As a father of young children, stories like this hurt my heart deeply:

The morning after [18-month old Phillip Odong’s] fever spiked, she took him to a clinic, but it did not have the medicines that might have saved him. He died four days later, crying, “Mommy, Mommy,” before losing consciousness.

Malaria deaths are entirely preventable, but we have yet to muster the collective will to prevent them:

As many as 100,000 people, mostly children, die of malaria each year in Uganda alone. “It’s like a jumbo jet crashing every day,” said Dr. Andrew Collins, deputy director of the Malaria Consortium, an international nonprofit group.

Poverty and disease in the developing world show the limits of our willingness to truly love our neighbors.

It’s good to know that while we continue to send our sons and daughters to kill and die in Iraq, are attempting to negotiate a peaceful end to two nuclear standoffs, and are trying to remain vigilant against terrorism around the world, that 66 of 100 U.S. Senators voted to keep us safe from the REAL threat to our freedom - flag burners.

Because you know, one day you burn a flag, and the next day you blow up something. Er, or something like that anyway.

This story of work conditions inside of Apple’s iPod manufacturing plants makes me want to think twice about buying another:

Inside Longhua, workers labor a 15-hour day building iPods, for which they usually earn about $50 per month. When they’re not on the assembly lines, they live in secluded dormitories that each house 100 people and prohibit visitors from the outside world. The workers are allowed “a few possessions” and a “bucket to wash their clothes.”

Unfortunately, this is the norm for most of the products we buy nowadays, so I would need to stop buying practically anything that wasn’t grown or made by myself. In short, it’s simply not possible for me to avoid buying items produced by the exploitation of people in other countries.

With the deck stacked so clearly against justice, it seems that the exploitation of workers in the developing world is an issue that the church should be as concerned about as other moral issues such as abortion. But where is the outcry? Are we silent simply because our neighbors live so far away?

We should be up in arms about trade agreements which do not require signing countries to enforce basic labor protections (such as, for example, an 8-hour work day) and living wages for their workers. Short of that, we should at least be demanding that American companies producing products overseas require their business partners to apply those same standards.

But then, we might have to pay a bit more for that iPod. And it might cost the shareholders a portion of their profits. We wouldn’t want that, now would we?

Regarding the three suicides at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay today, our government had this bit of Orwellian spin to sell:

“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed. They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of …warfare waged against us,” Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said in a telephone news conference.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. And Suicide is Warfare.

Political Wire has the short version of the rebuttal to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assertion that the Republicans rigged the election in Ohio to give Bush a second term:

Salon examines Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent examination of whether Republicans stole the 2004 election and offers its response in a word: no.

The details are in the link (or the Salon article for even more).

It seems my comparison of his argument with Bush’s case for war in Iraq was more apt than even I thought at the time. Time for RFKJ’s rebuttal?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes a compelling argument that Republicans stole the 2004 Presidential election.

I generally haven’t bought the conspiracy argument regarding the last Presidential election, but Kennedy sure does lay out a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Republicans MIGHT have manipulated election results enough to have given Bush a second term.

It’s certainly a stronger case than the one the Bush administration laid out for going to war in Iraq…

And it’s not exactly like the Republicans (allegedly) haven’t been caught doing this kind of thing before. Jamming phones in New Hampshire, laundering money to fund Republican victories in the Texas state house so that the Congressional districts could be redrawn prematurely… the list goes on and on.

But Republicans are good, Christian people, right? They would NEVER accept bribes from defense contractors, bilk Native American tribes out of campaign contributions while working against their cause, lie to get us to go to war, or throw elections, right? Right?