Andy Kroll:
Last Saturday's "Rally to Save the American Dream" was the culmination of two weeks of protests and a 24-7 sit-in inside the Capitol. Not for 30 or 40 years have unions and progressive groups come together in such an outpouring of support for workers' rights. What makes the Madison protests even more incredible is how spontaneous they have been: There has been no master plan, no long-anticipated strategy to turn Madison into ground zero for a reenergized labor movement.
Amanda Terkel:
Walker's budget estimates that Wisconsin would save $1.9 million annually by eliminating the Title V program, whose money goes to family planning centers such as Planned Parenthood. But Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin spokeswoman Amanda Harrington argued that more than 50 health centers in the state would be deprived of a total of $4 million once the federal and local funds are included. (Planned Parenthood receives roughly one-quarter of that money.) In many cases, Harrington said, these health centers are the only providers in the area and deliver critical care.
Charles Blow:
Staunch Tea Partiers seem to be guided by the worst kind of fundamentalist political extremism — immutable positions derived from a near-religious adherence to self-proclaimed inviolable principles. This could well be their undoing.
During the right’s season of anger, passion and convictions galvanized Tea Party supporters into an army of activism. But the vehicle is outliving its fuel. The movement is losing momentum. In fact, Tea Party-backed governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin could be providing the rallying cry on the left to pick up the mantle of anger and send the momentum back the other way.
If Tea Party leaders continue to operate as if anger is still a major part of their arsenal and Republican politicians continue to feel pressured into untenable positions, Democrats could enjoy their very own Charlie Sheen-ism come 2012: “Winning!”
The Fix on cutting entitlements:
To put it another way: Why would Obama go first, when he knows he just needs to wait for Republicans to go first?
Republicans have a whole caucus of freshmen elected with tea party support who will eventually push the issue to the forefront, and Democrats know this.
When they do, the proposals are likely to be very unpopular and force those Republicans into a tough position. For Democrats, saying 'no' to those proposals will be relatively easy; for Republicans, it will be a dance between pleasing the base and irritating lots of independents.
Unlike many other areas where voters are happy to see cuts, the entitlement programs are a political minefield just waiting for unsuspecting politicians to wander along.
And in a more neutral election year, that could cause all kinds of problems for Republicans -- or at least, more than they did in 2010.
Greg Sargent:
It's been widely assumed that once Governor Scott Walker starts sending out pink slips to public employees, it will increase pressure on fugitive Dems to return to Wisconsin and vote on Walker's measure rolling back bargaining rights.
But what if the opposite is true? What if the layoffs will actually increase pressure on Republican Senators to reach a deal with Dems and labor?
I'm told that Wisconsin Dems are mapping out an aggressive plan to make that happen, if and when layoffs start happening -- one designed to pin the blame for them direcly on Republican Senators.
"We don't think Republicans want these layoffs to happen," Graeme Zielinski, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me this morning. "They're going to eat this, and it's dawning on them."
Adam Serwer:
Bush's "freedom agenda" has been so narrowed by his supporters as to be virtually unrecognizable from what it actually was. The American people didn't support war in Iraq because they wanted to establish a democracy; they supported the war because the president of the United States told them that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and falsified a connection to al-Qaeda and that implied a willingness to use them.
Beyond the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Bush's "Freedom Agenda" was mostly characterized by the bipartisan continuity of support for despotic client states, except where the U.S. refused to adhere to the results of elections we didn't like, as when Hamas prevailed in Gaza. Krauthammer's argument that Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi was sufficiently frightened by the invasion to give up an arsenal he won't be able to use against protesters now has merit, but that in and of itself doesn't justify the invasion of Iraq, either.
To narrow the "Freedom Agenda" to simply believing the people have a right to self-determination is to excise everything about it that was objectionable.
Charles Franklin:
Support for gay marriage continues to rise in a new Pew Center for the People and the Press poll, completed 2/22-3/1/2011. The latest poll shows support at 45% and opposition at 46%, the narrowest margin in the history of Pew polling on the issue. Some polls by other pollsters have found support exceeding opposition but as the chart above shows, the trend estimates have converged by not quite reached equal levels of support and opposition. The consistency of the trends since 2005, however, all but guarantee support will exceed opposition within the year.