Strange beer-fellows

The Los Angeles Times has a political blog by Craig Howie about the invitation from the President, and who's related to whom (much to everyone's surprise, undoubtedly):

Turns out that Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. may actually be related through Irish ancestry to the police officer who arrested him in his own house earlier this month, according to ABC News. No, really!
President Obama, who initially said the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police department "acted stupidly," then on second thought sort of recalibrated his comments, has pledged to host the two for a "beer summit" and, hopefully, a make-up at the White House today.
One can only imagine how the proceedings will end, given that Professor Gates, who is half-Irish, says he can trace his ancestry to the Niall of the Nine Hostages, one of Ireland's most prolific warriors, to whom Sergeant James Crowley also attributes his family roots. However boozy it may get (maybe with a late-evening rendition of Molly Malone, who knows?) hopefully it won't set Obama back too much. These kind of familiar relationships do tend to crop up in Washington: President Obama is eighth cousin to former vice president Dick Cheney, and Obama is also related to six other U.S. presidents through his mother, Ann Soetoro, and the former British prime minister, Winston Churchill.
Churchill's wartime ally, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was related to eleven presidents by blood or marriage, while the Bush family is distantly related to the British Queen. Barbara Pierce Bush, the former first lady, is a great-great-great niece of the fourteenth president, Franklin Pierce. At least sixteen other presidents were of Scots-Irish descent, including Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant and Woodrow Wilson.
IrishCentral.com reports that up to three million Irish-Americans may be descended from Niall, the Irish "High King" at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405, who was said to have struck the fear o' death into the hearts of the English, the Scots, the French, and even the Romans.