The United Nations:  Its Moral as well as Legal Obligations to Zimbabwe

I recently read a recommended article from New York Times about a young woman terribly wounded by the wanton gunfights that have encompassed her neighborhood in the Niger Delta. The violence of the region is usually aimed at international oil corporations, their workers, and the police and government soldiers. But now the violence is focused at the internal as opposed to the external. The very people who are at the heart of the oil issue and conflict are being hurt and killed in the sights of the unhappy gangs of militias. The young and old are forced to flee the fighting when gangs enter and occupy their relatively peaceful villages.

To be honest the current state of the media is absolutely horrendous. Pardon my views, but it has been this degree of wonderful for quite a long time. The examples and representations of the state of the media are too numerous and myriad to present in one entry, but there are a few recent events that reiterate this sad fact. We are in an age where the media has an extremely strong influence on the public, yet the media also has a long and terrible track record of chasing the big story.

This year the Iraq conflict will be as long as World War II. This makes me question and wonder where we are headed and what could possibly be the best remedy now. In history classes the great victorious war of our grandparents to ensure the freedom of the world seemed so long and bloody and full of courage. How will the conflict (congress never declared war) in Iraq be recorded in history - full of bloodshed, uprising, sectarian violence, failure, and limited successes. Both will have covered the same time span and yet we are still stuck in Iraq attempting to clean up the mess.

Today I read an article in the New York Times at breakfast in which David Leonhardt of Economix looks at the ways the $1.2 trillion, spent over the span of the Iraq conflict, could have been better spent. Check it out:

Or so he would lead you to believe. On his prime-time gab fest Friday evening, the self-proclaimed cultural warrior and Caribbean vacation fantasizer declared, "if any company sponsors the [O.J. Simpson 'hypothetical' confessional TV appearance], I will not buy anything that company sells -- ever."

It just so happens that the book the interview is promoting is being published by ReganBooks, an imprint owned by none other than NewsCorp, which also owns Fox News.

Thanks Bill! I'll boycott your show if you really want me too. I'll even go out of my way and stop watching Brit Hume too.

O'Rielly also took the time to equate the double murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman with what else - abortion - while blaming the the New York Times for supporting the butchering of babies.

Why mention your hyporcritical corporate overlords by name when you can transpose a completely unrelated issue into the conversation to rail on the "elite media" at the New York Times?