Short diary to thank Malia Obama, 10, for sharing her birthday with so many others in Butte, Mont.

I'm the father of a 10 year old girl myself. I know how important birthdays are.

Here's my birthday wishes for you. I'll be going to my father in law's later today for a cookout. You and he share a birth date with this country. Born on the 4th of July. And I'm going to be talking to him about you and your father. I hope both you and my father in law have wonderful birthdays.

In 2006, ineffective Bush Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito won re-election with 57 percent of the vote in a year that saw Democrats take over the House nationally.

Part of this diary was originally published on June 9 at West Virginia Blue.

My connecting train was late tonight. It was hot as hell and I struck up a conversation with three young men, two black, one white, at the station about the heat and the lateness of the train. When we boarded, someone warned us the next car down didn’t have air conditioning working so I went up to the second deck and all the way to the end seat where I could stretch out. The other three followed me up and I had the end seat facing them as they sat sideways.

The man sitting closest to me, an African American in his 20s, was muscular with a tattoo of a flaming skull on his left bicep with "Protect Me From Evil" written around it (the skull not the bicep). He pulled out a book, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. His friends also began reading their books too though I could not see the titles.

Quick diary to note an idea before I fall asleep and forget it.

I was talking to the president of our county Democratic association about a couple of ideas to reach out to commuters and get them involved locally.

I guess that was still rattling around in my skull when this came to me.

The Barack Obama campaign needs to put out paper coffee cups. Here's why.

This is going to be short.

MsSpentyouth has a diary that you should read: Killing Alan: Suicide by Spreadsheet.

I've my own history of family with cancer, but her story is one that should not be happening in our country yet too frequently does.

I want to tell you a story about my father. And then I'm going to ask you to do something. It'll probably not be easy. You probably won't even like me asking you to do it. It could be one of the best things you can ever do.

On Saturday after I canvassed for our Democratic candidate Anne Barth in WV-02, I stopped at the Berkeley County Democratic headquarters. A West Virginia Serenade committee (tickets still available, see here for details) was discussing things and two of the regulars were sitting on the sofa waiting for Sen. Hillary Clinton to speak. Anne Barth and another volunteer had gone to work the crowd at the soap box derby and then were going to meet with a group at a restaurant.

casperr wrote a thank you to volunteers and I'm still from that list and adding to it.

If you volunteered for any race this season, please mention it in the comments. You deserve our thanks.

Oh this is too much. A day after Sen. Barack Obama called out Sen. Joe Lieberman I get this in my inbox:

Let me interrupt the celebration for a moment to invite you to a wonderful evening of music and politics.

But first a story.

We have to go back to the last presidential cycle. A few of you on this board remember me from back then. It seems like in many diaries now there's not many handles I recognize, but still some of us go way back.

So here was my final diary on the 2004 presidential race.

As a special for dick Cheney I'm reprinting this from April 30, 2007.

The email from presidentsecretemailaccount@rnc.com caught me by surprise.

DEar Carnaki,

We read you blog post Operation Skahira. We got a job opening for war zar and want you to apply for it. Can you come in Friday for an intervew? I like to meet people fase to fase to get an idea of what they ar like, to look into there sole. This issss all secret. My address is 160 Pencilvanya Ave, Washington. Come around to the back door cause it'ss secret

I leaned back in my chair and considered my best options.

Sources: Washington Post Faces of the Fallen, The Charleston Gazette. In cases where two addresses were listed, I went with the Gazette's listing, which was based off obituaries, news reports and Department of Defense information.

Long ago there was a Kossack named Jimmy. You've never heard of him, he had a UID in the 40s, having joined the site in that summer of free love 1968.

Jimmy was a hard working activist. Jimmy would knock on doors and do sign waves and blog until 3 a.m. and then get up to open the soup kitchen for railroad hobos at 6 a.m. so they could catch the early train to their homeless sites.

But one day in 1969 Jimmy was struck down by an SUV - a Hummer 3 - driven by then Gov. Ronald Reagan as Jimmy was helping an elderly transgendered woman across the road to vote.

I was there with Jimmy when he pulled me down to hear his dying words, his final advice to me as my mentor.

Day 3 of my Nick Rahall fundraiser.
...
U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D) of West Virginia's 3rd District (right) in the southern end of the state endorsed Sen. Barack Obama in March.
...
Let me tell you a story about U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV03).

I'm outside of Rahall's district. My representative - and I use that word loosely - is Bush Republican Shelley Moore Capito in WV-02.

Now back in the days when the Republicans thought they'd be the party in power for the next 1,000 years, if I called Capito's office with my view, it was like talking to a wall for all the good it would do.

Basically if Bush and then Tom Delay and Dennis Hastert didn't tell her to do something, she didn't do it. And if they did, she did it. But if it was a constituent from her district, unless you held the same view as Bush, she didn't care what you thought.

That's the way I felt especially in 2002 in the runup to the Iraq war.

U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D) of West Virginia's 3rd District in the southern end of the state endorsed Sen. Barack Obama in March.

Rahall, chairman of the Arab American caucus, is in a district that went largely for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Rahall did what he could do, but as kos and others have pointed out, Congressional representatives and senators do not have political machines to turn out the vote for other candidates.

But that didn't stop Rahall from trying and he deserves our thanks.

Now his Republican opponent is trying to use Rahall's support of Obama against Rahall. Do we got Rahall's back or not?

U.S. Rep. Nick Rahall (D) of West Virginia's 3rd District in the southern end of the state endorsed Sen. Barack Obama early on.

Rahall, chairman of the Arab American caucus, is in a district that went largely for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Rahall did what he could do, but as kos and others have pointed out, Congressional representatives and senators do not have political machines to turn out the vote for other candidates.

But that didn't stop Rahall from trying and he deserves our thanks.

For years I've tried to make myself a thorn in the side of Bush Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito. The day after she won in 2006, Clem and I met at Waffle House in Martinsburg to plot out what we could do to see her defeated in 2008.

Seeing and hearing how John McCain treated her today, I didn't know whether to laugh or cringe. So I did both.

Sure it's a primary and not a general election, but in a year where the Republican brand has a lower approval rating than herpes it's something to consider:

Barack Obama with just 26 percent of the Democratic votes 91,663.
John McCain with just 76 percent of all Republican votes 89,654.

More good news to consider.

Anne Barth is going to face Shelley Moore Capito.