Obama's spokesman, Hari Sevugen criticized Lieberman and Graham's ties to the Vets for Freedom group today saying:

"It’s not surprising to learn that Senator McCain, who waited nearly 15 months to produce a conflicts policy that his own staff admitted was developed just to deal with a ‘perception problem,’ is now not enforcing that policy," Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan said in a statement. "But it does beg the question of whether he’s ready to change the way Washington works if he’s not even ready to enforce his own rules to change the way his campaign works."

The April fundraising numbers are out and Obama beats Clinton and the Republican nominee, McCain, hands down, but I think we need to send a bigger message.  
Donate whatever you can and lets raise more money for Obama in May than his April numbers.

I didn't donate as much in April as I did in March; I was lax and it seems a lot of other people were as well, so this is a friendly reminder to donate whatever you can.  Ten bucks will help.

Selim Algar of the The New York Post has the story that the little girl who recited a poem on the tarmac at the air base in Tuzla is 'stunned and outraged' that the former First Lady of the United States would make up such a blatant lie.

Emina Bicakcic now 20 and studying to become a doctor, told The Post she stood on the tarmac at the air base in Tuzla, greeted Clinton and even had time to share the lines of verse she'd written - all without fear of attack from an unseen enemy.

"I was surprised when I heard this," Bicakcic said, referring to Clinton's assertion that she braved snipers upon landing, ducking and sprinting to military vehicles.

Katrina victims whose homes were reduced to mold covered framing, desperate for money to rebuild, living in government provided poisonous trailers finally won a federal grant and are now being told they have to pay it back.

The Associated Press has the story of another chapter in the Bush Administration's bungling incompetence of Hurricane Katrina:

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."

CNN has a new poll out today showing the race between Clinton and Obama is a tie in Texas.

In the survey, out Monday, 50 percent of likely Democratic primary voters support Clinton as their choice for the party's nominee, with 48 percent backing Obama.

But taking into account the poll's sampling error of plus or minus 4½ percentage points for Democratic respondents, the race is a virtual tie.

Peter Wehner, who served until March of 2007 as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives, has an article out in today's Washington Post about why Republicans like Obama.

Barack Obama is not only popular among Democrats, he's also an appealing figure to many Republicans. Former GOP House member Joe Scarborough, now a host on MSNBC, reports that after every important Obama speech, he is inundated with e-mails praising the speech -- with most of them coming from Republicans. William Bennett, an influential conservative intellectual, has said favorable things about Obama. So have Rich Lowry of National Review and Peggy Noonan. And so have I.

Nancy Dinardo, Chairwoman for the CT Democratic Party issued a statement on how Joe Lieberman has abandoned his Democratic principles and how in July of 2006 he said he would work in 2008 to get a Democrat elected to the White House.

Her statement is a little late and probably would have helped more around August of 2006, but better late than never.

The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work trying to devise a scoring system for hospitals and health care providers.  This story is on the front page of MSNBC home page and I didn't see a diary on this potential outrage.

The project, dubbed "MedFICO" in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.

Julie Rovner of NPR news asked all the presidential candidates about their individual health plan coverage and the only Republican candidate to respond was John McCain.  Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney all refused to say what they use for personal health insurance coverage.  Giuliani is a cancer survivor, so I would think it would be hard for him to get private insurance coverage, or is he still covered under his former business, 'Giuliani Partners' with Cobra insurance? We won't know because he wouldn't say, but it would be interesting to see how the advocates of the 'free market' navigate the waters of profit first when it comes to health troubles.

I was just reading over at ABC The Blotter that the Department of Energy has lost 308,000 barrels of oil that was designated for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  How does this happen?  Or is it like Empywheel writes and just Dick stealing from the US taxpayer again to give to his oil buddies?

How do you not notice when 308,000 barrels of oil go missing?

That's the question government auditors were asking after they looked into the Department of Energy's management of oil received for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a critical program to assure energy stability in the U.S. in case of an oil crisis.

Last May I received a phone call from a man telling me he heard I was interested in running for office. I was quite confused as I've never had an inkling to run for office and told him so.  He then told me my name was put forth as someone who would be a good candidate as the Democratic Town Committee lacked people to run.

I am partisan enough that I could not let a Republican walk into a seat unopposed, so that is how I came to be running for the Board of Education.  I told myself I would do my best and made up campaign brochures and starting knocking on doors.  I won this past Tuesday and here brings my dilemma; the Board recites the Pledge of Allegiance before every meeting and I don't agree with the Pledge.

The Observer has a story out how clothes destined for Americans malls just in time for the holidays are being made with child 'slave' labor in India.

Child workers, some as young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids, one of the most successful arms of the high street giant.

Speaking to The Observer, the children described long hours of unwaged work, as well as threats and beatings.

Yes, you read that right, unwaged work, these kids weren't even being paid!

I have a debilitating fear of spiders.  I just saw one as I was walking towards my computer to check Daily Kos - it was about the size of a quarter, brown, and it came wandering out from underneath my desk. My scream literally made the spider jump, along with my significant other who says my blood curdling scream is going to give him a heart attack one of these days.

Logically I know I'm much bigger than the spider and that I can do way more harm to it then it can do to me, but there is no logic when you have a phobia as bad as I have.  I'm not sure where my paralyzing fear came from - I only know that I have always been afraid of spiders as long as I can remember.  

The little wiry spiders don't bother me, I certainly don't like them, but they don't have the same effect on me as the big, hairy, brown ones do.

A government audit expected to be released Tuesday can't account for most of the 1.2 billion paid to Dyncorp since 2004 to train Iraqi police officers.  The article in today's New York Times goes on to say a review of security practices was ordered by Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, last month.

Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, said Ms. Rice would closely examine the report’s findings and recommendations and consult with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on what steps to take.

Mr. Gates, who is traveling overseas this week, is pressing for the nearly 10,000 armed security contractors now working for the United States government in Iraq to fall under a single authority, most likely the American military, in an effort to bring the contractors under tighter control.

Robert Bateman, a US Army Infantry Officer who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, penned a piece in the Chicago Tribune today, titled, Blackwater and me: a love story it ain't about Blackwater's out of control practices which twice came close to killing him.

This comes in the wake of Newsweek's story that Blackwater drew their guns on US soldiers, diaried here by MsLibrarian.

Myanmar's public internet access has been cut in an effort to shut down the flow of information that journalists, activists and bloggers are trying to get out to the world.  

Al Jazeera reports that officials have blamed the internet black out on a damaged underwater cable, but bloggers and activists say it is a deliberate move to cut off the flow of information.

Picture credit: AP

Friday's edition of the Guardian reviews a new book by Melissa Farley titled, "Prostitution and Trafficking in Nevada: Making the Connections", about her two year investigation into Nevada's legal brothels.

During a two-year investigation, the author, Melissa Farley, visited eight legal brothels in Nevada, interviewing 45 women and a number of brothel owners. Far from enjoying better conditions than those who work illegally, the prostitutes she spoke to are often subject to slave-like conditions.
Described as "pussy penitentiaries" by one interviewee, the brothels tend to be in the middle of nowhere, out of sight of ordinary Nevadans. (Brothels are officially allowed only in counties with populations of fewer than 400,000, so prostitution remains an illegal - though vast - trade in conurbations such as Las Vegas.) The brothel prostitutes often live in prison-like conditions, locked in or forbidden to leave.

Among the ruins of Bahgdad with its burned out shops and homes from numerous suicide bombers, the new American Embassy is officially transferred to the US government today.  Situated on 104 acres on the west bank of the Tigris River, it's bigger than Saddam's palace with a cinema, gym, pool, electricity and plentiful, clean running water.  It's built on the backs of slaves and is also quite toxic.

Picture credit: Martin Fletcher, UK Times Online