After spending billions and billions of dollars on two wars that have achieved little, the US gets to watch as actual popular uprisings in the Arab world accomplishes more in a month than we have in a decade.

One wonders what a few more years of sanctions on Iraq would have done without our military meddling.

I haven't said much about these historic and amazing events over the last month. We don't need to be sticking our nose into this, we need to watch.

And maybe agree on a spelling for the (still, but probably not for long) leader of Libya. I counted eight different ways official news sources have spelled his name: Gaddafi, Gadhafi, Qaddafi, Khadafy, Kadafi, Qathafi, Ghadafi and Qadhafi. And I could have sworn I saw Kaadafi early on, but wasn't able to find that on Friday.

Far from being "he who should not be named," he's the man who should not be an answer in a spelling bee.

The Libyan resistance has, as of today, created an organization structure. This gives the military a choice, I guess. Stay with the almost deposed leader or get with the new guys. We hope the standoff won't last too long, but it could. This is truly a civil war. And it's already messy.

The unifying complaint in all of the countries with protests is this: there's a guy at the top who's been running the country for too long at the expense of everyone else in the country. And the rest of country is realizing they have some power to exert.

We have a money power structure in our country as well. Those who are in the top 1% of wealth control a majority of the money in this country. More than 90% of us are left with scraps. And while we think we have control of our government because we get to vote, those who we vote for are propped to power by the people (and corporations) with the money to buy them.

And they keep the rest of us in line with distractions: Guns, abortion, religion, celebrity, and the inexplicable belief that any of us could move up the money ladder.

For this we give the people with most of the money the ability to keep more of their money than the rest of us. We gave them (so far) 12 years of extreme tax breaks. The rest of us got peanuts. And we've already eaten our peanuts.

We wonder why all the states and the federal government are broke? It's because the people with the money don't want to pay for our sorry asses. They don't want us to have wealth, health care, labor unions, civil rights or voices. So far it's working out pretty good for them.

We get debt and higher gas prices, and they get all the money.

Is this what we all vote for? The steel rod or the wooden one?

Matt Worley is watching the Oscars tonight because he knows one day one of those famous movie stars is going to notice him in a bar and give him lots of money to be their love slave.