• UGH: “DETROIT — Chrysler says it will close all 30 of its manufacturing plants for a month starting Friday.” It’ll be like a vacation for auto workers, except they won’t travel anywhere and will enter poverty. We just couldn’t afford that $14 billion loan! [AP]

Throughout 2008 we have relied on our beloved Detroit Free Press for exactly two things: transcripts of former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s fantastically erotic text messages, and blow-by-blow chronicles of the downfall of our once-proud American auto industry. Now the noble Freep and the other Detroit paper, The Detroit News, must fire some people and scale back their home delivery days because of the DEATH OF PRINT. MORE »

• EVERYTHING ABOUT DETROIT IS DEPRESSING: Now it’s the home of both the worst manufacturing economy AND, uh, newspaper economy: “The leading scenario set to be unveiled Tuesday would call for the Free Press and its partner paper, the Detroit News, to end home delivery on all but the most lucrative days—Thursday, Friday and Sunday.” Porn will still be available on Detroit’s Internet, however. [Romanesko]

The GOP’s two most important and popular “fixers,” Vice President Richard “Mitt” Cheney and Bush chief of staff Josh Bolten, spent yesterday on Capitol Hill in a closed-door meeting with Republican Senators, trying to persuade them to vote for the Bush-Democrat Motorcar Bailout plan of $14 billion. (Somehow, $14 billion has become a lot of money for Congress to spend!) The meeting did not go well at all — Cheney bit them? — and now the Republican Senators will never vote for anything involving money and cars again. MORE »

Reporter David Leonhardt at your liberal elitist rag the New York Times has a little thingy today about how nobody wants to buy American cars these days, and this is why Detroit finds itself in such an awkward no-cash-havin’ situation. While it is true that nobody wants to buy American cars, it is also true that nobody wants to buy any cars, Japanese, Korean, German, whatever, and your editor, after doing a fair amount of crapping on Detroit lately, has begun to see the error of her ways. MORE »

The cranberry menace Nancy Pelosi says a government appointee should oversee the bailout of Detroit. This person will be called the “car czar,” in celebration of the Russian aristocrats who invented the American auto industry. And guess who will probably be our car czar, if Nancy Pelosi has anything to do with it? No, not Patrick Kennedy. (He will be the drug czar.) MORE »

Look at their sweet coordinated dance moves! It’s like that “Thriller” video, only at the end, everybody has to give them 39 billion dollars. [NPR]

Christine Beatty, former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s former chief of staff and the woman on receiving end of Kilpatrick’s repeated inducements to meet him for some sexytime at the Benz Chili Bowl, got all suited up in a DEMURE RED SWEATER VEST and delivered a heartfelt apology to the people of Detroit after pleading guilty to two felonies. She betrayed the public trust by lying about her affair with this terrible doofus, who himself lied about a whole bunch of things (some of them actually consequential), and they both got caught, the end. The moral of the story is this: never sleep with anyone who thinks LOL is an actual word. [Detroit Free Press]

By the Comics Curmudgeon
Ahh, what’s that smell? Now that the election is over and there’s a brief respite from the never-ending stream of bullshit, we can catch a whiff of sweet romance! They don’t call the period after a new president’s election a “honeymoon” for nothing. Let’s enjoy this brief window of love-addled happiness before the hellscape re-engulfs us with these fine romantic cartoons. MORE »

A thing that sucks about our nation’s current financial unpleasantness is that Congress wants to find solutions to it and Congress happens to suck. Other people who suck in this situation include Hank Paulson and “President” George Bush Jr. Barack Obama, too, for throwing himself into this situation that can only end in a sucky outcome. And lest we forget, the American auto industry — known by its appropriately sucky metonym, “Detroit” — sucks. So. Do we give car companies money for sucking or do we let a ton of workers in depressed areas lose their jobs and family health care plans? Oh, the wacky situations America finds itself in after ignoring massive problems for decades. MORE »

People in Detroit hate nothing more than the Toyota Prius, because it is made by the “Orientals” in awful Japan. And unemployed blogger Meghan McCain, it so happens, drives one of these vehicles because she is a close friend of the Japanese President, Hirohito. Last week, John McCain tried to denounce his “daughter” by telling the local media that Meghan bought the dumb car herself, which is of course a lie, because Meghan McCain has no personal source of income. [Detroit News]