I kinda feel your pain on this one. I've been reading the headlines in the local paper and the Seattle PI (which are more like running tallies on donation), and It's becoming a giant pissing match between countries. Australlia is doing an awesome job of actually organizing and aiding in the physical sense. They are also hefty donaters, and we've done a fair share of humanitarian work there.

At first I was really dissapointed that we were only paying out 35 mil. to what is possibly the greatest natural disaster of my lifetime. That was a bit shabby, but I thought our second wave of funding was more than suffecient. I would have rather seen us offer more physical aide, but since the whole damn army is in Iraq... that's not likely. There's a lot to be done. A lot of money to get it done. Seriously though, America doesn't OWE millions of dollars just because a natural disaster occured. I think we should feel obliged to aid, but essentially we are just reallocating borrowed money. All these donations combined couldn't buy us out of our national debt!

I do think that we should avoid looking at this from a "what we get out of the deal." standpoint though. The world should come together over a disaster this catastrophic... but to be obligated to donate hundreds of millions while we are already busy rebuilding the heart of the middle east... uhm... there's only so much we can do at once!

My solution would be to reduce funds to Iraq and redirect it toward the tsunamis (which I feel is a more worthy cause), but that would only make things more difficult for our troops and us in the long run.

It seems no matter what we do we'll be criticized anyway. It seems to be popular to hate us these days. Get over it! Not everybody can be number one, and Bush won't be around forever! Our critics may want to spend some time evaluating their own problems FRANCE!

Anyway, my diatribe is over, though I'm sure everbody stopped reading about two sentences in anyway = )

Well, I feel we're obligated to fork out the cash in Iraq to some extent. We caused quite a bit of damage there...so we should pay to fix it. I agree though, that the tsunami diserves the money more...Iraq wouldn't be such a mess if human beings weren't such shitheads to each other and there's not jack that we can do to stop mother nature when she decides to off a couple hundred thousand people...

All in all, the pissing match is beyond annoying...but I'm more disgusted with our own home-grown snivlers...