Steven Rattner knows a thing or two about the American auto industry. He oversaw efforts to restructure the nation’s automobile industry as the former Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, and his knowledge of the industry and firsthand experience working with the White House eventually led him to write a book, Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry. Today, Rattner noticed an interesting irony at play in the President’s visit to the General Motors plant at Lake Orion.

Earlier this month, we looked into a report Fox News’ Megyn Kelly presented on an anti-bailout ad from Ford Motor Co. Was this commercial, she wondered, trying to piggyback onto the Tea Party movement’s energy (and its wariness) by voicing disapproval of American car companies that, unlike Ford, agreed to take government bailout money?

Well, now Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes is reporting that the car company has pulled the ad after questions from the White House.

This afternoon on America Live, contributor Mike Tobin reported on a new Ford ad that casts a negative light on the government’s bailout of the motor industry. You’ll recall that Ford Motors refused to take bailout money from the government — bailout money which happened to breathe new life into and create additional jobs for Chrysler and GM despite the fact that both companies are still in the process of repaying their debts. Well, it would seem that this refusal resonated deeply with at least one car buyer.

In the commercial, an “average guy” is pulled off the street and into a press conference, where he is asked various questions about buying a Ford vehicle, including whether driving an American car is important to him. His response was interesting.

Steve Rattner (a former Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury, a position that saw him lead efforts to restructure the flailing auto industry) created a blog post yesterday highlighting Mitt Romney‘s inconsistency when it comes to discussing the auto industry.

It would appear, writes Rattner, that Romney was for Barack Obama‘s plan to rescue the nation’s troubled auto companies before he evidently turned against it.

This afternoon, President Obama spoke before the press about GM’s new public stock offering. His brief, optimistic speech noted that the American auto industry has begun to bounce back after nearly going bankrupt—”For the first time in six years, Ford, GM, and Chrysler are all operating at a profit. In fact, last week, GM announced its best quarter in over 11 years,” he said.

A couple months ago, President Obama stopped by Chrysler’s Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit and told the workers there he had confidence in them. If the president had said that about us, we’d have been pumped. We might have even had a party. Of course, we probably would have stopped partying after a month and a half. And we probably wouldn’t have been partying during our lunch breaks. I guess the union workers caught boozing it up were just that excited.

t hasn’t been the best of winters over at Toyota, where a massive recall effort is in effect to fix broken gas pedal issues that have left many drivers speeding on the road without brakes, some without their lives. The president of the company, Akio Toyoda, visited Congress to testify at their investigative hearings on the matter yesterday, and, having been criticized for not seeming remorseful enough by some in the media, took to Larry King Live to give the apology another shot.

I was struck by the top article on the NYT Business Most-Emailed List (MEL) earlier today: In Denmark, Ambitious Plan for Electric Cars, by Nelson Schwartz, published on Dec. 1st. Even while GM was shoving out Fritz Henderson for moving too slowly (and even while his daughter showed that she, at least, knew how to [...]