Well said

Bob Harris says it better than I could.

$35 million. Swell.

The death toll is rapidly approaching six digits -- imagine 30 September 11ths, if you wish, with all the sudden speed, chaos, and complete wreckage of human life that entails -- with the number of affected people surely ten times that high. And the richest country in the world, the one which believes itself to be singular among nations (thus ironically fulfilling the notion before the neurons have even cooled), can only muster a few dollars per life destroyed.

What's $35 million?

The amount it takes to fix up one park in Pittsburgh.

It's exactly one new school in Montclair, New Jersey.

It's what Dick Cheney put in his own back pocket by ditching his Halliburton stock.

And it's one four-thousandth of what the U.S. has spent invading and occupying Iraq.

Tens of thousands of dead in a dozen countries on two continents, after a disaster so large it literally changed the map of Indonesia and completely obliterated the southernmost tip of India.

Survival infrastructures are simply gone now in many places. Famine and pestilence are likely to take at least as many lives if the rest of us fellow humans don't do enough to help right now.

$35 million. George W. Bush is telling the largest Muslim nation on Earth that the massive destruction in Aceh is worth less than the United States spends on occupying Iraq every day.

Obscenity.

I would add that it's really fucking sad when the re-elected President can't get off his ass on his ranch for four days except to give a lame-ass press-conference. I'm a little surprised he wasn't choking on a pretzel again. Or falling off a Segway. Or whatever excuse they're using this time.

Four more years of this shit, even. Unless the Plame indictments come down. Or the Abu Ghraib memos get traced back. Or the press does its damn job. Exactly when will America realize the emperor has no clothes? From where I sit, blood-stained hands and the bloated filth of crony capitalism doesn't look much like fine silks.