Highlights from The Fray:





Those who donate money to help people in foreign countries certainly deserve more points. Not only are they helping people in dire need, but they are doing it a manner that doesn't upgrade their name within their nearby community and improve just their environment. They are tearing down tribal barriers and defining people in terms of their souls--not their political associations. Its easy to feign outrage at the existence of homeless people that one sees on the way to work; but it takes a truly remarkable person to feel compassion for a distant, diseased, starving person in Central Africa. Not only does he/she need help more than a New York panhandler, but he/she doesn't fall under any ethnic/political category that benefits the giver, and nobody in the remote village will know the giver to think highly of him.



--Anonymous



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It is unfortunate that the adjustments to the "Slate 60" do not include qualifications based on the origin of the wealth of the donor. The inclusion of the Milken Family Foundation is an affront to thousands of working families whose retirement funds were looted by corporate raiders financed by the sale of junk bonds orchestrated by Mr. Milken. It is also a cruel slap in the face of the American taxpayer who was forced to redirect billions of dollars from needed social programs to rescue insolvent S&Ls bankrupted by participation in ridiculous real estate ventures financed with these worthless securities.



--Kenneth Jensen



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Who does Miss Huffington think she is that she can so readily criticize other people's gifts? The bottom line here: it is their money, to do with as they please. Socialism is dead, and, I had thought, with it died those who thought that some external and arbitrary value set could be applied to how one disposes of one's money. Obviously, socialism has simply gone underground, to rise in the form of politically correct and self-righteous statements about how someone else uses their money. Miss Huffington has every right to have an opinion regarding how money should be spent. Her money. She (and I, and anyone else) has nothing to contribute regarding how anyone else spends their cash, no matter how much or how little is involved. If she is so worried about the issue, I would recommend that she perform some soul-searching and attempt to determine how she should be spending her money. If it is more important to her that certain charities be funded, then perhaps a little less money spent on operas and other cultural events could be placed there. But that is her choice, because it is her money, and neither my opinion, nor that of any pundit should matter.



--Joe Gherlone



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Elmer Rasmussen's gift to the Anchorage Museum shouldn't simply be downplayed because he is a nonegenarian. While I'm not privy to his finances, his major asset was probably the bank he founded, National Bank of Alaska, which sold recently to the Bank of America. If this is the case, he hardly could have donated money he didn't have, before he had it. He also certainly could have kept it in his estate.



George Soros may have donated $15 million to charity, but I suspect that he has donated much more to causes which are not tax deductible, such as his efforts to try to force demagogues declare a truce in the drug wars.



--Frank Smith



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