To understand Trump, you have to understand right-wing media. To underestand right-wing media, you have to understand...

It is a fairly safe bet that nobody knows more about the business of comedy in the mid-20th century than Kliph Nesteroff. No one has conducted more interviews. No one has researched the subject so deeply. A few years ago, Nesteroff wrote a fascinating, in-depth piece on the widely known but little discussed relationship between the show Laugh-In and the Nixon White House.

If you have any interest in politics or media, you should read the whole thing( including the end notes and comments), but if you're in a hurry, I've pulled a few sections that are particularly relevant to our recent discussion of the 2016 election.

The Comedy Writer That Helped Elect Richard M. Nixon


Laugh-In is commonly considered a reflection of the late sixties youth sensibility, but closer examination reveals a much different picture. It was, in essence, an establishment show, profiting from the anti-establishment sentiment running through America. Moderated by the comedy team of Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Laugh-In was old in style, but draped in the popular fashion of the day.  ...   Whereas Tom Smothers found himself on Nixon's enemies list, Rowan and Martin found themselves on Nixon's guest list.   ...   In 1969 Dan Rowan said of Laugh-In's chief scribe [Paul Keyes], "President Nixon calls him four or five times a week and when he's in San Clemente, Paul's always there. He is very close to the administration on a personal and on a political basis." A generation of vociferous anti-Nixonites, enraptured by everything Laugh-In had to offer each Monday night, was none the wiser.

...


Laugh-In debuted on January 22, 1968. The show's format was conceived by George Schlatter and featured an odd melding of fast editing in the vintage Olsen and Johnson Hellzapoppin' milieu alongside a colorful "Summer of Love" design. The hosts were the comedy team Rowan and Martin, who had been busily plodding through show business with minor success   ....   "George Schlatter wanted Digby Wolfe for head writer," remembered Dick Martin. "We said, 'No, no, no, no. No way.'   ...  We brought in Paul Keyes from The Dean Martin Show ... we insisted that he be the head writer." And contrary to the earnest insistence of some, Laugh-In was innocuous as far as political satire was concerned.5 Richard Nixon was referenced, but the show never dared to take him to task for the aggressive foreign policy enraging the nation. Compared to other political television comedy of the decade like That Was the Week That Was or The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Laugh-In possessed a toothless bite.

...
But the left-wing and right-wing jokes that Laugh-In showcased were very tame considering the upheaval in the country at the time. The Smothers Brothers appeared to be speaking truth to power whereas Laugh-In was simply speaking. Perhaps a contemporary analogy is the difference between Stephen Colbert's roasting of President Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the following year's performance by Rich Little.

...

The "sock it to me" bit in question was conceived for Laugh-In's 1968-69 season premiere, less than two months before election day. "He would do anything to get elected," says George Schlatter. "Paul Keyes convinced him that it was good for his image to appear in the midst of this kind of avalanche, this tsunami of youth and vitality." Erickson explained that Nixon "showed up surrounded by his staff, whom he consulted about everything. Asked to say [Laugh-In catchphrase] 'What's a bippy?' Nixon huddled with his entourage and decided against it - he didn't know what 'bippy' meant, and really didn't want to find out. Likewise vetoed was 'Good Night, Dick.' After much deliberation, 'Sock it to me?' was the one Dick Nixon finally approved." It aired September 16, 1968. Schlatter recalls the afternoon with trepidation and not just because it was difficult to direct the cardboard candidate.

...

Scholarship remains undecided about whether the "sock it to me" bit actually pushed Nixon over the top, but the argument is largely irrelevant. Nixon's "sock it to me" was simply the culmination of a year's worth of work orchestrated by Paul Keyes and his savvy team of media manipulators.   ...   Officially, Keyes was merely a joke contributor, but the reality was much more. The forty-four-year-old was Richard Nixon's new master of media control along with an impressive team of Marshall McLuhan adherents that included Raymond Price, Harry Treleaven and a twenty-eight-year-old producer from The Mike Douglas Show named Roger Ailes; the future wunderkind behind Fox News.

Raymond Price joined Nixon's media stalwarts after a long tenure as an editorial writer for The New York Herald Tribune. Price was hired as Nixon's speechwriter, but he was quickly consumed less with Nixon's words and more with his image. Price, too, was a devotee of Marshall McLuhan and wasted no time in applying his theories to the hopeless candidate. Speaking about the nation's aversion to the withered politico, Price said, "The response is to the image not the man. It's not what's there that counts, it's what's projected ... it's not what he projects but rather what the voter receives. It's not the man we have to change, but rather the received impression." Professor McLuhan would have awarded Price a gold star. Unable to cure an awkward man, the Price-Keyes strategy was to make sure Nixon acknowledged his maladroit persona.
...

Roger Ailes was hired by Nixon after the two hit it off during the politician's 1967 appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, which Ailes had been producing. Ailes says his objective from day one was to put to rest the public's impression that Nixon was "a bore, a pain in the ass ... Let's face it, a lot people think Nixon is dull ... [That he] was forty-two years old the day he was born ... Now you put him on television, you've got a problem right away. He's a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight." Marshall McLuhan's treatise Understanding Media was immediately circulated to everyone in the office with a key passage highlighted: "The success of any TV performer depends on his achieving a low-pressure style of presentation, although getting his act on the air may require much high-pressure organization."

Just when I was about to back off from all the "black swan" references

If we start seeing lots of headlines like this...



‘Is Donald Trump plain crazy?’ Big-name writers now questioning GOP nominee’s sanity



... then a lot of outcomes we've filed under "virtually impossible" will move to the "definite maybe" pile.

Today's classic movie clip

Events have now got me checking Talking Points Memo three or four times a day.

Here's the latest from Josh Marshal:

It may not seem terribly important right now with all the stories roiling the campaign. But I think there's a good chance it's the most important. Over the last 48 hours Trump's allies, surrogates and now Trump himself have forcibly injected the topic of voter fraud or 'election rigging' into the election.

...

Vote fraud is clearly the aim in what is coming from Trump allies. But Trump's own comment - "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest" - seems to suggest some broader effort to manufacture votes or falsify numbers, to allude to some broader conspiracy. Regardless, Trump is now pressing this issue to lay the groundwork to discredit and quite possibly resist the outcome of the November election.

...

It's true that Republicans have been very disingenuously pushing the 'voter fraud' con for years, especially as the power of minority voting has grown over the last two decades. However, as bad as that has been, there's a major difference. Republicans to date have almost always used bogus claims of 'voter fraud' to rev up their troops and build support for restrictive voting laws, largely focused on minority voters. A number of those laws have been overturned by federal courts in the last week. A notable case was North Carolina where the Court found that the changes were intentionally designed to limit voting by black North Carolinians.

What Republicans politicians have virtually never done was use this canard to lay the groundwork for rejecting the result of a national election. This is Donald Trump, not a normal politician. You should not be surprised if he refuses to accept the result of an electoral defeat or calls on his supporters to resist it.

Explaining Trump in Four Words

We are currently suffering through an endless stream of bloated think pieces about the Trump campaign, all trying to unravel whatever deep malady in the American soul has doomed our democracy. Maybe it's not that complicated. What if we can explain the whole thing in four simple words?

Republicans believe Fox News.

Of course, we would have to throw in the occasional caveat about no group being monolithic and no major phenomenon having a single explanation, but if we limit ourselves to the core voters and proximal causes, I think this may be all we need.

Try a thought experiment.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you find publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the LA Times fundamentally reliable. I'm not saying that you always consider them accurate or honest or unbiased, but that you believe they are generally making a reasonable effort to get things right. Obviously this varies somewhat from writer to writer and story to story, but on the whole, your default setting is to give a high credence to what you read there.

I suspect that, by the same token, you do not extend that same assumption of trust to most conservative media, probably not Fox News and almost certainly not to the more extreme ideological outlets.

Now imagine things were reversed. You have a high degree of trust for things you see on Fox and a low degree for things you read in the New York Times and similar publications.

Think about what your world looks like.


Global warming is a hoax

The government and the media are hostile to Christians

Food-stamp recipients live on steak and lobster

While America is the most taxed nation in the world

The financial crisis was caused by government policies that required loans to be made to poor minority members

The 2008 election was probably stolen

President  Obama's birth records are possibly fraudulent, the product of a massive cover-up

President Obama is certainly anti-American 

As are most Democrats

Voter fraud is rampant

Islamic terrorist are on the verge of major attacks on Americans

America is in decline

If you believe all of these things then Trump becomes not only a rational choice, but perhaps the only rational choice.

I realize I am being somewhat flippant with my tone but I'm completely serious about the thesis. I'm arguing that all of the deep think pieces, the long reflections on the American character ("Democracy: Dying or Doomed?"), and probably everything David Brooks is going to write between now and November are destined to reach the wrong conclusions because they are asking the wrong question.

We don't need public intellectuals trying to figure out why a substantial portion of the electorate is gripped with a strange, unreasoning hatred and anger and fear. We already know the answer – – they watch Fox News. We also know that for the past 40+ years, Roger Ailes and Company have been looking at ways to cultivate these emotions for political gain. The basic assumption was the more intense the better as long most of the negative emotions were directed at the other side. For a while the system worked very well.

The conservative movement also declared all-out war on sources of trustworthy data like the census or meteorological research. While all this was happening, the mainstream press largely ignored and occasionally even encouraged this behavior, perhaps in part because their own walls at this point had an awfully high glass-to-brick ratio. A culture of inaccuracy, meme-whoring, groupthink, laziness, and cowardice had left the profession incapable of standing up to the assault on journalistic standards. Other than a few satirists, almost no one was willing and able to point out the obvious until it was too late.

We should not be asking how did Trump supporters get the way they are, but rather how was the process that made them what they are tolerated for so long?

A fifty-one year old view of the future of high-speed rail

This advocacy pamphlet/comic book from the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen is interesting for any number of reasons, ranging from the art from the legendary EC Comics artist Al Williamson to the mid-60s take on labor unions, but the relevant part for one of our recent threads is this section on experimental high-speed trains.

Technology and infrastructure were moving at a fantastic pace in 1965. It is safe to say that the majority of the people reading this at the time assumed that those trains would go from experimental to commonplace by the end of the next decade (which was, for those keeping count, 36 years ago).

Aspect Dominance or just reporters loking for a man biting a dog?

The neverhillary crowd certainly can be vocal and they get a lot of press, but how much of a factor are they? 

Harold Meyerson writing for the American Prospect (via Lemieux) [emphasis added]:

As the convention began, a new Pew poll showed that 88.5 percent of voters who’d consistently backed Sanders throughout the primary season now favored Clinton. A majority of the Sanders delegates in the hall in Philadelphia also back Clinton, but a loud Blinkered minority has managed to command disproportionate media coverage, which ever favors the loud. This disconsolate fringe—not just delegates but also the demonstrators lined up outside the convention area’s fencing—is almost entirely white and non-immigrant, people, that is, with less reason than some to fear a Trump presidency will overturn their lives. Nor are the demonstrators I’ve talked to preponderantly local, but rather have come from across the country to shout their rage and discontent. In short, the Blinkered are a fraction of the left, the Naderites come again. They are people who wouldn’t normally be involved either in Democratic politics or real-world progressive organizations, who hitched their wagon to Sanders’s star while many more experienced progressive activists failed to grasp Sanders’s potential for moving the world further in their direction than any political phenomenon in years.

Obviously, it is dangerous to infer too much from the decidedly nonrandom sample of "people you know," but I am Southern California based and I work with a program that relies heavily on millennial volunteers -- pretty much Bernie ground zero -- and this is entirely in line with what I've seen. Not only did all of the Bernie Sanders supporters I knew say they would support Hillary Clinton if she won the nomination, almost all of them found the thought of doing anything else laughably absurd. Everyone I talked to considered the difference between Sanders and Clinton somewhere between minor and vanishingly small compared to the difference between either and Trump.

As mentioned above, it is dangerous to infer too much from personal experience, but when that experience is backed up with both common sense and polling data, it is okay to infer a little. Specifically. I'd  suggest that the political press has overstated the size and strength of this segment of the party.

[insert sarcastic comment about the recent performance of the political press here.]

Catching up on Tesla

This story has had a bit more legs than I expected, probably in part due to the way it was handled by the company. Tesla, like its founder, has always been exceptionally good at working sympathetic and (let's be frank) credulous reporters, but it has a horrible record of overreacting to even mild criticism. Of course, a large sale of stock between the time of the accident and its announcement did not help either.

I suspect that had we seen a more low-key response and fewer angry demands that reporters "do the bloody math," recent developments in the story would get less press.

For example:

The National Transportation Safety Board today issued the preliminary report of its investigation into the May 7th accident which involved a Tesla Model S operating in Autopilot mode. The crash resulted in the death of the driver, Joshua Brown, who was 40 years old. The agency found that Brown’s car was traveling nine miles over the posted speed limit at the time of the crash, and the report also includes the first officially released images of the accident.

Brown’s car was traveling at 74 miles per hour before it made impact with a tractor trailer that was crossing its path, according to the NTSB. The posted speed limit on the divided highway where the accident took place — US Highway 27A, near Williston, Florida — was 65 mph. The NTSB states findings don’t contain "any analysis of data" beyond that, and the agency says that probable cause has yet to be officially determined. Tesla has stated that a combination of the "high, white side of the box truck" and "a radar signature that would have looked very similar to an overhead sign" are what caused the car's automatic braking not to fire, but the company declined to comment on the NTSB's preliminary report.

With this or any other complex story, it is important we guard against thinking too much in terms of scalars and linear relationships. Specifically, we need to push past the simplistic "is this technology better or safer than human drivers" and start asking what does the technology do best when should we use it and how can we best incorporate it into our transportation system?

We've all seen optical illusions that prove how easy it can be to deceive the eye, but the flipside of that is that there are also situations where humans are remarkably good at extracting information from visual data. It is entirely possible that a human being actively engaged in driving would've done a better job distinguishing between a large white corrugated metal box and a bright blue sky.

This is by no means a damning criticism of Tesla's Autopilot. Even if autonomous systems were overwhelmingly superior on average, we would expect to find at least a few special situations where humans performed better.

What is far more troubling is when an autonomous system screws up something and autonomous system ought to do well. Maintaining a safe and legal speed would be high on that list.

This may be another one of those cases where people think they're discussing technology when, in fact, they are actually focused on policy and public relations. You would think that limiting the cars in autonomous mode to the posted speed limit would be a fairly trivial matter. If so, this would  appear to have been a policy choice, and one with potential legal ramifications in the casse of a wrongful death suit.

And now a brief musical interlude

With all the talk of Russia and Putin trying to influence this year's Democratic national convention, it seems appropriate to take a look at a fascinating piece in this week's new Republic by James Cockayne on the role the Mafia played in the 1932 convention.

Seabury quickly exposed significant Tammany graft in the New York administration. The city sheriff had amassed $400,000 in savings from a job that paid $12,000 a year. The mayor had awarded a bus contract to a company that owned no buses – but was happy to give him a personal line of credit. A judge with half a million dollars in savings had been granted a loan to support 34 “relatives” found to be in his care. Against the backdrop of Depression New York, with a collapsing private sector, 25 percent unemployment and imploding tax revenues, this was shocking profligacy and nepotism.

By September 1932, the mayor had resigned and fled to Paris with his showgirl girlfriend. In early 1933, Roosevelt moved into the White House and broke off the formal connection between Tammany Hall and the national Democratic Party for the first time in 105 years. He even tacitly supported the election of the reformist Republican Fiorello La Guardia as New York mayor.

This call to mind a song I heard years ago called "Little Tin Box." I didn't know anything else about it (including the fact it was from the Pulitzer Prize winning musical Fiorello – – I'm not much of a musical theater person), but with the miracle of Google, a name or a lyric or even a vague description can bring you multiple versions of almost any song you can think up.

Everyone looks good compared to someone

Rick Perlstein has an exceptional piece of historical analysis up at the New Republic comparing and contrasting (mainly contrasting) the acceptance speeches of Nixon in 1968 and Trump last week. Trump does not fare well.

The whole thing is well worth your time, but  there is one point I'd like to single out. First is the odd disconnect between the often apocalyptic rhetoric of the convention and the actual conditions in the country.

The crux of the similarity between Trump’s speech and Nixon’s was supposed to be its grand law-and-order theme. But in 1968, Nixon could reasonably speak of “unprecedented lawlessness” and “unprecedented racial violence” because these things were unprecedented. Nixon spoke four months after the riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, including one in Chicago that burned two straight miles of Madison Street to the ground. Compare that to Trump followers cowering in terror at violence like last March’s in Baltimore, which left a single burned CVS in its wake. The number of violent crimes in the U.S. in 1960, according to the FBI, was 288,460. In 1968, it had exploded to more than twice that, 595,010. Now? The murder rate is down from eight homicides per 100,000 people in 1995, to under six in 2006, to four-and-a-half now.

You can argue that the voters of 1968 were over reacting to crime, social unrest, and political violence, but there actually was a significant amount of crime and social unrest and political violence to react to.

Even in the small chunks of the Republican national convention that I listen to, there were numerous doomsday images and references to the "dark times" the country was facing. The people in the stadium found these statements credible because that's what they had been told on Fox and on the other right wing media sources they got their news from. Once you factor in the state of conservative media, the rise of Trump is neither that surprising nor that interesting.

That's a perfect segue to this excellent piece on the prehistory of Fox News by Gawker (thanks again, Peter Thiel), but we'll save that discussion for another post.

When catharsis becomes an end to itself

Ed Kilgore does a good job summarizing an important aspect of the GOP convention.

On Wednesday night, Team Trump deliberately provoked what can only be described as a lose-lose confrontation with Ted Cruz that created a nasty and divisive scene overshadowing the maiden speech of the vice-presidential nominee. With each such decision, you get the impression the people in charge of this convention have forgotten that the real "arena" is the general election, and that their real audience is an electorate far beyond this bowl seething with unaccountably angry delegates.

Otherwise it's hard to credit the constant, interminable, over-the-top feeding of red meat to the crowd, beginning with Willie Robertson's first-night taunting of people who are not "real Americans." It may be understandable that speakers are tempted to interact with the people on the floor howling for Hillary Clinton's incarceration, but the job of convention managers is to remind them that these people are TV props — ignore them and remember the whole world's watching!

It's almost as though the Trump people are treating the convention as the culmination of the mogul's campaign: an opportunity to glory in their extremely unlikely conquest of one of America's two major parties, to gloat over the shattered Establishment that's being forced to accept them, and to shake their fists at the unbelievers who still mock their orange-tinted champion. That there is still a difficult election ahead and that this convention is a priceless earned-media opportunity to reach out beyond their own ranks seems to be lost on this wild show's organizers and participants.

This unwillingness or inability to shift the focus from the base to a broader audience is something we've been discussing for a long time. Here's a representative post from last year.

Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.

Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

First it was Andrew Gelman* with the clickbait titles...

...then the GSA

While on the subject, Ken Levine recently collected a number of representative  Huffington Post headlines. As he put it, "Why write comedy when I can just cut and paste this?"

Morons Charged After Stomping On Iconic Yellowstone Hot Spring

Naked Jennifer Lawrence Pelted By BB Gun While, Of Course, Peeing

Turns Out Matthew McConaughey Is Really Good At Making Weird Noises

Kim Kardashian Vows To Keep Breaking The Internet With Nude Selfies

Meet Kim Kardashian: A Spy Intent On Corrupting Iranian Youth

Stunning Photos Finally Give Cat Ladies Their Due

How To Live An Orgasmic Life When You Don't Have A Sexual Partner

Texas Republican Wants Schools To Decide How To Police Bathrooms -- Unless They Decide Wrong

Congress Is Using Zika To Weaken Truck Safety

This Couple Decided To Take Their Engagement Pictures At Costco

Lawmaker Briefly Proposes Regulation To Keep Strippers Young, Trim

It Turns Out That Having Sex In A Self-Driving Car Is Kind Of Dangerous

Proof That George Washington Would Be Ashamed Of Trump

The 8 Avocado Hacks You Want And Need

Mysterious 'Ghost' Voice Turns Out To Be A Guy In The Chimney

* Actually, Andrew seems to have since dropped the fake clickbait title, but given the time lag for his blog queue, he can't very well complain about my posts being out of date.

Son, there used to be these things called antitrust laws

From a fascinating set of graphics from the good people at Gawker Media.

These last two connect to one of our long-running threads. One of the reasons I push the terrestrial superstation story so hard is because of the way it both contradicts and supports the message of these two graphics. We are talking about a highly profitable and rapidly growing industry segment that was virtually invented by the small and nimble Weigel Broadcasting. Not only did it take majors like NBC, Fox and CBS years to catch up, but the latter two actually made a deal with Weigel to essentially run their superstations (Movies! and Decades) for them.

So it is possible for a small but smart and aggressive media company to disrupt and dominate the industry, but the obstacles are daunting. Most journalists are completely oblivious to little companies without massive PR budgets. Despite being one of the most interesting business stories of the past decade (at least of those involving well-run businesses), Weigel is almost unheard of outside of Chicago. Worse yet, the entire terrestrial superstation industry under the potential death threat of lobbyists trying to sell off that chunk of spectrum.

The little guy who has the better idea and the faster reflexes can sometimes still beat the big players, but only by overcoming a system stacked against him.

Charter school financing has a way of getting complicated

Via LGM.


I know I've made this point before, but emotions run hot in the education reform debate so it's important not to demonize people  on the other side. Most people starting and operating charter schools, like most people working in traditional schools, are primarily there to do good.

But it is also important to remember that, in its current form, the charter school system has tremendous amounts of money changing hands often through complex and opaque financial deals, with no-bid contracts between connected players, lucrative sinecures, questionable metrics and frequently misaligned incentives.

Here, the Charlotte Observer's Ann Doss Helms walks us through a not-that-unusual example of funding.

When the Thunderbird board got approval to open in 2014, it signed a contract with Banyan Strategics, a Mecklenburg firm that provides support for charter and private schools. The founders were involved in starting Lake Norman Charter in the late 1990s.

...

During the first school year, the relationship between Thunderbird and Banyan fell apart. Mojica declined to discuss details, saying the separation agreement prohibits it, and Banyan couldn’t be reached for comment. But the Thunderbird board ended up borrowing $450,000 to pay a penalty for breaking that contract.

...


The rest came from ALK Angel Holdings of Virginia, which gave Thunderbird a $250,000 line of credit, with interest-only payments of $4,167 a month, or $50,000 a year. That’s the one that really raised eyebrows among state officials.


“That just seems like a bad loan,” said Steven Walker, an advisory board member who is also general counsel to Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Walker pressed Mojica for details about Angel Holdings, including whether any Thunderbird board members did business with general partner Alex Karakozoff.


Mojica said Karakozoff is a venture capitalist with whom he had done business in the past.

...

In addition to paying off the Chinese investors and the three loans, Thunderbird pays rent to Vertex – under an agreement that also makes the school responsible for all maintenance and repairs.


Some of the classrooms flood during heavy rains, which means the school is paying to install a new drainage system and get rid of mold, which sparked parent complaints about health and safety. Families also complained to the Health Department about rats in the school; Thunderbird is hiring a pest control company.


Mojica says rent on the building is capped at 20 percent of the per-pupil allotment Thunderbird gets from taxpayers to run the school.


“We are within the norms. We might be on the high side of the norms,” he said. “It may not be the cheapest rent around.”


In 2014-15, the first year Thunderbird was open, expenses outstripped the money it took in. The 2015-16 audit isn’t due until October, but the school provided the state panel an informal report showing it had ended the year in the black.


But Alexis Schauss, the state Department of Public Instruction’s director of school business, said those numbers don’t seem to match what she has seen on monthly reports. “I don’t feel comfortable with the data I have,” she told the advisory board.

...

The Thunderbird board hired human resources consultants to screen candidates for the school’s volunteer board and the top job. The March decision to hire Emmanuel Vincent, an educator who had most recently worked at a Georgia charter school, over Andrea McKinney, a longtime local educator who had been hired as interim director, infuriated some families, who petitioned for Mojica to resign.


State charter board members said they want to see improvements on all fronts: relations with parents, healthy classrooms, board governance and financial reporting.


Mojica says that’s in the works – with more outside help. Even before last week’s meeting, Thunderbird had signed on two school leadership consultants to advise the board on academics and governing. A financial consultant will “audit the audit,” Mojica told the board, and Thunderbird is taking bids for a bookkeeping firm.


The board recently added two members and will continue working with the HR consultant to add two more, Mojica said.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking resume

It is important to remember that this ageism is part of a larger phenomenon. Though most of us don't have any adult memories of the Post-War period, it was not that long ago when having a shortage of science and technology workers actually meant a shortage. Companies like Texas Instruments were famous for being very flexible in their hiring and taking anyone who might be good at the job. Now when you hear employers in someplace like Silicon Valley complaining about a "shortage" of workers, what they mean is they can't find a large, ongoing supply of workers under the age of 30 with exactly the advanced degrees they need from top-ranked universities who are willing to work 60+ hours with no job security for good, but not great money until they burn out and have to be discarded.

It is also important to remember that those under-qualified and and over-protected workers of the Post-War era laid the technological foundation on which most of today's Silicon Valley fortunes are based.

From Dice.com:

In 2007, a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg famously ruffled feathers among some older colleagues when he suggested that tech companies should not hire people over 30. “Young people are just smarter,” the Facebook chief executive, then 22, told a crowd at Stanford University.

Nearly a decade after the public gaffe, some say little has changed in terms of how older workers are perceived in the tech industry. Despite making recent attempts to diversify their workforces through aggressive initiatives to attract more women and minorities, Silicon Valley firms still wear their disproportionately young ranks like a badge of honor, proudly flaunting a youth-focused culture in which 28 is seen as middle age and 35 over the hill.

While workers over 40 are protected by federal civil rights laws in the United States, the plight of older employees so rarely enters into conversations about workplace discrimination in tech that one would be forgiven for not realizing it’s an issue at all.

In fact, ageism is very prevalent. Just ask Dan Lyons, a technology journalist and writer for HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” As notably chronicled in his recent best-selling book “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble,” Lyons lost his longtime position at Newsweek magazine when he was in his 50s and decided to switch gears by taking a marketing fellowship at the software company HubSpot. In his book, published earlier this year, Lyons describes the startup’s culture as a frat-like circus filled with Nerf gunfights and hookup dens.

To complement the book, Lyons also wrote a LinkedIn post in which he called out tech industry executives for their defiantly ageist rhetoric, including his old boss at HubSpot, who he said once called gray hair and experience “overrated.” The LinkedIn post went viral, and Lyons said it was at that moment that he realized how widespread the problem really is.

“I got this outpouring of emails from people,” Lyons told Dice Insights. “I don’t mean to toot my own horn—I don’t think it’s that the article was so good. It’s just that there are a s–tload of people out there who experienced this. It was upsetting really.”

Cracked: "Why Everybody Wins If Batman & Superman Are Public Domain "

I believe we can safely take this as a piece of devil's advocacy -- Warner Bros. would not really come out ahead on this  -- but it's well though-out and makes some excellent points. For instance, it points the self-evident absurdity of extending copyrights to encourage creativity when the old laws had recently produced an unprecedented wave of valuable commercial properties. It also points out that being in the public domain has not appreciably hurt and has arguably helped characters like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes.