MB Civic

so Mubarek finally came on TV, made a campaign speech for 10 minutes and right before he finished offhandedly announced he was firing everyone in the government except him (about 15 mins before his speech Israeli TV reported that Mubarek had left the country .. weird) – then Obama gets into the act and sort of backs Mubarek up (I’m sure the Israelis are flipping out big time and the US gov’t is pretty much doing anything Israel tells us to do right now – exhibit A is Joe Biden: “Mubarak has been an ally of ours .. he’s been very responsible on .. the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel .. I would not refer to him as a dictator”) – and lets face it, if Egypt goes so might Jordan, Yemen, um Saudi Arabia, etc and who knows what those goverments will look like .. so there’s a whole lot of posturing and stagecraft going on (pics of Obama calling Mubarek after Mubarek’s speech) to try to keep the status quo .. not clear what the Egypt military is going to do or where their loyalty ultimately lies – there were erroneous reports that Nobel peace laureate Mohamed El Baradei was under house arrest (he called for Mubarek to step down again today) – i think two things can happen, 1) Mubarek/Israel/US/Multinational Corps get on a private jet and there’s a peaceful orderly transition w El Baradei and other candidates running for prez of what will be a decidedly less Israel-friendly (and hopefully not Islamist) gov’t, or 2) Mubarek/Israel/US/Multinational Corps decide to fight to the bitter end and a whole lot of people die … Huff Post live blog (and Egypt Twitter feed on the right column) is a good way to stay on top of events, as is the Al Jazeera live video feed – mab