host

Two points:

<b>1.)</b> IMO, since the U.S. "borrows" $1 billion every calendar day, to "purchase" 14 million bbls of "petroleum equivalents", and another $1 billion "plus" to buy all of the shit that is imported and stocked on the shelves of it's 3800 Wal-Marts, and to buy the 8 million new vehicles made by foreign companies, and borrows another $1.616 billion, each and every day....to "finance" the federal treasury spending deficit, money that the US government and it's people have no ability (do the math..... $1.4 trillion in new, annual debt to foreigners, every year, at a minimum, going forward....on a base of an existing $13 trillion combined international "balance of payments" debt, and US treasury debt....up from half as much of a trade debt in 2001 ($400 billion to $800 billion, annually, in just four years....and US treasury debt, up from $5.5 trillion in 2001, to $8.3 trillion in just 50 months, an annual deficit spending, increased from no more than ZERO, in fiscal year end, Oct., 2001, to $590 billion annually, NOW!)...to ever pay back.

What is at stake now, is not the access by the US to readily available petroleum and raw material supplies, and a steady flow of imported consumer products, but rather....what is at stake is the continued ability of the US to borrow enough money from foreigners at interest rates that are low enough not to interrupt the status quo.....the US only services the interest payments on it's rising mountain of debt. No principle of the debt has been retired via paying down any portion of the debt, since 2001.

The US will be compelled, by the math....to either take petroleum or other wealth from it's foreign debt holders and suppliers, via the threat of the use of military force against them....or it will have to learn to do WITHOUT. I don't see the latter happening, so.....

.....any discussion about "the oil", must also be a discussion about "the bankruptcy", because that is the inevitable course that the US is currently headed towards. No one even bothers to advance any discussion with "math" that leads to any non-military solution to this consumption fueled, debt crisis.
The US has more than doubled it's military spending since 2001, even when the "off-budget" appropriations, spent on the GWOT "fronts" in the "Stans", and in the M.E., are excluded. Tax cuts have aggravated and accelerated both the federal debt increase and the excessive consumption driven trade imbalance. Ridiculously low interest rates of the last five years in the US, fueled a speculative housing bubble that provided the equivalent of the entire number of new jobs created during that time. The percentage of US GDP attributed to housing, rose from an average 8 percent annually, to 15 percent this years, as for example, California's 36 million residents produced 500,000 realty agents, and of theat number, a third also held realty broker licenses.
One realtor for every 72 Californians, including the children and the retired poor, folks unlikely to be purchasing, or selling homes.

The US is not in danger of experiencing an "oil shortage", just a shortage of paper money that has value enough to purchase much oil, and the common sense required to manage and preserve what value remains in that money. IMO, the investment has been made in the military, and it will be used to directly procure what the dollar will be too weak to buy.

<b>2.)</b>Ch'i, you should know, that the man who singlehandedly determines for a signifigant number of Americans, what is "liberal media", to be marginalized and ridiculed, and intimidated into "towing the party line", and what is "fair and balanced"....is as immersed in the christian religious fundamentalist dogma, as "the party", and too many of it's unwitting and professed to be secular....but fully committed, anyway....supporters of the "party", and unquestioning defenders of the political "dear leaders", who seem fine with the course that the nation is on.....to fiscal ruin.

Here he is, talking the "talk". It's his "monster", and he seems quite comfortable with it. He's not satisfied (and neither is his "chorus") that NBC has put this on national TV, for children, on saturday mornings:
Well.....goodness....couldn't Phil Vischer have simply walked away from NBC's money and the benefit to him from network distribution, in defense of christ, over money/commercial success, and saved the busy Mr. Bozell the task of writng his protest column and distributing it to over <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=veggie+tales+nbc&btnmeta%3Dsearch%3Dsearch=Search+the+Web">one hundred thousand links on the internet</a> ?

The guy who wrote the preceding column, <b>has close to half the country believing in "liberal media bias", to the extent that that "half", has to get it's "news", from sources that the rest of us either never heard of, or wouldn't take seriously, if our lives depended on it.....and ironically, they may.</b>

On talk radio around here, the callers and the hosts uniformly "bleat" about the Aljazeerah Constitution ( www.ajc.com ), and the "Taliban" USA Today. This recently took up an entire 3 hours radio "talk" segment:
But....what's this?? http://www.moveamericaforward.org/ is an obviously right wing politcal site ? No.....
People who never heard of L. Brent Bozell, and don't consider themselves to be all that christian centric, probably don't even know how his MRC has filtered their news, and muzzled the working press in the US, and created shaped a patriotic-fundamentalist-christian, media and politcal monolith in the
US that is "on message", tolerates no dissent, and no discernible independent thinking or discussion. It's a perfect marriage of party, Jesus, and patriotism, far superior in it's filtration of information, than an elitist "liberal media", ever could have provided.

Could anyone tell me how you can "buy in" to the "message" of "liberal media bias", and not notice, or not be irritated that everyone in "the media" who says that, also all have the same patriotic, christian-centric, reagan worshipping, "rah-rah", "of course we all know that liberals....and that Clinton....blah blah blah" uh.... talking points?

What a shame, that....after 19 years of Bozell's "hard work", it's all about to implode....the good news is that the impending implosion will be a surprise; the failed Bush presidency, the situations "on the ground", in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the risks to the stabiltiy of housing prices and jobs and to the purchasing power of the US dollar, are all filtered out by the good work of Mr. Bozell's MRC.org , his Sarah Scaife foundation income stream, the christian right, and the RNC and it's volunteers and contributors, as well as the "reporters" that he the MRC has been able to "hew" to report on behalf of "the party", and "the church".