Today’s discussion about National Missile Defense was pretty intense, but even Avi the Roofer, John from Cleveland and Todd from Florida seemed to agree at least somewhat with Pete that the idea is off-kilter.

Here is how I knew what Russia says is its actual reason for opposing an American missile shield, from a Congressional Research Office document:

If a nation could intercept missiles launched in retaliation, particularly if it had diminished their numbers in its initial strike, it might believe it could launch a first strike without fearing retaliation. Knowing this, the nation without the defensive system might conclude that it had to launch preemptively, before losing any of its forces in an initial attack. Under these circumstances, stability would be lost and a nation might have an incentive to launch first in a crisis.

Now ask yourself, if the US government has relayed such a cogent argument, why won’t the mainstream media ever expose that simple reasoning?

NMD is not just a waste of money. And I’m not convinced it could never work as advertised (or, like I said, Russia wouldn’t be so upset about us wasting our riches on it). But it surely does sound like Russia may respond by developing a system of counter-measures, China will beef up its nuclear ICBM arsenal, and then we’ll have to keep building and developing this system.

And US corporations will keep getting rich off the Star Wars fantasy while our national economy sinks into a pit and we can’t afford food or health care. What else could we do with $10 billion a year?

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Pete read some questions on the air that he would like to ask Sen. Obama. Here’s the full list. Some of the questions are pretty shallow, but several should make even ardent supporters think twice. Would you guys like to add any questions, in case we can get him on the air for an interview? (Don’t hold your breath.)

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Two whole hours on the oil industry? And the lines were lit up the whole time! Americans are pissed, at their government and at the big oil companies. I can’t help noting that we get what we deserve as long as we accept a system that encourages those who amass wealth to exploit the rest of us. Until we change the system, we can’t really expect these goons to stop working it, can we?

Here’s a list of automobile fuel-efficiency pointers Pete read on the air. I tried for a little while to verify caller Ronnie’s advice about “fresh gasoline” being more efficient than the allegedly stale gas allegedly found at mom-and-pop gas stations. I couldn’t find anything backing that up, so if you find something about it, post a link.

Getting deeper into the politics, here’s an article I worked on a couple years ago about gas price manipulation by the oil companies. And here’s an article with links to the internal memos talking about how they can make gas prices go up.

How does that “liberal” mainstream media handle the issue? Most of the articles I’ve seen on today’s hearings with Big Oil executives just parrot what the executives said, relaying their excuses. Sure, they talk about how badly gas prices are hurting us all, but they don’t seem interested in challenging any of the bullshit the witnesses spewed to excuse their behavior. Here’s the ABC News article on the matter, called “Oil Execs Grilled Over High Prices.” See if you can find the grilling, then compare it to the cry-baby whining by the witnesses about how they need to keep reinvesting their profits so they can keep making mind-boggling profits.

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Comedian Joe Matarese’s score percentile matched that of his son’s head size: 35th. That’s pretty pathetic, but I think he got like 2 correct, so maybe we should look at it positively. The best part was when Pete claimed Joe chose Bosnia as his answer to the Serbia question because it was the only answer Joe had actually heard of, and then Joe said, “No, I’ve heard of Kosovo” — which happened to be the correct answer, just not his choice.

If you want, take the quiz for yourself and let us know your score.

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