What’s Going On: Evening News Roundup
Here’s the Monday evening news roundup:
- What the heck is going on in Pakistan? For three years, we’ve allowed Osama bin Laden to become entrenched in the hills of western Pakistan. During that time we did virtually nothing besides beg Pervez Musharraf to do something. Last week the U.S. actually went into Pakistani territory and attacked a village. It appears that the terrorists that we thought were there turned out to be innocent civilians. The Pakistani government was furious. Today, the U.S. again went into Pakistan and they were shot at by the Pakistani military. This is starting to get very ugly.
- It appears that President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe signed a power-sharing deal with Morgan Tsvangirai. Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete, chairman of the African Union, voiced the concern on many minds. “Will it hold or will it not? That is the question,” he said.
- Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films has a new ad featuring a Vietnam veteran who convincingly states that Republican presidential nominee John McCain is unfit for election.
- Governor Sarah Palin installed a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion. Sweet! This is clearly the reform that McCain has been espousing. By the way, did you know that she cut funding for the Special Olympics?
- McCain continues to tell us that the fundamentals of this economy are strong. In my opinion, this economy is geared to do one thing, make the rich even richer.
- With Wall Street in full meltdown mode, it may be time to conjure up one of McCain’s old ghosts: The Keating Five Scandal. The scandal should be familiar even to those of you who are not old enough to remember it. You have a bank who wants to make risky investments. You have a bank owner, Charles Keating, who’ gives large sums of money to five senators. Those senators pressure bank regulators to look the other way. You have greed and fraud that should look much like the subprime mortgage failure that we are having now.
- Glenn Greenwald had an interesting post from a couple of days ago. He pointed out the hypocrisy of many of the right wing pundits who ran to Palin’s rescue, including Charles Krauthammer. Glenn went back and looked over the last several years and found several of the right-wing pundits discussing the “Bush doctrine.” If Palin had done her homework, she would have noted that Charlie Gibson asked both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates about the Bush doctrine. As the Boy Scouts say, “be prepared.”
