Let Women Wear the Hijab: The Emptiness of Obama's Cairo Speech  —  I know many will gush over President Obama's Cairo speech and I'm likely swimming against the tide of the media and my fellow Democrats and progressives.  But reading the transcript, I was struck by two things:

Obama's Cairo speech: Surprisingly good  —  I didn't get the chance to watch Barack Obama's Cairo speech live, although I'm sure that it will be chopped up on YouTube within the next couple of hours.  Instead, I read the full text posted by Andrew Malcolm, as well as Andrew's commentary …

An Absolutely Extraordinary Moment  —  An African-American President with Muslim roots stands before the Muslim world and defends the right of Jews to a nation of their own in their ancestral homeland, and then denounces in vociferous terms the evil of Holocaust denial, and right-wing Israelis …

Addressing Muslim World, Obama Calls for New Start  —  CAIRO — President Obama pledged on Thursday to “seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” imploring America and the Islamic world to drop their suspicions of each other and forge new alliances …

Awful  —  What an awful speech.  Among the problems, one was the president's claim that there are “nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today.”  The true number is probably less than half that, as this page details.  —  Even when Obama was trying to be nice to Israel …

A Meeting in Damascus  —  About an hour after Barack Obama's excellent Cairo speech, I met with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, at his office here to talk about the speech and the Israel-Palestine conflict.  We spoke for several hours and I will have a fuller accounting of our conversation in my print column next week.

What Barack Hussein Obama told Muslims in Egypt (text here)  —  President Barack Hussein Obama, born to a Muslim father and educated in a Muslim country, won a rousing response in Cairo today with an outreach to a Muslim world that reviled his predecessor George W. Bush.

The Gingrich Universe  —  A great column from E.J. Dionne on the media clout of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh and the extent to which the discourse remains wired for conservatism: … A great example of this, that Dionne doesn't use in his column, was the incredibly skewed coverage …