Stepping up

Its really good to see that prople are stepping up and helping the people that survived Hurricane Katrina. Organizations are making it very easy to donate for Hurricane relief. The company that I work for donated to the Red Cross for Hurricane Relief, they also gave a couple of numbers for people to call in order to donate. Radio stations are doing benefits and online stores are providing links to donate. Over 20 countries, including France, Venezuela, Japan, Germany and Honduras have offered whatever help they could supply. The White House seemed at first reticent, saying we can take care of our own, but later saying we will take whatever is offered. It is good to know that respect tragedy despite wholly disagreeing with the actions of our cowboy foreign policy.

On a completely different note, Washington Monthly has published their College Ranking List. Their list differs substantially from the US News and World Report College Ranking List. This is not tremendously surprising because they used different formulas. While the US News and World report looks primarily at academic excellence, the Washington Monthly report also looked at what the school gave back to the nation; in addition to academic excellence they should be engines of social mobility and encourage an ethic of service. As a result of this, only 3 of USNWR's Top 10 are in Washington Monthly's Top 10: MIT, Penn, and Stanford. California's state schools did extremely well as did Texas A&M which went from 60 in USNWR to 7 in WM.

The total number of American casualties in Iraq for August was 83 which brought the total for the war to 1882.