Clunky Math

According to a CBS 2 article posted by Drudge:

With almost 23,000 deals already processed and tens of thousands more in the pipeline, it's possible the $1 billion allocated for the program might have already run out.

The back of my napkin looks like this: Assuming 30,000 deals at $5,0000 a pop and you have spent $1.5 million in a week. Assume that rate constant and you have 6 and a half weeks or so until you exhaust the $1 Billion allocated. I would suspect, in reality, the rate would decay and the program could safely stretch for two months. Unless, of course, administrative costs dramatically exceed the 25% I factored in on top of the $3.5-$4.5K received by consumers, or the money allocated is going elsewhere.

Or, and this may be most likely, the administration is pursuing a cabbage-patch strategy to generate positive -- for both program and government -- publicity.

The other back of my napkin looks like this: There were 1M vehicles sold in June. Sales for July are expected to be up 10% meaning an extra 100K. Less than 3% of total auto-buyers in July took advantage of the program. (Even though the program was not available till the end of July, it was passed end of June, so rational buyers interested in the program would have delayed their purchases until it began.) My initial gut was that this number was low until my wife pointed out that $3500 is not a ton for a used car in reasonable shape.

What this, to me, means is that a good chunk of Cash For Clunkers participants would likely have a bought a new car this year in any event. If 2/3s of the participants would not have otherwise purchased a car then 70% of the projected July over June increase is due to other factors, 10% represent sales cannibalized from future months and the remaining 20% is what we have to show for a 1.5M - 1B dollars of government spending.

Your Momma Outside

Reading the police report, the Gates arrest appears far more about class than race. Gates, himself, made this clear by invoking his status -- "You don’t know who you’re messing with" -- and authority -- "get the chief". Its fair to say that a person of any race who laced into a police officer the way Gates apparently did, would have been similarly arrested, but that only someone of Gates' status would have had the charges quickly dissmissed.

Reading Stanley Fish's column which testifies to Gate's personal history of being subject to racism, overt and subtle, helps to understand how Gates might have been predisposed to mispercieve racism in this instance, and, as such, how he is, in some way, a genuine victim here, and not simply a clown, or worse, a class bully on a power-trip.

That said, Mr Gates is not just any longstanding victim of racism. He is, or at least is advertised as, one of America's foremost authorities on race. As such, he, more than others, ought have been able to differentiate genuine racism and the soft everyday injustices -- a man who committed no crime being arrested in his home for arguing with a Police Officer -- that Americans of all races have learnt to live with.

There are, in other words, things that a black man is subject to in America because he is black, there are things he is subject to because he is a man, and there are thing he is subject to because he is in America. It is disappointing that our national experts on race appear unable to understand these distinctions and that "having a police officer visit your home when you have been seen breaking in" and "being arrested for verbally assaulting a Police Officer" are clearly in the latter category.

European Sophistication

One note from my trip to Europe. I found it interesting that behavior that here is taken as evidence of European sophistication are, there, simple nessecity.

For example, bottled water. In America, where running water is mostly drinkable, drinking European bottled water is a sign of sophistication. In Europe, where the running water is generally not drinkable, it is a practical necessity.

Similarly, transport via small cars and bicycles. Here, where streets have been built for cars, they are a symbol of energy-, or environmental-, consciousness. In Europe, the streets, often built hundreds of years ago for narrower transport, ill fit cars, driving small cars or bicycles is a practical necessity.

Snippet

The following snippet from the Sotomayor confirmation hearings deserves mention.

GRAHAM: When it comes to civilian criminal law, do you know of any concept in civilian law that would allow someone be held in criminal law indefinitely without trial?

SOTOMAYOR: When you're talking about civilian criminal law, you're talking about...

GRAHAM: Domestic criminal law.

SOTOMAYOR: Domestic criminal prosecutions.

GRAHAM: Right.

SOTOMAYOR: After conviction, defendants are often sentenced...

GRAHAM: I'm talking about you're held in jail without a trial.

There are many easy excuses to make for Sotomayor's apparent ignorance of the legal fact that "conviction" comes after a "trial". Confirmation hearings are long and exhausting, she was obviously only trying (as she did the entire hearing) to obfuscate, and so forth. That said, one would be hard-pressed to review the transcripts of previous Supreme Court nominees and find something similarly embarrassing.

Fustrations

Not that there was much at stake, but the Democrats apparently won the Sotomayor confirmation hearings.

The GOP effort felt lacking sufficient discipline or strategy. To my slanted ears, the sharpest questions came from Senator Hatch in the guise of "questions from constituents". The questions fashioned by the Senators and their crack staffs underwhelmed.

The nominee did present an inviting target. She was awkwardly over-rehearsed. Many of her answers brought to mind the Bing commercial as she offered repeated scripted responses to keywords whether or not they fit the question. In my petty heart I wish that a GOP Senator had called her on her cartoonish slow-talking. I think the politics would have supported making an issue of her -- I am pretty sure -- unprecendented, for a Supreme Court nominee, number of answers hid behind "I don't know" and "I can't recall" and "That wasn't my area of expertise". What does well qualified mean in the face of that sort of demonstrated (or was it put-on?) ignorance?

In as much as Sotomayor chose to play the role of Judicial conservative, Republicans may have been well advised to prod her less, and use her to poke Democrats more. Sen Kyl prompting Sotomayor's dismissal of the President's judicial philosophy was a coup. I wish they had pulled off a like moment more explicitly exposing the Democrats Sunstein-derived identification of Judicial Review as Judicial Activism.

The one exchange that really let me down, was following Sen Coburn asking the sensible question "How did we get to the point where something that's spelled out in our Constitution and guaranteed to us ['is not settled law and settled fixed'], but something that isn't spelled out specifically in our Constitution is?", Sotomayor answered:

One of the frustrations with judges and their decisions by citizens is that... what we do is different than the conversation that the public has about what it wants the law to do.

We don't, judges, make law. What we do is, we get a particular set of facts presented to us. We look at what those facts are... and then look at the Constitution, and see what it says, and attempt to take its words and its -- the principles and the precedents that have described those principles, and apply them to the facts before you.

Coburn, dropping the ball, responded, simply, "Thank you." A smarter, or at least more you-tube-worthy, response would have forcefully articulated that the Constitution belongs to the American people, not a narrow class of elite judges and that a gap between how the American people understand their Constitution and how judges interpret it, reflects not -- as Sotomayor would have it -- ignorance on the part of the people, but arrogance on the part of judges.

Or, failing that, he could have at least pushed her to back away a little from her assertion that precedent innocently describes constitutional "principles" towards acknowledging the plain reality that the way we got to this point was that some Judges simply made law which is now sanctified as precedent. And judges who rule based on such precedent are, if not making law themselves, blessing the principle of Judicially fabricated law.

In related news, the President subtly re-iterated his desire to hide behind the Supreme Court's skirt on gay marriage.

Swine Flu

It is easily explainable -- if you live in a large city you are more likely to be exposed to both human-transmitted disease and Democrats -- but mildly amusing that the CDC's swine flu map closely resembles the Red-Blue maps.

The published to-date US fatality rate is 0.57% with high state-by-state variance (stdev of 0.52%). On the high end New York has a 2% mortality rate, Wisconsin with far more cases has a 0.07% rate. This divergence could reflect factors like differing virus strains, demographics and, perhaps, the method for counting cases (perhaps people in New York are less likely to get diagnosed than people in Wisconsin).

According to published reports, British Health planners are expecting a much lower mortality rate, expecting it to range from 0.1% to 0.36%. They expect between 19,000 and 65,000 deaths assuming 30% of the population of 61 million fall ill.

One strong argument in favor of a nationalized medical regime is the potential for more organized data collection and more data-driven medical decision making. Unfortunately, in Britain, at least, that potential is unfulfilled:

The CMO needs to remedy data deficiences over swine flu

What is the death rate from HINI flu likely to be? ...it is vital to know as accurately as we can how many are likely to die of it.

But it’s no good asking the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson. Radio 4’s Today programme tried doing that this morning, and was fobbed off with a series of claims about how difficult it was to make such a forecast, and how wide was the area of uncertainty... Sir Liam would have been better employed remedying the deficiencies in the UK data that are the basis of the uncertainty.

Why, for example, did the capable Imperial College team have to rely on data from the US Centers for Disease Control, rather than the UK’s Health Protection Agency?
...
The only way to get a grip on what is happening with H1N1 is to use statistical science properly, not to mock its uncertainties in radio interviews. If statistical science does not underpin the Government’s estimate of 100,000 H1N1 cases per day by the end of August 2009, what does?
...
If statistical science does not underlie the UK’s planned locations for 500 Tamiflu collection points, what does?
...
(Conflict of interest: Sheila Bird serves on UK’s Scientific Pandemic Influenza Advisory Committee, which has not met since swine flu reached the UK.)

"Independance"

Drudge posted a Newsweek article:

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence... Holder... may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way... leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do... Such a decision... could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities.

It seems ill-fitting to characterize an Attorney General pursuing a course demanded by the President's most partisan supporters -- which the President, himself, has been reluctant to pursue for fear of alienating moderate voters -- as rising above partisanship.

The timing of this change of policy, in the face of the President's rapidly dropping approval ratings would suggest that the President's political calculations might have something to do with this change of course.

Until now, the President has tried to please his most partisan supporters by pursuing policies important to them (staking out far left positions on stimulus, healthcare, global warming, ...). His political advisors may now view that choice as costing too much moderate support (perhaps recognizing that the country is, by and large, more fundementally conservative, or centrist, than they thought initially). Prosecuting interrogators who went "far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the [Bush] Justice Department" is an easy way to please his most partisan supporters without disenchanting moderate, or even conservative, voters. Republicans would be politically foolish to protest prosecutions of interrogators who clearly violated the law as understood by the Bush Justice Department.

The only significant political risk this new policy poses to the President is the potential perception that the administration is engaged in partisan prosecutions, criminalizing honest policy differences with the previous administration. This risk is substantively mitigated by limiting prosecutions to interrogators who clearly violated the law, (as opposed to Bush Administration lawyers who issued "controversial" opinions) and to the degree that the investigation is perceived as emanating from an independent Attorney General, and not, or better: against the will of, the President.

In other words, in credulously reporting that Holder is, in this, acting independently of the President, Newsweek is doing Robert Gibbs' job.

Hard Talk

While abroad, I caught an episode of the BBC programme HardTalk, they were interviewing one Lynn Forester de Rothschild.

Mrs de Rothschild, a major Clinton fundraiser is no radical neo-con, but that did not stop the interviewer from treating her as one for suggesting that Obama might be less than divine.

Highlights of the interview included an exchange were despite the pre-emptive explanation offered by de Rothschild, the interviewer was unable to grasp the difference between "privileged" (which McCain and not Obama was from birth) and "elitist" (which McCain is demonstrably not, and de Rothschild thought Obama is) and, Mrs de Rothschild being asked, after she noted that "10% of taxpayers pay 70% of taxes", "well, can't they pay more?"

In general, I can't remember an interviewer being this rude to an interviewee since I watched Charlie Rose lecture Bernard Lewis on precisely why they hate us. Almost every sentence from de Rothschild was cut off by the interviewer.

More fundementally, the interview had a hard to describe Orwellian tone. In one telling moment (and there were a few of these), de Rothschild asserted that she felt Obama was elitist because her impression of him was that he considered himself better than other people. The interviewer sputtered a bit before launching: "But no-one says that." The sense was, in the interviewers mind, conventional wisdom is the same as not-to-be-questioned truth.

Returning To Obama's America

DISCLAIMER: The title of this post isn't quite fair, but not entirely unfair either.

So I arrive back in JFK after a week abroad. After the long flight, I get to the immigration line. The line is separated into two sections, one for "Americans" and one "Visitors". The line for the Americans was twice as long (~200 people) as the line for Visitors, there appeared to be ~2 times the number of stations servicing visitors as there were servicing Americans, only one of the stations servicing Americans had an agent present and that agent was apparently not processing anybody.

A number of people stuck in the long unmoving line began checking their emails on their PDAs. A lady in the Airline uniform came over and confiscated one young lady’s PDA announcing that they were not allowed. On being politely questioned, she asserted that she had been clearly announcing the rule for some time. People in the crowd witnessing this scene responded – as was the case – that none of us heard any such announcement. She followed by proclaiming that there were clear signs. People in the crowd questioned this as well asking her to point out any such signs, which she could not. Instead, she berated us, lecturing that it was “common sense” that we were prohibited from using cell-phones. The poor girl whose cellphone was taken, was forced to debase herself and humor/flatter the uniformed lady in an thankfully ultimately successful effort to retrieve her property. The banality of evil was brought readily to mind.

At some point, the line started moving quickly and we were fortunate to get to a station. Unfortunately, the line froze there. From what we can tell they were rolling out some sort of software upgrade. The mechanism for this was to distribute CDs to agents that had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to do with them and what they did do with them broke their systems. After a few minutes of inter-agent banter to the effect of "How do these disks work?" all but one of the agents packed up and left their stations. The one agent left was instructed to hold off installing the disk, so his system was still running and he was stuck processing the whole line by himself.

I can't wait until the people behind this are ru(i)nning our health care.

Revenge of The Fallen

My initial impression is this sequel is almost superior to the original. RoTF is a near perfect summer blockbuster. It has inspiring heroes and heroics, over the top special effects and no shortage of girls in their summer clothes. I absolutely loved the score, which framed and held the movie together in the absence of a particularly coherent plot.

That the characters are cartoonish, or the plot a loosely woven pastiche, is hardly, in this context, criticism.

It is unfortunate that apparently because the script had the audacity to tweak Obama (in much the vein that the original tweaked W) proffessional reviewers wanting to keep their jobs were not allowed to simply enjoy the movie. Instead they felt obliged to instruct us along the lines of:

The man just wears you out and wears you down, so much so that it’s easy to pretend that you’re not ingesting 2 hours and 30 minutes of warmongering along with all that dumb fun.

or

Memo to Michael: It's a toy movie. Your audience is predominantly teen and pre-teen. My kids don't need to see your salivating soft-porn fantasies or your reactionary militaristic politics.

Not that these reviewers should be taken seriously -- and, of course, they aren't. RoTF may earn more in its opening weekend than all the star studded Hollywood anti-war-movie efforts to date combined -- but its worth noting the precise "warmongering" "reactionary militaristic politics" embedded in the move, which reduce to: Don't negotiate with Decepticons.