A Texas village is missing its idiot

I Think He Meant Gazillion
By Stu Finkel
12/30/04

Bush yesterday defending the amount of aid that the U.S. will provide to Tsunami victims noted that it was being upped to "35 billion." Needless to say he meant "million." Also needless to say, the SCLM generously corrected this rather glaring error without comment -- only a single entry on Google News, from a readers forum on China Daily(?!), even mentions it.

A minor mistake, sure. But does he either know or care about the difference?

That's a post from a blog Maru introduces today.

I'm guessing that he neither knows or cares. He's on vacation.

And, speaking of not knowing or caring....when first any offer was made ($15 million), I remarked that it was only a promise, and we're known to renege on those. Eg: AIDS and global food aid. Zeynep has some more examples:

Here's a brilliant suggestion:

Speaking by telephone from his home in Vermont, Mr. Leahy, who is the ranking Democrat on the foreign operations subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, urged that a portion of the largely unspent $18 billion for Iraq reconstruction be re-directed for Asian relief efforts.

That's great, let's just roll the money from an earlier unkept obligation... Maybe some of the money promised but also not delivered to the earthquake victims in Bam (one account has only $17 million delivered out of a promised one billion) could be included while we're at it.