Saturday punditry. And please note: later today (starting at noon ET) we'll be down for most of the afternoon to transition to the new DK4.
NY Times:
Egypt erupted in a joyous celebration of the power of a long repressed people on Friday as President Hosni Mubarak resigned his post and ceded control to the military, ending his nearly 30 years of autocratic rule.
NY Times:
Few believe that the revolution will represent the kind of moment that Eastern Europe experienced in 1989. The Arab world, ruled by monarchies, republics and something in between, has too many different ideologies and disparate histories. Of all Arab countries, Tunisia and Egypt have the strongest sense of national identity, a cohesiveness that helped their revolutions coalesce so quickly. Neither had a military that would brutally crush dissent (as in Syria), or the ability to play off populations against each other (as in Jordan) or even the money to pay people to stay quiet (as in the gulf).
WSJ:
Social media, most notably Facebook and Twitter, have featured prominently in recent years as tools of the opposition in insurrections against entrenched regimes, accustomed to controlling what their citizens know through an iron-tight grip on their country's newspapers and television.
But in most of those uprisings—from Iran in 2009 to Myanmar in 2007—the regimes were able to crush the opposition, in some instances by co-opting the new technology and using it as a way to monitor and identify dissidents.
Not this time.
Charles Blow:
Republican state lawmakers, emboldened by their swollen ranks, have a message for minorities, women, immigrants and the poor: It’s on!...
Judging by the lead-up to those elections, one could have easily concluded that the first order of business on Republicans’ agendas would be a laserlike focus on job creation and deficit reductions to the exclusion of all else. Not the case.
As MSNBC and Telemundo reported recently, at least 15 state legislatures are considering Arizona-style immigration legislation. If passed, four of the five states with the largest Hispanic populations — California, Texas, Florida and Arizona — would also be the most inhospitable to them.
Tom Jensen/PPP:
Our swing state polling suggests Obama would win same number of electoral votes from 2008...
Republicans need two things to happen over the next 20 months if they're going to beat Obama and time is one thing they have on their side- they need a much stronger candidate to emerge, whether it's someone outside this top 4 or someone inside this top 4 successfully remaking their image, and they need Obama's numbers to get back in negative territory and probably by a good amount- somewhere south of 45%.
Ezra Klein:
The health-care debate has a cyclical nature, and I don't want to keep writing the same posts over and over again. So rather than write a whole new piece on the GOP's rediscovery of the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the health-care law will reduce the labor supply (which they recast as "destroying jobs"), I'll just link to the long post I did on the subject in January.
In case you don't want to click over, though, the short version is this: If you make health-care insurance cheaper and make it harder for insurance companies to deny people coverage, then a certain number of people who would like to leave the labor force but can't afford or access health-care insurance without their job will stop working.
Bob Herbert:
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.