perspective

Well, it's official. Tony Snow got the job. Can you get more transparent than hiring a talking head from a right-wing "news" organization? Bill Kristol gets my quote of the day award for this: "It'll be nice to have a fair and balanced press secretary." It'd be funnier if he wasn't being serious. I'm taking suggestions on possible countries to move to. Right now I'm leaning towards Ireland--they love the Josh Ritter as much as I do it seems. Plus, you know, there's that whole heritage thing I've got going on.

It only took about 3 years, but the U.N. has imposed sanctions on 4 men accused of being involved in the Darfur genocide. 3 years, possibly hundreds of thousands dead, and millions forced from their homes. I go back and forth on my feelings towards the U.N. It's one of those good-in-theory organizations. Unfortunately, the U.S. has a tendency to make the U.N. irrelevant thereby taking away any power it could have. That and we haven't paid our dues to the U.N. in forever in a masterful attempt at strongarming the U.N. into doing what we want. To say that Darfur has been woefully underreported is an understatement. Here's a report from last July about it. In 2004--at the height of the violence--the 3 major news networks aired a combined total of 26 minutes on the situation. The Katie Holmes/Tom Cruise engagement received 12 times more coverage and the Michael Jackson trial got 50 times more coverage. I consider myself to be a fairly informed citizen and yet I think I'm woefully undereducated about the situation. I stumbled across this blog that has a ton of links. I strongly urge you to educate yourself about Darfur. Don't wait for it to hit the front page of your newspaper because it won't. If you even remotely consider yourself to be a compassionate person, you'll start doing everything you can to bring this issue to the forefront. While the U.S. sits back and bemoans our high gas prices, there are families being driven from their homes, women being raped, and people being slaughtered.

$3.00 a gallon doesn't seem so tragic anymore now does it?