"...this big. No, really, that's what Trump said. So I went on air with it, and the lamestream media just mocked it. That's how much they hate the guy."Jeff Malet/NC via ZUMA

Michael Cohen’s mystery client has been revealed:

An unnamed client of Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, has been revealed as Fox News host Sean Hannity.

….A lawyer for Cohen at the Monday hearing said that Cohen performed secret legal work for Hannity. “We have been friends a long time. I have sought legal advice from Michael,” Hannity said in response to being revealed as Cohen’s third client, according to a Wall Street Journal reporter.

I would never have guessed this, but now that I know it seems somehow inevitable.

Luiz Rampelotto/Europanewswire/DPA via ZUMA

Wut?

President Trump on Monday put the brakes on a preliminary plan to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia, walking back a Sunday announcement by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley that the Kremlin had swiftly denounced ss “international economic raiding.”…Trump conferred with his national security advisers later Sunday and told them he was upset the sanctions were being officially rolled out because he was not yet comfortable executing them, according to several people familiar with the plan.

Officially, Haley “misspoke.” In reality, she obviously did nothing of the sort. So what happened?

Some officials said the misunderstanding could have been the result of Haley’s tendency to speak directly with the president, sometimes outside of the normal policy process. “She’ll usually talk to the president without the rest of the White House and get her remarks cleared directly,” said the administration official. “Often we don’t know about them.”

So in this administration, talking directly to the president is likely to lead to remarks that the president doesn’t like. This is presumably because:

1. The president changes his mind about what he likes on an hourly basis.
2. The president freewheels about stuff without knowing what it means.
3. The president is too consumed with the Mueller investigation to care about anything else.
4. The president is a moron.
5. All of the above.

Take your pick.

Vox features an interview today with constitutional lawyer Stephen Vladeck:

As a matter of US law, was the latest American military strike on Syria legal?

Almost certainly not. To be legal, the strike would have to authorized either by some act of Congress or by the president’s own powers under Article II of the Constitution. And neither of those conditions appear to have been met here.

I’ve seen lots of versions of this opinion, but it’s wrong. In dorm-room-bull-session terms there might be something to it, but in practical terms there isn’t. If an action is approved, either implicitly or explicitly, by the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches, then it’s constitutional. That’s how our legal system works. Full stop.

In this case, the executive obviously approved the action. Congress has had many opportunities to rein in these kinds of strikes, and they haven’t. Ditto for the Supreme Court, which has always given the president wide latitude in matters of military force.

Until this changes, lobbing missiles at anyone we want is constitutional.

Over at Quanta, they have an interview with Donald Richards, a statistician who is one of the pioneers in the use of a new and better way of measuring correlations:

Wolchover: How does distance correlation work?

Richards: This is where the concept of a Fourier transform comes in….If you give me two probability distributions—the statistical spread of values that a variable takes on—and if I want to test whether the two distributions are the same, all I have to do is calculate their Fourier transforms. If these are equal then I know that the two probability distributions had to be equal, to begin with. The distance correlation coefficient, in layman’s terms, is a measure of how far apart these Fourier transforms are.

Ha ha ha. That’s the “layman’s” explanation. Richards must hang out with some pretty smart laymen. But let’s just pretend we all know what that means and move on. Last year Richards wrote a paper showing how distance correlation is better than bog-ordinary Pearson’s linear correlation. What prompted the paper?

Richards: This was prompted by an opinion piece in The Washington Post in 2015, by Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA. The title of the article is “Zero Correlation Between State Homicide Rate and State Gun Laws.” What he did was—you know, my eyes bugged out; I couldn’t believe it—he found some data on the states’ Brady scores, which are ratings based on the toughness of their gun laws, and he plotted the Brady scores on an x-y plot against the homicide rates in each of these states. And if you look at the plot, it looks like there’s no pattern.

….I was horrified. There are so many things wrong with this analysis….Should you even fit a linear regression line to this data set? If you look at the rest of the data, you don’t see any linearity to the relationship, and it’s easy to understand why: There are bunches of points that correspond to geographic and culturally similar regions. If you break up the states by region, then you see reasonably linear relationships starting to show up in the scatter plots. And then in each case, you find that the higher the Brady score, the lower the homicide rate.

Bloggers for the win! Though I have to admit I’m not sure whose side I’m on here. If I see a scatterplot that appears completely random to the naked eye, I’m pretty suspicious of efforts to massage the data with sophisticated techniques in order to extract a correlation. So…I’ll take this with a grain of salt. Still, at least Richards is speaking my language:

Wolchover: Do you hope that by developing better tools—like distance correlation—that eventually these methods will seep out into more common use?

Richards: Yes, I hope so. And in fact, I have heard that one of the big pharmaceutical companies is now starting to use distance correlation methods. And I know that people in academia are using it more. I hope to live long enough to see distance correlation be a standard pull-down tab in Excel, or if not Excel, certainly on Wolfram Alpha. You enter your x-y data, and boom: It gives you the distance correlation. I live for that day!

Anybody who lives for the day when Excel will include an obscure statistical function is my kind of person. My hopes and dreams for Excel are a little more mundane, like being able to pick any starting point I want for a chart. I guess I’m a cheap date.

Here’s the latest from the supergeniuses in the White House:

President Donald Trump’s senior counselor, Kellyanne Conway, slammed former FBI Director James Comey as a publicity hound who is trying to promote his new book. “The president is very confounded that this person is always able to divert the spotlight to him,” Conway said told ABC News Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos on the morning after his exclusive interview with Comey. “He has a very deft way of making things about him.”

Conway also referred to Comey’s admission that he may have subconsciously expected Hillary Clinton to become the next president when he decided 11 days before the election to announce the reopening of an investigation into her emails. “He thought the wrong person would win,” Conway said.

First, I have no doubt that Trump is very sincerely confounded at Comey’s ability to grab the spotlight. That’s something only Trump himself is supposed to do.

Second, um, what? Conway said, “This guy swung an election. He thought the wrong person would win.” Conway is referring to Comey’s admission that he thought Hillary Clinton would win easily, which is one of the reasons he wasn’t worried about reopening the email investigation ten days before the election. So Conway is saying that Comey swung the election to Trump because he thought the “wrong person”—Hillary Clinton—would win. That’s an admission we’ve never heard from the White House before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-M5wa4m3gE&t=1m6s

So was this just a case of Kellyanne Conway having too much coffee before the interview? She certainly sounds that way. Or just getting confused about the party line? Or what? She later “explained” that she was “being sarcastic.” Uh huh.

Welcome to Monday.

The New York Times ran a piece this weekend about the growing burden of paying public pensions. Naturally it features a few examples of outrageously high pensions, but the overall gist is that the cost of pensions is getting so high that it’s crowding out spending on other things. Dean Baker comments:

Workers sign contracts that specify compensation. Most of it is in direct pay, but benefits like pensions are often part of the contract….Taking back pensions for which people worked is like taking back a portion of their pay after the fact.

….As far as the claim that public employees are overpaid, most research shows that they are actually paid less than their private sector counterparts, when controlling for education and experience….While the piece implies that public employees typically get generous pensions, this is not true. The Detroit pension system, which is referenced in the piece, pays an average annual benefit of $20,000 a year, or less than $1,700 a month. Most other public pension systems provide comparable benefits to typical employees as opposed to highly paid doctors and football coaches.

For the most part, public pensions are fairly ordinary. The biggest exception is police and firefighters,¹ who are often allowed to retire after only 20 years; are allowed to spike their pensions; are able to take part in special semi-retirement programs that boost their pensions even more; frequently take disability pensions; and just generally have pensions that pay them a high percentage of their working salaries.

But put that aside. If they can negotiate all that stuff, then bully for them. The real issue, as everyone knows, isn’t so much the size of public pensions as the fact that they’re almost never fully funded. Politicians, who mostly work on timeframes no further out than the next election, are simply more willing to negotiate generous pensions than they are to negotiate higher salaries that might require tax hikes on their watch. It’s like Wall Street’s IBGYBG: “I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.” And sure enough, now that the pension bills are coming due, all the politicians who passed the buck—literally—are safely out of office.²

The real answer all along has been simple: negotiate any pension you want, but you have to fully fund it with no wild-ass investment return assumptions. Done properly, an extra $1,000 in pension income would cost about the same as a $1,000 salary increase, so politicians would have no special incentive to prefer one over the other.

It’s a little late for that, of course, and although lots of cities and states would love to take back a chunk of worker pensions, they can’t do it. It’s all specified in a contract, after all, and courts will enforce those contracts. One way or the other, paying out old pensions is probably going to require an average increase in state and local taxes of about 5-10 percent or so. Maybe more, depending on where you live. The sooner everyone owns up to this, the better off we’ll all be.

¹Although in Los Angeles the hot ticket is to work for the Metropolitan Water District. Hoo boy. Nobody shoots at them and they don’t have to fight fires. But they get paid a fortune and their pensions are sky high.

²And collecting a pension, of course.

Meet Revlimid, the drug I take for multiple myeloma. It costs $20,000 per month. A generic would probably cost $1,000 per month. However, the generic version is still stuck in court because Celgene refuses to sell any capsules for testing.Celgene

In order to earn FDA approval for generic drugs, manufacturers need samples of the name-brand drug to test against. Frequently, however, the name-brand folks refuse to sell their pills for testing. Congress is on the case:

Legislation to ensure access to drug samples for generic drug manufacturers has broad support in Congress, from Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, on the left to Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, on the right. A similar bill in the House also has diverse backers, including Representatives Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, and Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, who is the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.

Under the bill, a generic drug developer could file a lawsuit, and a federal court could require a brand-name drug maker to provide samples of its product to a generic company “on commercially reasonable, market-based terms.” The court could also award damages if it found that a drug maker had refused to sell samples “without a legitimate business justification.”

….Lawmakers of both parties pushed for the legislation to be included in a far-reaching budget bill signed by Mr. Trump in February, but it was dropped at the last minute.

So this has broad, bipartisan support and would be an indisputably good thing, but somehow—note the passive voice here—“it was dropped” at the last minute. Apparently somebody’s lobbying budget paid off.

But as long as we now have another crack at this, maybe we can write a better bill. Why authorize lawsuits? Why not simply authorize the FDA to buy pills at the Medicare price¹ and then resell them to generic manufacturers at cost? This would not only be a lot easier, but it would solve one of the complaints of the name-brand manufacturers: “They say the bill would be a boon to trial lawyers, giving them an incentive to sue brand-name pharmaceutical companies for damages, which could be worth more than sales of the proposed generic drug.”

Why do we make things so complicated? If we think that drug companies should be required to make pills available for testing, then just require them to make pills available for testing. And if we want the pills available at a “market price,” then just set the market price. This shouldn’t be rocket science.

¹Or some lower price, if that’s appropriate.

Donald Trump can blather all he wants about the Rasmussen poll—which has always been extremely friendly to Republicans—but in reality his approval rating is nowhere near 50 percent. However, it is up. Why? I suppose that nothing really big has happened since the tax cut passed. That sounds crazy to political obsessives like us, but what’s made the last couple of months seem increasingly bizarre is a relentless tsunami of little things. These loom large to us, but are mostly unknown to normal people. So if you’re interested, here are the current estimates of Trump’s approval rating from the two leading poll aggregators, plus Gallup’s comparison to Obama:

I don’t have anything new on the high-speed photo front, but I’ll come up with something eventually. In the meantime, here are a few more bees and hummingbirds. First up, a hummingbird:

This picture shows the bird’s back and tail, for our birding folks who keep saying they need to see this. Hopefully we can now determine once and for all which type of hummingbird this is.

Next up is a very good freeze frame of a bee in flight:

The curvature of the lower wing is, I’m pretty sure, an artifact of how the shutter works at high speeds. The camera’s firmware allegedly compensates for this effect, called “rolling shutter,” to produce a proper rendering of reality. This fine piece of Sony marketing explains:

Most of the time this works as advertised. Every once in a while, though, it can’t quite fix things properly, and you get some curvature in very fast moving objects. That’s what happened here.

Finally, here’s another bee, just because.

On Friday night I snarked that the NAEP folks—who produce the “gold standard” of student testing—couldn’t even count to two:

Muphry’s Law states that “If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” Sure enough, a regular reader emails to say that I got this wrong. Here are the exact numbers:

• 2015 score: 265.4, which rounds to 265.
• 2017 score: 266.6, which rounds to 267.
• Difference: 1.2, which rounds to 1.

This is actually a really nice example of how rounding numbers can get you into trouble. And it means that I have to change my criticism from NAEP’s too-weak arithmetic skills to its too-strong adherence to house style. Obviously their house style for simple graphics like this is to use only whole numbers. That’s probably a good style rule. But accuracy and clarity are always your main goal, and there are rare occasions when you just have to make style exceptions. Here’s what the chart should have looked like:

Maybe there’s another way to do this, but one way or the other, the graphic simply can’t be allowed to display what looks like an obvious error. In long rows of numbers, you sometimes see the disclaimer “does not add to 100 due to rounding,” or something similar. Maybe something like that would be enough. But I suspect that the cleanest and clearest way of getting this right is to break the style rule. I sympathize with style nazis, since I tend to be one myself, but every once in a while house style rules just have to be broken.