Thomas Frank:
Unless it rains today, thousands of average people will stand up across the land, declare their mad-as-hell-ness. Look for folks to holler for lower estate taxes and a replacement for Sarbanes-Oxley. They will put on three-cornered hats, wave "don't tread on me" flags, and imagine that they are channeling the spirit of Tom Paine as they do their part to ease the troubles of the economy's winners.
And Fox News, which plans to cover the tea parties, will no doubt hail this plastic populism as the realest kind of social uprising, a movement that is the rightful expression of this year's discontents.
Steven Stark: Something else to thank Richard Nixon for, in addition to Watergate and the Imperial Presidency.
"Seeing newspapers fall apart brings me joy," writes an anonymous essayist in a broadside reprinted on the blog Reflections of a Newsosaur. Then there was the throng of commentators on boston.com that rejoiced over news the Boston Globe might close.
Part of this sour reaction is due to the traditional American love of any new futuristic innovation or technology. The past be damned! But a large part of it can be traced back more than 30 years to Richard Nixon. It was he who made hatred of the mainstream press fashionable, and his administration's cultural legacy continues to this day.
National Journal's National Security blog: "Truth Commission On Torture?": Michael F. Scheuer, Col. W. Patrick Lang, (U.S. Army, ret.) and others
National Journal's Health care blog: "Paying (Or Not) For Reform": Jason Rosenbaum, Uwe Reinhardt and others
Ron Brownstein:
Since President Bush's first term, the Republican Party has contracted in a way that makes it extremely unlikely that Obama can ever sustain significant support from GOP partisans. In Gallup surveys last year, only 28% of the electorate identified as Republicans-the smallest share since Gallup began collecting those numbers with its current technique in 1988. Conservatives dominate that shrunken core: in cumulative Gallup polling for 2008, fully 70% of Republicans identified as conservatives. (By comparison, only 39% of Democrats in Gallup polling last year identified as liberals.) It's difficult to imagine that many of those conservatives will approve of Obama for long, or even that securing their approval is a reasonable (or necessary) goal for a Democratic president. In the Pew survey that precipitated the Rove and Gerson articles, just 24% of conservative Republicans approved of Obama. Obama still enjoyed a respectable 38% approval rating among moderate and liberal Republicans-but they were only a small sliver of the party. In other words, one reason Obama receives such low marks among Republicans is that the strategy Rove helped design reduced the party to its absolute conservative nub-a trend that Rove is now trying to wield as a weapon against Obama. Chutzpah would be one way to describe that maneuver.
And, of course, though the Right refuses to compromise, it's the Left's fault for saying it out loud. That's how I prove I am a centrist.
National Review Online: Poor polling for conservatives can't possibly be because people think conservatives don't have good ideas, and whine too much. It must be because the pollsters are cheating. Or that they are liberals. We are victims, yet again. There is simply no other explanation.
Adam Graham:
I’m not going to the tea party to make the case that President Obama is a Muslim born in Indonesia, to advocate secession from the union, or to explain how America’s problems are the direct results of actions by members of the Council on Foreign Relations. I’m not going as a Republican; I’m going as an American.
The other stuff? Sheer coincidence, kinda like what happened at Sarah Palin rallies before the election.
Cynthia Tucker:
It wouldn’t take much to shove Cuba toward a stable, democratic and friendly government. Lifting the embargo would start the tectonic plates moving.