A month ahead of schedule: "Boo!!" GM's September sales dropped 45 percent from a year earlier, and Chrysler's fell 42 percent. Sounds like collusion to me. Ford, the only one of the three not directly bailed out, dropped only 5.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the stock market suffered a severe case of the heebie-jeebies, the Dow industrials plummeting 140 points by mid-afternoon in what the WSJ termed a "precipitous drop."

The Republicans' Deaf Ear Is a Preexisting Condition (WashPost, Dana Milbank)

Funny piece on the first day of the Senate's "debate" on the health-care bill. GOP senator Jim Bunning declared he was against the bill, no matter what form, and then he promptly fell asleep. The Republicans might as well have sung "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It," Groucho Marx's bit from Horse Feathers (1932). Or just stayed home to watch re-plays of former colleague Tom DeLay dancing with the stars.

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A New Bubble Of the Fed's Creation (WashPost, Steven Pearlstein)

Stimulus packages boost the market so much that, well, another boom is underway. Here's an example of excessive greedsters feasting on carcasses artificially bloated by government money, from the WSJ: "Speculators Seek Fortune in AIG." The NY Post notes that Lehman alums are setting up funds to pick at the carcass of their failed bank. Stocks are rising and traders are waiting with bated breath as the Fed meets this week to figure what, if any, action it will take.

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Delayed Foreclosures Stalk Market (WSJ)

Though some foreclosures are being delayed out of good intentions to help beleaguered homeowners, "some analysts believe the delays are prolonging the mortgage crisis and creating a growing 'shadow' inventory of pent-up supply that will eventually hit the market."

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A Teflon Rally Running on Volume Fumes (Seeking Alpha, Babak)

Warning: "... this rally is the largest one powered by the least volume ..." Even crazier, an astonishing share of volume has been from a mere handful of stocks. See Liam Denning's "Smoke Signals From the Stock Rally" in the WSJ.

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Prosecutors say half of Bernie Madoff's investors lost nothing in Ponzi scheme (NY Daily News)

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

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BERNIE 'DYING' IN JAIL: '20 PILLS FOR CANCER' (NY Post)

"There's been much speculation as to why Bernie Madoff took the entire fall for the scheme -- and rumors of his suffering from pancreatic cancer surfaced many months before he arrived at the Butner, NC, complex in June." We didn't really think he confessed because his conscience got to him, but we did think he confessed because the market's plunge would have soon unmasked his phony boast of steady profits from his "investments" anyway.

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'Cash for Clunkers' Environmental Benefits Are in Doubt (ABC)

Roundup of criticism (not only on possibly dubious environmental impact) of clunker program, including a mention of this Berkeley study, "The Implied Cost of Carbon Dioxide Under the Cash for Clunkers Program," which says the smokin' deals are "an expensive way to reduce greenhouse gases."

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Roubini Sees Increasing Risk of Double-Dip Recession (Bloomberg)

Haven't reached the bottom yet, says NYU's self-promoting but often right economist.

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Apple Highest Grossing Retailer on Fifth Avenue as Crowds Swell (Bloomberg)

Apple defies recession. Everyone wants an iPhone. Despite the annoying TV ads with the treacly music.

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CITY DEALING TO MAKE LUXE CONDOS CHEAPER (NY Post)

At last: affordable housing in New York City. A $500,000 condo might wind up being marked down to $300,000. And developers/bankers would get $50,000 per apartment for doing this.

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NASA May Outsource Amid Budget Woes (WSJ)

Federation runs out of money, thinking of hiring Ferengi to fly the Enterprise and the rest of Starfleet.

MORE HEADLINES FOLLOW

No surprise that Ron Paul hates "Cash for Clunkers" almost as much as he hates the Fed. Even if you're a well-meaning do-gooder, you can at least listen to the Texas maverick: He's not as obnoxious a critic as lightweight loudmouth Glenn Beck. And every time Ron Paul uses the word "foolishness," he backs it with a good example. He makes some good points here, especially when he talks about how poor and near-poor people are getting the shaft every time a clunker gets shredded.

Not to mention teens looking for that rusted but barely driveable hulk that they covet as a first car. Paul doesn't mention that angle, but Big Money's Matthew DeBord does in "Does Cash for Clunkers Kill Teen Car Dreams?"

Stocks are up, cash-for-clunkers will stay in business — things are looking up, you say.

Except that consumer spending is up (good, they say), while personal income is down. And Obama's Making Home Affordable program? Sluggish at best. Some loan-servicers haven't modified a single damn loan.

But why should they offer refinancing to help homeowners stave off foreclosure, even if the government pays the companies to do so? Aside from illegal scams, the banks usually make more on fees when a house goes into foreclosure.

Enough about your homes. We're still waiting the collapse of the commercial real-estate market.

Ford's making out great on the cash-for-clunkers program (or at least people seem to think so), and the Obama administration is just so pleased about it.

But the CEO of the car site edmunds.com, Jeremy Anwyl, argues that "it's not clear that cash for clunkers actually increased sales" because consumers knew the program was underfunded and so they poured into showrooms. More from Anwyl: "This sales frenzy was inevitable. We have crammed three to four months of normal activity into just a few days. What everyone fails to realize is that once this backlog is met, interest in the program will fade."

For now, though, suddenly everybody thinks he or she is a used-car salesman. Veteran journo Bob Franken jokes that maybe "Cash for Clunkers" should extended the "divorce industry," where one could "trade in their overused spouse — a clunker — for a new model."

Har-de-har-har. That's life in the slow lane from the silver-haired Franken.

His lame-ass humor gets a thin-lipped grimace/smile from Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler, who says "cash for clunkers" is "not really a joking matter." Car dealers getting money from this are the "cornerstones" of communities all over the country, she says, and it's a "quick," "effective" stimulus for communities, dealers, consumers, the environment. She gets all misty-eyed, and I'm starting to tear up a little, too.

You can watch more of this by clicking on the above video. Or you can just punish yourself by listening to Glenn Beck mouth off about it. Or you can buy my '97 Jeep Cherokee.

"Cash for Clunkers," the program so popular that it ran out of cash, is back in business after an emergency infusion of $2 billion by the House. The program is serving its purpose, and that of Detroit's Big 1 Plus Two Others, by luring shoppers into showrooms.

Barack Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is playing his part, sounding like a classic car salesman when he told America today at a press conference, ""If you were planning on going to buy a car this weekend, using this program, this program continues to run." Obama also gave a personal huzzah-huzzah (see video above).

Of course, neither Obama nor Gibbs is trapped in a dealership trying to get on the government's website to wrap up an actual cash-for-clunkers deal. The NYT's Katharine Q. Seelye dove into the details of the logistical nightmare and concluded -- even by the end of her story's first paragraph: "Things sound like a total mess in the showrooms."

Yes, but it's kind of a pleasant mess. Ford's stock is up 6.6 percent "on speculation" that the program's boosting auto demand.

No new auto has ever been delivered more quickly to a customer than new automaker GM has been dropped off at our house. From bankruptcy court to Wall Street is geographically a short stretch in lower Manhattan, and with a jump start, a shove, and billions of dollars from the Obama administration, the new GM has gone from zero to sickly in record time.

After only 40 days wandering in the desert of bankruptcy court, GM "completed a major step in its turnaround," selling its good assets to something that lawyers call Vehicle Acquisition Co., soon to be renamed General Motors Co. The "bad" assets — not all of them are so bad, considering that legitimate, genuine claims for earned money, like pensions and unpaid bills, are among them — still rest on the scrap heap, compacted into something that lawyers call Motors Liquidation Co.

The only person guaranteed to squeeze sizable money from GM is disgraced ex-CEO Rick Wagoner, whose exit package is being negotiated with more respect being shown to him than to GM's creditors and employees.

Now the taxpayers own a new GM that's just a shell of the old one, so good luck competing on the world market. Inside the shell is a shriveled company that will sell you a Chevy or Caddy and little else, and it will do it without thousands of its old dealers.

"Leaner, more focused" — that's how the Wall Street Journal describes the new entity. The hype is extraordinary this morning, with wire services gushing that "a leaner and meaner automaker [is] ready to win back American consumers and pay back taxpayers." Yeah, and undercoating is worth paying extra for.

Time to return to the important business on the Street: the bonus recovery. "AIG Seeks Clearance For More Bonuses," reports the WashPost:

While figures finally show that China has sped ahead of the U.S. as the world's biggest automaker, GM's failed CEO Rick Wagoner is still hanging onto a job (raking in his full benefits, plus a token $1 salary), waiting for the government to figure out his pension plan.

A touchy subject, a "delicate issue," that pension plan. But the two big bankrupt U.S. automakers, GM and Chrysler, are both still saddled with bigger pension problems: having to fund them for thousands and thousands of other employees. CNN Money has good background here on the pension plights of GM's workers and the company itself.

As you prepare to hit the streets and fire your rifles into the air to celebrate the expected quick emergence of GM from bankruptcy, keep this in mind:

The "new GM" — to be known as "GM" — will still get off scot-free "from liability for consumer claims related to incidents that occurred before GM went into bankruptcy protection."

People who have already filed claims are shit out of luck; think of yourselves as crash-test dummies.