If you're looking for a Petraeus break, you can't do much better than checking out Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage sitting down this week at TPMCafe's Table for One.

Savage joins us to discuss his book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. In his first post, he explains how he came to gradually understand the radical project that was underway:

I kept asking the question why. What was driving Dick Cheney and the other “presidentialists” who were so relentlessly and systematically pushing this agenda, about which they had said nothing to voters when campaigning for the office? Where was this coming from? This question took me to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, where the National Archives houses a bookcase full of documents in gray boxes titled “RICHARD CHENEY FILES.”

This week at TPMCafe's Book Club, we have an all-star group to debate Jon Chait's new book, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Paul Krugman, Stephen Moore, Will Wilkinson, Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat, and Ezra Klein will be joining in.

Blog debate so far has focused on Chait's history of the rise of suppy-siders, but as he explains in his first post they're only a piece of the puzzle:

The wealthy interests who favor tax cuts, and other pro-rich items, aren’t motivated by supply-side ideology. While they may believe that tax cuts help the economy, their deeper belief is that every dollar they have, including the dollars they inherited, is a reflection of their success and a measure of their virtue. So, in this sense, supply-side ideology simply plays the same role that Social Darwinism did a century ago and that economic orthodoxy did seventy years ago.

In other words, it acts as an altruistic gloss on a much more crass political project.

Some of the more right-wing participants in this week's discussion likely won't agree. In fact, we've put together a relatively more conservative group to respond to Chait's argument, so we're expecting fireworks. As one reader put it, it's like "like a celebrity death match within the dismal science."

Enjoy.

As if there wasn't enough to follow this week with Petraeus and Crocker hitting up Capital Hill for political support and cash, we've got two amazing features here at TPMCafe.

In the Book Club, we've assembled a pretty incredible group of folks to debate Jon Chait new book The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics. Joining Chait will be Paul Krugman of Princeton and the NYTs, Stephen Moore of the WSJ and formerly of the Club for Growth, Ezra Klein of the American Prospect, Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute, and Megan McArdle and Ross Douthat both of the Atlantic Monthly. It's a brilliant and intellectually diverse group from which we expect some entertaining fireworks.

At the Table for One, we're thrilled to have Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage here to talk about his new book, Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Savage won his Pulitzer for being one of the only major American journalists to, as Glenn Greenwald put it, simply "look at the public record of what the White House was doing, figure out what it meant, and report what the government was doing." As his editor put it, "he covers what the White House does, not just what it says."

Enjoy both of them, we're proud to have them. And let me know what you'd like to see in the future and we'll work with you to make it happen.