Bush and Abbas on Friday, LaHood on Thursday, and Iraq Today (Update 3)

The US President met the President of the West Bank friday. I wrote this down then.

In translation, Abbas said he and Bush were "committed" to "eliminating" road blocks to peace, which, considering Bush's previous statements on Hamas, obviously includes eliminating the elected government of Palestine.

UPDATE: Might take a while, but to do a search of all the times Bush has said something is a "priority" or "a top priority" or "the top priority" might make for some pretty muddle headed amusement.

This next bit sorta seems dangerously trivial.

Roy "The" LaHood (R-Ill, part of the former Hastert machine), spoke at the Arab-American Dinner.

I think he had some arrangement with some members of the audience to clap in the middle of this sentence, to fool the assembled people (many of whom would be immigrants, or first or second generation) into clapping for the Republican's current immigration policy. 

(close paraphrase)
My ancestors did what all good immigrants did to make this country great: (pause, a few claps, then more claps as we realize he's saying immigrants make this country great) learn English, work hard and play by the rules.

Article about Iraq contracts and descoping

But rather than terminate the [lucrative Bechtel] project, U.S. officials modified the contract to change the scope of the work. As a result, a U.S. database of Iraq reconstruction contracts shows the project as complete "when in fact the hospital was only 35% complete when work was stopped," said investigators in describing the practice of "descoping" as frequent.

Little Georgie only got 3 right out of 10 on his test, let's make 3 into the new 100 percent!  Isn't this the soft bigotry of low expectations? 

UPDATE: I don't think Danielle meant to say we were wasting taxpayers:

Danielle Brian, executive director of the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said the latest audit report points to significant U.S. taxpayer waste in current reconstruction efforts.