Real electric cars are finally coming to the USA. I’m not talking about some $100,000 two-seater from Tesla that barely exists. These will be $30,000 and actually for sale. Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm, is putting up the money to import 50,000 electric cars from Norway’s Think Global corporation.

The cars would have a maximum speed of 65 mph making them technically highway capable, but only if you never leave the right lane. It would also be 95% recyclable. I don’t see that as a selling point to anyone except people who wear hemp clothing, but generally those people don’t have $30,000. That price is a touch high for me. I think I could swing it, but it really would eat up my monthly budget. I can’t even guess what the insurance would be on this car anyway. Still though it’s a huge improvement over Tesla’s pricing and I really don’t think Kleiner Perkins will have a problem finding 50,000 buyers who can cough up that much money. There are probably enough wealthy people in California, Oregon and Washington State who must show off their green-ness to buy up all the cars.

Think Global produces three different models, but it looks like the Think City is what is being brought to the US. This is a four-seat hatchback. I was originally going to call it a hatchback with virtually no storage, but I soon found that the rear seats fold flat for storage. That’s a pretty nice compromise for a small car. You can carry people, or you can carry groceries, but how often do you really need to carry both? I guess you can’t use it to take more than one person to the airport, but who wants to be called upon for airport runs anyway?

I’m a little disappointed the Think Open isn’t being sold here. That one is a two-seat convertible. I would never buy it for myself but it’s the perfect car for cute women to be seen in. If you’re a woman and 5’4″ or less, you should be driving that car. You will look doubly adorable in it.

I have to wonder what these cars are actually made of. These pictures from Think Global’s website make these cars look like they have plastic body panels. Do they? It would be lightweight, but that just makes the car seem godawful cheap. It passes Euro and US safety standards tests, but plastic is not a word that evokes quality. I think I still like it better than a Smart ForTwo however. The City may look dinky, but it still looks like a car. The ForTwo is a mutant.

A $30,000 car is beyond what I want to spend, even for an electric car, but it’s actually within reach. It’s refreshing to see an attainable goal, rather than some pie-in-the-sky venture like with Tesla. I hope Kleiner Perkins succeeds with this. If it does I’ll bet we get a $20,000 electric car within five years.

Hillary held on to the “bitter” vote achieving her 10% victory in Pennsylvania and then saw her shadow thus ensuring us six more weeks of campaigning. I missed her speech but I did get to watch Obama’s concession on MSNBC. It was the only speech of his that I’ve watched from beginning to end. After listening to him, I don’t understand his appeal.

If I knew nothing about the United States, Obama’s speech on Tuesday night would leave me thinking America is Victorian England but with better technology. The nation is filled with illness wracked citizens who can’t afford health care. Everyone lives in fear of losing their job. Every paycheck is stretched to its limits. The economy is collapsing and we can blame outsourcing and the lack of an interventionist government for it. Where’s the hope in this? I thought his campaign was supposed to be positive. He was going to offer solutions instead of gripes. The Republicans under Bush have been known for their terrorist fear mongering. Obama’s answer to this seems to be economic fear mongering.

I don’t understand this kind of class warfare. Does it really have wide appeal? I’m sure you can find several million people in dire straights. The US is a big nation with 300 million people. Of those 300 million I expect a good size majority are living comfortably. I think most people can live with their salaries, and aren’t “sitting at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to pay an insurance premium and a kid’s tuition and their mortgage.” Am I wrong?

I make less than the median household income in California, but I’m not lying awake at night wondering if my next paycheck will cover next month’s bills. I save money each month. I have money invested in stocks and bonds. I have a Roth IRA and a 401(k). I listen to Obama and all I hear is someone who wants to take away my money and give it to people who can’t manage their finances. He talks about families worried they may be “the next ones to put up a for sale sign in their front yards.” Well why do I have to help them? Why are you going to tax me so those irresponsible people who signed a mortgage agreement they didn’t understand can stay in their homes? I was responsible. I didn’t close my eyes and sign on the dotted line, but I still have to pay for it. Obama wants to raise the capital gains tax to make it fairer. Here I am trying to be responsible and grow my savings. That’s apparently unfair. I guess decent Americans leave their savings in the bank or bury it in their backyards.

My mother raised me to be responsible with money; not to spend it frivolously. My family wasn’t wealthy, but we all grew up to know an education was a requirement to get a job. I went to a state college, not any expensive private school. After graduating I found a job that gets me health insurance, paid off the credit card debts I ran up while unemployed and then began to save. Now I pay my student loan and car loan on time every month and the money I have leftover from my paycheck goes into my savings until I figure out where I want to invest it. If I believe what Mr. Obama said I achieved a miracle because Americans can’t afford health insurance, are unemployed because they had their job outsourced, and live under constant threat of foreclosure.

I guess I’m just a filthy capitalist, and as such, Obama’s message doesn’t appeal to me. I learned the value of money and importance of working for it. Government handouts, whether they be welfare checks or subsidized health care or farm subsidies, are despicable. Someone telling me they will make America better by sending out more government checks, angers me. Someone else trying to scare me into thinking those checks are necessary to save the world, disgusts me. Mr. Obama, you promised everyone politics based on reason to tackle the root causes of America’s problems. No more partisanship. No more pandering. You aren’t delivering. All I hear from you are the same tired ideas from decades ago. People can’t afford healthcare? The government shall insure them then. People can’t afford their mortgages? The government shall give them money to get out of their mortgages. Government stepping in with handouts was tried in the 60s and 70s, and it turned out so miserably everyone applauded when Bill Clinton finally dismantled those systems.

This post actually turned out much longer than I expected but this election really burns me up. At least Hillary is upfront with her interventionist stance. She doesn’t hide that she believes it’s a good idea for government to be active and involved in everything. Obama is dressing up the same old liberalism as some brand new breakthrough in American politics. It really just galls me that everyone is falling for it. Obama is probably going to win the presidential election, and then I’ll just have to brace myself for the higher taxes and slew of new government programs that will be created. I don’t believe at all that taxes won’t be raised on people who don’t have six-figure incomes. He’ll get into office on that promise but once he’s there we’ll hear the new taxes are temporary and necessary to repair the budget damage of the Bush years. Never mind that Obama will be adding social spending, infrastructure spending and a mortgage bailout on top of the cost of Bush’s two wars. 2009 is going to be a hell of a year.

Thanks to Britain’s dominance last century, Cricket is a global game. Yet even though people in India, Africa and the Caribbean play the game, it never shook off its stodgy British association. Some Indian entrepreneurs are taking a chance on breaking that upper-crust reputation.

The newly founded Indian Premier League is trying to jazz up the game with an American import – cheerleaders. For the inaugural game, the IPL hired the Washington Redskins cheerleaders to shake their junk and draw in the crowds. According to the Washington Post’s reporting, that seems to have worked. When the WP asked Setty Bishum what he thought about the cheerleaders he responded, “They’re the only reason I am here. I wanted to treat myself.”

The Redskins cheerleaders are also training Indian women in their choreography so I suppose India can look forward to this piece of Americana. Reading about this though I was getting whiffs of the XFL. You remember that right? No? Well that was WWE’s Vince McMahon’s personal football league. It was a skanked out NFL. The cameras were supposed to spend lots of time on the cheerleaders and in new positions on the field, we were supposed to hear what the players were saying, and looser rules would make the game tougher. More sex and more action were supposed to bring in the fans. Yet somehow no one was interested in watching. Pretty girls are lovely to look at but in the end people watch sports for the sports.

The odds are probably against the IPL lasting. The league, in another attempt at making the game exciting, is playing a version of cricket named Twenty20. It somehow speeds up the game from a week of play down to three hours. I really don’t want to know the details. I’ll let the cricket fans argue over the merits or evils of that. All I know is that it’s tough to get the public to pay attention to new sports. It’s like Arena Football in the US struggling to get attention from the public. Actually it’s like Major League Soccer in the US too. Using scantily dressed cheerleaders to get people to watch only works for the first couple of games. If the game sucks, people will remember, and no one will bother coming back.

By the way, the Redskins cheerleaders were rooting for the Bangalore Royal Challengers. The RC lost their inaugural game by 140 runs; whatever the hell that means.

A website was brought to my attention at work. CarOffer.com, run by Lane Logic, is a website that gives people an offer to purchase their car. You fill out a form with some questions about your car – make/model/trim, physical damage, paint condition, mileage, etc – and they send you their offer by email. It’s perfect for today’s Internet culture where people can’t be bothered to actually speak to others.

I did discover one sleazeball practice. CarOffer requires you to enter a new car lead. Of course they don’t say it like that on the website, but question 9 asks you what new car you would consider buying after selling your car. There’s no way to say “none”. You pick a car there and you’ve just generated a new car lead.  

So I complained to our affiliate managers about the practice and hopefully in a few days we’ll get them to change it. After my job well done, I got curious. As you know I’ve been torturing myself with fantasies of getting a new car. The prospect of selling my car turns me off though since it will certainly be a pain doing it while it’s financed. But then CarOffer will give me an offer within a day. I had to try this out.

I know it has to be a lowball offer because doing this means the car has to go through two middlemen. I sell my car to CarOffer, who turns around an auctions it off to a dealer who will try to sell it to another person. CarOffer and the dealer both have to make a profit off of this so I can’t get top dollar. But maybe I don’t need to. If I were to sell my car privately I would first list it at $18,500 and negotiate from there. I’m curious to see how far CarOffer will lowball me. Would it be worse than the trade-in I would get from a dealer?

So I filled out CarOffer’s form. I made up a new email address because I didn’t want to risk getting spammed at my real one, and I gave them my office phone number because I never bother answering that. Oh and for my forced new car lead I chose the Honda Civic hybrid. I still can’t get 45 mpg out my mind. Now let’s see what sort of service I get from them.

*** Time Passes ***

The weekend has gone by and I checked that dummy email address. CarOffer offered me $11,000. Just wow. That’s way lower than my expectations. I was actually figuring on $13,000. I could definitely do better at a dealership. I see no reason to use this website.

Now this is a cold, calculated crime. Two elderly Los Angeles women concocted a plot to kill homeless people for life insurance money. The two women picked up two elderly homeless men from a shelter. They paid for their apartments and bills for two years while also taking out multiple life insurance policies on the men. The reason for the two year wait is so the policies would not be challenged by the insurance companies. So after two years the women, in separate incidents, drugged the men and staged hit-and-run accidents.

Somehow the law became involved. Unfortunately the BBC article doesn’t explain how. Did a cop investigating the deaths notice both of these men were supported by the same two women? Was there some physical evidence at the scene of the fake hit-and-run that pointed to them? Did an insurance company realize they paid out two policies to the same women in a short period of time and get the police to investigate this suspicious occurrence?

The AP explained what happened, and wow is it some bad luck for these two. As it turns out the two staged car accidents were investigated by different police detectives. One just happened to overhear the other describe a hit-and-run case very similar to his own and they got to talking. Almost three years later the women are convicted. So really the error here was laziness. They killed the two homeless guys in the same town. Let that be a lesson to you would be killers. Commit your murders in different towns. Different police agencies won’t bother to talk to each other about dead homeless men.

The story got me wondering how this plan was hatched. The BBC article said the women had been friends for 20 years. How do you approach your friend about a murder/insurance fraud plot? Do you do it over dinner? Should you get your friend tipsy so later, if they’re appalled, you can say it was just crazy talk from the liquor? Somehow I can’t imagine one of my friends asking me to participate in a crime. I guess they lack the spice of criminality.

I meant to write about this earlier but the destruction of my cell phone has had my mind reeling. A few days ago the NY State legislature killed Bloomberg’s pet project: Congestion Pricing. In Bloomberg’s dream no one would drive around Manhattan below 60th Street without having to pay $8. Sheldon Silver, leader of the NYS Assembly, killed that dream.

This battle took several months to fight and gave me a lot of time to think about the issue. I started out against it. I saw it as yet another way for government to get into our wallets. Traveling freely is something Americans have taken for granted since before the country was founded. The road isn’t private property. My taxes paid to build it, so why should I have to pay to use it?

Then about two weeks ago, while sitting in a bathroom stall at work contemplating the meaning of life, I suddenly saw the issue from a new angle. Congestion pricing has been advertised by greens and progressive politicians as a brand new idea to cope with the distinctly 21st century problem of mounting traffic. That’s all bunk. It’s window dressing to make these people feel they’re doing something meaningful. Congestion pricing is just fancy talk for a toll road. Toll roads have been around for centuries; maybe millennia. The only “innovative” part is deciding to limit the times you’re going to charge a toll. You’re not going to inspire people by demanding more tolls so you give it a new name and tout it as a breakthrough in urban planning.

So if New Yorkers want to charge themselves more tolls, let them. Why should I object to that? They can raise their income taxes too while they’re at it. It’s the same thing. What congestion pricing isn’t about is getting vehicles off of Manhattan’s streets. This toll is just a new revenue stream. If the goal was actually about getting people out of cars and into the subway, it would be targeted towards those who could take the subway. So then why aren’t delivery trucks exempt from congestion pricing? They have to go into Manhattan and you can’t deliver a truck load of anything on the subway. No exemption would have meant a lot more freight deliveries entering Manhattan before 6 am. I doubt that extra noise in the morning would do anything to improve quality of life. The second problem is the toll itself is too low. Eight dollars is just a nuisance. It’s not enough to change behavior. If you want to get people to stop driving I would estimate you have to charge at least $20. The cost has to hurt to convince people to ditch their cars, and even then it will only keep them out of Manhattan. You’ll see a lot of people parking near subway stations near the East River.

I guess that’s all moot now since the plan is dead. I don’t think it will be forever though. Congestion pricing is such an easy copout for the government. Instead of spending money on expanding infrastructure, the city can levy a new fee or tax or toll or whatever-you-want-to-call-it, that forces people to stop moving about. It’s a choice between making politically painful budget decisions or increasing revenues through a new tax that’s disguised as an environmental measure. If the city really did want to increase subway usage, they would make the subways more convenient. People from the outer boroughs drive into the city because the subway is weak at the edges. The only long term solution that won’t harm the economy is more subway lines. Way back in 1929 the city’s engineers planned for new lines that extended deep into Brooklyn, across the Bronx and through Queens to the Nassau County border. In 1939 they planned a subway line to Staten Island. This was back when NYC had 2 million fewer people. They recognized spending money on the subway was worth it. Today there’s no political will to find the money to do it.

Instead of building new subways, we’re spending…

• $2.7 million on the Commission on Human Rights
• $940 million on transportation of pupils: Nearly a billion dollars to move kids around? Doesn’t that strike you as excessive? It’s not as if we’re hiring PhD’s in child care to drive these busses.
• $31 million in the School Food Services budget listed under “Other Services And Charges” subsection “Other Expenses – General”: Is $31 million such a pittance it can be listed under the “other/other” category? 
• $4 million on the Landmarks Preservation Commission: All the commission does is hold hearings about whether or not buildings should be given a landmark status. Why do these meetings cost so much? Besides, aesthetics are subjective and shouldn’t be dictated by government.
• $32 million on the Taxi & Limousine Commission: I don’t understand why it costs this much to license cab companies. Aside from granting business licenses to cab companies, why does the city have to regulate cabs? Plus they’re spending $2.5 million on rent. Is there no city land they could be using?
• $1.1 million on bank charges to the Public Assistance account: Did NYC bounce 44,000 welfare checks? Since when do you pay a bank to have an account open?
• $164 million on museums and cultural programs: Do you really want government in the business of funding culture? If NYC slapped a “Government Approved” logo on everything from the Met to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, wouldn’t that give you pause? Wouldn’t it strike you as a tad fascist? So why is funding art different than the city government deciding which art is good and which is bad?

I really got carried away looking at NYC’s budget. I wish I had a document with more detail because there are a bunch of other charges I found questionable. I couldn’t tell if the money was being wasted or not because I couldn’t see exactly where it’s going. A listing like “rent” doesn’t tell you much. The welfare department is spending $4.5 million on postage. Is that excessive or barebones spending? I don’t know.

You know who should know? The politicians we elect should. Of course they don’t. Well, they choose not to. It’s easier to cry poverty than to reform opaque bureaucracies and squeeze new efficiencies out of them. More subways would get more riders. More roads around the city would divert thru-traffic around the city center. Easier transit improves an economy, but it requires a lot of money upfront. We’ve reached a point where our politicians refuse any reform to accomplish those goals. They lack the courage to fight bureaucrats and union kingpins, and shake up the city budget to find that money. Worse is that I think regular citizens now believe politician’s talk that there is no money available. I guess New York should get ready for a round of higher taxes.

All anyone is talking about, on business news anyway, is the airline industry. Delta and Northwest hooked up over the weekend. Jealous Continental and United are eying each other, hoping to show the new Delta that they didn’t need them anyway. And a bunch of little airlines died recently.

I was actually a little sad to see one of those airlines go. Frontier Airlines filed for bankruptcy last week. It could be worse of course. Airlines like ATA and Aloha Air are completely kaput. At least Frontier is still flying even though it’s in bankruptcy. Filing was actually a pretty canny move for them. The crisis was caused by the firm Frontier contracted with to process credit card orders. That firm became spooked by Frontier’s balance sheet and decided it would withhold more credit card money from Frontier. If Frontier did fail, like the other airlines, the credit card processor would be the company that had to make all those refunds. Holding back more money from Frontier is how they cover their own ass. But Frontier decided this made it far too risky to operate and declared bankruptcy. Doing so forces the credit card processor to continue to remit funds at the same rate as before, because the change did not take place before bankruptcy.

The reason I care is that Frontier was a pretty nice airline. I flew on it once for a trip to NYC. You get as little seating space as you do on other airlines, but the planes are clean. I didn’t appreciate that at the time but I sure do now after my last trip on the dreck that Northwest flies. Everything on Frontier is routed through Denver. I’ve had layovers at Denver, Minneapolis and Houston and Denver was the best experience by far. In Minneapolis and Houston I always had to run to a whole other terminal to make my connecting flight. Frontier has all of its connections in the same terminal so your connecting flight is only a few gates away; No anxiety about missing your flight, no lugging your bags across an airport. I really liked the personal TV on the Denver-NYC leg too. It was well worth the $5.

I wish I could have kept flying with Frontier, but their prices were always much higher than the competition. When I priced out my last trip, Frontier was a $100 more expensive. I have to wonder though if it would have been a much less stressful to pay the extra.

But now with the Delta/NWA merger and the likely Continental/United one, airfares are expected to rise. I don’t really believe that though. The idea is that with less competition, the airlines are going to raise prices. This would only work with a monopoly though. If those four airlines merge into two, they still have to compete with each other and also companies like American, JetBlue, Southwest, Virgin America and US Airways. Some less common routes may rise in price of course, but nationally there is plenty of competition. Maybe this will help finally get airlines to stop being these zombie companies that drift in and out of bankruptcy every couple of years.

What would really help the industry in America is allowing foreign companies to operate in the US. The Civil Aeronautics Act, enacted in 1938, and the Federal Aviation Act of 1958 limits foreign ownership of an airline operating in the US to 25%. Virgin America only exists because of some complex governance structure that keeps foreign ownership under that cap. Richard Branson couldn’t just spend his billions on a new US airline. He had to waste time finding US investors to put up money. Thank you government for delaying the launch of an airline I’ve heard great things about from friends. This is just plain, ordinary protectionism. Foreigners have the money and experience to run airlines here but the law coddles our domestic airlines and keeps out competition. If they were allowed in, not only would consumers benefit but so would domestic airlines over the long term. They would be forced to restructure when faced with real competition instead of the continual cycle of bankruptcy filings. The ones who can’t shape up would die, and I say good riddance to them. A free market means we leave business alone to grow or fail. Protecting companies is just welfare.

Years ago a friend gave me a keychain that said “I likes em big!” It was as true then as it is today.

I was having my mental dessert, reading through some gossip blogs, when a link took me to a picture of Stacy Dash. That’s 42 year old Stacy Dash. Forget about saying she’s hot for a 42 year old. She’s hot period. Where did she disappear to? I remember her so well from Clueless and thinking how much better looking she was than Alicia Silverstone. I never understood why her career didn’t take off. She was just stunning back then, and I didn’t even know about her bubble butt. If I saw that back in the 90s I so would have been one of those creepy stalker fans.

Just look at that butt. I likes ‘em big indeed.

Okay not really, but Obama did admit to putting his foot in his mouth. Here’s the quote in case you missed it.

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Obama said this at a fundraiser in San Francisco that did not permit press coverage. Someone recorded his speech and posted it to YouTube. I first heard about this speech yesterday when Obama was still defending what he said and trying to lash back at Clinton and McCain for attacking him over it. I wasn’t going to bother writing about this because it seemed like another mini-controversy that will blow over. However when I read today that Obama admits, “I didn’t say it as well as I should have,” I felt I had to say something.

I think that was a blunder. 95% of people aren’t going to hear Obama’s nuanced statement that he made a poor choice of words but his point stands. Voters will only remember “Obama admits” and simply assume he admitted to saying something wrong and snobby. Obama should have stuck to counterattacking so he could make it costly for Clinton and McCain to attack him. Trying to cast them as career politicians who don’t understand how rural Americans are suffering is a good tactic. Yeah it’s a little John Edwardsy but it’s better than saying you screwed up.

By the way, I just found it hilarious that Obama was saying this to a San Francisco audience. Everyone was playing to their stereotype that night. San Francisco Democrats are the very definition of limousine liberals. Obama, the favored candidate of the liberal elite, travels to SF to feed these people stereotypes about the poor folk in the flyover states. It’s like in Victorian England when a rich socialite would throw a party and invite a famous missionary or soldier to regale the guests with tales of the savages they found in Africa or the Orient. I like to imagine Obama’s voice sounded like he was telling a scary story around a campfire. “They all have guns, and they all go to church. They even read the Bible during the week. And can you believe they are against Roe v. Wade? But you really can’t blame these people for being the way they are. It’s because government has forgotten about them. When I’m president I’ll spend so much money on them, there’s no way they can stay bitter. Then they will become just like you.”

You know when Obama started his campaign, didn’t he say stuff about being positive, sticking to issues and not going for petty attacks? It seems like that’s all forgotten. Now his message seems to be scaring people about the state of the economy or frightening everyone into thinking McCain wants a hundred years war in Iraq. So much for new politics.

The destruction of my cell phone has distracted me for a few days, but before that I did have an idea running around my head. I was on CarsDirect, doing something work-related (seriously), when I noticed a big ad on the page. It took me to a website called Green Hybrid. There I saw something that blew my mind.

Green Hybrid shows real world MPG figures based on reports from their hybrid-driving members. On the chart I saw there was a Honda Civic hybrid. Amazingly this car gets 46 miles to the gallon. I was just stunned. That sort of mileage boggles my mind. I already knew the Prius is in this range, but that car is so fugly I would never consider buying it. The Civic is a normal car though.

At least that’s what I thought when I first discovered this. The Civic is the ultimate in normal. It’s boring, safe, tame, vanilla, generic, any adjective you can think that means unnoticeable. I wasn’t enamored with the idea of being a Civic owner but for 46 mpg I could live with a dull car. So I investigated further. That took me to Honda’s website. I wanted to price out one and get an idea if it was affordable for me.

Now let me pause to say I was aware the Civic was redesigned for this model year, but I never bothered to check what it looked like. Why would I? I didn’t want to buy one, and it’s not exciting enough for me to fantasize about. Well there on Honda’s site I took my first hard look at the new Civic.

Oh what a monstrosity. I think Honda ripped off the Prius. The Prius has a pretty distinctive wedge shape. The new Civic doesn’t have that copied exactly but it’s really close. The windshield has such a low slope it nearly blends seamlessly into the hood. The hood looks stubby too. The car’s proportions are just ugly.

You would think this would be the end of my flirtation with practicality but not quite. I went ahead and priced out a Civic hybrid since I was there.

I got an MSRP of about $24,500. That should come down when you actually visit a dealership, but this is a ballpark figure. Even if you took this down to $21,000 that’s still more than I would want to spend on a car I find hideous. That gas mileage is so fantastic though. Why oh why must this be ugly!

If there was a hybrid Mazda3 I would be all over it. Well, as long as it got over 40 mpg. I rather like the Nissan Altima hybrid but at 34 mpg, it’s not worth upgrading. I’m averaging 28 mpg with my 2.3 liter engine now, and I guess that’s going to have to do for at least another year. It’s a shame though. Now that the economy is slow, possibly in recession, it’s a great time to buy a car. The Auto Industry is definitely in recession. Sales are weak all over, even among the Japanese car makers. That means there are hungry salesmen willing to deal. I guess that’s why I have such an itch to buy a new car. I feel like I’m missing out on a good opportunity. That and gasoline finally made it over $4 a gallon in my town. I actually didn’t mind $3 gas, but $4 a gallon is making me cringe.