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From MSNBC’s Countdown, Keith Olbermann talks to Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a Navy lawyer forced out because he did his job too well. He was assigned by his superiors to provide legal representation to one of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Apparently he was supposed to lose his case.

“All I ever wanted was to make a difference — and in that sense I think my career and personal satisfaction has been beyond my dreams,” Swift said [in a newspaper interview].

In the Olbermann interview, Swift paraphrases Thomas Paine, who wrote:

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine also said this:

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

For too long, we’ve relied on men and women in uniform to secure liberty for us. But “these are the times that try men’s souls.” Now it’s time for the rest of us to step up and take our share of the burden, and to defend our rights and our Constitution from those who would despoil and defile them.

I’m expecting gasoline prices to rise after election day. I’ve predicted five-dollar gas by the end of the Bush-Cheney administration. But maybe I’m not sufficiently pessimistic:

Those falling prices at the gasoline pump may only be temporary. Indeed, they could signal the start of an era in which, forecasters say, “the death of cheap, abundant crude might unleash war and plunge the world into a second Great Depression.”

“Peak oil is a reality,” says Willem Kadijk, a hedge fund adviser quoted by Bloomberg Markets magazine. He is just one of many who believe that global oil production is now at or near its peak, and the only place to go is down.

“Once the flow crests and starts to decline, and some geologists say it already has, oil will no longer be able to slake the world’s growing thirst for energy,” Deepak Gopinath writes in summarizing the argument. “The result will be the oil shock to end all oil shocks.”

The price of a barrel of crude oil, which closed yesterday at $58.68, “will spiral to $200 — and keep rising,” he writes.

That “boom” you hear is not the economy.