David Bohrer/For The Times

This must be what power feels like!

Last month in this space I was demanding to know why the nation's biggest corporate earners and therefore presumably thinkers weren't showing their patriotism in part be becoming dollar-a-year men, after the symbolic salaries of FDR's wartime strategists.

And then, presto! GM and Ford's honchos agreed that if the feds helped to bail out their companies, they'd take a buck a year.

Maybe we should pay that buck in gas.

The Big Three have grounded -- or at least put out of public sight -- the private jets that took them in Roman emperor-style to that first round of Capitol Hearings. They've all arrived in D.C. in separate hybrid vehicles, which is an improvement, but doesn't approach the confessional message that they should have made by showing up in my transportation of choice for them: a clown car.