News Of the Week

I'm embarrassed. This has been the most newsworthy week in recent memory, and I wasn't here to comment on it. So let's see if I can get up to speed. . . .

A week ago this time the federal government was simply trying to prop up two big banks and an insurance company. Now they're going to spend 700 billion - billion, with a "b" - to prop up all of Wall Street to keep credit flowing and avoid a meltdown of the national and possibly global economy. I don't have an opinion of this. I know we can't just throw a loan willy-nilly to the greed-heads who run our economy, but something has to be done. But is this the right thing? Hmm, maybe I do have an opinion about this after all. . . .

John McCain almost didn't debate Barack Obama last night, claiming to want to put it off because of the financial crisis, which he pledged to help solve. But even when a deal failed to materialize, McCain was confident that a deal could be reached. The only problem is, he didn't do anything to facilitate a deal this week, and he's been AWOL on the issue of the economy much of the year, not having voted on Senate bills since April. Barack Obama has been out of the Senate a lot too, of course, but he didn't suggest calling off the debate and, quite frankly, would be the first to admit that going back to Washington wasn't going to - and didn't - solve anything.

So the debate was held last night. I was at a concert - Graham Parker, whom I finally saw after waiting over a decade for the opportunity - so I missed it, but I hope to see the repeat on MSNBC tomorrow. From what I gather, McCain didn't do too well, failing to make any eye contact with Obama and still being unclear on the relationship between Spain and the United States, confusing the European NATO ally with a Latin American banana republic.

McCain may have thought Iraq and Pakistan shared a border, but he's still more adept with geography than running mate Sarah Palin, who knows her home state of Alaska is between Russia and Canada but somehow fails to understand that Alaska, the most remote state, is between the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug and the Yukon Territory, the two most remote places in Russia and Canada, respectively. In other words, her state's location hardly makes her an international affairs expert. Her incoherent explanation of how Vladimir Putin's plane enters American air space through Alaska led me to wonder why Putin would fly east from Moscow to get to Washington or New York for a summit - and over the International Date Line - when flying west would be easier. But then, what do you expect from someone who didn't even have a passport until last year?

She makes Dan Quayle look Periclean.