Obama got a packed house and huge applause before saying anything about what he would do as president. For a while it was all about the influence of lobbyists in Washington, the tragedy of Katrina, the tragedy of Iraq, the need for a politics of the people, the need for hope and optimism. All opposition to the way things are, and the need for something vaguely better.

All feel good. And a lot of people clearly felt good in the room. A lot of people shouted "all right!" "you said it!"

But what did he say? He talked about what he did in Illinois. He talked about how bad things are. He said he believes in hope. But what would he do if he were president? For a while, Obama gave us no idea, other than hope, which he said is the cause he will work for every single day as president.

Finally, Obama got to some substance. He said he wants to bring together businesses and unions and insurance companies to solve our health care crisis. He promoted his "universal health care plan that covers every American." But his plan does not cover every American, and as long as it includes the insurance companies, how much hope can there be for it?

Boo-hoo! I made Tim Griffin cry.

He cried. Then he lied.

You remember Tim. Karl Rove's right hand (right claw?) man. The GOP's ragin' cagin' man.

Griffin is the Rove-bot exposed by our BBC Newsnight investigations team as the man who gathered and sent out the infamous 'caging' lists to Republican state chairmen during the 2004 election.

Caging lists, BBC discovered, were used secretly as a basis to challenge the right to vote of thousands of citizens - including the homeless, students and soldiers sent overseas. The day after BBC broadcast that the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sought our evidence on Griffin, Tim resigned his post as US Attorney for Arkansas. That job was a little gift from Karl Rove who made room for his man Griffin by demanding the firing of US prosecutor Bud Cummins.

Last week, our cameras captured Griffin, all teary-eyed, in his humiliating kiss-off speech delivered in Little Rock at the University of Arkansas where he moaned that, "public service isn't worth it."

The current scandal involving the firing of U.S. attorneys cannot be separated from the Bush administration's scheme to suppress black, poor and working class voters. In order to divert attention from its voter suppression tactics that won Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004, the Bush administration created the myth of "voter fraud." Using fake "voting rights" organizations, obscure groups to finance civil suits and pressure on the U.S. Department of Justice to bring criminal charges against voter registration organizations, Karl Rove and his political operatives like Mark F. "Thor" Hearne have succeeded in undermining the United States' democracy.

"Hearne was one of the most important Bush operatives that almost nobody in America has ever heard of. He applied his vote-suppressing trade from coast to coast, behind the scenes, in a well-funded systematic effort to undermine democracy and keep voters – Democratic voters – from exercising their legal franchise," Brad Friedman, Editor of Bradblog, told the Free Press. Bradblog was the first to reveal Hearne's masquerade as a voting rights advocate.

Experience shows that history, like nature, does not move in a linear way, in a straight line. It is characterized by long periods of time when, on the surface, little seems to be changing. Then, all of a sudden, big changes can happen, much more quickly than anyone thought possible.

We are facing this reality in a negative sense with the transcendent issue of climate change. The hard truth of the matter is that we are in great danger of experiencing soon, within years, not decades, a “climate snap,” a shift from the general climate reality the world has been experiencing for the past 10,000 years, to one characterized by freakish, violent and persistent major storms, spreading drought and wildfires, extensive plant and animal species extinction, water scarcity and crop failures on a massive scale, and accelerated sea level rise.

This is what the world scientific community is telling us. The rapid heating up of our atmosphere, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, is the evidence which leaves no room for doubt.