Barack Obama has built his whole campaign around change. But he has not yet explained why we need that change. You might think that's a strange criticism because he has theoretically been talking about why we need change this whole time. But in fact, he hasn't; not real change. What do I mean by that?

Libertarian Presidential candidate Bob Barr visited St. Louis this past week-end to raise a little money and make a little news.  STL Today (St. Louis Post Dispatch online news outlet) covered his visit.

Barr rejected claims that he is a 'spoiler'.

Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr on Sunday rejected critics' assertions that he could be a "spoiler" in November, shifting votes away from Republican John McCain and possibly aiding the election of Democrat Barack Obama.

"It's an awfully weak argument for Republicans to make," Barr said, while predicting that the GOP may be facing a defeat of "tsunami" proportions.

The REPUBLICAN congressional years 1994 - 2006 (and 2000-2008 President Bush years) will be remembered for all they've accomplished...

Seven year war in Afghanistan, 5 year war in Iraq with close to 660 billion dollars spent, part of which we now owe China to pay for them.

North Korea, Iran and now Russia, are all greater powers then before the GOP took control of government. Pakistan with nukes is about to lose their (U.S. picked) leader. China is now listed as having the most manufacturing companies in the world.

The following joke is apparently being circulated by people in (or somehow affiliated with) the local Republican Party power structure in Harrisonburg, Virginia. I occasionally get these types of things forwarded to me from Harrisonburg, Virginia due to a personal contact (who shall remain nameless because I really thought this person had better judgement-I'm at a loss as to why this person sent this to me). Most of the time I ignore the crass Republican BS that comes to me via Harrisonburg, Va-which almost always seems to be crass and vulgar. This one however think deserves some special attention because it shows the level of crass ignorance that some Republicans have stooped to.

Here's the "joke":

Anyone who still thinks this election will be a matter of polls, attack ads, vice-presidential selections, or whatever, needs to read this:

As Barack Obama tries to draw hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls, Republicans are beginning to scrutinize registrants' eligibility as both sides draw a major battle line over voting rights...

Republicans said they are particularly worried about prospects for fraud in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and are beginning to comb thousands of new registrations in those states for ineligible applicants. In some cases the huge numbers threaten to swamp their efforts -- and those of state and local governments to verify and process applications.

This is their plan.  They know that, if this election is fair, they will lose.  So they will try to keep as many of "them" from voting as possible.

Quite a few persons of note, received a piece in their mailbox which told them that they needed to call their congressmen in order to get Offshore Drilling passed now...

The Telegraph caught my attention with this post on the speculative side of oil..

But what about its political timing?  Why did gas prices start to drop minutes after Nancy Pelosi closed down Congress and went home for break without voting on offshore drilling?  That is just plain odd.

Minutes.  Was this entire gasoline emergency an artificial set up, meant to scare the American People into arm twisting Congress to acquiesce and finally allow off shore drilling?

There have been numerous diaries as to who John McShame will select as his running mate.  So let's have a little fun with this, and pick the worst possible legitmate, though obscure choice for the senior (or is it senile) senator from Arizona to run with.  More after the fold.

CALLING DENGRE!!!!!

In an interview today on MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell-Greenspan, gets Carly Fiorina to try to name "one single legislative accomplishment" on energy in his 26 years in DC by John McCain.

Video below the fold.

It was like a knife in my heart!  For the first time in my adult life, I had to declare myself a Republican to vote in the Kansas primary.  For the next 24 hours I will have to live with myself.  

I apologize for the short diary, but a shower is in order to wash off the stink.  Let me explain after the jump.

You know, I sit here every day watching the diaries that scroll on the recent list.  I see which diaries jump right to the rec list.  It still amazes me how some people here are so unwilling to fight a fight and how many are right behind them singing kumbaya.

As I read these diaries, as I read these comments, I reflect over my own life.  This is going to start out a very personal diary and I hope after you read it you will begin to see the truth of my words.

So, off we go... back... way back... back into time...

I think there's something almost refreshing about the new "Drill Here, Drill Now!" battle cry from Republicans, oil companies, and conservatives. It's at least blisteringly up-front about being a giant screw-you to environmentalism, to the oncoming freight train of peak oil, and in fact to having any actual energy policy in general. The Republicans have decided that, since they don't have anything better to do, they're just going to use soaring gasoline prices to screw with everyone else. Soaring energy prices? Bah! Converting to alternative energy sources? Bugger off!

It's the legislative equivalent of mooning a tollbooth attendant.

But just to insert a good dose of conspiracy theory into the mix, isn't all this playing out suspiciously similarly to the Enron debacle?

It was the first years of the Bush administration: prices are soaring uncontrollably in the newly deregulated California energy markets. Enron, a company that has newly decided there is far more money to be made in marketplace speculation than in actual energy production or transmission, is powerful enough to control the flow of electricity throughout the state and region in question, which they do, squeezing supply further so that prices soar. They idle plants under their control in order to artificially reduce capacity; they reroute power away from the state, leading to an ongoing rotation of community blackouts. They and other energy companies then use the entirely manufactured demand "crisis" to demand long-term state contracts -- at locked-in rates far above what they would have gotten before the "emergency" -- as the only possible way to "solve" the problem. Republicans and Republican-controlled regulatory agencies take the side of the Enron and the corporations throughout the entire process. (Yeah, they were hoping we'd all forgotten about that -- we haven't.)

In the end, the contracts are signed, the Democratic governor of California is recalled due to a brilliantly plotted, corporate-financed campaign of misdirected consumer outrage, and the looting of the state energy markets would have gone off spectacularly except that in the process, the jackasses at Enron managed to leverage the company into a complete collapse via a number of similarly speculative/manipulative/illegal activities. Until the day they collapsed, though, they had politicians eating out of the palm of their hand, willing to grant them anything to "help" with the "crisis" that all of that unnecessary environmentalism and cruel corporate taxation had supposedly led us to.

Cut to 2008. Gasoline prices are soaring uncontrollably, and become a huge political issue. Oil companies and oil-connected politicians say that if certain corporate-friendly steps are taken to further consolidate the power of the extraction companies over existing regulation, prices will be better controlled. Republicans are at the forefront of this effort, taking the side of the corporations: we need to abandon our environmental protections, because they are suddenly killing our marketplace. We need more subsidies, and more cheap leases, and more corporate tax breaks, all so that noble but terribly put upon companies like Enron -- sorry, I mean Exxon -- can help us in this time of crisis.

What happens next? Let me guess, it's exactly what the Republicans and the oil companies are assuring us of -- we abandon the offshore drilling restrictions and, remarkably, prices almost immediately start subsiding this fall, even though not a single drop of oil is being drilled that wasn't being drilled the months before. The crisis is "solved", merely by acquiescing to something that didn't have any actual production or refinery impact. In the meantime, billions of dollars worth of new assets have been added to the very companies currently enjoying higher profits than any companies in the history of mankind.

Of course, there are differences. What Enron did was unequivocally corporate terrorism -- by intentionally cutting power to traffic lights, homes, elevators and whatnot they created an uncountable number of situations that could have led directly to injury and death, statewide. It wouldn't be reasonable to assume the same level of collusion here -- and it would be terribly irresponsible to muse on whether or not there aren't plenty of other energy executives and speculators who saw the Enron model of governmental blackmail, and decided that it was nothing short of brilliant, and looked to use it in a model in future anti-regulatory efforts.

But the similarities are striking, and in some ways, the Republican and energy company efforts to open offshore drilling -- something that everyone who isn't a baldfaced liar all agree will have zero impact on current production or prices -- are a very good analogy to the Enron blackmail. The entire purpose of new offshore leases would be as a boon to energy companies and market speculators, by infusing the speculative market with billions of dollars worth of new product at almost no expense to the companies themselves.

The oil companies can't drill those new leases, that much is clear. There's plenty of existing leases to drill, and they aren't drilling those either, and there seems no particular interest in rapidly expanding capacity in order to actually drill them.

But each company can hold those leases, and borrow against the value of those leases, and trade those leases, so that's the primary value of the new offshore plots -- as tradable assets on the speculative market. If we give them the leases (that is, charge them at the usual pittance), we're vastly increasing their available capital, vastly increasing the capital of the entire speculative market, and they don't have to lift an actual finger to see it happen. No drilling; no additional exploration; nothing. Only the creation of new paper.

In that sense, it is identical to Enron, in that these companies want these leases purely as tradable commodities in and of themselves, without actually having to do any actual extraction. It's 100% giveaway to the companies, it has nothing to do with the actual current cost of oil or gasoline, and it's being done in an environment of record profits and near-blackmail.

You have to admire the chutzpah of Republicans actually staging a pizza party on the floor of the darkened, shuttered House in order to actually celebrate their desire to help another set of corporate speculators plunder the energy markets at taxpayer and consumer expense.

Truly, the word "shameless" has lost all meaning.

Every day it seems gas prices are edging higher. For almost a year, oil prices have increased by one percent per week.  A year ago, $100 barrel seemed a nightmare fantasy to many.  Today, oil at that price is viewed almost nostalgically — as the good old days. In the face of growing price pressures during an election year, the Democratic and Republican parties have radically different answers, radically different approaches to the challenge. At the end of the day, neither is dealing with the fundamental challenges facing humanity with full honesty. One party seems caught in confusion and disarray, the other is providing direct answers to the challenge based on fundamental dishonesty — answers that will aggravate, rather than solve, our problems.

Hello, Republicans?  This is what is happening to YOUR brand! Yes, in a supposed Red State near YOU!

In the State of North Carolina, the times, they are a-changin' when it comes to the Red State / Blue State mentality.  Sure, North Carolina is mostly a Democratic State when talking local elections.  
The North Carolina State Senate and State House are controlled by Democrats and there are even a majority of U.S. House of Representatives that belong to the Democratic Party, as well as the Governorship.  Yet, North Carolina currently has two Republican Senators and on a national level has not had a majority that voted for a Democratic Candidate since Jimmy Carter.

As I said above, the times, they are a-changin'.

Our press corps, is there a spine among them?

John McCain slimes his way through the 2008 campaign, repeating what has been successful for the Republicans during the last two presidential campaigns and the 1988 campaign as well. Only Bill Clinton was able to overcome the Republican attack during his two campaigns.

The Republicans have turned the dodge into an art form. Until the Democratic Party develops an antidote to this approach, many fine candidates will struggle to win.

The American public has proven its appetite for sleeze. One need only look at the type of programming on television, the popular movies to understand that we Americans have a low threshold of intellectual thought to satisfy our quest for knowledge. If you can put it on a bumper sticker, a majority will accept it as factual and all they need to know to make a decision. Thinking is so much easier if you restrict verbal and written interchange to a subject, a predicate, and sometimes a direct object.

You know I have been dropping poetry from my book BEING BLACK: being human over the past few days because I felt my poems addressed some of the crap I see coming out of the woodwork since Obama has been nominated.

I was going to take a break today but now I have to drop this one because those guys with the flag in Obama's face really pissed me off!

Jump below for my poem of the day...

No one cares what your dreams are because they’re your dreams and only you can actually make sense of them.  And let’s face it: listening to someone retell a dream they’ve had is a bit like someone taking their cell phone into the bathroom stall with them.  I’m not sure what exactly that analogy may mean, but it sprang to mind, so I put it in.  In any event, I had this dream last night and think it more than befitting to tell as it certainly caused some reflection on our times:

So, picture, if you will, a small outdoor McCain pep rally complete with a stage.  The back of the stage is lined by many suits filled with assorted pasties (and no, that was not meant to be "pastries"... though that would’ve presented far better buns than those in this dream.  Read on to see what I mean...)

Both the Republican Party and Democratic Party always try to register people to vote.  This year, being a Democratic year, a heck of a lot more people are registering to vote as Democrats or Independents planning to vote Democrat.  There is also a highly-targeted campaign by Obama for America to register voters who they can count on and who they'll be able to easily find for turn-out efforts in November.  However, the Republican Party is also greatly known for "preventing voter fraud", which is a nice way of saying, "preventing people from voting Democrat.  The head of the Republican Party in Virginia has issued a ridiculous allegation and warning to would-be-voters.