It's time, once again, for me to write about my time at the convention, taking in all the important parts of the convention but emphasizing myself.

It's a harrowing tale. Join me as I relive my time spent with my good libertarian friend Bob Barr, some LaRouchies, quite a few great candidates many, many many great bloggers, and quite a lot of refreshing beverages.

Hats were stolen, hearts were broken, and I even found a protege to indoctrinate.

And yes, the Squirmy Rooter and Rick Astley were involved.

Join me below the fold.

Sorry I'm late, y'all. Breakfast with the candidates and showering and whatnot.

Debbie Cook, Huntington Beach mayor is up now.

Serves on two non-profit boards

Study for Peak Oil ???

Post-Carbon Institute.

Jerome A Paris is awesome, and without the Internets, she'd never be Energy Smart.

The down button is missing from her PC.

Picture: "A Road Forward"-Bliss Rd and Dead End crossroads.

JeffLieber turns out to be a DEA official, so I will soon be arrested for underage drinking.

Help, help, I'm being repressed.

It's his second job.

He brought the Squirmy Rooter, too, but it's not here now.

Maybe later ...

Meeting people terrifies him.

Ben Masel wants to get me in trouble. I'm in!

Sign on the men's room door: Larry Craig Caucus

What is this world coming to? I always thought that if only two things in this world were certain, they were these:

1. It's the members of the Democrat party that flip-flop

2. Ron Paul will always vote against spending money that was stolen by force by the Government from innocent freedom-loving Americans.

Yet today, my beliefs have been cruelly torn asunder. Ron Paul joined the Democrat party in stealing our money, and the Republicans flip-flopped on taking more of our money for the Socialist Medicare program.

I am very, very upset.

As you probably heard, last week the Obama campaign began the general election with an 18-state ad buy

In addition to the presence of 6 red states Kerry never advertised in (AK,  GA, IN, MT, NC, ND), many of us noted that the ad isn't running in 4 blue states where Kerry ran ads.

Kerry won Maine by 9 points, and Obama has a 22 point lead in the latest poll.

Since the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party was founded in 1944, only 3 times has Minnesota failed to vote for its nominee (still McGovern's 2nd best state after MA in 1972, and Stevenson's best non-former slave state in 1956), and most pollsters have shown Obama up by double digits.

Washington went for Kerry by 7 points and nearly every poll has Obama up by double digits, so that's explained.

But most Oregon polls have him up by only by single digits; Kerry won by only 4 points, and Oregon was one of 4 states (along with IA, NM and WI) that Gore won by only half a point; had he lost them all, Florida would have been irrelevant.

It turns out that he is advertising there after all.

He's just contracted it out ... to Republican Senator Gordon Smith

Kossacks Under 35 is a weekly diary series designed to create a community within DailyKos that focuses on young people. Our overall goals are to work on increasing young voters' Democratic majority, and to raise awareness about issues that particularly affect young people, with a potential eye to policy solutions. Kossacks of all ages are welcome to participate (and do!), but the overall framework of each diary will likely be on or from a younger person's perspective. If you would like more information or want to contribute a diary, please email kath25 at kossacksunder35 (at) gmail dot com

While everybody benefits from a mass transit system, it's a more pressing issue for young people.

Of course, that's not to say that even younger Americans use mass transit regularly; in 2006, only 5% of Americans got to work using mass transit.

There are several reasons so few Americans use mass transit.
The biggest reason, though, is that we haven't built it.

In a strong blow to the chances of a dystopia like GATTACA, the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act has unanimously   passed the United States Senate after apparently minor changes made to capitulate to Tom Coburn (because, of course, unlike Chris Dodd's hold on the FISA bill, Coburn's hold matters)

One of Senator Coburn’s main concerns was that the bill might subject employers to civil rights lawsuits stemming from disputes over medical coverage. ... "We would have created a trial lawyers’ bonanza," he said.

Senator Coburn, a medical doctor, had called for a "firewall" between the employer and insurance sections of the bill. "We withstood all the criticism we got from lots of people, and now we got it fixed," he said.

This bill prohibits discrimination in health insurance and employment based on genetic information.

Since it passed unanimously in the Senate and with only 3 NAYs in the House (fake libertarian R0n P4v1 and 2 other extremists), I expect the House to pass the minorly amended version soon, at which point it will go to Bush, who will likely sign it.

Where's the darn coverage? It looks like it's headed for a runoff.

Right now the Republican is up 29,521-29,169 over Travis Childers, with the other candidates getting enough votes to keep it 48% to 47% [50% is necessary to avoid the May 13th runoff]

Nearly all the votes are in. Of the two outstanding counties, one is 30% black and one is majority-black, so it seems highly unlikely that the Repub wins outright tonight.

Before Roger Wicker won this district in the '94 Republican rEVOLution, it was held for a long time by Jamie L. Whitten. And I mean a very long time. When he first took office, the Japanese had not yet bombed Pearl Harbor.

He served as Appropriations Committee chairman from 1979 until he was removed from the position by House liberals in a coup, installing William Natcher until he died in early 1994, at which point Dave Obey became chairman, a position he now holds again.

Update: Travis Childers takes the lead, 29,997 to 29,659

I'd been wondering why Senator Obama chose the word "bitter" in his remarks.  I've just heard from an unreliable source that Obama chose to use "bitter" as a pander to Jewish voters.

See, Passover (or, as John McCain would say, Jewish Easter) is starting just days before the Pennsylvania primary, and the Jewish vote is likely to be key to winning the Pennsylvania suburbs, which is a must for Senator Obama.

On Passover, the youngest (that would be Senator Obama, since he's seen as so young and gets all the youth vote) asks four questions.

One of those questions is "Why is it that on all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs, but on this night we eat only bitter herbs?"

Some misguided individuals may write polling diaries on presidential race polls, like the poll showing Obama up 8 in Pennsylvania or down 17 in North Carolina.

But nobody writes about the most crucial issue facing us these days:

How many Americans have been rickroll'd?

SurveyUSA estimates that at least 18 million Americans have now been "Rickrolled," according to this latest national poll of 959 adults, conducted 04/08/08.

Unsurprisingly, the major difference in the crosstabs is by age group.

7% of 18-34 year olds have been rickrolled, while only 3% of those in the John McAncient demographic have been rickroll'd. Moreover, 66% of 18-34 know what rickrolling is, whereas a majority of those 35 and up have no idea.

Earlier today, an Israeli/Palestine diary was posted about H.R. 185. Given the anti-Semitism and the lack of a working link, the comments section focused on that rather than on the bill at hand.

I decided to check out this bill for myself and see what it was all about.

Now that I've read through the bill, I see the diarist was right. That bill goes against our fundamental American values.

More below the fold.

Interesting news coming separately from the chief election officials of these 8 states.

In New York, there were nearly 100,000 affidavit and absentee ballots left uncounted in heavily black areas of the city. Under pressure from Assemblywoman Jenkins charge that "They are stealing this election, " they have finally counted the ballots.

Similar stories are coming from Massachusetts, Tennessee, New Jersey,  Arkansas,  Texas, Ohio, and New Hampshire.

In short: Senator Clinton's vote was heavily overstated.

See this mem from somerville diary for an explanation of the edscan phenomenon (you can and should join the edheads on Google.

In his own verse:

I have written many "diaries" trying to stimulate the Democratic voter
to "know" about the conspiracy to overthrow their government.
None have been more important than this sentence.
The purpose of the conspiracy was to undermine the very core of our democracy by defrauding the Democratic voter in every way possible.

But what, pray tell, is this conspiracy? I've done some searching, and I think I've figured it out.

This diary combines the facts he's given us about the conspiracy in his diaries with some outside research at Wikipedia.

And I've unraveled the conspiracy.

Yeah, I have an enormous ego and a diary left to post. So contact administration and take legal action against me.

When GoldnI did those GENRs back in 2007, I said that I'd be posting an ego-related diary, and I figure that there's no time like the present.

So come on, join the DemocraticLuntz club.

If you don't, you'd better keep a close watch on your hat, or else ...

Charter members are:

1. filmgeek83

2. Mogolori

3. DemocraticLuntz

4. Armando

5. JR

6. socratic

7. SallyCat

8. Drewid

9. ballerina X

10. LaEscapee

Get a 2-digit # while you still can!!!

More members below.

I almost saw Fred at a Bojangles in South Carolina right before he went back to sleep/dropped out.  I was down there campaigning for Obama and hit up a black neighborhood in the Columbia suburbs in the pouring, cold, rain. My literature got absolutely destroyed. However, every single person I canvassed was for Obama-that's when I started feeling really good about his chances, although Nevada was somewhat of a disappointment.

Anyway, enough about me. Fred has decided to ignore his great-grandchildren

and spend his time destroying America via the big screen.

My favorite Fred moment was this one, where he was briefly awake.

Thank heavens that somebody is working to make McCain's life difficult. That somebody would be supporters of the tin-foil hood wearing Congressman from Texas, Dr. No (a.k.a. R0n P4v1)

The Ron Paul rEVOLution is apparently just getting started in much of the country.

Despite getting only 4.5% of the vote in the Missouri primary, the Paul hordes were able to take 1/3 of the state delegates to the convention (and will try to rewrite the rules at the convention to favor Ron Paul).

The Wright situation has shown that should one's religious organization or pastor have any views one finds wrong/distasteful/out of mainstream, one must reject and denounce them.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, while having been raised an Episcopalian, for the last 15 years, McCain has been a member of the Southern Baptist Convention.

As such, it is our duty to find things the SBC has done/proclaimed that McCain must disavow, and coordinate methods to demand that he disavow these views.

Here are some to start with:

Reposted at desmoinesdem's behest

Note that this does not include the final vote on the bankruptcy bill, which for the record Obama did in fact vote against [Hillary was with Bill for his surgery and didn't vote]).

I'm not going to speculate on why they voted how they did, unless it's clear from the Congressional Record. That is what the comments section and many, many, many diaries are for.

I will just link to the vote, give as much detail as is necessary to explain what the vote was on, and say how each one voted, as well as how the rest of the Senate voted in terms of party (Joe Lieberman and Jim Jeffords are counted as Democrats).

If the summary given on the page with the roll call vote seems too brief or confusing to me, I take statements from the Congressional Record to help explain them.

These diaries are intended primarily as a reference, and as one (not the only, but one) source where one can find differences between the various candidates for president.

As a disclaimer, I support Obama, but I've tried hard not to be biased.