Glad to see you’re still on this, Josh.

http://digg.com/political_opinion/Dealergate_Update_What_we_have_so_far

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“Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”
Ronald Reagan

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1. It’s just a coincidence.
Gee, that doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to things like examining whether a business has biased hiring practices or a school has biased admission standards does it?

2. Chrysler did it, not us.
And we know from GM experience that the CEO and the board had better do what Obama wants or they’re tossed out the door.

3. Car dealers in general donate to the GOP, so this is to be expected.
This is the area where there COULD be some truth, though these arguments have typically consisted of talking about donation TOTALS rather than numbers of dealers. That could be misleading because if a few huge GOP donors were spared it could hide that medium/small donors were targeted.

A DEM Pres fires 93 US Attorneys.

A REP fires a few.

The REP get’s the heat.

To think there isn’t ANY politics going on here is naive at best. Obama going after the car business in the first place should stick in every American’s craw very uncomfortably.

Don’t let the MSM frame this as a non issue. It is a distraction.

They’re going to liquidate Chrysler within a year anyway.

Then we can list the whole deal as yet one more major failure of Obama’s policies.

FOX news responded by saying if they investigated it or asked question it would just be denied so why do it. I am glad that Roger Mudd did not work for FOX News or else he would never have asked Ted Kennedy why he wanted to be President.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER answer the questions for other people let them answer the questions. This is journalism 101. This is journalism day one. This is laziness and non professional people at FOX

This is way too many bleached blonds and way too few journalists on a network..

Then, instead of “Fix It Again, Tony” - FIAT will be an acronym for “FUBAR It Again Timmy.”

- JP

This is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard in the world of politics. None of the data shown proves nothing of significance.

This is pure wing nut craziness at it’s best. So Obama and team went down the list to see who was republican and could not care less whether they were profitable or not and said, “yeah let’s ax them.”

In turn doing that hurts Chrysler which loose profits from those who make money all in the name of politics. Meanwhile no one at Chrysler gets upset and goes along with the plan. No republicans work there, who decide to leak the information or go public with it.

The great democratic leadership and democratic Chrysler organization working together to screw some guys who gave away some money to a republican who blew it all and lost anyway……yeah that sounds plausible.

What’s also funny is that nobody admittedly has all the information necessary to throw out this accusation and yet the right wing blogoshpere is doing it anyway, yet that sounds about right.

“It’s even better than Kool-Aid!”

- JP

If the analysis proves with a correlation of more than 80% that the administration is playing Chicago-style politics, all that will do is prove that Obama is surrounded by Chicago-style thugs. We already knew that.

There won’t be any criminal charges, and no one of consequence will be forced to resign, because there’s no illegality here. Why? Because there’s no legal framework surrounding any of this. THAT is the problem! The administration has been given free reign over a huge industrial complex and massive amounts of taxpayer money, and there’s no controls, no legal framework, no accountability, and no oversight.

The left spent nearly eight years complaininig about the Bush administrations alleged violations of constitutionality, and here we are turning over a small empire to the President. That sort of unbounded power is exactly what the constitution is supposed to prevent.

The problem here, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t wheather this system was used to dole out patronage, it’s that it can be use for that purpose and there’s nothing illegal about it.

This administration is sounding more and more like Moussolini every day.

..when it all comes out, we’re going to find out that something fairly non-nefarious is going to be at the root of all this. With such a high percentage of Republican ownership of dealerships, it really doesn’t matter what criteria they used, they were going to hit a bunch.

I don’t know what the total percentage is of dealers making a donation to anyone at all, but let’s say it’s 25%, which would be well above the population average. If that’s the case, we’d expect around 20 Obama donors among the culls. We evidently don’t see that. So how do we get there? My suspicion is that one of two things happened.

1. A list was generated using the criteria they developed, and Chrysler purged the list of owners well connected from it in an attempt to ensure that roadblocks didn’t get thrown up to the plan passing - it would only take a handful to do this, and we know of several already.

2. A list was generated using the criteria they developed, and Chrysler purged the list of minority owners, for fear of diversity lawsuits. This had the side effect of the donation patterns we’re seeing, and quite possibly the red/blue area patterns as well.

If I had to bet money, I’d suspect it was number 2.

I believe that’s the favored phrase the left uses in civil rights cases…

most entrepreneurs are GOP so it may or may not be a hatchet job, I can’t tell but it really doesn’t matter, another distraction.

no worries, my friends, the Unions and Government do a much better job then them, it’s proven…..somewhere….

not.

The spreadsheet for the closed list was smaller and more important to get done, but a full comparison of statistics requires the second spreadsheet.

The data came in such mangled format that it has to be 100% edited into comma delimited format for import to a spreadsheet..

My understanding is that about 1/3 rd of that conversion has been done.

I was looking at the list of closures, and it seems that most of them are one- or two-line dealers. (The document identifies four lines: Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge Trucks) Most of those being spared seem to be three- and four-line dealers. That seems to make decent business sense; I’d rather have a single dealer selling all four lines.

By the same token, it seems a better business decision to keep a dealer with a presence in multiple cities than a dozen single-city dealers. The multiple-cities dealer gives you one dealer, one inventory, one point of contact, et cetera for the X cities in which they operate.

Trumping all of the above would be, obviously, sales volume. That probably spared a few AND killed a few.

The interesting cases are the three- or four-line dealers that were closed, or the one- and two-line dealers that were spared. I’d be really interested in that information.

… but it’s really important to do it right.

Anecdotal evidence isn’t helpful. There are hundreds of dealers on each list. Three or four standouts isn’t meaningful.

No information about the closing dealers means ANYTHING unless compared with information about the dealers remaining open.

As for Nate Silver, the fact that he used a HuffPo site is not a valid criticism of his work. I just redid it with OpenSecrets and got similar results.

The criticism of Nate Silver is that he didn’t look at the actual dealers affected, he just looked at car dealers in general. Interesting numbers, but not relevant.

We HAVE all the names. We can look them up. Every one. Then, if there is a pattern, it’s time to raise hell about it. But before then, making noise isn’t helpful, because without ironclad evidence, it comes off as a fringe theory.

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froid