THE WAY HIGH GAS PRICES HAVE BEEN SEEN AS A CLEAR AND PRESENT THREAT TO MORALS, DECENCY AND COMMON SENSE in post-9/11 America--let alone the "antient and pecuilar soverignty and soverign identity" thereof--have led @ least one Congressman to suggest resorting to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to increase the supply of cheap gasoline, diesel fuel and propane within measurable distance.

That Congressman is Rep. Ron Kind (D/WI), who backs up the suggestion with evidence that the Federal Government conspired to take numerous refineries out of production (and pay their owners accordingly) following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to "stabilise prices" while increasing consignments of refined fuels for the Reserve.

Which may appear to be all the more crucial considering recent threats by Venezuelan majordomo Hugo Chavez to cut off all crude oil imports to the United States in case ExxonMobil files legal action vis-a-vis the amount and quality of compensation received from the Venezuelan State for the nationalisation of their oilfields.

Likely to be followed by a reprise of Pat "700 Club" Robertson's rather tactless suggestion to the CIA of killing off Chavez, and excusing such as necessary for G-d, Country and Cheap Gasoline.

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SO MUCH FOR EVANGELICAL (READ: FUNDAMENTALIST OR PRIMITIVE) CHRISTIANS BEING LIKELY TO SUPPORT REPUBLICAN CANDIDATES all the more in Indecision 2008.

Think Progress had the following to say the other day as is worth note @ this time:

Throughout the primary campaign, Faith in Public Life has noted that exit polls have failed to ask Democratic voters if they are Evangelicals, while consistently asking the question of Republicans. On Feb. 5, the group took action into its own hands, commissioning exit polls in Tennessee and Missouri, which found that "one in three white evangelical voters in Missouri and Tennessee participated in Democratic primaries." The group's exit polls also found that "evangelical voters want a broader agenda that goes beyond abortion and same-sex marriage."

After all, Your Correspondent has long been of the opine that the Pseudoreligiopolitical Right has been paying unhealthy attention for way too long on what are essentially "junk food" issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and "indecency" in film and television. And not paying enough on "nutritious" issues that really matter, such as the economy's effects on the socioeconomically vulnerable, the harm posed by capitalism with American characteristics upon said vulnerable of society, the environment, and suchlike.

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COME TO THINK OF IT, "JUNK FOOD" ISSUES AND "NEWS" (AS IN PROLEFEED, FOR WANT OF A BETTER TERM) are a pet staple of the conservative propaganda machine, what with their obvious targeting of the poor, undereducated or homeschooled and easily-influenced of the community.

Especially when obscure or otherwise insignificant news stories are embellished to the point of bombastic exaggeration, consistent with the Josef Goebbels "big lie" philosophy:

If a small lie can be made big enough, and can be repeated frequently enough, within two weeks, the public will be expected to accept the lie as fact.

The Nazi regime's Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment would no doubt be proud that his "big lie" ideal lives on in American conservative media. So would, methinks, Julius Streicher, publisher of the infamous anti-Semitic tabloid weekly Der Sturmer, whose editorial philosophy emphasised simple, easily-understood language and concepts which only served to heighten the extent of anti-Semitic depravity to the point where anti-Semitism was fully ingrained in the German national psyche--and served only to worsen the depravity of The Holocaust.

For which Herr Streicher was named among the several co-defendents in the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials in 1945-46 from the highest echelons of the Nazi regime charged with Crimes Against Humanity--and for which he was among such sentenced to death by hanging.

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YOUR CORRESPONDENT WOULD LIKE TO REMIND THE JOHN McCAIN PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, and its Zealots and True Believers, of his rather tactless remarks from last fall where Sen. McCain called the United States "a Christian Nation."

And to what extent he still supports same, or whether he now disclaims responsibility therefor.

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HIS FRAUDULENCY'S GREAT WITHIN MUST PROBABLY BE SEEING DOLLAR SIGNS GALORE IN THEIR EYES when they picture the opportunities galore in the Fiscal Year 2009 budget for the "complete and final" privatisation of such agencies, institutions and schemes deemed "non-essential" or otherwise "unlikely to continue generating taxpayer value" under current conditions.

Especially so Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, Amtrak and suchlike.

But before you have any delusions of grandeur about profiting from such massive corporatisations His Fraudulency must secretly have in mind (and yet is hesitant to openly acknowledge as much), you need to consider the possibility that such "privatisation" is more than likely to be rigged or manipulated to the point of such being on a par with the now-discredited concept of "spoils," whereby the ilk of corrupt or otherwise weird and unwholesome specimens of die Maschienpolitik reward close droogs for Good and Loyal Service by way of appointment to the likes of what are best described as "fake-work" positions.

As in the mandatory "competitive bidding" procedures being seen as "merely a formality" open to deliberate manipulation and perversion, not to mention all manner of tricks and strategems to avoid scandal.

Let alone the formality of public notice being ignored in any "signing statements" to Executive Orders which His Fraudulency will likely issue to authorise such denationalisation, thereby opening the door to "spoils" being used all the more. Same favouring especially loyal supporters all the more to rank-and-file enterpreneurs, invoking all form and fashion of platitudes and patsies lacking credibility.

Not to mention the likelihood of such being brought about while His Fraudulency was non compos mentis, technically rendering null and void any authorisations to those ends.

The likelihood of which needs to be brought before Congress.

Write Your Congressman.

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AND IF THERE'S ONE UNLIKELY ARTICLE OF FAITH WHICH THE CONSERVATIVE ELEMENT HOLDS DEAR above all else when it comes to the "moral superiority" of free-market capitalism with American characteristics requiring the utmost of contempt for the Lower Classes, it would have to be that which expects to achieve, "completely and finally," a nil rate of unemployment consistent with free-market capitalistic principles and disciplines.

Let's not forget where Communist regimes were forever boasting of having nil unemployment, all the while claiming that mass unemployment would be among the undoings of capitalism--never mind that such required creating all manner of "make-work/fake-work" positions just to create the aura of nil unemployment.

Which begs the question of whether achieving nil unemployment based on capitalistic socioeconomic models and paradigms is possible without recourse to waste, fraud, inefficency, mismanagement, corruption, lack of investment in plant and capital excused as "protecting industrial heritage" (talk about unlikely platitudes there!)--in other words, nothing short of outright cartel behaviour.

And would it be stretching things to imagine "the Four Hundred" being some of the biggest supporters of anti-abortion movements, hoping to see in same a means towards their desired ends of nil unemployment based on free-market capitalist parameters?