We have recently done some work on the TPM backend to improve the login and email delivery systems. You should always receive confirmation emails from us when you sign up for an account or change your password, and you shouldn't be logged out when browsing the site, leaving comments and posting to Reader Blogs within one session. Though we've tried to squash as many of these bugs as we can find, I'd like to know what your experience has been in the past few weeks. Please leave a comment here if you're still seeing either of these issues.

So, the internet is exploding this morning with the news that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The President says he's "humbled," some pundits say he should turn it down, everyone's got an opinion. What's yours?

Thread away.

This Times piece makes wonderful Memorial Day reading.

Donna Reed was a beautiful and famous actress in the 1940's. She was the mom in "It's A Wonderful Life" and, for boomers like me, Jeff and Mary's mom on "The Donna Reed Show in the 1960's."

But, apparently, for Yanks overseas during the war, she was one of the biggest pin-up stars.

And they wrote her letters, thousands of letters of which she saved a few hundred. Her family did us all a favor by releasing them to the Times for Memorial Day. They serve as a reminder of what young American boys were like two generations ago. Their innocence seems both lovely and incredible.

Read more »

A few days ago I spoke with a group of TPM regulars about the possibility of opening one or more chat rooms at TPMCafe for more real time discussions. An update after the jump ...

Read more »

As you may have heard, the President is now reading Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, a novel about playing cricket in New York, and the American Dream, and so forth. Excellent choice, POTUS. We here at Cafe also love Netherland, and you can check out our book club discussion of it last summer here. Enjoy.

Liaquat Ahamed joins us this week at Book Club for a discussion of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke The World. An economic history of the liquidity crisis from 1914 through the Great Depression, Ahamed focuses on four central bankers and their larger-than-life personalities: Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Emile Moreau of Banque de France, Hjalmar Schacht of Reichsbank, and Benjamin Strong of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Lords of Finance details the four men's attempts to return the economy to the gold standard - and how a series of bad decisions brought the four major banks (and their respective economies) to the brink of collapse.

Ahamed's work is particularly relevant today - in a TPMTV interview last month, he compared the current regulatory environment to the one in place during the 1920s and 1930s.

Joining the discussion are James Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin; Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to President Clinton and Senior Fellow for the New York University Center on Law and Security; Julian Zelizer, Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University; Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics at the University of Oregon; and Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network.

Clay Risen joins us this week to blog on his book, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, an account of the riots that raged across the country in April 1968. The narrative delves into each individual riot and explores the broader impact of violence on the American public. Risen also details the efforts of President Johnson, Robert Kennedy and Stokely Carmichael to curb the simmering rage.

From Risen's first post:

Why the King riots were so important in American history: Namely, they were a signal moment for so many white Americans that postwar liberalism had failed to ensure domestic order, even as it had pushed further on racial integration than many whites-in and outside the South-were comfortable with.

Risen is currently the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Previously, he was assistant editor at The New Republic and has written for The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The New York Observer, Slate, and the Atlantic.

Joining the conversation are Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation; Thomas J. Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; Peniel Joseph, Professor of African-American Studies at Brandeis University; and Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology at Columbia University and regular TPMCafe contributor.

This week at Cafe we have Matt Miller with us, book clubbing on The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. In it he dissects a series of conventional ideas - on education, free trade, health coverage, taxes - that are out of date and threaten our nation. From Matt's opening post (to go up shortly):

The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits).

Matt Miller is co-host of public radio's Left, Right & Center, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and author of The Two Percent Solution.

Joining him are Robert Litan, expert on antitrust, banking, and internet policy at the Brookings Institution and Kauffman Foundation; Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for TIME Magazine; Jeff Madrick, editor of Challenge Magazine; Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good; Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute.

Escalation in Afghanistan, drawdown in Iraq, instability in Pakistan, dialogue with Iran; relations between the United States and the Muslim World are at a height of complexity and intensity. This week at Book Club, we will be joined by Juan Cole who will be discussing his new book Engaging the Muslim World. Cole hashes out where we are, where we've been, and what the future could like in relations between the the United States and the Muslim World. Juan Cole is a professor of History at the University of Michigan and the author of the blog Informed Comment.

He will be joined by Patricia DeGennaro, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute; Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University; Saskia Sassen, professor of Sociology at Columbia University; and MJ Rosenberg, regular Cafe contributor.

This week at Book Club, we have Robert J. Norrell, history professor at the University of Tennessee, discussing his work Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. The book is the first full-length biography of Booker T. Washington in some time and re-examines the life and controversial strategies of this leader of the African-American community. Among the topics given renewed attention are the huge influence Washington wielded in the black community and larger American society and the precarious position he occupied between white supremacists on one side and competing black leaders on the other.

Joining him are Joe Lowndes, political science professor at the University of Oregon; Jane Shaw, President of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy; Ralph Luker, history teacher and author on race and on religion; and Bruce Kleinschmidt, attorney and librarian. Join us!

This week at book club, Greg Mitchell editor of Editor & Publisher and author of So Wrong for So Long joins us for a discussion of his latest, Why Obama Won: The Making of a President 2008.

As he remarks in his opening post (up shortly):

But more than anything the book explores the profound influence of what we'll call, in shorthand, "new media" in propelling Obama to victory. Obama, with the help of an unprecedented grassroots funding and organizing effort, battled the Clinton machine to a standstill, then knocked out McCain a few months later. This was the first national campaign profoundly shaped -- even, at times, dominated -- by the new media, from viral videos and blog rumors that went "mainstream" to startling online fundraising techniques.

You might call it Campaign 2.008.

Joining him are Randall Wray, economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; David Shorr, expert in national security strategy and the US role in the world at the Stanley Foundation; Michael Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nick Katzenbach, Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson; and D.D. Guttenplan, writer for The Nation. Come by and weigh in.

Hugo Chavez, Moqtada Al-Sadr, Sen. Joe McCarthy, George W. Bush: charismatic mass leaders, and democracy's most dangerous enemies? This week at Cafe, we have a Book Club discussion on Michael Signer's Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies. In it, he explores the history of the rise of popular leaders and the threats they pose to the democracies that produce them.

Signer was Foreign Policy Advisor on Sen. John Edwards presidential campaign and he is Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress and Senior National Security Policy Fellow at Third Way.

Joining him are Rachel Kleinfeld, co-founder and Executive Director of the Truman National Security Project; Heather Hurlburt, speechwriter and policy advisor in the Clinton Administration; Michael Lind, Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Brian Katulis, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; and Matt Dallek, professor at the University of California Washington Programme. See you there!

This week, we've got Will Bunch with us to blog American myth making vis-a-vis Reagan in our latest book club discussion. Bunch's new book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future examines the yarns that have been spun about President Reagan, the actual strengths based in truth, and the continuing shadow which President Reagan and his mythical specter casts over our nation. Or, as Will puts it in his opening post, up shortly, "Seriously, you didn't think the myth of Ronald Reagan would be wiped away in one election cycle, did you?"

Bunch is a Senior Writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 with the New York Newsday staff. He is also the author of Jukebox America. You can read his blog Attytood at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/.

Joining the conversation are Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland; Kyle Longley, professor of history at Arizona State University; Stephen Knott, professor of political science at U.S. Naval War College; Douglas Kmiec, professor at Pepperdine University School of Law; and Michael A. Cohen, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. As always, join us!

This week at Cafe, Eric Rauchway is joining us for a book club discussion on his latest, The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. This is a great series, and I think this book in particular does an excellent job of laying out the details of the Great Depression and The New Deal in a timely, readable, and highly relevant way.

Eric Rauchway is a History Professor at UC Davis and he specializes in US political, cultural, and intellectual history. His previous works include Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (2003) and The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900-1920 (2001).

Joining him are James K. Galbraith, economist and professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and University of Texas at Austin; Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkeley; Susan Feiner, professor of economics and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine; Mark Thoma, associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon; Anthony Badger, professor of history at Cambridge University; Jason Scott Smith, assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico; and Julian Zelizer, professor at Princeton University.

This week at Cafe we have Andrew Bacevich with us to book club blog on his latest book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. The book examines the citizenry's complicity in the current economic, political, and military crisis. Bacevich is a professor of International Relations and History at Boston University and a retired army colonel. His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002), The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003) (editor), The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), and The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy since World War II (2007) (editor).

Joining him are Michael Hollerich, professor at the University of St. Thomas; Michael Klare, professor at Hampshire College; Michael Lind, a Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; Nathan Newman, the policy director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; David Shorr, a program officer in policy analysis and dialogue at the Stanley Foundation; and Tony Smith, a professor at Tufts University.

So, it's a pretty special week. And here at Cafe we're going to be delving into some of the excitement with two week long discussions-- each gazing in a different direction from this very particular point in history. In conjunction with Democracy Journal we'll be hosting a conversation about Obama's America. After eight years of Bush Administration malfeasance, we'll be examining where America stands, as measured by the values that define our nation, and what that means for the Obama Administration going forward. Over at book club, we'll be looking back-- to the first hundred days of FDR's administration.

Read more »

Randall Stross is with us for this week's TPMCafe Book Club, where we'll be discussing his latest book Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know. The book takes us inside perhaps the most innovative, successful, and controversial company of the 'Internet Age'. Where is Google leading us, how much do they know about us and how much do we really have a say in the matter?

Randall also writes the Digital Domain column for The New York Times and is a professor of business at San Jose State University.

He'll be joined by a panel of specialists and critics who've all weighed on the dynamic role Google plays in the world of information technology. Nicholas Carr is the author of a recent Atlantic cover article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and the bestselling book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World From Edison to Google (out in paperback this coming week). James Grimmelmann is an associate professor at New York Law School and a former resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, specializing in copyright, intellectual property, and internet law. Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia, currently working on a book about Google, and maintaining the web site www.googlizationofeverything.com. David Vise won a Pulitzer Prize as a business reporter for the Washington Post, and is the author of The Google Story: Inside The Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time.

Join us.

Author Rose George is joining us this week at TPMCafe for a book club a bit off the normally beaten Cafe path. We'll be discussing her latest book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters. Her excellent book takes a tour of the world's sewage system while addressing the sometimes uncomfortable-- and often controversial-- subject of the global politics of waste.

We've lined up a slew of experts and journalists to discuss along with Rose. Frederick Kaufman, journalist and author of the in-depth sewage study "Wasteland" (Harper's, Feb. 2008); Caroline Snyder, activist and biosolids specialist with the Sierra Club; Vincent Sapienza, assistant commissioner for wastewater operations at New York City's Department of Environmental Protection; Carl Lindstrom, engineer and designer of greywater and composting toilet systems; and Chris Peot, the Biosolids Division Manager with the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority.

Rose's first post will be up shortly. As she concludes in the introduction to The Big Necessity,

Once I start noticing, I can't stop. And once I start meeting people who work in this world-- who flush its sewers and build its pitlatrines, who invent and engineer around our essential essence, in silence and disregard-- I don't want to. I'd rather follow Sigmund Freud, who wrote that humanity's "wiser course would undoubtedly have been to admit [shit's] existence and dignify it as much as nature will allow." So here goes.

Here goes.

If you're seeing anything funky with the myTPM software, I'm collecting reports here.

This week at Cafe, Paul Krugman is joining us to talk about his new book The Return Of Depression Economics And The Crisis of 2008-- a revised version of his 1999 book. The first version focused on Asia and Latin America-- this one turns its gaze on our current economic troubles and America.

Paul's first post will be up shortly, and he'll introduce the discussion. In the meantime, check out his Nobel Prize lecture, which he recently delivered in Stockholm on December 8th.

We've roped in a great group of economists to discuss with Paul all week: Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and assistant professor of economics at Bucknell University; Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Treasury in the Clinton Administration; Robert Reich, professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and former U.S. Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997; Dana Chasin, Senior Policy Advisor at OMB Watch; Jo-Ann Mort, the founder and CEO of ChangeCommunications, Randall Wray, professor of economics and research director at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability at the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Mark Thoma, associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon; and Susan Feiner, professor of economics and women's and gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

This week, we'll be discussing Avraham Burg's new book The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes. Burg is the former Speaker of the Knesset in Israel (1999-2003), turned political dissenter, and the book is at once intensely personal-- using his own family history to think about the Jewish state today-- and significantly political. He writes in his intro post (to go up shortly):

My argument is simple -- very soon our children will live in a world without living witnesses. The Holocaust will become a memory rather than an experience. So how do we depart from experience to memory, from trauma to trust, from the past to the future?

Joining the conversation are: Philip Weiss, who blogs at www.philipweiss.org and is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps; John Mearsheimer, a University of Chicago professor and author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy; TPMCafe regulars Bernard Avishai, the author of Hebrew Republic and Jo-Ann Mort, the founder and CEO of ChangeCommunications; Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Initiative at the New America Foundation, and a former adviser to the Israeli government; Jonathan Jacoby, a writer and former director of the Israel Policy Forum; Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of jstreet.org, who served as Bill Clinton's deputy domestic policy adviser.

Stay tuned for Burg's first post.

We have two projects running at TPMCafe this week, both focused on Iraq.

First we'll be running a discussion between TPM's own Josh Marshall and Alex Holmes, a co-writer of House of Saddam, a four-part miniseries documenting the rise and fall of the Iraqi dictator. Produced in partnership with HBO and BBC, the drama aired in Britain this summer, and will air on HBO starting December 7. We'll be posting a few clips from the film throughout the week, so stay tuned.

At our Book Club, Michael Lind joins us for a discussion of his 2006 book, The American Way of Strategy. Lind, once the darling of conservative circles, now bills himself as a member of the "Radical Center" and serves as a senior fellow at the New America foundation. In the book he asks:

Is it all propaganda, then? Is the statement that American soldiers died in foreign wars defending the liberties of Americans nothing more than a patriotic lie? The thesis of this book is that the assertion is true ... The purpose of the American way of strategy has always been to defend the American way of life.

Other Book Club participants this week include: David Rieff, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute at the New School for Social Research; David Shorr, the program officer in Policy Analysis and Dialogue at the Stanley Foundation, and coeditor of Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide; Michael Signer, the Senior Policy Advisor at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and author, Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies; Charles Kupchan, a professor of international relations at Georgetown University and Senior Fellow and Director of Europe Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.

Join us.

This week at Cafe, Charles Homans is joining us for a special discussion, something we've been gnawing on at Cafe for a while now. The topic: what should be done in the last days of the Bush presidency and the beginning of Obama's term to address the malfeasance of the last 8 years. The conversation will be centered around Charles' upcoming article in the Washington Monthly: Last Secrets of the Bush Administration: How to find out what we still don't know.

It's easy to let this slide out of the public discourse right now. The economy, Obama's new team of appointees, etc, are crowding the table. As Charles writes:

"The thought of revisiting this history after living through it for eight years is exhausting, and both President Barack Obama and Congress will have every political reason to just move on. But we can't--it's too important."

Have you ever seen a President so completely disappear?

Discussing with Charles: Scott Horton, New York attorney specializing in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, and regular contributor to Harper's; Suzanne Spaulding, lawyer specializing in national security issues, including homeland security, intelligence, and terrorism; Daniel Larison, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and host of the blog, Eunomia; Mickey Edwards, former congressman (R-OK), lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school, and Vice President of the Aspen Institute; Anne Weismann, Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; and finally, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

Charles' first post up shortly. Join us.