FEMA-- Brownie's gone and the President probably still thinks they're doing a Heckuva job.

How do you figure out a way to hide millions in relief supplies from the people who need it, and then give it away to other state agencies instead?

Easy-- you create an obscure office that no one knows about, send them there and then declare that since no one applied for them they are actually not needed.

Then if you have a state government run by good ol' boys (somebody must have tipped them off) they can jump in and claim the loot to plug budget holes in their own agencies.

That's what the Bush administration did with millions of dollars in supplies that never made it to Katrina victims, many of whom are still waiting (I guess it would be a good opportunity to mention that today is July 7, 2008 which makes it officially 1,043 days they have been waiting.)

BILOXI, Mississippi (CNN) -- Prisons in Mississippi got coffee makers, pillowcases and dinnerware -- all intended for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The state's Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks took more coffee makers, cleaning supplies and other items.

Plastic containers ended up with the Mississippi Department of Finance and Administration.

Colleges, volunteer fire departments and other agencies received even more.

But the Mississippi hurricane victims who originally were intended to receive the supplies got nothing, a CNN investigation has found...

Last month, CNN revealed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had stored $85 million worth of household items in warehouses for two years. Instead of giving the supplies to victims of the 2005 hurricane, FEMA declared them surplus and gave them all away to federal agencies and 16 states in February.

The state of Louisiana -- the most hard-hit by the storm -- had not asked for any of the supplies, prompting outrage in the community after the original CNN report.

CNN's investigation showed that Mississippi was one of the 16 states that took the FEMA supplies, but it did not distribute them to Katrina victims.

Jim Marler, director of Mississippi's surplus agency, failed to return repeated phone calls over several months to explain what happened.

Agency spokeswoman Kym Wiggins said, "There may be a need, but we were not notified that there was a great need for this particular property."

That doesn't sit well with most aid groups in Mississippi. "You would have to be living under a rock not to know there is still a need," said Cass Woods, the project coordinator of Coastal Women for Change.

Wiggins said that nonprofit organizations must meet federal guidelines and register with the state and that no such groups helping the needy or homeless were registered with Mississippi's surplus agency.

"There is no specific designation outside of a disaster period that says we have to have sustained properties going to the disaster area," Wiggins said.

CNN interviewed the leaders of eight nonprofits helping Katrina victims at a Biloxi, Mississippi, church used as a staging area for community groups. All said they had no idea these items were available, and most had no idea the surplus agency existed.

Yeah. There are thousands of people who are still waiting for help, and they haven't gotten it.

Ultimately the fact that the state of Mississippi, where the story is focused knew about the goods but chose to give it to other state agencies instead of to the victims it was intended for is something which both the Bush administration and Governor Haley Barbour's office is going to have to answer for. In Louisiana, neither former Governor Kathleen Blanco nor current Governor Bobby Jindahl apparently even bothered to apply for the aid at all.

Like I said above, it is 1,043 days and counting that some people are waiting for assistance.

And Brownie's long gone, so it must be someone else who's doing a Heckuva job.

House seat lost by GOP in Mississippi leaves 199.

The Republicans lost another special election for a previously Republican open seat tonight, as Democrat Travis Childers defeated Republican Greg Davis by a solid margin to win an open seat in Mississippi.

They may spin this as just a loss of a single seat, but it was damaging for the GOP on so many more levels than that.

This is the third such race for seats that were previously held by Republicans for decades, and like the former Speaker Dennis Hastert's seat in Illinois and another in Louisiana it went Democratic, so Republicans are now 0-for-3 in these strongly contested special elections.

But this is arguably far more damaging to the GOP than the other two. In both of those cases one could argue that the Republicans had flawed candidates. But Davis was the candidate they wanted in this race, so that excuse won't fly. Further, this is probably the most heavily Republican of the three districts. Though all are Republican, in the Mississippi first district, President Bush won by a landslide, just four years ago, with 62 percent of the vote.

Further the Republican Congressional Committee, despite having been outraised by the Democrats 6-to-1 and burned by an embezzlement scandal so that they had only $7.2 million cash on hand at the end of March according to FEC reports (vs. $44 million for the Democratic congressional committee), invested heavily in this race. So did the Democrats, but a battle of attrition ultimately favors the side better prepared to accept the costs, which is the Democrats. And then the result was the same for Republicans as if they had spent nothing.

The reason they invested so heavily is that they recognize that if Republicans can even lose this district, then there is essentially no such thing this year as a 'safe' Republican district. And you know what? They're right about that.

The Bush administration also invested a measure of what little prestige they have left, sending Vice President Cheney to bolster Davis (after all, if supporting the Bush administration was seen as a positive anywhere you'd expect it to be here.) The loss means that the Bush administration has no prestige left.

The GOP attack machine was in full gear, running ads against Childers that tied him to Sen. Obama and to Rev. Wright. Clearly they miscalculated. The voters apparently don't dislike Sen. Obama in the way that they have been trained to hate previous Democratic candidates. As to Rev. Wright, most voters know that Childers has nothing to do with Rev. Wright, and recognized the attack ads as a symptom of the shortage of anything of substance to discuss on the GOP side. Their well-oiled smear machine-- failed. And if they try to run these ads nationally and/or demonize local Democrats it likely the result will be the same. For at least the past couple of decades the Republicans have been masters of the personal smear, but that plan fell flat tonight so they will have to come up with another way to run a campaign. People have gotten wise to their game.

The loss of this seat is likely to unlock a flood of endangered Republican held seats.

And just to put the cherry on top-- a number that will compound the GOP's psychological barriers this year: This seat means that the number of GOP Congressmembers now numbers 199. Nothing screams 'minority party' louder than being back below 200.

Hate crimes up nationally, lowest in a surprising place.

The FBI released statistics showing that hate crimes rose nationally by 7% over the previous year.

Nationally, 7722 hate crimes were reported. Hate crimes are defined as crimes in which the motivation is the victim's race, religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

The majority of the hate crimes reported were racially motivated. Of these, 2/3 of them involved a black victim. 20% of them involved a white victim, and the remainder involved a victim who was targetted for being of some other race.

19% of hate crimes involved religion. Of these, nearly 2/3 involved attacks against Jews.

Approximately the same percentage as religion being the motivation were carried out against victims based on sexual orientation, with male homosexuals the most frequent targets.

There is one silver lining in all of this, and it is a most unexpected one. The states with the fewest reported hate crimes, in fact none in one and only one in the other for the whole year, were Mississippi with no hate crimes reported, and Alabama with one.

Yes, you read that right. Mississippi and Alabama.

Mississippi was the state whose racism was famously associated with the movie 'Mississippi Burning,' about the murders of three civil rights workers by the Klan in 1964. It was the home state of such notable racists as depression era Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, who liked to write books comparing blacks with monkeys.

Alabama has always been associated by most of us with racial intolerance, of the most violent and malignant variety. The home state of George Wallace was the state where marchers were brutally beaten at the Edmund Pettis bridge, the state where Bull Conner's police dogs attacked peaceful demonstrators, and the state where klansman murdered four black girls by bombing a Baptist church in 1964.

Mississippi and Alabama have always been considered backwards, racist and a hotbed of racial hatred. Hardly the kind of place you'd expect to see setting a national standard for tolerance.

But that's what we see. Let's recall the words of Dr. King in his 'I have a Dream' speech:

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice...

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I'm sure there are still some racists around in Mississippi and Alabama, as there are every place. I'm sure there are still a few klansmen there, just as for that matter there are some klansmen here in Arizona. But for whatever reason, they have become more tolerant, at least when it comes to resorting to violence, than the rest of the country.

And I call that a miracle. Maybe the rest of the country should see what has changed there.

Justice later is justice still

Today, James Seale pleaded not guilty to charges that he was involved in two murders in 1964.

JACKSON, Mississippi (Reuters) - A former Ku Klux Klan member pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges in the 1964 murders of two black teenagers in Mississippi, in a case that highlights violence used by white supremacists during the civil-rights era.

Marshals escorted James Seale, 71, to and from federal court in Jackson for an initial hearing on kidnapping and conspiracy charges.

A three-count indictment says Seale trained a shotgun on the teenagers while his companions beat them. Then they attached heavy weights to the pair and threw them alive into the Mississippi River.

It will be interesting to follow this trial and listen to the evidence. And perhaps the best justice in the case may not be that which will be reserved for James Seale, if he is convicted. Rather, it may be the fact that he pleaded before a black judge today (a female one at that) and even in Mississippi segregation is as illegal as what he did defending it. Black people have the same rights to use the restroom, eat at restaurants and go anywhere that white people do. James Seale lived to see that happen in spite of his efforts.

That isn't to say that there is no more progress to be made, because there is a great deal that still has to be done before we can say that race is no longer an issue in America and that the ugliness of that era is behind us (both in the south and in the rest of America). But this trial shows that no matter how long it takes, justice can be served.