Frances Rice charges that "Democrats have a 150-year history of using race as a political weapon to keep blacks in virtual slavery and Republicans out of power."

Mrs. Rice was not only critical of white Democrats, but the party's black members, too. She says in her "black community, people are outraged about how Democrat demagogues, including billionaire Bob Johnson of [Black Entertainment Television], are treating Obama as an 'uppity Negro' who dares to defy their white Democratic Party masters."

Different George

Former Republican George Phillies has just been endorsed for the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nomination by the executive committee of "Outright Libertarians."

Who and who?

First, Outright Libertarians identify themselves as the country's most influential LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Libertarian organization.

As for the 60-year-old Mr. Phillies, a scientist and college physics professor who previously served in the U.S. Army Reserves, he says he was a Republican until the late 1980s, abandoning the party when the government and deficit "got bigger," taxes "kept going up," and the party's social agenda got on the "wrong track."

"I am not a social conservative," he explains. "When George Bush attached himself to the 'Christian Right', he took the Republican Party his way, and I went my way."