It's been a long long road to get here, Kitt. It started perhaps with Susan Sontag equivicating for three hours on Bookspan TV, on the eve of the Iraq war. Either you don't know or you don't'care. Insinuating I don't know what I am talking about because I directed these items to an open format, is precisely the sort of tool a propagandist would use to discredit someone with a personal attack.

FYI there is a nice piece on the doctored photos the CIA released of the Syrian nuclear reactor, on the 5things post. Brian Williams, is not a Liberal newscaster, (that sounds like Right Wing propaganda), and NBC is not fair and balanced, just because the Left is represented by a sportscaster.

A lot of people have been swallowing their crap for so long they are starting to take THEIR assumptions into the Liberal vernacular. Let's assume that's what happened here.

The tone of the article is surprise, what, Brian Williams isn't a Liberal newscaster? Okay thats' a rhetorical device, but Kitt's personal slam distracts us from a serious issue, and that is classic Right Wing smear tactics.

And if you're uncomfortable with that, so am I.

During the 2004 midterm elections, Goldman Sachs rejiggered the commodity index to reduce the weighting of gasoline. The move sent funds managers scurrying and drove gasoline prices lower. (Paulson was head of GS before he went public). At the same time Enterprise was paying back oil they borrowed during Katrina. Then a number of surprise inventory builds hit the market, and there was a double whammy of sorts. Now if you wonder how oil is transferred from Enterprise to government storage, you are not alone. Since the SPR is considered to be the sum of both forms of storage, at around 1.5 billion bbls.

Now if these crude oil inventory reports were accurate, there was no reason for crack spreads to go higher, but they did. In fact they went on a tear, indicating there was really much less oil than anyone thought, since the spread reflects the premium between the finished product and the commodity. Was there oil sitting in enterprise storage which really belonged to the government, which was being used to count against enterprise storage?

The manipulation of gasoline prices during the midterm elections is an unreported scandal. Afterwards Bush stood up and proclaimed the SPR was a pretty good thing, and we should make it even bigger. If there was a Congress they would have audited the SPR. There was no Congress before 2004, and there is none now.

Bush is a lame duck, and he never cared a whit about the American consumer as long as he could outsource their job to China, make them run up a pile of debt, and watch them being thrown out in the street while his rich crony banker pals bought up the property for pennies on the dollar. (Maybe that last part didn't work out the way he planned, but Bernanke hs done a lot to save Wall Street, not much to save main street) And of course Bush cares about promoting the Republican political base. The oil companies are pretty close to being utilities, in the business sense, they really don't care how much gasoline they sell, they make their money.

I'm nodding too, just not for the same things.

Anyone recall what happened with the VT shooter's papers? he mailed them to NBC, and they refused to repeat one word of it. Maybe the FCC needs to come into the 21th century.

to buy oil at these prices, when the reserve is already 95% full, is that there are plans to use that oil in a different sort of tank. (or the oil isn't there and he has to balance the ledger before he leaves office)

the line between government storage and enterprise, or private storage is sufficently blurred to cause a reasonable person to question what is happening.