The Way We Live Now: stroking our chins as we contemplate which of our dozen or so late-model quality American automobiles we want to take out for "a spin" on our nation's roads. Have you heard? Cars are back!

The hot Christmas present in the USA: some kind of car! Auto sales rose by 11% in the month of December! Everybody and their mother believes that the U.S. auto industry is poised for its biggest turnaround since Henry Ford decided to make his wheels circle-shaped, rather than octagonal!

You'd think that this would be a great thing for beleaguered Detroit, but Detroit was long ago plowed under and turned into soybean territory. The positive impacts of the auto industry's resurgence will therefore be dissipated across the whole of America, getting diluted all the way. That and a back door bailout of Bank of America will barely buy you a cup of coffee in Manhattan these days! Hey, let's hope they're making those new cars in some of our major cities, where unemployment is overwhelmingly on the rise! Amirite? Maybe those struggling microlenders can become macrolenders and give poor people some money to buy a new car. We have lots of them! (Cars.) (And poor people.)

Now if we could just have a $14.4 billion marine landing craft industry resurgence, too! You know?

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