Katrina - Let the telethons begin!

Today, various networks announced that they will be broadcasting benefit concerts to raise money for hurricane relief efforts. NBC and it's cable stations will be broadcasting a concert on Saturday that will have Tim McGraw, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Connick Jr. perform, among others. BET will also be holding a telethon next Friday, and the MTV Networks cabal will also be putting on a show on Sept. 10, with a bit of a younger lineup (Green Day, Gretchen Wilson, Ludacris, among others).

I commend the artists and the networks for the making the effort to get the word out and asking people to raise money to help the people who got washed out by Katrina. But, think about this for a second: after the pictures of a flooded-out New Orleans and a destroyed Mississippi coast have been splattered across the nation's TV screens for the last week, how much more motivated does a person need to be to give the Red Cross a couple of bucks? Do you really need Billie Joe Armstrong screaming "Longview" (a song about masturbation) into his microphone to get you to break out your credit card? Just go over to www.redcross.org right now and contribute. You'll feel better. Promise.