We ended up with the Honda Civic EX. We looked again at the Corolla, but they checked and told us there wasn't a white Corolla in a 5 state area with ABS and side airbags. They said they had never seen one at all with stability control. ??? We had an offer of a white Honda LX without side airbags for $15,200 with 1.9% interest. There was no white LX with sidebags anywhere in the state. We almost took the one without the sidebags, but we really want the side airbags. They didn't have a white EX with sidebags, but they found one at a dealer 300 miles away. They wanted $400. over invoice. Too much I though and we left after 3 hours. They called me at home and knocked $100. off. Still too much. They called back and offered invoice. I took it. They are still of course getting a dealers holdback and I am sure there is more. The EX also has ABS brakes, sunroof, and a few extra bell and whistles. We are paying $17,475 with 1.9%. I hope this is fair. What do you think?

DH just informed me that he learned while watching the Congressional Hearings on the auto industry that the auto industry's current debt is also heavily leveraged by credit defaut swaps. So if they go under and stop paying off their debt, we can expect another round of financial industry failures. Why not just keep them in business and let them pay off their debts? Why bail out the financial industry again when they produce nothing material? jkom51: I believe that Buick is the luxury car of choice in China, a huge emerging market. I agree that the Big Three need to get rid of their airline fleets. So shoul all the other business bailed out by the government. In doing a search on "Corporate Jets," I came across a story from 2005 that talked about executives being required to use the coporate jet when on personal travel! "Citigroup's proxy says it spent $309,783 for personal "company transportation" for Chairman Sandy Weill, $108,208 for CEO Chuck Prince and $459,153 for executive committee chair Robert Rubin. Citigroup doesn't break out personal expenses for planes or ground transport." And Jack Welsh, the rumored new Auto Czar: "After reports of heavy personal plane use among disgraced CEOs and negative PR heaped upon former General Electric CEO Jack Welch over his post-retirement use of company jets, "Culturally, you don't want to send a message to the market, employees or customers that CEOs are treated preferentially," notes compensation specialist Mike Kesner of Deloitte Consulting." Yikes! He used the coporate jet after retirement, and he is going to be the guy who gets the Big Three to be frugal? But realistically, here is basic info on coporate jet use from Wikipedia: "There are approximately 11,000 business jets in the worldwide fleet with the vast majority of them based in the United States or owned by US companies. The European market is the next largest, with growing activity in Asia and Central America. There is a pre-owned marketplace in which aircraft are bought and sold based on their immediate deliverability because new aircraft orders often take two to three years for delivery."

It surprisingly went down near us the past day or two. But we all know how the "supply/demand" affects prices. If we "demand" less, the price will go down... Though I'm NOT by any means trying to down play the crisis it puts many of us in when these prices get so out of control, it IS all good for the environent... It's my hope that this is a condition/habit that we all try to maintain in good times, as well as bad. We should NEVER, for the good of us all, ever be this dependent on foreign supplies (oil).

David- Those maps confirm a few thoughts of mine as well as my experience: Minor/short term droughts (D0 and D1 on the drought monitor) in the Mid-Atlantic are far more common here than Ohio, occurring somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic almost yearly, at least for a month or two. Severe, long term droughts, however are pretty rare, as is the case for most of the Eastern Seaboard. Our last really bad one was 2001-2002, and I lived in Ohio at the time (OH did have a moderate drought one of those summers IIRC). 2007 was fairly bad, but ended quickly with winter and spring rains in ’08. Ohio, however, is more prone to the droughts that spread from the Central Plains and those can be more severe than what we get in MD, especially in NW Ohio around Toledo, which tends to be drier than the rest of the state anyway. Summer rainfall reliability – the Standard deviation issue is real – while average JJA rainfall in Akron and Baltimore is not all that different (around 4” for June and July and 3.5” for August, more or less), Ohio’s cooler summers mean more overall moisture stays in the soil (the difference is admittedly probably slight – temps only run about 5 degrees cooler), and our reality in MD is that 4” average for July really means about 3 years out of ten where we get 5” or more, 4 years we get under 3”, and a couple that might work out near “normal”. Ohio does see that but to a lesser degree from what I remember – except for 2003, when my backyard rain gauge in Akron clocked 11.23” of rain for July. Although we’d all love to just have a nice 1” of rain every 6-10 days all summer, falling over a 12 hour period at night, with sunshine in between, it doesn’t ever work out that way. Reality is we’ll get 3” in a thunderstorm, then nothing for 3 weeks, but plenty of dreary days scattered within, with sprinkles or pathetic showers, where the average clueless Joe says “but it rained yesterday!” when I complain about watering the garden…but Joe doesn’t understand that the 0.02” of rain that ruined his son’s soccer game didn’t do jack squat for my plants.