What’s going on – Wednesday Evening News Roundup
Posted on January 14th, 2009 by ecthompson
Wednesday Evening News Roundup
Note to MSNBC: upgrade your servers!!! From 7 p.m. to midnight Eastern Standard Time, it is nearly impossible to watch any of the videos (Countdown with Keith Olbermann , The Rachel Maddow Show). You need more bandwidth!
- Peter Bergen, counterterrorism expert, has a few comments on why Osama bin Laden has raised his ugly head. I’m not sure that Mr. Bergen adds anything new to the discussion. He does believe that recent air strikes by US predator drones in western Pakistan may be having some effect on the Al Qaeda leadership. It should be clear to all Americans that Al Qaeda and Bin Laden are linked to the Palestinian cause.
- One of the things puzzling me over the last several years is why Motorola has been struggling. Three years ago, everybody had a Motorola Razr phone. The latest Motorola phones pale to the iPhone or a new Blackberry. Motorola has announced today that they’re cutting 4000 jobs. Why don’t they keep most of those folks and put them into R & D? (Fire the folks currently in R & D, because they aren’t getting the job done!)
- There’s an interesting story that has been circulating over the last several days which truly points out how ineffective Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been. Remember that UN resolution that called for both sides to cease aggression in Gaza? Well it appears that Condoleezza Rice had a big part in drafting that resolution. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went around Condoleezza Rice and spoke with President Bush directly asking for the US to abstain from the vote. So the Secretary of State had been working on a resolution that basically asked Israel to stop. Then the Israeli prime minister called Bush and we completely changed course. Does that make any sense to you?
- Dick Cheney believes the deaths of 4500 Americans and over 100,000 Iraqis was clearly worth it.
- For the most part, I usually agree with Thomas Friedman. Yes, I know that he continually tried to justify the Iraq war which really has no practical justification. Of course, the premise of his wildly successful book, The World Is Flat, that globalization is good, was overly simplistic and really overlooked the terrible suffering that globalization has brought to some developing countries. Well, now that I think about it, I guess I don’t agree with him all that often. In today’s column, he pretty much glosses over the negative consequences of war again. He tries to justify Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon and appears to be as delusional as President Bush in stating that this incursion was successful. Collateral damage (aka civilian deaths) was not a bad thing as everyone else in the world thinks, but instead is a good thing. I’m not sure that killing civilians in Lebanon or Gaza (or anywhere) can ever be thought of as a good thing. It is obvious to me that the politics in the region are extremely complex. With Hamas in the south and Hezbollah in the north, it is hard for Israel ever to get a good night’s sleep. Some solution needs to be found. Thomas Friedman does not have the answers. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on Friedman’s column.
