Comedy has become a liberal genre: Takes big role in presidential political race (Lisa Wangsness, October 20, 2008, Boston Globe)
Last week John McCain tried to make peace with David Letterman, who has been in a snit with McCain since the GOP presidential nominee canceled an appearance on his show weeks ago. But the jokes didn't exactly flow; in what felt more like a rant than a ribbing, Letterman grilled McCain in disapproving tones about everything from his attacks on Barack Obama to his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.Palin, meanwhile, good-naturedly joined the "Saturday Night Live" cast this weekend to poke fun at herself. [...]
Both appearances drew gargantuan ratings, the highest in 14 years for "SNL" and almost three years for Letterman. But they also underlined the extent to which comedy has become a liberal genre in America, at a time when comedy has taken on an unprecedentedly important role in presidential politics.
Stocks Soar On Hopes Of Credit Recovery: Dow Gains 400 Points As Lending Rates Ease, Fed Chair Pushes Economic Stimulus (CBS/AP, Oct. 20, 2008)
Wall Street surged on a burst of optimism Monday, propelling the Dow Jones industrials up more than 400 points on more signs of a reviving credit market and comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. All the major indexes finished with gains of 3 percent or more.Investors who had sold furiously in recent weeks in response to immobile credit markets became more optimistic as bank-to-bank lending rates eased further. There's also less demand for ultra-safe Treasury bills, another sign that the credit markets are gradually returning to a healthier state. And Bernanke has hinted that the government will take more steps to help the economy.
Palin Becomes Increasingly Accessible To The National Media (Scott Conroy, 10/20/08, CBS News: From the Road)
It was less than two weeks ago when Sarah Palin astonished her traveling press corps by lifting the curtain (literally) and journeying to the back of her campaign plane to answer reporters’ questions for the first time after 40 days on the campaign trail. But the candidate who has been criticized for having a bunker mentality when it came to the national media can now lay legitimate claim to being more accessible than either Joe Biden or Barack Obama.In the past two days alone, Palin has answered questions from her national press corps on three separate occasions. On Saturday, she held another plane availability, and on Sunday, she offered an impromptu press conference on the tarmac upon landing in Colorado Springs. A few minutes later, she answered even more questions from reporters during an off-the-record stop at a local ice cream shop.
By contrast, Biden hasn’t held a press conference in more than a month, and Obama hasn’t taken questions from his full traveling press corps since the end of September. John McCain—who spent most of the primary season holding what seemed like one, never-ending media availability—hasn’t done one since Sept. 23.
Though she often turns the “mainstream media” into a punching bag on the stump, Palin clearly enjoys interacting with reporters.
Houses For Sale--To Immigrants (Diana Furchtgott-Roth 10.20.08, Forbes)
We should consider ameliorating the underlying problem--the weak American real estate market, with its large overhang of unsold housing--by increasing visa quotas for immigrants who want to come here to live and work.Many potential immigrants have money. We have empty homes, whose spiraling downward prices are contributing to our financial chaos. Why not raise visa allowances to encourage home purchases, at no cost to the government?
Currently, more than 2.25 million vacant homes and condominium units are for sale, according to the Census Bureau, and the vacancy rate is 2.8%.
This is far higher than the 1 million and 1.8% that were the norm before 2006.
A study by the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes entrepreneurship, concludes that 1 million skilled workers are competing for 120,000 permanent residency visas, causing talented workers to choose to live--and buy or rent homes--elsewhere.
Worlds Apart: Obama, McCain, and the future of foreign policy (Nicholas Lemann, 10/13/08, The New Yorker)
The network of experts set up by Lake and Rice eventually grew to about three hundred, divided into teams by region and issue, with each group generating its own material and passing it up the line. (Now, after the official absorption of Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy apparatus, there may be as many as five hundred experts connected to the Obama campaign.) These people support a close group of about a half-dozen advisers, who include, in addition to Rice, Lake, Craig, Danzig, and Lippert, another former Senate staffer named Denis McDonough, who worked for Tom Daschle before he was unseated in 2004; Ben Rhodes, a young speechwriter who had helped draft the Iraq Study Group Report in 2006; and Scott Gration, a retired Air Force major-general whom Obama has befriended. Only Lippert, Rhodes, and McDonough are on the campaign’s payroll; Lippert travels with Obama, Rhodes is based at campaign headquarters in Chicago, and McDonough splits his time between Chicago and Washington. The thoughts of the many experts—who generally respond by e-mail—are most often filtered through Rice, Lippert, and McDonough. Thus far, nobody leaks, nobody bickers in a way that can be discerned by outsiders, and there are not obvious camps. The general feel of the campaign, both in its spread-out virtual form and at its headquarters in a modern office tower in downtown Chicago, is a little like that of the Microsoft campus in the nineteen-nineties, or the Google campus today: everybody seems young, trim, competent, cool, and casual, but casual in a “you and I both know that we’re ferocious and brilliant and we’re going to crush the other team” way.The tone comes from Obama himself—he’s a mixture of soulful outsider and competitive, hyper-organized meritocrat—and it has an ideological manifestation. The Obama people think of themselves as future-oriented strategic thinkers, not old-fashioned, gooey, Eleanor Roosevelt-style humanitarians—as people who get it, the “it” being the new realities of the twenty-first century. Although the candidates may be required to say that their foremost concern is how the economic crisis affects the middle class, they seem to get their inexhaustible drive from the belief that they might be able to run American foreign policy. Obama’s foreign-policy staff likes to think he reads their memos first. The most sustained signal we have about Obama’s personal views on foreign policy is the next-to-last chapter of his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope,” which is called “The World Beyond Our Borders,” and which, by all accounts, he wrote himself, taking particular care with it. [...]
The most mystical believer in Obamaism whom I met was Scott Gration, the retired Air Force major-general—a burly, friendly, artifice-less guy who assured me that he had only recently begun to wear a tie regularly. I went to see him over the summer at his house in Nutley, New Jersey. An American flag flies from a flagpole on the lawn. Gration, who grew up in Africa as the son of American missionaries, and who flew two hundred and seventy-four combat missions over Iraq, used to be a registered Republican, but he became a Democrat after spending time with Obama, especially during a trip to Africa in 2006. Perhaps because his background isn’t conventionally liberal, he is more open than the other top Obama advisers in expressing a soaring optimism about the possibility of a less arrogant, more coöperative, more empathetic America leading the world in confronting its most intractable problems. “We’ve screwed up,” he told me. “We don’t really fix these things.” He mentioned the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, the Israel-Palestine dispute, and the tension between Russia and Georgia. “What I’d hope we learn from that is: ‘Yep, we’ve got to fix the basic issues here.’ ” He went on, “What doesn’t work, in Gration’s mind, is forcing a solution. Create an environment, give people the opportunity to air their differences, and see if they can come together. We don’t tell them what the solution is, but we do have an obligation—let’s get people in here, find out the needs, see if you can come up with a plan. Don’t try to freeze conflicts!”
Gration was impatient with the idea that conflict is the natural state of the world, to be managed rather than resolved. “People are more alike than their cultures and religions,” he said. “When Obama talks about global citizens, it’s the same framework. You see, religion and culture—they’re the way people communicate their values. They want stability, order, education. This is just humanness. Then you add on your religion, your culture—that’s how you execute it.” His implication was that if we can get past the religious and cultural identities that serve as host organisms for conflict, and deal with people at the level of their humanity and their basic needs, then we can make real progress—especially if Obama personally holds an office that permits him to set the tone and lead the effort.
Acclaimed Colombian Institution Has 4,800 Books and 10 Legs (SIMON ROMERO, 10/20/08, NY Times)
In a ritual repeated nearly every weekend for the past decade here in Colombia’s war-weary Caribbean hinterland, Luis Soriano gathered his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, in front of his home on a recent Saturday afternoon.Sweating already under the unforgiving sun, he strapped pouches with the word “Biblioburro” painted in blue letters to the donkeys’ backs and loaded them with an eclectic cargo of books destined for people living in the small villages beyond.
His choices included “Anaconda,” the animal fable by the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga that evokes Kipling’s “Jungle Book”; some Time-Life picture books (on Scandinavia, Japan and the Antilles); and the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language.
“I started out with 70 books, and now I have a collection of more than 4,800,” said Mr. Soriano, 36, a primary school teacher who lives in a small house here with his wife and three children, with books piled to the ceilings.
“This began as a necessity; then it became an obligation; and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.”
A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys.
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Bwoop! Bwoop! Fruitcake alert! Fruitcake alert!
Bailout Impact: Libor Improving (Luke Mullins, 10/20/08, US News)
Below is a table from acrossthecurve.com, which shows that Libor rates—a key measure of interbank lending—have begun easing. The movement demonstrates that banks are growing less terrified—at least for now—of lending to one another. This is a key step in the recuperation of the credit markets.
The New Fear: It's not just about 9/11 (SASHA ABRAMSKY, 10/24/08, The Chronicle Review)
Even Barack Obama's presidential candidacy, built around the language of "inspiration" and "hope," framed in explicit rejection of the language of fear, in some ways grows out of this moment. During times of extreme uncertainty, phenomena that might be labeled "gyration points" emerge. Last spring, a year into the subprime debacle, but before the banking system itself had begun to visibly fail, the stock market was swinging wildly on the merest rumor. Fortunes were won and lost on the psychological tics of big traders and investors. Similarly, political loyalties throughout the past eight years have been in wild-swing mode. Majority support for President Bush and the national surveillance state in 2004, the audience ecstasies of the deliberately policy-nonspecific "Yes, we can" movement of Obama in 2008 — both are products of a national unease, a desire for a knight in shining armor to ride in and save us from the bad guys. That Bush is clearly a man of the conservative right and Obama a man of the liberal left is in some ways secondary to the fact that both emerged into prominence by preaching to the crowd their ability to radically transform a broken status quo. And voters have responded, because even more than identifying as "liberal" or "conservative," many people these days respond to a candidate's perceived ability to tackle fear.Our current gyration point makes for fascinating politics. But it doesn't necessarily make for good policy making.
Fear of the end of cheap oil created a market stampede in the spring and summer that, indeed, ended the era of cheap oil, even while supply held remarkably steady. Yes, oil prices have since fallen, but only because of the terror of a long-lasting international depression. Fear of a housing crash at least partly helped create, and then exacerbate, the stampede away from mortgage investments — nobody, including bankers, wanted to run the risk of being the last one stuck inside a burning building. Over the summer, fear of the dollar's continuing to depreciate helped create an investment rush into commodities — pushing up the price of oil, food, and other key staples, putting further pressure on the dollar and turning what could have been a minor devaluation into a currency crisis — one that has slowed with the banking crisis, but possibly only temporarily. Fear of bad news from banks drove stock prices into their own wild gyrations, historically unprecedented in their rapidity, further reducing the ability to meaningfully value financial institutions, which in turn furthered the credit crunch. And so on.
At the public-policy level, fear of recession has taken on mantralike qualities. In the past, we assumed that boom-bust was a cyclical proc-ess. Like squirrels, government and citizenry alike would store up at least some of the surplus from the good times to tide us through the bad. We don't do that anymore — instead we've gone on a spending binge that has destroyed our reserves. Hence our panic at the thought of a slowdown in economic growth.
Today the very notion of "recession" is enough to put the Federal Reserve Board into a tizzy. Yet in rushing to lower interest rates to stave off a recession in the middle part of this year, and in then throwing hundreds of billions of dollars into hastily cobbled-together, poorly coordinated rescue packages for banks and mortgage lenders, the Fed may well ultimately have unleashed an inflationary spiral that will, in the long run, do at least as much economic damage as a corrective recession would.
As for climate change, while it's clearly a massive problem, it's also an extremely complex one. Yet suddenly, as the reality of a warming planet belatedly enters public consciousness, we've all become climate experts. Every storm, every deviation from the norm regarding daily temperatures, rainfall, wind speed, is now blamed on global warming. And so we look for quick-fix solutions. In glomming onto one such panacea, biofuels, we may actually have made the problem worse, while contributing to a massive global food crisis.
In short, we're becoming so fearful of the future — the next attack, the next economic collapse, the next environmental catastrophe — that we're undermining the present. And in so doing, we're paradoxically making it more likely that the future will be as bleak as our nightmares suggest.
So what's going on?
The books discussed here offer some interlocking explanations: Political elites stoke fear; the media further that process, as does our brain's kluge-like psychological and information-evaluation systems. But that's just part of the picture.
Over the past three or four generations, technology has transformed our lives, our experiences, and — at least as important — our expectations of a future coming at us at warp speed. We have learned how to fly, how to travel in space, how to manipulate our genetic code. We have developed the Internet and come to take for granted instant, and global, transfers of information. We have created vast electronic data storehouses, giving anybody with a computer immediate access to more information than the most-learned scholars could have gotten 20 or 30 years ago. We have engineered drugs to cure previously lethal diseases and watched human life expectancy soar. We have seen countries like India and China march into modernity, leaving behind epic famines. We have watched human wealth skyrocket and seen new inventions, like CD's, iPods, and cellphones, transform how we spend our leisure time and how we communicate at work and at play.
In the past, human beings expected their futures to pretty much imitate the past and present. The future was predictable, and since it was likely to be as stained with blood, epidemics, and famines as the past, they were in no rush to get to it.
Yet by the end of World War I, along with technology, a utopian streak of futurology entered the popular consciousness. The war was so terrible, the technologies employed so devastating, surely it was the War to End All Wars. Of course, it wasn't. But then, at the end of World War II, when the atomic bomb was unleashed, optimists again concluded that the horrific nature of the technology meant an era of peace was at hand. During the cold war, proponents of the theory of mutually assured destruction, in both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, essentially embedded such thinking into global culture.
With more than a dose of luck, MAD worked long enough to bring down the Soviet Union, and it provided a protective space within which most Americans grew culturally unaccustomed to war (or, at least, expected not to have to experience firsthand such conflicts as the wars in Korea and Vietnam); culturally expectant of the endless march of science; culturally demanding of an ever-higher quality of life and ever-longer years in which to experience the good times.
Our future promises to be sharply different from the futures afforded previous generations. In some ways, the emphasis on speed underlined in the books discussed here — the speed of communications, of realizing threats, of the pace of events — is relevant. But it's a different speeding up that seems to me most important. After centuries of technological progress, we think we can glimpse the Promised Land. We can envision a world in which cancer is merely a coldlike nuisance; in which stem-cell research banishes Alzheimer's. We are Greek deities — emotional yet near-omnipotent. Masters of the universe.
It's an intoxicating — if incoherent — vision. But the world today is far from a utopia. My guess is we have become so fearful at least in part because we fear our intoxicating future's being snatched away from us. That's a more psychologically devastating emotion than simply going through life knowing that threescore and ten meant you'd had a pretty good go-round.
Especially affected are the comfortable classes, the people who have most benefited from educational, economic, workplace, and scientific changes in the past few decades, and who have the highest expectations for how they and their children will interact with those changes. Comfortable people today don't simply fear losing what they already have; they also fear losing what they might soon have. They fear that the ugly present might sabotage a beautiful future.
Hard to see how convincing themselves that the Unicorn Rider is the new messiah would make them any less fearful when he inevitably face-planted.
Why the crisis-rattled elite is banking on Obama: The endorsement of Obama by every liberal’s favourite Republican, Colin Powell, springs from disarray and desperation in DC circles. (Sean Collins, 10/20/08, Spiked)
Historically the differences between Republicans and Democrats have been narrow (especially by European standards). And in challenging times, such as war, politicians from both sides have come together. Today, both parties have abandoned their old principles and have lost a sense of direction. Consequently, when it’s not clear exactly what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat, the meaning of party membership does not carry the same significance as before. The Powell endorsement of Obama shows that the shrill politicisation of lifestyle in this election contest masks an ongoing erosion of substantial political difference between the Republican and Democratic leaderships.More to the point, the financial crisis has shaken the confidence of the American establishment. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen an entire political class (not just the Bush administration) panicking and floundering to find a response. In this situation, a number of leading figures, such as Powell, have concluded that McCain is not up to the task and is too big a risk. At a time like this, the cross-party elite wants adults in charge, from whatever party. McCain, with his one-a-day economic prescriptions and gimmicks like new mascot Joe the Plumber, doesn’t seem to fit the description. Obama might not have much to say about the financial mess either, but at least he seems to take it seriously and to have an ability to calm the public.
While everyone is asking why Powell is backing Obama, perhaps the more interesting question is: why does Obama welcome his endorsement? Obama responded to the news by saying he was ‘honoured and deeply humbled’, and indicated that Powell would be an adviser of some kind in his administration. It may seem obvious, given the potential electoral benefits already mentioned, why Obama embraced Powell’s support. But one of the central arguments Obama deploys during his campaigning is that he had the foresight to oppose the Iraq war, and yet Powell was intimately involved in that war and the entire Bush foreign policy. Powell is the one who put forward the case for war to the United Nations with his speech on bogus weapons of mass destruction.
Obama’s welcoming of Powell’s endorsement – and suggestion that he would use him as an adviser – indicates that he really will not represent a decisive break from Bush, as he claims. Obama’s main criticism of McCain is that he follows Bush, and yet here we have Obama aligning himself with one of Bush’s main lieutenants. In fact, with regard to Afghanistan, if anything Obama outdoes both Bush and McCain in bellicosity.
Leading indicators rise in September (Associated Press, October 20, 2008)
The economy's health improved for the first time in five months in September as supplier deliveries and new orders strengthened, a private research group said Monday.The New York-based Conference Board said its monthly forecast of future economic activity rose 0.3 percent, a better reading than the 0.2 percent drop expected by Wall Street economists surveyed by Thomson/IFR.
Here the People Rule (WILLIAM KRISTOL, 10/20/08, NY Times)
According to the silver-penned Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, “In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.”Leave aside Noonan’s negative judgment on Sarah Palin’s candidacy, a judgment I don’t share. Are we really seeing “a new vulgarization in American politics”? As opposed to the good old non-vulgar days?
Politics in a democracy are always “vulgar” — since democracy is rule by the “vulgus,” the common people, the crowd. Many conservatives have never been entirely comfortable with this rather important characteristic of democracy. Conservatives’ hearts have always beaten a little faster when they read Horace’s famous line: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance.”
But is the ignorant crowd really our problem today? Are populism and anti-intellectualism rampant in the land? Does the common man too thoroughly dominate our national life?
Cannibal chef given life sentence (BBC, 10/20/08)
A chef who stabbed his lover to death before cutting flesh off his thigh and cooking and eating it has been jailed.Anthony Morley, 36, the first winner of Mr Gay UK, was told he would serve a minimum of 30 years in prison for the murder of 33-year-old Damian Oldfield.
Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader (Michael Arrington, October 18, 2008, Tech Crunch)
Users who hadn’t already left Bloglines for Google Reader and other functional RSS readers are doing so now, largely because Bloglines has stopped working and the company has done absolutely nothing to communicate to users what is going on or when it might be fixed.Even Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher, who sold the company to Ask.com in 2005, is ready to jump ship. In a Twitter message yesterday he said “Bloglines, please stop sucking. It’s been a couple weeks now. I don’t want to have to move to Google Reader. Sigh.”
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Against the Odds, Financial Crisis Helps Stimulate the Dollar (JOANNA SLATER, 10/20/08, Wall Street Journal)
Rather than sinking under the financial-sector bailout, the greenback is buoyant. That is a surprise to many who expected rising government spending and a tanking U.S. economy to cripple the dollar.Instead, the dollar has benefited from the global flight from risky assets as well as the unwinding of bets made with borrowed cash. The scope of the crisis also has helped: It is clear that economic and banking woes aren't unique to the U.S.
Bank-Lending Boost Could Spur Thaw (EMILY BARRETT, 10/20/08, Wall Street Journal)
On Friday, three big banks led by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. made multibillion-dollar offers of three-month funds to European counterparts, causing an immediate stir in the shriveled markets for unsecured lending.That raised expectations that lenders would finally open their doors and businesses would be able to borrow again, removing one of the biggest stresses on the global economy.
In response, futures markets are predicting sharp declines in the rates banks charge one another to borrow, with the benchmark three-month Libor, or London interbank offered rate, expected to drop by around half a percentage point from 4.41875% Friday. That would be a multiweek low, but still some way above the 2.8% seen before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September.
Libor is the benchmark for pricing of all kinds of debt, including corporate borrowing and mortgages. A lasting drop would be a powerful signal of recovery in the banking sector. If banks are prepared to lower their lending rates, it means they are regaining sufficient confidence to resume their normal relationships as creditors, instead of plunging their cash into government bonds and considering central banks the only trustworthy counterparties.
MORE:
McCain Missed a Trick (Conrad Black, 10/20/08, The Daily Beast)
When he interrupted his campaign to return to DC to manage the economic crisis, McCain was onto a winning streak. But he blew it.President Bush did his best to manage the financial crisis in a way that would have enabled John McCain to turn it to his advantage, but the candidate missed his great chance. [...]
With only a month to go before what at that time was a toss-up election, President Bush handed McCain the chance to add to the relief measure any flourish he might find politically useful. McCain could have demanded that executive compensation be capped and financial reporting be amplified.
He could have packaged up his entire tax plan, added a vote-flavored stimulus proposal, and presented the whole confection as a statesmanlike, imaginative, just plan of action. He could have held the public's attention all the way to the election.
It was the greatest opening for an incumbent to assist his preferred successor since Lyndon B. Johnson conjured out of thin air a phony peace breakthrough in Vietnam six days before the 1968 election, for the benefit of Hubert Humphrey against Richard Nixon.
It didn't happen. McCain said almost nothing at the White House meeting, and stripped the gears of the Straight Talk Express.
As Fuel Prices Fall, Will Push For Alternatives Lose Steam? (Steven Mufson, 10/20/08, Washington Post)
Doing something about the amount of gasoline Americans use is essential to defusing future oil shocks. The American motorist is among the most profligate in the world. More than one out of every nine barrels of oil produced worldwide ends up in the gas tanks of cars in the United States. The amount of petroleum burned by U.S. motorists exceeds the entire crude oil output of Saudi Arabia, and that has propped up demand -- and prices.Yet U.S. cars are among the least fuel efficient in the world. "The U.S. dependence on oil imports is based on waste, not on needs," said Paolo Scaroni, chief executive of Italian oil giant Eni.
Electric cars aren't the only answer. More efficient cars, whether better combustion engines or hybrids like the Prius, may be a cheaper way to achieve big fuel savings.
Some firms are creating substitute fuels such as ethanol derived from corn or diesel derived from algae. Biofuel players range from the oil majors, such as BP and Royal Dutch Shell, to ethanol giants VeraSun Energy and Poet, to tiny firms like Solarzyme, which started in its founders' garage five years ago and is now testing an algae catalyst in a large commercial vat. Many firms are working on cellulosic ethanol, derived from organic materials such as grasses or wood chips, but those factories are still in the pilot or demonstration stage.
Almost all of those alternatives rely on federal subsidies or are counting on lower costs as technology evolves. The cheaper oil gets, the bigger those technological improvements need to be to compete.
The electric car has the potential for making a bigger impact than alternative fuels because it would be powered by the electricity grid, which relies on a mix of coal, nuclear, natural gas and renewable energy sources. Moreover, recharging an electric car is much cheaper than refueling a gasoline car.
Its proponents say the electric car has transformative potential that other transportation alternatives lack. "We want customers to see the Volt as the game changer it is, not only for the technology, but also for business, and maybe more importantly for the way the world drives," said Troy A. Clarke, president of GM North America.
"Reducing our oil dependency meaningfully in the U.S., under any scenario, requires radically improving the efficiency of our vehicles," says Saurin D. Shah, a vice president at investment firm Neuberger Berman who expects an explosion of hybrid and plug-in cars by 2030. He predicts hybrid and electric cars will replace conventional vehicles as swiftly as electric locomotives replaced steam-driven ones.
But because their batteries are expensive, plug-in cars are going to cost as much as $8,000 more than conventional gasoline cars. The lower the price of gasoline, the longer it is going to take for fuel savings to make up for the car purchase premium.