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~ EXCERPT ~ Thousands in the streets protesting. Chanting workers, young and old, taking over a government building and grinding activity to a halt. Lawmakers fleeing. An executive standing firm in face of the revolt. **snip** President Obama weighed in on the issue on Wednesday, calling Walker's legislation "an assault on unions." **snip** "The President was quicker and more forceful of his denouncement of Gov. Scott Walker than he was of denouncing Hosni Mubarak," (ABC News Correspondent Jon) Karl said. "Madison, Wisconsin – the state of Wisconsin -- this is arguably ground zero for the 2012 presidential campaign. Look, this...

Egyptian authorities arrested on Thursday former Interior Minister Habib el-Adly and two other ex-ministers who are under investigation for corruption, security officials said. Authorities also arrested steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz, once a prominent member of the ouster leader Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. El-Adly, whose job gave him control over the 500,000-strong security forces, has been widely blamed for the deadly brutality used by riot police against demonstrators in massive protests that began Jan. 25 and forced Mubarak to step down Feb. 11. El-Adly served in his former post for 12 years. News of el-Adly's arrest followed the detention...

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak refused to respond to telephone calls from US President Barack Obama because he still felt offended by Obama's statement in which he called on Mubarak "to step down immediately," London-based Arabic language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Thursday. Mubarak, still living in "presidential style" in Sharm el-Sheikh, according to the report, refused an invitation from Saudi King Abdullah to come to the kingdom, telling him he preferred to die on Egyptian soil. The report said that it was not clear if Mubarak had been in contact with Egypt's new military rulers through his former deputy...

WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday. Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

Egypt's ousted president has given up and wants to die in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh where he has been living since a popular uprising ended his rule, a Saudi official said on Wednesday. Hosni Mubarak, 82, has suffered from health problems in recent years and travelled to Germany for gall bladder surgery in March last year. Reports of a further decline have increased since he stepped down on Friday after three decades in power. An official in Saudi Arabia said the kingdom had offered to host Mubarak but he was determined to see out his days in...

Tarek al-Bishry, the chairman of the constitutional panel, is a respected judge who criticised former president Hosni Mubarak and is regarded as moderate in his views. But he has been associated with Al-Wasat, an offshoot of the Brotherhood. He has selected a committee made up mainly of judges and politicians, including a judge who is a Coptic Christian, but also a former Muslim Brotherhood MP. There are no women. Wael Abbas, the best-known human rights blogger in Egypt, who was sentenced to prison by the Mubarak regime last year, said it was a "worrying" choice. "There is no such thing...

Saudi Official: Mubarak has given up and 'wants to die' There is talk of his depression, refusing to take medicine for ongoing health issues, and even of his falling into a coma this weekend. Yet despite reports that he'd flown to Germany, Hosni Mubarak is refusing Saudi offers to host him, instead saying he prefers to remain on Egyptian soil to the end of his days... which may be drawing near from the sound of things: On Tuesday morning, the London-based pan Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat reported that Mubarak is in very grave medical condition. A senior Egyptian official close to...

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, is more than a radical network, comparable to al Qaeda; more than an ideological phenomenon, like the followers of Khomeini in the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and more than a political insurgency, similar to Pakistani jihadism. It is an Egyptian Islamist subculture of great depth and influence. It is therefore also much more than a product of political decisions made by Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood was powerful before Mubarak, before his predecessor Anwar Sadat, and before their elder comrade, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But the Brotherhood today is not identical with the paramilitary Arabist-Islamist Ikhwan...

On October 6, 1973, in a move calculated to attract US attention, Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal, capturing a narrow strip of land. After three weeks of fighting and with a fragile UN ceasefire in place, Sadat's grand plan came to fruition. In November, Henry Kissinger, the US national security adviser, arrived in Cairo for talks. Agreements between Israel and Egypt were brokered and the following year Richard Nixon, the US president, visited Egypt for the first time. A series of diplomatic efforts ensued which ultimately led to an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel and Sadat's highly...

The overthrow of the Egyptian government is being led by the hard-corps Islamics, and there is video to prove it. We are repeating history. In 1962, a group of senior enlisted USAF photo interpreters was secretly slipped into the back door at the White House. They were there to brief President Kennedy. There had been unconfirmed rumors of a significant Russian military presence in Cuba, but the CIA agents on the ground were supplying conflicting information, and no proof of anything. In addition, no one had reported the missile crates being unloaded from Russian ships in Cuban harbors. The crates...

The Jerusalem Post's Ben Hartman and Melanie Lidman describe the Egyptian uprising, painting a harrowing picture of lynchings, beatings and fear for their lives.

Middle Eastern Democracies by Ari Bussel The recent wave sweeping the Middle East has been overwhelmingly non-violent. As if an invisible force, visible only to corrupt or autocratic heads of state, has been advancing and bringing down decades-long regimes within a matter of days. It seems that almost no one is immune to this force, except those that outwardly and actively fight democracy like Syria and Iran. The public has cried “Democracy,” and the youth has repeated and reiterated the call, over and over again: “Democracy,” they chant, “Democracy,” something we know nothing about, have never experienced (other than what...

Hosni Mubarak's departure from power does little to address the fundamental issues that brought protesters to Cairo's Tahrir Square for the past 18 days. In fact, their protests were never about Mubarak but about a sclerotic political system and an economic system that was full of cronyism and corruption. Mubarak sustained that system, but its backbone was always the Egyptian military. Mubarak nurtured the military, from which he came, and the military preserved him. Although the officers behind Egypt's 1952 revolution abandoned their uniforms long ago, Egypt's rulers have been generals in suits for decades.

For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations. Finally, the confused administration seemed to have realized that U.S. foreign policy must center on long-term support for the non-violent transition to secular consensual government, rather than hour-by-hour, very public assessments of Egyptian individuals. To the degree that individuals thwart constitutionality (quite a different thing from plebiscites), we should be opposed; to the degree they aid it, we should be supportive. That way, we at last dispense with the embarrassments of “Mubarak, a dictator/not a...

In a piece from this week's Newsweek, Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School, totally destroys the fallacy on going that the Obama Administration's policy toward Egypt during this recent crisis was purely successful. He writes:

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, EGYPT - Hosni Mubarak, whose presence was felt and feared throughout Egypt for 30 years, has fallen quickly and astonishingly out of sight, his exact whereabouts unknown. The prime minister declared Sunday that Mubarak was here, in a favored southern Sinai resort, and a senior U.S. administration official said the White House also believes that Mubarak is staying in Sharm el-Sheikh. Mubarak remains unseen here so far, just as always. For the last five years, he has come to this sunny retreat for one or two days a week, often longer, local residents say, vanishing behind the high...

Things in Egypt are looking grim indeed. After weeks of protests and riots, Mubarak finally stepped down. The military has now taken over the country, in a move that many are bizarrely calling "democratic." This seems incredibly unlikely to bring about an Egypt which is more just and less corrupt. "Egypt's military dissolved parliament and will run the country for six months or until elections are held, it said in a statement Sunday, two days after President Hosni Mubarak resigned."

We have learned through foreign sources that Hosni Mubarak was flown this morning to a Baden hospital in Germany after falling into a coma. Continue reading on Examiner.com: Mubarak in life/death state in Germany hospital - National Foreign Policy | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/foreign-policy-in-national/mubarak-life-death-state-germany-hospital#ixzz1DsUiWFbO

It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in American relations to the Arab world. The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than...

"He had very tough things to say about the United States," said Ben-Eliezer, a member of the Labor Party who has held talks with Mubarak on numerous occasions while serving in various Israeli coalition governments. "He gave me a lesson in democracy and said: 'We see the democracy the United States spearheaded in Iran and with Hamas, in Gaza, and that's the fate of the Middle East,'" Ben-Eliezer said. "'They may be talking about democracy but they don't know what they're talking about and the result will be extremism and radical Islam,'" he quoted Mubarak as saying. Meanwhile, Doug Schoen,...