samer shehata, assistant professor of arab politics at georgetown university. and steven cook, senior fellow for middle eastern studies at the council on foreign relations. 6-thank you all three for being here. i just want to report to you and our audience, we've just learned that vice president biden has been on the phone in the last hour or so calling the new egyptian vice president urging restraint on both sides. the wires are reporting the white house is saying that the egyptian government is responsible for ensuring peaceful demonstrations don't lead to violence. now, samer shehata, what is the level of concern here in the united states about where things are headed? >> well, i think people are very concerned, both in egypt and the united states. as the report mentioned, tomorrow is supposed to be the day. as far as the protestors are concerned, all different types of protestors, from the april 6 movement to the muslim brotherhood. and they're going to try to get to cairo and get to tahrir, liberation square, in large numbers. and they're hoping that will

samer shehata, this was not the speech that most people were expecting, what did you hear? what jumped out at you? >> well, there wasn't that much to the speech. this is the third time hosni mubarak has spoken. this is the third time the egyptians have expected him to resign or leave and the third time egyptians have been disappointed, in fact, shocked, outraged as margaret mention. ed so the details weren't important. he talked about this supposed quote/unquote dialogue with a group of opposition, quite broad and so on, he talked about youth and constitutional amendments, specific constitutional amendments having to do with restrictions on presidential candidacy and judicial supervision of elections but really none of that mattered because that's not what this is about. i mean, for several weeks now millions of egyptians have been calling for the president to resign and they didn't get that and i think things are going to escalate, as margaret mentioned. >> brown: mary jane deeb, does it mean he thinks he has... does he have the backing of the military of power elites? >>

host: samer shehata is a professor of georgetown.e has taught at columbia, and why you, and the american university in cairo. from pittsburgh, good morning. caller: you kind of already answered my question that i have for you. you stated that the idea is to have the -- not an islamic nation but a civil one. i want to say something about the previous caller. the peace agreement that jimmy carter had with saddat in, goodness, i forgot. who is that agreement? mubarak was the new leader. they camped piece for a long time -- they kept peace. israel asked for one thing, the right to exist. i feel that if the other arab countries would give them a right to exist, anyone in the world would ask for the right to exist. what is wrong with that? i do not understand why this cannot be resolved. host: that was the reagan-sadat agreement signed in 1979. guest: the arab states, quite importantly, i think in 2002 there is the meeting in beirut and it was called the abdallah proposal. they put forward the idea that of the arab states would recognize i

talking about the budget process as it unfolds with robert bixby of the concord coalition and samer shehata talking about the muslim brotherhood and the priorities as egypt seeks to forming a government after the recent uprising. that is coming up tomorrow on "washington journal." we went to you know that we have been covering the cpac conference for most of the week and one of the articles talking about that conference is in "the new york times peacoat "gop hopefuls offer criticism of all things obama." they will conduct a straw poll in late this afternoon they will be releasing the numbers. we will have live coverage of that on c-span starting at about 5:15 p.m. if you want more information about c-span's coverage of cpac, go to our website, c-span.org. thank you very much for watching this edition of "washington journal" and we will see you again tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. eastern. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] >> this morning, a couple of house hearings. the first one was for federal funding for abortion. next