Harold Meyerson:
Read the census data that have been coming out over the past couple weeks and you're compelled to a stark conclusion: Either the Republican Party changes totally, or it has a rendezvous with extinction.
What the census shows is that America's racial minorities, aggregated together, are on track to become its majority. The Republican Party's response to this epochal demographic change has been to do everything in its power to keep America (particularly its electorate) as white as can be.
David Brooks dives into the shallow end of the pool again and comes up gasping.
Declan Walsh:
Pakistan certainly seems ripe for revolt. It is perpetually on a knife edge – extremists plot and explode bombs, senior politicians are assassinated, society seethes with discontent. A slim upper crust floats in a bubble of wealth and privilege – the local version of Hello! offers coverage of upper-class toddler parties – while the poor grind along under soaring food inflation and 12-hour power cuts. Regional tensions threaten to pull the country asunder. In Quetta, residents were shivering in their homes because the rebels had blown up the gas pipelines four times over the previous week. ...
Some analysts compare the mood to Iran in 1979, when a restive middle-class upended the American-backed Shah and opened the door to theocratic Islamic rule. Yet on the ground in Pakistan, the whiff of revolution is faint. For a start, the country is too fractured. ...
Bob Herbert:
...when all is said and done, it is the economic revolution that gained steam during the Reagan years and is still squeezing the life out of the middle class and the poor that is Reagan’s most significant legacy. A phony version of that legacy is relentlessly promoted by right-wingers who shamelessly pursue the interests of the very rich while invoking the Reagan brand to give the impression that they are in fact the champions of ordinary people.
Daniel Denvir found CPAC's attack on public-sector unions to be the most caustic panel at the organization's recent soiree, even though red-diaper baby David Horowitz was also there, praising the McCarthy era's House UnAmerican Activities Committee.
Cal Thomas:
The events of recent days in Egypt offer a sober lesson to westerners who think the uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak resembles the American Revolution.
Much of the television commentary revealed complete ignorance about the history of the region and of Egypt and especially the clear and present danger of a theocratic coup by the Muslim Brotherhood. First prize for those who are clueless about what is transpiring before their blind eyes goes to James Clapper, director of National Intelligence (though the runner-up prize goes to a TV commentator who compared demonstrators in Tahrir Square to America's tea party movement.)
Kate Sheppard says the GOP wants to take a chainsaw to the Environmental Protection Agency's budget, chopping it by 29 percent.
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr.:
Timing is important here. We should not wait until it is too late to get all of this work done. It is going to cost money, time, and energy. I am always amazed to witness so-called progressive and liberal political forces to waste valuable time when it comes to galvanizing and re-activating the potential progressive political base in America. There is no effective substitute for grassroots organizing precinct by precinct in every Congressional District, city by city and state by state. The truth is that in 2008 there was a last minute scramble to get out the youth vote in many key states. That mistake should not be repeated. The time to make the difference is now for the mobilization of the youth vote.
Ed Quillen laments that the Republican Party that crafted the 14th Amendment is now dominated by the likes of Mike Coffman (CO-06) and Dave Lamborn (CO-05), Republicans who want to gut the amendment's citizenship provision.
The Los Angeles Times editorializes:
By refusing to preach reality to constituents who maintain Obama is a foreign-born Muslim, House Speaker Boehner insults the president and encourages the denialists.
Debra J. Saunders takes up the verbal cudgels in favor of an ancient GOP remedy for the budget deficit: Get rid of government subsidies for those alleged hotbeds of leftist thought - NPR and PBS.