As Egyptians head to the polls today, pundits are hesitant to celebrate, fearing the country’s first free elections in decades will be another vote for Islamic parties gaining power across thew new Middle East. But in the Guardian, Al Jazeera director general Wadah Khanfar says Western talkers should stop worrying about the “problem” of political Islam and recognize its potential to produce democratic stability. “Reform-based Islamic movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, work within the political process,” Kanfar writes. “In western discourse Islamists are seen as newcomers to politics, gullible zealots who are motivated by a radical ideology and lack experience. In fact, they have played a major role in the Arab political scene since the 1920s.”

When a NATO helicopter accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last week, most commentators declared it a disastrous military mistake. But The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart sees a clear foreign policy doctrine finally emerging from the White House. The airstrike was obviously a mistake, but Obama gave up long ago on trying to remake Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Obama doctrine appears to be to ditch expensive nation-building in favor of combating enemies with naval and air power. This approach is less brazen, but it tends to reemerge “when the money and bravado have run out.” 

Newt Gingrich's unpredictable rise to the top of the 2012 Republican field, including a major endorsement from a leading New Hampshire newspaper Sunday, has spawned endless discussions of how, exactly, he managed to live down his incredible amount of baggage. Newsweek's Michelle Goldberg takes on the most surprising comeback of all: the rehabilitation of Newt's reputation among evangelicals. "Gingrich benefits, of course, from the powerful Christian narrative of sin and deliverance," Goldberg writes. That doesn't mean he has the religious right locked up, but "anxious anti-Romney conservatives are eager to coalesce behind someone."

Nearly everyone agreed the supercommittee was a farce and that its failure was a good thing. Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman takes the glee to new heights with a wildly contrarian proposal: we don't just need new taxes, we need lots and lots of new taxes. "I don’t just mean a return to Clinton-era tax rates. Why should 1990s taxes be considered the outer limit of revenue collection?" The best things to tax would be the income of the super-rich and financial transactions."Once upon a time America was a middle-class nation, in which the super-elite’s income was no big deal. But that was another country."

The knives are out for Massachusetts' liberal Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren, and that means the perennial conversation about how to run against a strong female candidate. Slate's Libby Copeland takes the opportunity to examine the seven most common lines of attack: "nutty," "power-mad bitch," "wicked witch," "frivolous," "uppity," "deviant," and finally just outright sexism. "As John Edwards and his expensive haircut will recall, male candidates are particularly vulnerable to seeming less than entirely masculine. Women, meanwhile, are especially vulnerable to being portrayed as insufficiently warm and feminine."

Meditations on the imminent demise of Occupy Wall Street are everywhere, but New York political columnist John Heilemann thinks the movement may have only begun to shake up American politics. In a lengthy cover essay, Heilemann reports that Occupy leaders believe "after a brief period of retrenchment, the protests will be back even bigger and with a vengeance in the spring—when, with the unfurling of the presidential election, the whole world will be watching." Whether or not the movement has major political impact next year will "depend on which of two broad strains within OWS turns out to be dominant," the radical reformists or the Marxists.

The start of the new TV season has spawned hot debates about the sudden drop in female writers and the rise of "male anxiety" on television. Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz says it's even trickled into HBO's big-budget Boardwalk Empire, which lags behind other critically acclaimed shows in creating complex female roles. "The reflexive counter-argument that Boardwalk Empire is set in a man’s world almost a hundred years ago—and that deeper, more sharply defined, even autonomous female characters would be unrealistic, or anachronistic—doesn’t wash when you compare it to similarly testosterone-driven but superior shows."