The News Roundup from Monday night, October 24, 2011 — more on the Administration’s refi plan, Tunisian elections, GOP opposes jobs and infrastructure to prevent tiny tax on tiny number of rich, Ambassador Ford comes home, Libya, Occupy coverage, Herman Cain’s campaign, and much more . . .

The core of Obama’s speech aims to highlight the value of ordinary citizens sparking movements for change. But this focus is deceitful on many levels.

Obama’s speech on the Arab uprising was delayed, apparently because of late rewrites. And I think that’s apparent in the text, which is a real tightrope. There’s a tension to fit all of the past and present actions of the United States in that part of the world under one coherent theme. The President spoke of how “America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator,” and this is impossible to square with tacit support for dictators before this moment, and more importantly, during it.

The Arab protests have typically used Friday prayers as a rallying point, and today was no different in multiple hot spots.

The forces of greed and selfishness, as upheld by corporate focus-group-tested propaganda in the US and with guns in certain other parts of the world, hit a few speed bumps this week.

Many people have scoffed at any relationship between the life and death struggles in Egypt and elsewhere, and this peaceful protest in Madison. But Goodman, whose show “Democracy Now” will broadcast from the Capitol Rotunda today, rightly observed that the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were, at the core, labor uprisings.

As the United States struggles to respond to rapidly changing conditions in Egypt, it is informative to look at the arc of US foreign policy over the past half century or so. Foggy Bottom is stuck in a fog precisely because the approach to foreign policy has not evolved sufficiently since the demise of the Cold War. US foreign policy today is just as dependent on supporting individual despotic leaders today as it was in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

The people in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are fighting for basic freedoms we here in the US take for granted. The teabagger types and their fellow travelers riled up by their rhetoric are fighting against — traffic laws.

Americans love the idea of Democracy for other people, as long as it doesn’t involve regimes we’ve underwritten to protect us from our phobias.

Oh dear, Wiki-leaks hated by Beauty Queens and Tyrants alike.