A good little mostly American made car (some components manufactured outside the US).

The problem?  You can't buy it anymore!  They stopped using fiberglass a couple years ago.  My mother's two year old Saturn sedan, the model that replaced my SL2, does not get the same gas mileage.  Her best is still at least 5 mpg below my car's average.  (She's no lead foot.)

I was appalled when I learned that!  My husband's SL2 is dying and he wants a high mpg non-hybrid car - but he may have not be able to buy a US made vehicle! Here's one top ten list.

But Ford quit building it, presumably because the boys in accounting didn't think it was profitable.  Heck, Ford has never spent much advertising on the Focus, let along any of the variants within the model. Oh, and the "quality is job 1" b.s. never made it to the Focus factory. Ford's strength has always been the powertrain; quality on the remaining components of its vehicles tend to get neglected.

Still, I'm keeping it as long as I can. I sure don't need a car note right now.

What Ford needs to do is develop the hybrid version of this car as a platform for moving into the future, but the company won't do it. That and build a car that I don't have to change out the fuel pump on every three years. Or change out the motors on three of the four power windows (oh, to have hand-cranked windows again!).

Of course, having seen the assassinations of the '60s at an impressionable age, I also always have a horror of seeing such stuff again -- and urban riots, as I went through one in my town, too.  So I am one here who does not appreciate the "blood in the streets" sort of thing that is tossed around here . . . as guess which group lost the most?

There is much more to AAs to the selection of Springfield as Obama's campaign launch -- not the riot but the reaction that we will celebrate next year -- the centennial of the founding in Springfield, where AA leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett of Chicago and W.E.B. DuBois came together there to found the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the nation.  The organization that backed Wells-Barnett's anti-lynching campaign and finally won landmark laws.  The organization that trained Thurgood Marshall to win Brown v. Board of Education, which led to his historic appointment to the Supreme Court.  The organization that led Daisy Bates to lead in Little Rock.  The organization that trained so many others who created organizations of the '40s like CORE with its dream of the March on Washington, and then organizations of the '60s that began other marches that brought MLK to Birmingham, etc.

Completely clueless.

Lansing, my home town had over, 20,000 GM employees in 5 plants and a massive parts warehouse a couple of decades ago. There were numerous independent parts makers, tool & die companies and forges. In a town and area with a population, at the time, of about 250,000.

Now there are about 6 to 8,000 GM employees, a tool & die maker, a forge plant and a tiny handful of parts makers.

Detroit (which was once nearly 2 million people) now has a population of just under a million.  The Number of GM, Ford and Chrysler workers and dozens of peripheral industries was staggering, an industrial collosus. And that's leaving out many plants in Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Jackson, Kalamazoo, etc.

One lousy plant will not do.

If you lived in a GM town (not in Detroit where all car makers were located) you would have bought a Chevy or other GM make produced in your town.