Two must-read articles on the state of California's charter schools with commentary by Charles Pierce

From the Los Angeles Times' Howard Blume:

A former local charter school operator has agreed to pay a $16,000 fine for misconduct that includes using public education funds to lease her own buildings.

Under a tentative settlement with the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission, Kendra Okonkwo acknowledges that she improperly used her official position “to influence governmental decisions in which she had a financial interest,” according to documents posted Monday by the state agency.

The settlement or “stipulation” notes two instances of wrongdoing: establishing leases for the school in two buildings that Okonkwo owned and arranging for public funds to pay for renovations to these structures.

The school, Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists, lost its charter to operate and closed last year.

...

The violations cited this week by the state date from 2010 and 2011, when Okonkwo earned a total of $223,615 as the elementary school’s executive director. She also received about $19,000 a month in rent from the school. She attempted to eliminate the appearance of conflict by assigning the property to a new, separate corporation, for which her mother signed the leases. But the arrangement did not pass legal muster, according to the state.

The other violation pertains to Okonkwo signing contracts for school-funded renovations worth $62,000. Okonkwo addressed this conflict by resigning as executive director. Someone else then signed the renovation contract.

Charters are independently operated and exempt from some rules that govern traditional campuses. Wisdom Academy began under the jurisdiction of the L.A. Unified School District, which refused to renew the school after its initial five-year charter expired.

A report to the school board cited “serious concerns pertaining to violations of conflict-of-interest laws against self-dealing on the part of the school's executive director as well as insufficient governance by the … board of directors.”
...

The county cited a report by state auditors, who concluded that administrators may have funneled millions in state funds to Okonkwo, her relatives and close associates.

And here's the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss:

But there is another place with a scandal-plagued charter sector that gets less national attention than it should: California, which has more charter schools and charter school students than any other state in the nation, and where one billionaire came up with a secret plan to “charterize” half of  the Los Angeles Unified School District.

There is a never-ending stream of charter scandals coming from California. For example, a report released recently (by the ACLU SoCal and Public Advocates, a nonprofit law firm and advocacy group) found that more than 20 percent of all California charter schools have enrollment policies that violate state and federal law. A Mercury News investigation published in April revealed how the state’s online charter schools run by Virginia-based K12 Inc., the largest for-profit charter operator in the country, have “a dismal record of academic achievement” but has won more than $310 million in state funding over the past dozen years.

If you're in a hurry and just want the sharp and funny highlights, you can always go with Esquire's inimitable Mr. Pierce:

There's now a bill before Governor Jerry Brown that would tighten the public accountability standards for charter operators within the state. The evidence is now abundantly clear in a number of states: As it is presently constituted, the charter school movement is far better as an entry vehicle for fraud and corruption than it is for educating children. The fact that the charter industry is fighting to maintain its independent control over taxpayer funds is proof that the industry knows it, too.

I'd like to emphasize the "as it is presently constituted." There are a lot of good people working for charter schools today, but if we don't fix the current system's perverse incentives, that good faction will be driven away.

Pension Funds: a never ending saga

This is Joseph.

It is worth noting that pension plans are always going to be a regulated industry.  There is a huge amount of trust in giving somebody money now and expecting it back (with interest and earnings) in 30 years.  If you do a truly private firm, then there is a concern about outright theft.  If you do a government overseen hybrid model, it appears that things can also go wrong:

Why is this becoming a big issue now? Because for its first 35 years, when it was being hailed as a free-market miracle, not many people were actually retiring. Now they are, and it turns out their pensions are pretty paltry. If net returns had been closer to the 8 percent retirees deserved, their pensions would be three times higher. Fees like this are basically legalized theft.

I think Kevin Drum is a bit bombastic in his conclusions here. but it is easy to see how there can be a lot of wealth extraction.  After all, a 401(k) plan has a management fee and then invests in instruments (like mutual funds) that also have management fees.  It's easy to see how these layers can add up, even before one considers the possibility of investing in a hedge fund with both management and performance fees.

That is why I am interested in options like social security.  Governments have political risk (they can cut benefits or be destroyed by war) but they have the longevity to make these types of commitments.  Governments do best in the face of issues like collective action problems and social insurance, and saving for retirement has features of both of these problems. 

A reminder that the New York Times is not a monolith

It is often convenient and sometimes extraordinarily helpful to anthropomorphize institutions. When we talk about what a political party "wants" or about whom some organization "likes," we are engaging in a useful fiction. Large groups are never truly of one mind. While it would be impractical to stop this practice entirely, it is important to remind ourselves from time to time that useful fictions are still fictions.

A number of commentators, myself included, have been spending a great deal of time discussing the curious treatment of Hillary Clinton by the New York Times. We generally talk as though the paper were an individual with a long-standing grudge against Bill and Hillary Clinton (not to mention Al Gore), but of course that's not the case. The NYT is put out by a large and changing roster of people who almost certainly have a wide range of beliefs and attitudes between them.

We got an interesting reminder of this a few days ago with the reporting on the presidential predebate moderated by the unfortunate Matt Lauer. Thanks to a very cool service called Newsdiffs, we know that there were at least three notably different versions of the paper's coverage of the event featuring two different authors.

First a bit of background. Two of the most controversial (and some would say offensive) comments made by Donald Trump that evening involved the "leadership" of Vladimir Putin and the causes of sexual assault in the military. With that in mind, look at these three accounts of the same event. The first relatively hard-hitting version by Alexander Burns that takes Trump to task, the second a much milder version by Patrick Healy and the third, also credited to Healy but rewritten sometime after the initial response to the second version. You can find the first to here and the third here.

Obviously, we need to be careful about speculating, but it is fairly clear that the first two stories represent radically different approaches to covering the campaign, particularly when it comes to the more questionable statements by Trump. Furthermore, it certainly appears that the paper was reacting to the immediate social media backlash to their coverage by re-introducing into the third version some of the elements that had been omitted from the second.

(At the risk of piling on, it is also worth noting that a week earlier, the NYT had been forced to rework another Healy story after an overwhelming backlash.)

As an institution, the New York Times has a great deal to answer for in its coverage of the 2016 election, particularly in comparison to its rival the Washington Post, but it is important to remember that a large number of extraordinarily gifted journalists work for the paper and there is reason to believe that many of them are more in agreement with Josh Marshall than with Liz Spayd. It would be a win for everyone if the paper would start to reflect that.

Ddulite watch -- annual Apple post

Not-safe-for-work language but you have to watch it anyway.







Phil Schiller, the company’s senior vice president for marketing on changes to the iPhone.

As much as it seems like some greedy ploy by Apple to screw you over and force you into buying another set of expensive new toys, the truth is that any innovative, forward-looking company has to make these difficult breaks with the status quo.

    This is technology.

...

Some people have asked why would we remove the analog headphone jack in the iPhone. I mean, it’s been with us a really long time. I’m sure you know that the source of this mini-phono jack is over a hundred years old, used to help quickly exchange in switchboards. Well, the reason to move on … really comes down to one word: courage. Courage to move on, do something new, that betters all of us. And our team has tremendous courage.

Apple has been responsible for a number of really impressive innovations, one of which I am currently using to dictate this post, but from a marketing standpoint, by far their greatest innovation has been the realization that a properly spun reduction in functionality can actually pass off as an advance in the technology.

Around the turn-of-the-century, Steve Jobs realized that you can take away a feature that people currently have, use on a regular basis, and can't really do without, and, instead of being pilloried, you can be held up as bold disruptors.

With the usual caveat that I am no one's target market, I keep a set of earbuds in my pocket. I use them to listen to my iPhone, my tablet, my laptop, and the televisions on the ellipticals at the gym. If they are lost or if the connections start to get a bit wobbly, it is cheap and easy to pick up another pair. I also keep a jack in my car that allows me to plug portable devices into my stereo.

The main point of a smart phone is the convenience. Everything it does can be done better by some piece of dedicated tech, often at a lower price. I tolerate merely adequate performance because I don't want to keep up with all of those other things. Having to carry around a second set of ear buds undercuts the main advantage of having the phone to begin with.

This goes back to our previous discussion about ddulites' mystical approach to technology. Just to be clear, I'm not using 'mystical' here simply as a synonym for irrational; I'm saying that the attitudes and, if you will, heuristics are those generally found in believers discussing magic and superstition. It is a world where objects have powerful but intangible and undefinable properties. Apple understands the ddulite mentality. It knows that it can get away with removing useful features like optical drives and USB ports if it can convince hardcore users and tech reporters that the features are evil spirits that must be exorcised to keep the technology pure.

So far, the holy water trade has proven highly lucrative.

A quote to close the week

There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish ideas will invariably fail and end up working for him. If he cares about something, it’s important; if he says something can be done, it can. The people who are already doing the same thing are peons and their opinions are to be discounted, since they are biased and he never is. He doesn’t need to provide references or evidence – even supposedly scientific science fiction falls into this trope, in which the hero gets ideas from his gut, is always right, and never needs to do experiments.

Alon Levy writing about Elon Musk and the Hyperloop

We haven't talked about this for a while

With a company like Hyperloop One, the fundamental question is always just how much management has bought its own hype. The product they've promised to deliver simply can't be delivered for a workable price. The most optimistic estimates exceed the numbers Elon Musk initially suggested by at least a factor of twenty and the latest generation of proposals appear to be even more expensive direction.

On some level, the management of these companies has to know that their claims aren't realistic, but that does allow for the possibility that they still produce some kind of maglev vactrain eventually. From a distance, it is difficult to tell the these true believers from those just trying to keep the balls in the air long enough to cash in.

Without reading too much into one story, charges of mismanagement and malfeasance are always a bad sign.

From a Bloomberg article by Sarah McBride:

The company, known as Hyperloop One, became the latest symbol of tech startup dysfunction on Wednesday when co-founder Brogan BamBrogan filed a lawsuit accusing Pishevar and others of mismanaging the company and lining their relatives’ pockets. BamBrogan, who was the chief of technology before being fired, claims his attempts to expose and correct the mismanagement led to a backlash when Pishevar’s brother, Hyperloop One’s general counsel, left a hangman’s noose on his chair last month. A lawyer for Hyperloop One called the lawsuit “unfortunate and delusional.”

Tensions had been mounting behind the scenes for weeks. In late May, several employees, including BamBrogan, wrote to Lonsdale, Pishevar and Chief Executive Officer Robert Lloyd to complain about voting control and other issues. “The disproportionate influence that the current ownership structure provides to them, especially in light of how they have used that influence, represents a threat to the success of this great company,” the letter said.

The employees said Pishevar’s and Lonsdale’s behavior included holding too many distracting parties at Hyperloop One’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters. Of particular concern was what they deemed nepotism. Pishevar named his brother general counsel. He also began dating Hyperloop One’s outside public-relations representative, whose fee then jumped from $15,000 a month to $40,000, more than any other Hyperloop One employees, according to the lawsuit. Meanwhile, under pressure from Lonsdale, the company hired his younger brother’s nascent advisory firm, Fideras, to provide banking services.

We haven't had a visit from Roger for a while

On a completely unrelated note, has any else noticed the surge in advertising for EpiPens?

From the good people at Cracked.

I don't normally link to Twitter, but...

This tweet from Josh Marshall is both too good and too relevant to let pass unnoticed.

On the case! pic.twitter.com/oOUttR6zge

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) September 4, 2016

At the risk of pushing this post into the painfully obvious and this thread into the death of a thousand cuts...

If this were simply an isolated instance of the New York Times failing to cover a major election story, it would just be an embarrassing oversight, but that's not what we have.

Among independent voices who follow the story closely, there is a growing consensus that the New York Times has a long-standing personal issue with Hillary Clinton driven by some combination of institutional culture, declining standards, and an overly close symbiotic relationship with well-placed but unreliable sources. Not coincidentally, the same charges were leveled during the paper's coverage of Whitewater, the Bush-Gore election, and the build-up to the Iraq war.

Obviously, the smart play on the part of the New York Times at this point would be to spend a little time playing up stories like this and the Trump/Mafia connection (as noted in Politico which – – God help me – – is actually passing the New York Times in quality of coverage here). The topics are extremely newsworthy and just a few articles would go along way toward undercutting the paper's critics. Unfortunately, the old gray lady has always been notably weak when it came to acknowledging criticism and now that the previously mentioned roar of cognitive dissonance has cranked up to 11, any kind of course correction will be particularly painful.

[note -- typos corrected and link added.]

The cognitive dissonance phase

Let's have the essential Josh Marshall set the scene.

We've had a number of looks recently at how The New York Times appears to be revisiting its 'whitewater' glory days with its increasingly parodic coverage of the "Clinton Foundation" - I'm adding scare quotes to match the dramatic effect, even though of course the Clinton Foundation is a named legal entity. Beyond the 'clouds' and 'shadows' TPM Reader AR flagged to our attention, as Paul Glastris explains here, the latest installment from the Times explains how Bill Clinton's request for diplomatic passports for aides accompanying him on a mission to secure the release of two US journalists held captive in North Korea constitutes the latest damning revelations about the corrupt ties between the Foundation and the Clinton State Department.

The Times uniquely, though only as a leading example for the rest of the national press, has a decades' long history of being lead around by rightwing opposition researchers into dead ends which amount to journalistic comedy - especially when it comes to the Clintons. But here, while all this is happening we have a real live specimen example of direct political and prosecutorial corruption, misuse of a 501c3 nonprofit and various efforts to conceal this corruption and the underlying corruption of Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. It's all there - lightly reported here and there - but largely ignored.

The core information here isn't new and it's definitely not based on my reporting. Much of it stems form the on-going and seemingly indefatigable work of Washington Post reporter David A. Fahrenthold who's been chronicling Trump's long list of non-existent or promised but non-existent charitable contributions. In this case, it goes to a $25,000 contribution Trump made to the reelection campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013. The neglected story has only popped up again now because Trump was penalized by the IRS for a relatively technical part of the corrupt act.

...

But all of these pale in comparison to the essence of the transaction itself. Trump made this substantial contribution to Bondi at just the moment when her office was evaluating whether to bring legal action against Trump's 'Trump University' real estate seminar scam. Indeed, Bondi admits she reached out to Trump to solicit the contribution just as the decision was on her desk. She eventually declined to take legal action against Trump, overruling the recommendations of career investigators.
A mounting legal case was also underway in Texas, by career investigators under then-Attorney General and now Governor Greg Abbott. Abbott overruled the investigators recommendation for legal action. Shortly thereafter Abbott got $35,000 from Trump. In this case Trump at least mad the contribution without the commingling of nonprofit funds that go them in trouble in Florida.

...

At the risk of stating the obvious, these facts are textbook examples of the sort of political and prosecutorial corruption journalists are supposed to uncover. Trump used money to buy protection from the consequences of his bad acts from friendly politicians. He then tried to cover up his payment of protection money. And on top of all that he made the either bizarre or incompetent mistake of paying the protection money out of his Foundation - the money from which mostly comes from other people beside Trump.

So here you have straight-up bad acts, political corruption to enable prosecutorial corruption to escape the consequences of fraud perpetrated on vulnerable consumers. And yet the page space gets dedicated to Clinton Foundation stories which raise 'questions' that could 'create appearances' and all other journalistic workarounds reporters use when they haven't found what they were looking for. The North Korea rescue mission Glastris pinpoints in the Times latest salvo just gets the whole enterprise to the point of self-parody.

Now why this disjuncture?

I think there are basically three reasons, some more understandable than others but none of them good. The first is that the Times had a decades long institutional issue with the Clintons. There's no other way to put. It goes beyond single reporters and even individual executives editors. Why this is the case I'll leave to biographers and psychologists. But that it is the case is obvious from reading a quarter century of their reporting on the topic.

We've reached the point where much, if not most, of the campaign coverage produced by the New York Times can only be explained by cognitive dissonance. What we are seeing is the journalistic equivalent of the day after doomsday in " When Prophecy Fails."

How we got here is a long and convoluted story dating back at least a quarter-century involving self-interest, declining journalistic standards, class and regional prejudices, the kind of social psych forces normally associated with isolated tribes and high school lunch rooms, and (inevitably) Maureen Dowd, but the result is a set of beliefs so deeply held that they define the paper and so inextricably interconnected that challenging just one can bring down a world view.

As these beliefs have become less and less defensible, those holding them have clung more and more tightly. Particularly over the past year and a half, organizations like the New York Times and the Associated Press have tended to let they expected and/or wanted to see blind them to what was obviously happening. We've seen this in a string of absurdly off-base predictions, a number of stories that had to be retracted because the sources were obviously unreliable, a reliance on ominous and insinuating language that has become the stuff of punchlines ("these clouds cast a shadow over the Clinton campaign"), and most recently, an account of Trump's widely anticipated immigration speech that actually managed to report the exact opposite of its contents.

Self-criticism is always a painful process, but when it requires up ending a number of fully internalized and tightly networked erroneous beliefs, it can be absolutely traumatic .This is especially true for the NYT, where faith in the paper's superiority is fundamental to the institution's sense of identity. Ironically, this very article of faith has become the biggest impediment to the paper reversing its decline. In order to once again be the best, it has to acknowledge that it hasn't been the best for a long time.

Josh Marshall is the most important journalist of the 2016 election.

No one is better. No one is close.

The essential context for this and every other SpaceX story

On the whole, SpaceX is a pretty good company. Its technology is not all that revolutionary, nor is its business model. Almost all of the breathless claims and mythic narratives you read about Musk's flagship enterprise are either factually challenged or show a fundamental misunderstanding about the aerospace industry and SpaceX's place in it (not to mention Elon Musk's role in the company itself).

But when you strip away the bs, you do find quite a bit of good work that's had considerable positive impact on the industry. Much of that impact came from raiding TRW's best tech and (more to the point) best rocket scientist, but Musk deserves credit for making far better use of both than the old established company did.

The relentless hype generated by SpaceX (and Tesla and Solar City) tends to amplify both good and (to a lesser extent) bad news. This was certainly a bad day for Musk and friends, but if you hear any big, sweeping doom-and-gloom pronouncements coming out of this story, remember to dial things down a bit.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A massive fireball and explosion erupted Thursday at SpaceX's main launch pad, destroying a rocket as well as a satellite that Facebook was counting on to spread internet service in Africa.

There were no injuries. The pad had been cleared of workers before what was supposed to be a routine pre-launch rocket test.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk said the accident occurred during the fueling of the rocket and originated around the upper-stage oxygen tank.

"Cause still unknown," Musk said via Twitter. "More soon."

The explosion — heard and felt for miles around — dealt a severe blow to SpaceX, still scrambling to catch up with satellite deliveries following a launch accident last year. It's also a setback for NASA, which has been relying on the private company to keep the International Space Station stocked with supplies and, ultimately, astronauts.

Another Day, another dot

Nearing the end of my moving adventure. Everything from the apartment and the storage unit is in the house and when you read this, I should have internet running (this post is brought to you from McDonald's WiFi. I know I'm supposed to say "Starbucks" but the coffee's better here).

I'll try to come back to this excellent piece by  Rebecca Traister and how it connects to a number of the threads we've been following regarding both the press and the Trump campaign. In the meantime, the go-to blogger on this one has been  Scott Lemieux.

Here's Traister:

Here’s the thing: There is no reason for there to be political fall-out from this. There is an increased likelihood of TMZ coverage and fantastic tabloid headline puns. But nothing in this silly, sad story has any bearing on the presidential campaign. The fact that we are talking about it like it does is a result of the hungry media’s attempt to maintain the fantasy that there is any equivalence between Hillary Clinton, a competent candidate whose politics you can love or hate, and Donald Trump, a man best summed up by some of his Scottish critics as a “weapons-grade plum.” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted Monday morning that the Weiner story is a “problem for Clinton team” since after Trump’s recent hire of Steve Bannon “Democrats repeatedly pointed to Bannon’s personal past” making it “hard to argue Weiner is off limits.” But Bannon, a white nationalist media entrepreneur, is in the employ of the Trump campaign, and the personal past Haberman was referring to involved divorce proceedings in which his ex wife claimed he had violently assaulted her and also made anti-Semitic comments, Haberman later tried to clarify that her tweet was meant in reference to the Bannon divorce and was not “equating a police report with the Weiner situation.” But as with the Washington Post, this clarification didn’t help much. We are still in the fairyland of false equivalence.

Consider the contrasting situations: Donald Trump, who wants to be the president, recently hired a purveyor of white ethno-nationalism who had been accused by his wife of assault and who is alleged to have fired a woman suffering from MS while she was on maternity leave, as the CEO of his campaign. Hillary Clinton, who wants to be the president, has employed since the 1990s a woman who in 2010 married a guy who turns out to be really skeezy.

The fact that anyone is suggesting even mild political concern about the impact of this story of Clinton’s campaign is ludicrous. Hundreds of the most powerful men in this country, including a number of presidents, have been just as skeezy as Anthony Weiner. Roger Ailes built a cable news network that helped prop up several Republican presidential administrations, all while using his network’s money to help him cover up his record of serial sexual harassment; he just got paid $40 million to walk away from his job and sign on as an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Anthony Weiner, so far as we know, is a putz who’s way too enamored of his own putz, and has until recently been married to a woman who works for a woman who is running for president. End of story.

Cracked takes on AirBNB

For a wide range of business models, the advent of the Internet and smartphones greatly reduced barriers to entry, transaction costs , and turnaround time. One predictable result was that very small scale businesses became practical. For instance, before eBay, you probably needed to accumulate at least a few hundred dollars worth of collectibles to make it worth your time to sell them. After eBay, the cut-off was more like 30 or 40 bucks. The basic business was the same. What had changed were the size of the market you could easily reach and the threshold of how big a transaction needed to be to make it worth pursuing.

This could be very beneficial. For one thing, it allows us to take better advantage of people and resources that have been underutilized up till now. On the other side of the scale, there are serious concerns about abuses and unintended consequences. How do you control fraud, guarantee quality, maintain safe and reasonable working conditions? What's worse, the contact point between these vast markets of buyers and sellers often comes down to one company (two if you're lucky). This means there is a huge potential for these companies accumulating both monopoly and monopsony  power.

This might be OK if the "new economy" were occurring under better conditions, but it's not. We have gutted regulation and largely abandoned the concept of antitrust laws. We can't even have an intelligent conversation on the subject because almost the entire discussion now consists of bullshit narratives about visionary CEOs and ddulite  dreams of the future.

There's always Ann Coulter.. No,wait. Strike that.

The relationship between the nominally liberal mainstream press (exemplified by the New York Times)  and the GOP is an enormously complex story, and I'm still very much paying catch-up with other demands, so I don't have time for connecting the dots (just making individual dots is pushing the bandwidth). I did however want to mention this Josh Marshall post.

 Since at least sometime in the 1980s, the mainstream press has taken charges of liberal bias very seriously. Its response has overwhelmingly been defensive and conciliatory. Media handlers in the conservative movement have gotten very adept at using this as yet another tool to manipulate press coverage.

As is so often the case, Donald Trump has taken a long-standing and highly questionable practice or position and made it so blatant it has to be acknowledged for what it is.

From Josh Marshall:

[T]his year we still haven't heard who the moderators are going to be because the Commission is trying to be sure they pick people who Donald Trump or his supporters won't view as biased against him.

That is a huge, huge problem. Obviously this should always be a top priority. The moderators shouldn't have a bias against either candidate. But Trump of course sees everybody who is not obsequious and toady-ish as biased against him. Over recent weeks he's made Sean Hannity his official interviewer, like a doofus Boswell to Trump's clownshow Dr. Johnson.

He tried to set the tone with those silly complaints about conflicts with NFL games. And the only reason to be especially solicitous of these concerns is that Trump has a history of complaining. This is no more than recapitulating his strategy through life, business and this political race: start with aggressive over-the-top demands, try to assert dominance at the outset so as to engage solely on his own terms and with his dominance already an accepted fact.

In any case, they're not going to find anybody Trump won't claim is biased. No one. Literally, no one unless it's someone like Hannity or Hugh Hewitt. My concern is he's gotten inside their heads with his antics and they'll find someone who is a known softballer or someone who actually is biased in favor of Trump. More likely they will create a situation where the moderator is given a brief which makes them fall over themselves to prove they are not biased against Trump.

Perhaps we'll find out that they're just doing an extra level of vetting to make sure the people they pick didn't say something mean about Trump six months ago or something - though frankly, how many sentient people haven't made some critical comment about Trump in the last year?

The logical result of an illogical policy

[I plan to come back when I have more time and fill in some detail, but for now I think the short version does have a certain pithy quality.]

Due to a largely recent (think 21st Century) cover-your-ass definition of balance, the ethical concerns about then Secretary Clinton meeting with a Nobel Peace Prize winner merits more coverage than Donald Trump being in bed with not one, but two of the five families of the New York Mafia.


Nancy LeTourneau

But here is where the AP blew their story. In an attempt to provide an example of how this becomes an “optics” problem for Hillary Clinton, they focused much of the article on the fact that she met several times with Muhammad Yunus, a Clinton Foundation donor. In case you don’t recognize that name, he is an economist from Bangladesh who pioneered the concepts of microcredit and microfinance as a way to fight poverty, and founded Grameen Bank. For those efforts, Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010.

The connection the AP tries to make is that SoS Clinton met with Yunus because he was a Clinton Foundation donor. What they didn’t mention is that their relationship goes back over 30 years to the time Hillary (as first lady of Arkansas) heard about his work and brought him to her state to explore the possibility of implementing microfinance programs to assist the poor.

During the time that Clinton was Secretary of State, the government of Bangladesh was trying to discredit Yunus and remove him from leadership at Grameen Bank due to the fact that he was seen as a political threat.

Matt Yglesias:

According to their reporting, Clinton spent a remarkably large share of her time as America’s chief diplomat talking to people who had donated money to the Clinton Foundation. She went out of her way to help these Clinton Foundation donors, and her decision to do so raises important concerns about the ethics of her conduct as secretary and potentially as president. It’s a striking piece of reporting that made immediate waves in my social media feed, as political journalists of all stripes retweeted the story’s headline conclusions.

Except it turns out not to be true. The nut fact that the AP uses to lead its coverage is wrong, and Braun and Sullivan’s reporting reveals absolutely no unethical conduct. In fact, they found so little unethical conduct that an enormous amount of space is taken up by a detailed recounting of the time Clinton tried to help a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s also the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would.

And Scott Lemieux:

There is a liberal critique of the Clinton Foundation, which as recently as last month I found fairly credible, that even if they weren’t doing anything wrong, it created the unnecessary potential appearance of corruption. The view of the Clintons is apparently that literally anything they do will be treated as scandalous so if they think the Clinton Foundation is a net positive it’s worth doing. I suppose both can be true, but the ridiculous reporting this week makes me think that the latter position is more accurate.