Not much to expand on here, so you will have to accept it for what it is.

CNN reports this morning on the value of supplies actually given to Katrina storm victims. The Bush Administration, GSA and FEMA proudly claimed they had given away $85 million in relief supplies, but apparently this total was accomplished by assigning the value of a crate of toilet paper to a roll of tp, etc. The real value was a paltry $18 million and not all of that was distributed. Imagine that! A whopping $18 million to an entire city destroyed with hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and much of it never distributed. How generous!

The General Services Administration, which manages federal property, over-counted cases of toilet paper, plastic sporks and other cutlery, by mistakenly counting a single item as being worth as much as multiple items contained in a package of goods.

About 2 weeks ago I sent a message to one of the Obama volunteers asking them to ask Barack to stop off in Ireland on his trip. Looks like Rep. Neal (D-MA) is on the same wave length.

"House aides confirmed yesterday that Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) is encouraging Obama to add a visit to Ireland to his agenda, holding the nation out as a model of conflict resolution. Appearing there would also serve as a boost for Obama among the tens of millions of Irish in the United States."

MSNBC

Rep Neal, we are on the same wave length. There are thousands of people in Ireland that are still in touch with relatives now living in the US and they talk all the time. Coming to Ireland and visiting the place of his ancestors would be a well-appreciated gesture in the Irish Community. AND I [me me me!] would finally get a chance to see him. Not that a Granny would ever get excitied about something like this. [OMG!! He might come HERE!! WHOOPPEE!! YEA!!! WOWZER!!!]

Strike out what isn’t appropriate to your hit diary, then copy and paste.

I have always been an Obama supporter.
I am an ardent Obama supporter.
I once supported [insert name of candidate] but now support Obama.

I believe Obama is totally wrong on [insert issue].
Optional: This is diary # [insert number] today on this issue.

I will/will not support Obama in the election.
I will/will not send him any more money.
I have cancelled my donation and requested my money back.
My donations will now go to [name of candidate or party or DNC/DCCC/DSCC or other]
Obama has/has not sent my money back.

I am not a concern/purity/McCain/Clinton troll.
Optional: I am a Democrat! I do/do not want to get Obama elected.

So here I am sitting in Ireland watching the flood disaster in Iowa and Illinois, and I am watching men filling sandbags. I did a double-take and said that looks like Obama filling bags and I was sure I was wrong. I had to be wrong. But it WAS Barack helping the people of Quincy, IL out. [Link should be on FoxNews soon] This man is great. No one else running for office would stop his campaign and go to fill sandbags. McSame would never even think of doing something like that.
I am so sorry that the country is suffering this horrendous flooding. Something serious must be done to reverse Climate Change now or we will be having floods and tornadoes even worse than what we are seeing this year. I understand FEMA got rid of all the supplies it had left over from Katrina. So what are they going to use for the next disaster? We need a serious Change of government, and a President willing to get in there and help people instead of blowing out birthday candles while cities flood.
Go Barack Obama!

Dear John, I have noted that you have to wear a hat when you are outdoors (health reasons) and I sense a great business opportunity for me here. It really bothers me that a potential future president of the United States is going to wear a baseball cap wherever he goes. It doesn’t have much presidential status, John, even with your name on it. I mean caps are...well...caps. So I am going to start a new business just in honor of you and bring some class back to this cap stuff. Now if you are inaugurated, I think we can forget the cap, per se, that day. I have in mind something in a hat on the order of something Lincoln wore, something top hattish but very tall, like a soaring, regal stove pipe providing sufficient room for your name embroidered on it, and perhaps with protective ear flaps with beer cans embroidered on those. (Never hurts to advertise the little woman’s business, does it. Hee Hee.)

I'm old enough to remember the stir when Jackie Kennedy went to France and France went insane with love for her and Jack. Bill Clinton stirred up Ireland. Al Gore is welcomed all over Europe for his stand on Climate Change.
Well, there's a new sheriff in town and Europe is in love with Obama.

But right now, in French eyes, there's a single good American: the Democratic Party nominee, Barack Obama. His book, "The Audacity of Hope," is on bestseller lists. His face is everywhere, sometimes in socialist realist images evoking Che Guevara.

An online committee for his election has drawn all-star support, including the fashion designer Sonia Rykiel, the Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the writer-philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, and Pierre Bergé, the partner of the late Yves Saint-Laurent.

More over the fold

This diary, although pretty informative, is just to get your minds off West Virginia for a minute.

Reporters Without Borders has a press release out and Al-Jazera/English is reporting that their cameraman, Sami Al-Haj, picked up in 2001 at the Pakistan/Afghanistan border has today been released. The camerman has been held at Guantanamo since 2002. He had been charged with "Interviewing OBL, gun smuggling for Al Qaeda and running an Islamist website", however, no evidence of any of these things was ever produced and no charges were ever brought against him. Reporters Without Borders and other groups have been working to free him for the last 6 1/2 years. His son was a year old when his father was picked up and is now 8 years old.

I had a friend for many years, long dead now. We met at a college in the Mid-west. The town was typical, all white, small town America, and that was my background. Growing up, the only time I saw anyone black was when we went into one of the big cities. My dear friend was black, raised in a ghetto in one of those big cities. The time was at the end of the 50’s and then into the 60’s and 70’s.
We met and we discovered that there were things that we found and liked in each other. I cannot tell you how many hours we talked about our pasts, how we were raised, what we liked and didn’t like, how we felt about things and how our lives compared. And there was much to talk about at that time as the civil rights movement had begun. JFK and RFK and MLK were assassinated, the Vietnam War was raging and thousands were dying.
But that is not what I want to write about.

MSNBC has two Nobel Prize economists on right now. They were asked which of the three - Obama, Clinton or McCain - would be best for the economy, and both replied Obama.

Joseph Stiglitz, who was connected to the Clinton presidency and a 2001 prize winner, said that Obama's speech 3 weeks ago on the economy was brilliant. He also said that the deregulation of the markets during Clinton's presidency was a mistake and the markets need to be re-regulated.

Edmund Phelps, 2006 prize winner, agreed. We need a new way of looking at the economy and Obama is the one that can do that. We do not need the thinking of the past.

What great endorsements there!
Stiglitz bio
Phelps bio
Per FlDem5 Video of show
Per ManahManah Obama's speech

I have been combing the news archives looking for those items mentioning Hillary's visits to Ireland in particular and can find nothing beyond speeches to women's groups, women parliamentarians in Dublin, and the opening of playgrounds. All very nice cheerleading things. Along the way I did run across a comment by Bill that cracked me up:

Published: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1998
Mr. Clinton sidestepped a question from one reporter about whether he supported an independent Palestinian state. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, caused a brief political furor in Israel, and among some U.S. Jewish groups, when she told a group of Israeli and Palestinian schoolchildren in May that she favored such a state.

"She did" make such a statement, Mr. Clinton said, "but she's not the president, and she's not trying to manage this peace process."

link

Guess that says it all.

Once in a while one gets an e-mail that is too funny and must be shared. This will get your mind off Tuesday for a few minutes.

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word.

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

More below

Although the Clinton campaign denied that it had officially released the photo of Obama in Somali dress, whichever damn fool did it thinking it was soooo very clever has unloosed a storm on the other side of the world.
The Kenyans, having just agreed to a peace between themselves, are now demanding that Washington apologize for insinuating that there was anything wrong in dressing a dignitary in native dress and insulting a tribal elder because he had done it.
The Kenyans are excited about Obama's campaign in much the same way as the Irish in Ireland were about Kennedy's campaign and they are paying close attention to the news, and they are not happy today.
More over

Two quick observations on the Florida vote. Everything has been addressed to Hillary's ploy to allege the Florida voters have been disenfranchised after she agreed that the votes would not count there. That may have been true up to the point that any ballots were cast, but after that the voters that were disenfranchised were the voters that did not bother to vote because they knew their votes would not count, per the DNC.
Voters that had another reason to vote came out to vote in droves on the Florida property tax measure, and those would be the older voters who own property, and who would favor Clinton. The younger voters, who do not own property, would be the ones that tended not to bother voting, and those would tend to favor Obama. We cannot make this Florida election right again no matter what we do; it is grossly flawed to begin with and flawed at the end. The DNC would be damned if they tried to change the rules now.
Second....

So our war-mongering, blubbering, corrupt and lame duck administration is spreading the word on how they are getting tough new sanctions against that evil Iran. Russia, however, has let the world know exactly what is being discussed for the new UN resolution.

Ajax the Greater had a diary today that discussed Bloomberg entering the race. After watching MTP today, I found myself asking Myself a couple of questions. If Hillary is going to be the Democratic nominee, can I vote for her? I had to hold my nose voting for Maria Cantwell, but would I be able to do the same with Hillary? What would I do if Bloomberg came in as a third party candidate? He would make a good executive and maybe better than Hillary. Scuttle seems to be that if Hillary IS the candidate on the Dem side, nothing would stop Bloomberg from jumping in with a war chest of a billion Dollars.
I'd like to take Ajax' poll a step farther. If Hillary is the Dem candidate and Obama looks to be shut out but joins with Bloomberg, would I vote for a Bloomberg/Obama Independent ticket?

While we obsessively count votes and delegates, and try to figure where support is coming from and going to, and agonize over whether tears are real or not, one of our candidates has made time in the chaos of a campaign to try to bring some peace and hope to the world.
Elections in Kenya are very different. The latest has brought the horrific deaths of many hundreds of people. Now the "government" has brought back the Mungiki, an ethnic Kikuyu gang notorious for beheading its victims, to solve its problems.

Please turn the page

Looks like in the next few minutes, we will be seeing a McCain-Lieberman ticket....in the spirit of bipartisanship, of course. How can Reid now possibly remove Lieberman when he is so good at reaching across the aisle to his Republican brethren? Will Joe run as a Democrat? Did he really switch parties? Will he run as an Independent?
If the Dems in Congress do not take this to be the greatest insult ever, I will be blown away. John McCain stands for everything the Dems purport to be against. Are we being driven to a one-party system?
If I am wrong, please use this diary as yet another thread to give old Joe what he deserves.