The Roan Plateau is a huge swath of land that spans thousands acres on Colorado’s western slope. On August 14th, the Bureau of Land Management fetched $114 million from oil and gas companies for 55,000 acres on top of the Roan Plateau.

The main bidder was Vantage Energy, which purchased about 35,000 acres of the 55,000 acres up for lease.

Vantage is backed by two venture-capital funds — the Carlyle Group and Riverstone Energy,

51% of sale proceeds will go to the U.S. treasury and the other 49% will go to the state of Colorado.

Governor Ritter had proposed that the 55,000 acres leased by the Bureau of Land Management be leased over a period of time instead of all at once. This phase leasing strategy, according to Governor Ritter would have, “maximized the value of the natural-gas resource beneath the Roan over a longer period of time.”

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Like Virgil leading Dante through the "Inferno" I took a walk around downtown Denver with the lead organizer for the Recreate 68, Glenn Spagnuolo. We talked about the differences in this year's protest and protests of yore. Fortunately, Rennie Davis of the original Chicago 7, was able to provide some insight as to where today's protest movements are missing something that was present in the late 1960s.

Today at the Tent State Music Festival, Rage Against the Machine headlined a star studded line-up including the Flobots, Wayne Kramer from the MC5s, the Coup and State Radio. Check out interviews with Wayne Kramer, Andy ROK and Johnny 5 of the Flobots and Boots from the Coup at http://think.mtv.com/profile/trevorFmartin.

Two key members from the coalition that brought Rage Against the Machine to Denver for the DNC sat down with THINK MTV to describe what their organizations were all about. Garrett Reppenhagen, a member of the Iraq Veterans to Against the War (IVAW), and Adam Jung, an organizer for Tent State University, talked with THINK MTV via mobile broadcast. Check out their interviews brought to you by Flixwagon at http://think.mtv.com/profile/trevorFmartin.

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Music transcends generations. It gives us a look into the past at what the composers, songwriters, vocalists and producers were thinking and feeling about the times.

The 2008 convention in Denver will have its own sound, its own lyrical representation, frozen in time as if it were an ice core where the folks of this generation can look back and say, "OMG...lmao, I remember that song, a/s/l/p???"

Kidding, btw, but the list of hyper culminating artists and speakers to perform outside of the Pepsi...

I've always wanted to be that guy on the campaign trail that puts together the "playlist" for campaign events. If I could meet that guy, I'd hand him a mixed tape with my favorite compilations and look him square in the eye with a slightly tilted neck, lean over and say, "Badass."

Every political festival needs a group of songs that puts a theme to it. Those great songs that every political party plays to get the crowd pumped up before their candidate comes to the stage. This playlist does nothing of the sort, in fact some of it is anti political, not to be confused with apathetic. The themes below are lurid conjectures with tenuous political meaning at best but if you put them on an iPod playlist, I promise no shuffle shame!

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The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing are about to get underway, prior to the games, I met some of America’s athletes who will be competing and for most of these young athletes it’s their first Olympic games. They all seem to have one thought on the mind and that is show the world the best performance they’ve got in ‘em