Monday punditry, the "something's in the air" edition.
Paul Krugman :
Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”
It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.
In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew.
NY Times :
But in the view of officials from both major political parties, Republicans may be risking the same kind of electoral backlash Democrats suffered after they were perceived as overreaching.
Public surveys suggest that most voters do not share the Republicans’ fervor for the deep cuts adopted by the House, or for drastically slashing the power of public-sector unions. And independent voters have historically been averse to displays of political partisanship that have been played out over the last week.
Democrats were not overreaching, or perceived as overreaching. Democrats were perceived as not fixing the economy fast enough.
EJ Dionne :
Take five more steps back and you realize how successful the Tea Party has been. No matter how much liberals may poke fun at them, Tea Party partisans can claim victory in fundamentally altering the country's dialogue.
Define victory. You mean with the media or politically? If WI wakes up a sleeping giant and even Republican officials are thinking they've overreached, a victory lap is a tad premature.
NY Times:
Hours earlier, the protests against Mr. Qaddafi’s 40-year rule spread to the capitol, Tripoli, on Sunday night, and protesters in the eastern city of Benghazi were celebrating their takeover of the city and a prominent Libyan diplomat said he was quitting to join “the popular revolution.”
Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone Sunday night said protesters were converging toward the city’s central Green Square and clashing with heavily armed riot police officers. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes.
Adam Serwer :
The problem, of course, is that at least one recent poll showed that a majority of Republicans have doubts about the president's citizenship, which explains the rise of "post-birtherism." Republican leaders don't want to anger a large section of their base by flatly calling this stuff what it is, which is nuts. So the new approach is to joke about it or to carefully avoid denouncing the idea completely.
Hugh Bailey :
Everyone wants to see more private sector employment. No one, no matter what you hear, favors driving off businesses. But public workers, despite protestations on the letters page, spend their salaries and pay their taxes like anyone else. There was a time when it made sense for the government to hire people when the private sector wouldn't; Republican presidents once pushed for stimulus plans, too.
Infrastructure improvements would appear to be an issue that everyone could get behind. You can't avoid bridges and pipelines. And unemployment remains at a level that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
Jonathan Capehart :
Al Jazeera's silence on Lara Logan has been deafening. And while I appreciate Allan getting back to me, her explanation rings a tad hollow. She writes that journalists "are not the story." But the Web site of Al Jazeera English ran an excellent story on Feb. 3 headlined, "Media in the line of fire in Egypt: Domestic and foreign journalists have come under siege amid the turmoil in Egypt." And when CBS News asked that the press respect Logan's privacy, the network wasn't asking that the story not be covered. After all, its own statement revealed details of the attack -- albeit days later.