Chandler, Sun Lakes, Gilbert)
  • LD16 (mostly Pinal)
  • LD17 (Marana, NW Tucson)
  • LD23 (Yuma, plus parts of Maricopa, Pinal, Pima)
  • LD27 (NW Phx, Glendale, Peoria)

To ADOPT a district, sign up TODAY! → bit.ly/SOSAZPledge

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Elections, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Trump vs. The Military

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
3

The USS Abraham Lincoln is on its way home after spending many months at sea. It’s coming home because family members of its crew complained about the morale of the sailors and the conditions aboard the ship. Resupplying the ship with food and other necessities became difficult after Iran bombed and closed down American bases across the Middle East.

Hegseth and Trump tried to discount the complaints, but ultimately conceded. That’s why the ship is coming home.

Jason Linkins of The New Republic writes that these events are part of the contempt that Trump has towards the military. He dodged the draft five times, yet he loves to post memes of himself as a general covered with medals. Why do veterans still support him?

Linkins writes:

If you want to get the unfiltered skinny on how the never-ending war with Iran is going, it’s written in the dust. Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi reported this week that U.S. service members marooned in the Persian Gulf have been expressing themselves in messages fingered onto a dusty aircraft flap. The anonymous graffiti, which calls to mind the helmet scrawls of disgruntled soldiers in Vietnam, include “Operation Epstein Fury,” “Peace deal #64 incoming … ALL THIS FOR THE HOLY LAND,” and “Bibi’s cucks.” Sounds like things aren’t going so well! “I have no frame of reference, I can’t compare it to the sentiments of U.S. soldiers in previous conflicts,” Parsi wrote. “But I suspect these are new sentiments, or at least a new willingness to express them this openly and directly.”

Whether these sentiments are new is indeed unclear, but it’s not without a frame of reference. Trump has always been fairly explicit in his disrespect for the grunts who do most of the work—and all of the dying—in this racket that we call “war.” But only now is a seemingly unwinnable war bringing this all to a head. It’s no longer possible to pretend that the president doesn’t have boundless contempt for U.S. service members. They’re trapped in a war that was essentially kicked off to distract from all the other terrible news the Trump administration generates—or at least to turn attention away from the Epstein files. (Though if these dust etchings are any guide, Trump failed in this attempt to wag the dog.)

In recent weeks, this dynamic has been playing out on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has been on a nine-month deployment to support Trump’s war with Iran. Conditions on board the carrier have deteriorated to the point where some seamen have jumped overboard in an attempt to escape the misery. The crew has, for several weeks, been dealing with food shortages and grotesque sanitation issues. As TNR’s Hafiz Rashid reported, “In recent town hall meetings with military leaders, including acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, things have gotten heated, with family members expressing fear and worry over mental health and the risk of self-harm for the ship’s personnel.”

As it happens, this trouble is not confined to the USS Lincoln: Crews on the USS Benfold, Carl Vinson, and Tripoli have also reported miserable conditions in recent weeks. Pete Hegseth, our self-styled “secretary of war,” has gone to great lengths to downplay and even deny these accounts, characterizing them as misrepresentations while covering up the reason the Lincoln, which is now finally coming home, wasn’t resupplied. The dust scribbles surfaced by Parsi tell a different story.

If anything, the story is an old one. There has always been good reason to question Trump’s respect for U.S. service members. As The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported in September of 2020, Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in Paris, questioning his senior aides as to why he should go to a cemetery full of “losers.” Per Goldberg, “In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed.” All of this came about because he didn’t want to get his hair mussed in the rainy conditions. (Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, would later confirm Goldberg’s reporting.)

Trump’s disparagement of the military is pretty consistent. He’s slagged off the armed forces’ top officers as “dopes and babies” and compared them unfavorably to the military leaders he, for whatever reason, holds in high esteem: Adolf Hitler’s generals. He’s complained about having to see disabled veterans at military events, and has advocated for the exclusion of wounded soldiers at official functions because, “Nobody wants to see that.” These kinds of insults were a staple of his first run for office, during which time he mocked Gold Star families and, famously, Vietnam POW survivor John McCain.

But Trump’s disregard is hardly limited to mere aesthetics. As The Huffington Post’s David Wood reported in 2017, Trump’s gigantic military buildup shoveled billions of dollars to the Pentagon, but not much of that kitty ended up benefiting the working grunts who risk their lives on our nation’s behalf.

Only the outlines of Trump’s proposal to lavish money on the military have been drawn up. There’s a request for Congress to add $30 billion to this year’s defense budget and a vague plan to add $54 billion to next year’s spending. Not included in those plans: money for the best infantry weapons, the safest troop-lift helicopters, the most protective lightweight body armor. Instead, grunts will have to settle for budget leftovers with antiquated rifles, helicopters built for their grandfathers during the Vietnam War, and communications gear that is overweight and unreliable.

The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned familiesof troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)

Public opinion about the war in Iran has been consistently awful for Trump, whose overall approval hit a low of 33 percent this week. As Parsi reports, those who are stuck on the front lines of this folly are not likely to disabuse their fellow Americans of this being anything but FUBAR. As one service member told him: “What people in the media don’t understand when they compare past conflicts to this one, is this operation has no morale behind it. That makes a world of difference to service members deployed to undesirable locations indefinitely.” Parsi thinks that the only thing left to do now is to “simply end” the war. But Trump is knee-deep in this big muddy, and there truly is no end in sight.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Trump

Paul Krugman: Reality and Evidence Are Not to Be Trusted!

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2026 //
2

Paul Krugman is the Nobel-Prize winning economist who was a columnist for The New York Times for many years. He here captures brilliantly the MAGA refusal to accept reality and evidence. How was the mainstream of the Republican Party either captured or cowed by this delusional mindset?

Krugman writes:

The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rakeits 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.

The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America.

The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates scientists.

What the ongoing show trial of Fauci — which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to shoot the messenger.

Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even how most voters think about politics — is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.

I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.

But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning. It’s something far more extreme.

If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face.

Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has “blackouts and brownouts every weekend,” when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that you must show ID to buy groceries, which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says that they don’t.

George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war” he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:

In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone.

Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed. Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:

If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five.

If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?

What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet, anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between fantasy and reality.

But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments,” because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to stop clapping.

The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a subject to be delved into another day.

What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on America as a whole.

Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with Trump or his successor still in charge.

Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.

And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our weapon stocks with stunning speed.

But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Hoax, Lies, Trump

Trump Threatens to Sue Think-Tank for Publishing a Report He Doesn’t Like

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

https://share.google/DwYvniOIxZNXpV1Md

The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a centrist, Democratic-aligned think tank in D.C. It is known as a haven for high-Democrats when Republicans are in power and as an incubator for new policies. It is to the Democratic Party what the Heritage Foundation is to the Republican Party, except that the Heritage Foundation is allied with the extremists in the GOP, not the centrists.

CAP recently published a report concluding that Trump’s decision to station troops in Los Angeles, Memphis, and the District of Columbia cost $1.7 billion but had not reduced crime. Trump didn’t like that report. He didn’t agree with its conclusion.

Understand that journalists and think tanks publish articles critical of elected officials every day. Elected officials may use their bully pulpit to disagree, but they can’t stop critics from voicing their views..

That’s the way it has been, but Trump likes to break norms.

Trump has retained a lawyer and threatened to sue CAP for $5 billion.

Categories Education Reform

Jamelle Bouie on the Real Natalie Harp Scandal

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
2

For several days, a relatively unknown White House aide became a very well-known White House aide. Until recently, few people knew the name Natalie Harp. Now she is front-page news across the country.

While some writers have speculated about the relationship between the aging Trump and his attractive young assistant, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says that salacious speculation misses the real scandal. Harp filters the news that Trump gets. She gives him good news. She posts items on his social media. She even communicates with foreign powers on his behalf. She is one of the most powerful people in the government. CNN reported that she posted scores of tweets supporting Trump on January 6, 2021, urging readers to fight for him and overturn “the steal.” Those tweets have since been deleted.

This is not normal, unless you hearken back to the time when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, and his wife acted on his behalf.

Bouie writes:

Last month, after a warning that there might be an Iran-sponsored attempt on his life, President Trump secretly left Air Force One for a military jet when he was leaving the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. His Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his key deputy, Stephen Miller were left to fly on Air Force One.

Who did Trump bring on his emergency departure plane? There was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; a White House aide, Dan Scavino; and Natalie Harp, the president’s executive assistant.

Harp was in the news this week after Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia mentioned her in a stump speech, as an aside to an attack on Trump. “And while the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings,” Ossoff said. “See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.”

The White House pounced, attacking Ossoff in crude, juvenile terms. But rather than change the subject, the ferocity of the response drove new questions about Harp’s role and relationship to the president. On MSNOW, my Times newsroom colleague Maggie Haberman referred to Harp as the president’s “comfort blanket.” And that role appears to include information management, as Haberman noted in an article she wrote with Shawn McCreesh:

As long as Ms. Harp is around, he enjoys an unvetted flow of information, some of it poisonous and counterproductive, at least as far as a number of his other advisers are concerned. She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes) and provides him with a view from the world outside official Washington, of which he has always been mistrustful. Her moniker is “the human printer,” because she tails the president with a portable printer so she can hand him information in hard copy.

Harp posts on social media in Trump’s name and even responds to foreign leaders in his name. She spends more time with Trump than any other aide and reports exclusively to him and no one else.

If the presidency is a job of crisis management, in which the principal task is to deal with an endless number of fires of various sizes and scope, then the most important thing a president can have is good information, to help him know what to handle, what to delegate and what to delay.

If Harp has as much control over Trump’s information environment as she appears to hold — if she is the one shaping his sense of the outside world — then it is entirely reasonable to say that Natalie Harp is one of the most powerful people in the United States.

The reason the Harp story has caught fire is that it is salacious — the elderly president spends nearly all of his waking hours with a young, attractive aide — but the reason it matters is that it is further confirmation of one essential fact of the Trump White House: that the president exists in a degraded, chaotic information environment.

He rejects information that is gathered and collected for the purpose of informing him and is highly reliant, instead, on counsel from people who have no incentive to contradict him and every incentive to tell him what he wants to hear or what they want him to hear. Trump has dismantled every institutional structure designed to curb the worst aspects of the presidency — a tendency toward isolation and groupthink — and has instead sunk deeper into his own propaganda and invented reality.

Harp, it appears, is a key part of that. A total devotee, she shapes his world. The result is a chief executive who is detached from the information he needs to avoid disaster, much less successfully govern the country. Accordingly, Trump has neither avoided disaster nor managed to put the country on stable footing. Instead, he is carelessly careening toward catastrophe. So far, it’s only been a matter of luck that we haven’t crashed.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Trump

Pentagon Fires Leadership of “Stars and Stripes” for Exercising Freedom of the Press

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2026 //
3

Pete Hegseth has made clear his determination to control press coverage of his actions. He decided which media would get space in the press rooms of the Pentagon, kicking out some established journalists to make room for right-wing journalists. He tried to monitor all information coming from the Pentagon.

This week, he fired the leadership of the military’s “Stars and Stripes,” which has always enjoyed editorial independence. Hegseth can’t tolerate that. He wants total control.

Although he was a talking head on FOX, he has no respect for freedom of the press.

The New York Times reported:

The Defense Department on Friday fired the publisher and the editor in chief of Stars and Stripes, a government-funded news outlet that reports on the U.S. military, according to a senior Pentagon official and the dismissed journalists.

The firings raised questions about the Pentagon’s willingness to ensure the editorial integrity of the publication that has reported extensively on difficulties faced by military communities as the war in Iran has dragged on. The terminations came about 10 days after Stars and Stripes journalists reported on hardships that Navy sailors were facing on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, the aircraft carrier whose deployment was extended to nine months amid the war.

On Friday, the Pentagon sent termination notices to Erik Slavin, the editor in chief, and Max Lederer, the publisher, who had announced his retirement earlier this week, citing conflict with the Pentagon leadership on the paper’s direction. Lara Korte, a Middle East correspondent at the news outlet, was also fired on Friday, according to the official and a post she made on social media.

The Defense Department declined to comment. Capt. William Urban, the military deputy to the publisher who was brought to the role earlier this month, said in a letter published on Friday that his priority was to ensure “the highest quality of editorially independent reporting” at Stars and Stripes. Captain Urban’s previous role was as a senior spokesman for the Pentagon….

Why it matters:

“Stars and Stripes” is supposed to be an independent news organization for the military, not a propaganda mouthpiece for the Pentagon.

The ouster of the leadership of “Stars and Stripes” is a plain effort to muzzle the publication and turn it into a lapdog for Pete Hegseth.

This is a brief overview of how “Stars and Stripes” won its editorial independence, as told by blogger TCinLA:

In 1944, General George S. Patton Jr. was very upset with a 22-year old Sergeant who drew cartoons for “Stars and Stripes”. The Sergeant was Bill Mauldin, creator of two cartoon characters, Willie and Joe, who were considered to be the voice of American GIs on the front lines. Willie and Joe were always tired, needed a shave, were wearing the filthy fatigues they lived in on the front lines in Italy, and viewed the U.S. Army as a more threatening personal enemy than the Wehrmacht. The GIs agreed with everything they said. By 1945, the war in Europe was a slog through the coldest European winter in a century. In March 1945, General Patton summoned Mauldin to his Luxembourg headquarters, where over 45 minutes he accused Sgt. Mauldin of inciting mutiny and destroying military discipline through his unkempt character portrayals. Mauldin defended his work as a “safety valve” for combat infantrymen, resulting in a tense 45-minute standoff that ended in a stalemate.

It took an intervention by Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower to protect Mauldin and preserve the editorial independence of “Stars and Stripes,” preventing Patton from banning the paper or jailing the cartoonist. Eisenhower fiercely believed that “Stars and Stripes” should belong entirely to the front-line troops, famously declaring: “This newspaper should be the equivalent of a soldier’s hometown newspaper, with no censorship of its contents, other than for security.” Ike recognized that Willie and Joe served as a vital, non-destructive psychological safety valve. He knew that letting G.I.s laugh at their miserable conditions and blow off steam about overbearing officers actually preserved army morale. Too bad the current dildo running the Pentagon and his short-fingered thin-skinned felonious boss are too fucking stupid to understand that Eisenhower was smarter than all ten of them combined.

Originally when it was created by Congress in 1942, Start and Stripes occupied a unique place in American journalism: funded by the government, read by the military, but mandated by law to report the news independently, without editorial interference. This was because the America that could actually win wars believed US servicemen deserved real news, not Pentagon horseshit. (That happens to still be the law, should any congressional moron care to see it enforced.)

Cartoonist Bill Mauldin won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in “Stars and Stripes.”

You should read the full post by TCinLA, which reports on the recent episodes of censorship by the Trump administration, some of which have succeeded, others that have not.

Categories Censorship, Ethics, Freedom of the Press

Florida: Voters Oust Key Right-Wing School Board

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
4

If there was one school board in Florida that was the beachhead for Moms for Liberty’s efforts to push their agenda of censorship and right-wing ideology, it was the school board of Sarasota County. Last Tuesday, voters replaced the Moms for Liberty majority with moderates who want to make their public schools better, rather than a battleground for culture war issues.

The right-wing culture warriors won school board elections in other counties in the state, but Sarasota County is where their organization was born and gained national notoriety.

Lauren Lumpkin of The Washington Post reported:

A Florida school board that was at the epicenter of national debates over covid mask mandates and book bans lost its conservative majority this week, a change that some say signals a priority shift among voters.

Two Democratic-backed candidates beat out conservatives in Tuesday’s school board election in Sarasota, Florida, flipping the board’s majority. Helmed for the past year by a co-founder of Moms for Liberty — a conservative group that gained a national following with its parents’ rights messaging — the board is moving in a new direction, the winners said. A third Democratic-backed candidate will head to a runoff election against a contender endorsed by Republicans in November.

“I really think at the end of the day, regardless of political affiliation, our community was just tired of the culture wars, the political theater and being the center of national attention for all the wrong reasons,” said Megan Tennimon, a former teacher who won election to the board on Tuesday.


While Democrats say the flip indicates voters want to move on from fights over social issues, Moms for Liberty points to conservatives’ wins in other parts of Florida.


“Every couple of years someone in the media writes our obituary, and every couple of years parents show up and prove them wrong,” Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty co-founder and chief executive, said Wednesday. “School boards are ground zero in the fight for parental rights, and last night Florida parents made that clear.”

During covid, the Sarasota County school district was among those that saw heated board meetings and headline grabbing debates over parents’ rights. High-profile conservative leaders with documented ties to the county include former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Charlie Kirk, the head of a pro-Trump youth group Turning Point USA who was killed last year.

The Sarasota County School Board had been controlled by conservatives since 2022, on the heels of the pandemic. As school board meetings and elections, typically quiet and uncontroversial, became partisan battlegrounds, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) got involved around that time by endorsing candidates, something governors have rarely done.
His involvement in the local races came as he pushed an education agenda that included a ban on teaching young students — and later all students — about sexual orientation and gender identity.

Among those who won DeSantis’s support was Sarasota County School Board Chair Bridget Ziegler, first elected in 2014.

Ziegler, who was embroiled in a sex scandal in 2023 and refused to step down when her husband was accused of sexual assault, did not run for reelection this year. Ziegler’s husband was cleared of the sexual assault charge in 2024. She did not immediately return requests for comment.

Elsewhere in the state on Tuesday, a Democratic-backed school board candidate flipped a conservative seat in Orange County, one of the largest school districts in the country. On the same ballot, a democratic socialist won an upset primary victory in the U.S. Senate race.

“I think that they realized how destructive those divisive policies really were,” Beth Mayberry, another Democratic-backed winner in the Sarasota County School Board race, said about voters. A retired educator, Mayberry’s campaign focused on school funding and mental health.

“What they’ve seen in the last four years, with basically the tabloid happenings on the school board and a lot of the policies and resolutions that were being made, our general community did not agree with,” Mayberry said.

Another candidate endorsed by the local Democratic Party, Jimmy Glover, won the most votes in his race against two Republican opponents, but failed to capture more than 50 percent of the votes. This will trigger a runoff election in November.

If Glover wins, the board will be completely Democratic-backed — and he will be the first person of color to serve on the Sarasota County School Board, said David Dean, chair of the county’s Democratic Party.

Two other members, who were also supported by Democrats and have previously opposed conservative members, round out the five-member board.

While school board elections are nonpartisan, political parties typically endorse candidates they believe will support their priorities. Dean echoed sentiments that residents are fed up with the culture wars and instead want their school board to focus on teachers and students.
“School board meetings should be boring. They shouldn’t make the national news,” Dean said. “There’s certainly a shift in attitudes toward the MAGA agenda, even here.”

Led by conservatives, the Sarasota County School Board voted last year to remove references to race, sexuality and disability from its anti-bullying rules. In January, it reaffirmed the district’s stance to cooperate with law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Ziegler, at the time, said it was a safety measure. “Our School District cannot provide safe harbor to criminals, including those who violate our immigration laws,” she wrote on social media.
However, the measure did not change anything because the district had already agreed to work with authorities, Tennimon said. “That resolution was designed to do nothing but instill fear in our community.”


Sarasota is still deep red — many voters support voucher programs and religion in schools.
Moms for Liberty rose to prominence during the pandemic, when conservative parents demanded more say over what their children learned in school — particularly around topics including race, sexuality and gender.


The group has expanded to about 130,000 members in 48 states since its founding in 2021, according to its website, hosting Donald Trump and DeSantis at its summit in 2023 in a run-up to the presidential election. It has since accrued influence in the GOP, in school board elections nationwide, and was called upon by the Trump administration to help shape national education programming.

The group has regularly attacked the LGBTQ+ community and spread “messages of anti-inclusion and hate” while aligning itself with extremist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But organization leaders are pushing back against reports that their influence on school board elections in their home state of Florida has waned. Moms for Liberty officials said 11 of the 15 school board candidates it endorsed in other races across the state won or advanced on Tuesday.

Heidi Brandt, a conservative who will face Glover in the runoff in November, said she was disappointed with the school board election outcome, but hopes the newcomers will concentrate on schools. Like the Democratic-backed candidates, she said she wants to remove political fights from the board.

“This is about our students and our teachers and our families, it’s not about a conservative or liberal majority or minority,” Brandt said. “I understand the celebrations and the turning of the tables, but I’m just truly praying that it’s not going to be about politics.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Education Reform

Trans Trailblazer in Tennis Looks Back with Regret

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
12

Renee Richards shocked the sports world in 1977 when she she sued for the right to play in the U.S. Open; she was a trans woman. She had been a successful opthamologist and an amateur tennis player. After she transitioned, she became a professional tennis player. Some events barred her, and she sued to participate in others. Now, in her 90s, she looks back with regret at some of her decisions, and she explains why. As a fully developed man, she now believes she had an unfair physical advantage. She rationalized her advantage because she was so much older than most if the women she played.

She was interviewed by Leah Asmelash of CNN:

In 1977, Dr. Renée Richards — a well-regarded ophthalmologist who’d spent most of her life as a very good amateur tennis player — sued for her right to play in the US Open.

Richards had played some competitions locally and throughout the country. She had the backing of tennis great Billie Jean King. And she had a tricky left-handed serve.

But Richards was a transgender woman, the first in the sport. Some tournaments allowed her to play, and opponents dropped out in protest. Others, like the Italian Open, accepted her at first only to change their minds days before the tournament’s start. And the US Open barred her completely.

A judge ruled that the US Open had violated New York State’s Human Rights Law, and that Richards could play. Though she was knocked out in the first round that year in singles, she was a finalist in women’s doubles. She went on to play in other tournaments and in 1981, at the age of 47, she retired from professional tennis.

Richards, now 92, describes herself as a steadfast supporter of trans rights. She also calls her own lawsuit “selfish” and says she opposes trans women and girls participating in women’s sports.

A new biography published this week, “Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer,” by the trans and nonbinary sportswriter Julie Kliegman, chronicles the challenges and contradictions of Richards’s life and career. Richards won acceptance in part because she was seen as a “one-off,” Kliegman said in an interview.

Competitors like Martina Navratilova, who is now a vocal opponent of trans women playing women’s sports, liked Richards as an individual, Kliegman said: “It’s often sort of easier to accept someone from a marginalized group when you have a personal relationship with them, as opposed to the abstraction of trans people who might be seen as coming to steal scholarships or prize money from cisgender women.”

While Richards is a strong supporter of trans rights, she now opposes the entry of trans women into women’s sport. She believes that she had an unfair physical advantage.

She thinks that the debate about bathrooms and trans people is ridiculous. People don’t make the momentous decision to transition so they can use bathrooms of the other sex.

Why does she now oppose trans women in women’s sports?

She said:

If a male who becomes a female went through male puberty, that person has an advantage over other females who were never males in the beginning and didn’t develop larger long bones and bigger chest cavities and larger hearts and a greater amount of muscle mass and bigger cardiac output and lung capacity. Even if they are deprived testosterone by their transition, that’s only part of the story. It’s not enough.

She added:

I thought I was being fair in competing with cisgender women because the competition was pretty close. I won some matches against top players. I lost some matches against poorly ranked players.

I thought that because I was older than the other players, that negated any advantage I might have had by having formerly been a male. I thought that it was a pretty equal playing field until I played in one match in 1979. I played in the women’s 35-and-over championship at Flushing Meadow, and I beat Nancy Richey, a Hall of Fame player. She won the French Open and a few other big tournaments. I beat her in the finals, and I was only 10 years older than she was.

And after I beat her in the finals, I said to myself, “I don’t think it’s fair. It’s not enough of an age difference.” So that got me to think that my opinion about allowing transgender women to play on the tour was inaccurate. I’ve been saying that it’s been fair because I’ve been playing against women that are 20 or more years younger than I am…

I didn’t think that the age would make such a difference. When I played that match against Nancy, I hadn’t conceived of it until then. I’d been playing against Chrissie (Evert) and Martina (Navratilova) and Tracy (Austin), and they had an advantage over me for sure because of the age difference. No matter the size and the muscle mass and so on, I was at a disadvantage playing Martina and Chrissie and Tracy, and I knew it, and they knew it…

Being a trans woman is something that is a right and should be respected. And if you’re a trans woman congressman, you don’t have any physical advantage over other congressmen or women.

Competitive sports are a totally different entity. Why do you think we have juniors and seniors and junior seniors and 35-and-overs and 150 pounders and lightweights and middleweights and bantamweights and heavyweights? Because sports is different.

Categories Gender, Sports

Connecticut: A Hedge Fund Billionaire Redefines the Democratic Party

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2026 //
2

David Sirota’s The Lever posted an important article about a hedge fund billionaire who hopes to redefine the Democratic Party. I thought I had heard of all the billionaires who were trying to remodel education to their own specifications, but I had never come across Steve Mandel.

Like many other billionaires, Mandel’s great passion is charter schools. He has poured millions of dollars into political campaigns, trying to elect candidates who share his values. His great hope appears to be to block candidates who are progressives and who are pro-union.

The article, by Katya Schwerin and Luke Goldstein, traces Mandel’s rise, from his elite schooling at

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Reform

Sign up for the Network for Public Education Conference in Conroe, Texas, September 25-26!

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2026 //
0

The Network for Public Education (NPE) and NPE Action National Conference will take place from September 26 to September 27, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Conroe in the Greater Houston area (Conroe, Texas). The theme for this year’s event is “Public Schools Build Democracy.”

NPE will gather parents, educators, scholars and citizens concerned about their public schools.

Please join us as we learn about ways to defend, protect and improve our public schools.

Registration cost: $199 (includes meals).

For the agenda and registration, open this link:

https://networkforpubliceducation.org/2026-national-conference/

Categories Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Resistance
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