With that being said, I bring up a new threat to this nation that I think is far more serious-our  countries' food supply.

I believe the mass importing of foreign food poses the single largest threat to the security of this great land. The recent poisoning death of thousands of U.S. pets from tainted wheat gluten, imported from China, should stand out as a warning to us all.

In 2006, we imported over $64 billion dollars in foreign food. That is a 33 percent increase over 2003. Imports from China alone increased by 20 percent last year. According to a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report, FDA inspectors report tainted food imports from China are being rejected with a higher frequency because they are filthy, contaminated with pesticides, tainted with carcinogens, bacteria and banned drugs.

The scary part is that the FDA only inspects one percent of the food being imported into our nation. They are in the process of doubling the inspections which sounds good and would only leave 98 percent of the imported food not being inspected.

Other countries do not have the food safety standards that we do. This along with the potential threat of food based terrorism should wake us all up.

We need to support and protect our domestic food producers. This country needs to move towards food independence as well as ending our reliance on foreign energy. We have always been the nation that has fed the world and it seems there's now a new philosophy that other countries should take over this role.

Our family farms are in crisis and are under attack from many different sources. Instead of our government concentrating on increasing the inspection process of imported food, we need to be protecting our domestic food supply and the farmers and ranchers which feed us all.