If campaigns believed that people didn’t start paying attention until after Labor Day, then why have they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ads until they can’t buy any more T.V. time? Why do they care so much about campaigning if we allegedly do not.

The situation in Cairo is changing daily. When Max posted it seemed as though Tahrir Square was emptying out and Mubarak’s wait-it-out strategy was sapping the will of the protesters.

After nearly two weeks of turmoil, it looks like Tahrir Square is starting to empty out. The Egyptian Revolution – if we can call it that – seems to be entering its inevitable second phase, the power political phase, where elites sit down at a negotiating table and wield the old images of the angry masses as bargaining chips during administrative transition.

Indeed, the origins of the uprising itself lie in the use of social networking sites by antigovernment activists several months ago, after the death of Khaled Said, an Egyptian man killed by police officers after he discovered them using drugs. Support for his cause--that of fighting back in the face of government corruption--has widely been cited as the spark that helped ignite future activism.

Authoritarian regimes across the Middle East are atremble as popular revolution threatens to engulf a second country in the space of two months. Following the fall of the Ben Ali government in Tunisia, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians have converged on major cities such as Cairo and Alexandria to protest a longstanding list of political and economic grievances that include an entrenched police state, one-party rule, endemic unemployment, and rising food inflation.