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Friday Morning News Roundup

• Tomorrow at 9 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, The Errington Thompson Show will hit the airwaves. I will be reviewing the week’s top stories. My guest will be Amanda Terkel from the popular progressive blog Think Progress and my good friend Bill Scher from Campaign for America’s Future and Liberal Oasis, one of the oldest progressive blogs.  You can listen to my show live — here.  You can also catch my podcasts — here.
• The world stock market continues to spiral in a downward trend. Asian and European markets closed sharply lower yesterday. Wall Street lost over 7% of its value on Thursday. It opened sharply lower today. No one quite seems to have a handle on what’s going on or how to stabilize the markets.
• What I thought was going to be one of the great pay-per-view classic wrestling matches (Citigroup versus Wells Fargo over Wachovia bank) has ended with a whimper. Citigroup has had enough. They are walking away. This is actually excellent news for Charlotte, North Carolina, which stood to lose over 20,000 jobs. Now job losses look like they will occur in California.
• A new report reveals that the NSA has been spying on innocent Americans without reason. Civil liberty groups warned us that this would happen. Is anyone really surprised about this in the age of George W. Bush?
• Governor Sarah “Barracuda” Palin is much less of a maverick against the oil companies than we first thought. She’s actually pretty mainstream. Who would’ve thought that Governor Palin would be distorting her record?
• There seems to be a major shift in violence in Iraq. It is true that car bombings have decreased sharply over the last 12-18 months. It seems, however, that recently targeted assassinations of key officials are replacing those massive car bombs.
• Floyd Norris of the New York Times has pointed out how Plan A has not worked. Banks are not lending money. Plan B may be to follow Britain’s lead and actually buy portions of banks. How will conservatives on Capitol Hill take this news?
• Late last night, the John McCain campaign issued a report which covered the investigation of Governor Sarah Palin with regard to the firing of Alaska’s former public safety Commissioner, Walt Monegan. Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen points out that this is like Richard Nixon in July of 1974, “issuing a statement:’ I’ve looked into this whole Watergate thing, and I’ve decided I have done nothing wrong.  Time to move on.'” The McCain campaign is cracking me up. The “real” investigation report is due out later on today.
• OMG. Adam “Pac-Man” Jones gets into a fight with his own security detail and the Sports World goes nuts. Jones is expected to play in Sunday’s game. This is a story that blew up over nothing.