You DON'T accuse people of being in cahoots with Osama bin Laden because the disagree with you. That's punk bullshit. I was less than 20 miles from Ground Zero on 9/11 and like most New Yorkers, I did not panic either. Nor is my response to that disaster a need to kill, kill, kill in order to restore some lost sense of power or invulnerability. What I have wanted, demanded, from day one is that the perpetrators be brought to JUSTICE, and punished to the fullest extent of the law. Not their cooks, drivers, or latrine-diggers. Any of those schmucks who have endured Bagram and Guantanamo have paid a hefty price already. If they can be shown to have actually done something like plant bombs or shoot people or plan such actions, then they must be punished further. But they should not be tortured, or subjected to cruel or unusual punishments, or convicted by kangeroo courts, because those are not the attributes that define us as a culture, or at least they weren't until lilly-livered types ran away from what we stand for.

So don't pretend you give a shit about freedom or justice. You want heads, you want vengence, and you are prepared to smear anyone and trample any principle in order to get it.

My bad. However, your answer, where you rant about child molesters and communists, shows that a) my point about you mindlessly smearing anyone who disagrees with you is valid, and b) you haven't got the slightest clue what this nation was supposed to be about. Kufir, here in America, communists ARE entitled to a fair trial, and we believe in these little things called "due process" and "liberty and justice for all." You seem to confuse fairness with compassion, as if we are doing people a favor or shwoing them compassion or in some way giving them a break by assuming innocence, expecting the government to prove its case against those it accuses of crimes, or giving people a fair trial. These things are not gifts, they are the inalienable rights of citizens, for sure, and human beings, by implication (we certainly think so when we criticize the Chinese for NOT doing these things). But, of course, you don't belive a word of this. Perhaps you would feel better moving to a place where rights are the gift of the rulers and they can dispense with all this nonsense and execute the "evildoers" at will. Try Spain, circa 1492.

The evidence is overwhelming that 1) the cheap oil, the light sweet crude that is close to the habitable zones on Earth and, under pressure, basically extracts itself once you stick a drill down into it, is largely used up; 2) new sources of oil will slow the rate of growth of oil prices, but if economic and population growth continues, any new sources, even including theorized ones, will not reverse the upward trend in gasoline prices; 3) the ecological costs of the new oil sources, and burning that oil, is high.

Logically, unless oil is a virtually infinite resources, some day you will use up all the cheap and easily extracted supply. And in a market economy, once supply gets tight, even if supplies can just about continue to meet demand, prices will go up. We are at that point now.

Oil is not about to run out. But CHEAP oil almost certainly has. We can buy time by ruthlessly exploiting whatever is left, or we can conserve and move on, using oil largely for lubricants, plastics, and fertilizers, which we desperately need it for, more than we need it for transportation. Or, like many posters here, we can play "let's pretend."

but I am unsure what to think. The fact of the matter may be that Americans cannot be led on this. That to tell them the truth would be political suicide. That they will vote their dreams and their desires rather than their interests. In which case we'll get McCain and an irreversable global warming catastrophe. I just don't know.

It's like those who today lambaste Roosevelt for lying about the steps he took prior to Pearl Harbor to check fascist aggression. And he did lie. And he overstepped his role as the President of this Republic. And in my gut I feel that was wrong.

But Americans were not going to do shit to help Britain, France, and China (forget about the Soviets!) hold Fascism in check. He tried, at least at times, to "lead", to convince, to bamboozle the populace, and yet they resisted stubbornly and aggressively.

And for those who would use these arguments to justify Shrub's lust for torture, exrtrajudicial killing (i.e. murder) and unprovoked war, I say this: another 9/11 would cost us 3000 lives--runaway global warming will kill hundreds of millions. What Roosevelt did to thwart Hitler was bad, but the cost of a Hitler victory would have been unbelievable, as will the costs of an ecological catastrophe. And even there, I think he was probably wrong to lie to the people and finagle the Constitutional order. It's a question of degrees. Roosevelt may have met the test for his actions, he may not have. The threat Bush faces doesn't come close to justifying his breeches of our Law and Custom.

The sad erosion of our economic house is not sexy, it is not really partisan in a way the media can explain in 15 seconds or less, and it's a downer. They want this stuff to go away. They cannot fit it into any facile narrative of "debate" or uplift or human interest. It has no face to plaster on the story, and no visuals worth a damn. Unless we have guys taking headers out of Wall Street windows or the damn stock market drops like this for a week straight, we will be back to Palin and "Is Obama 'American' enough to be President" and Brittany Spears or Lindsey Lohan's latest beaver shot in no time flat.