“Thanks to the U.S., I don’t even know what the word ‘Dad’ means,” Muhammad told me when we met at his family’s house earlier this month in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Clutching a portrait of his father, Abdul Khaliq al-Baidhani, in a white prison jumpsuit, he added: “I just want the U.S. to send my father home.”

If President Obama stands by his statements on Thursday, Muhammad may finally get his wish. During a wide-ranging speech on counterterrorism policy, Obama vowed to lift a freeze on repatriations of Yemenis from Guantánamo that he imposed in January 2010, days after a botched effort to attack a U.S. airliner that authorities linked to Yemen. Obama also renewed the pledge he made on his first day in office in 2009 to close Guantánamo altogether – though without offering a time frame.

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According to the New York Times, a bill that’s already moved through the House Financial Services Committee, allowing more of the very kind of derivatives trading (bets on bets) that got the Street into trouble, was drafted by Citigroup — whose recommended language was copied nearly word for word in 70 lines of the 85-line bill.

Where were House Democrats? Right behind it. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a major recipient of the Street’s political largesse, co-sponsored it. Most of the Democrats on the Committee, also receiving generous donations from the big banks, voted for it. Rep. Jim Himes, another proponent of the bill and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, now leads the Democrat’s fund-raising effort in the House.

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Rosen wasn't charged. In truth, the government never really intended to charge him. They just needed a judge to agree that Rosen probably violated the Espionage Act so that they could get their warrant to read his emails, as part of their real investigation into his source, an intelligence analyst named Richard Kim. It worked. That's the scandal: that the government could charge a journalist with, effectively, spying, simply for reporting. Barack Obama yesterday announced that he did not want his Justice Department treating the act of reporting as criminal. He is going to convene a panel, and urge the passage of a shield law. The question is, what will he do about Holder?

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As a liberal, I’m against drones essentially by reflex. At least, I used to be. Recently, I’ve begun to reconsider that view; and I’m no longer sure where I come down on the morality of drone strikes. Disturbing as I find state-sponsored violence, when drones do the killing instead of soldiers, it seems apparent that we have an easier time recognizing the violence as horrific. War, in its traditional form, distorts our moral reasoning. Drones do not. And as much it grates against my broader political commitments to say so, this is plainly a benefit of drone warfare, other shortcomings notwithstanding.

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In a speech at the National Defense University, Obama tried to redefine that fight and at least rhetorically end the war. “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us, mindful of James Madison’s warning that ‘No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’”

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“I’m willing to cut the young lady who interrupted me so slack, because it’s worth being passionate about,” Obama said. He added: “I obviously don’t agree with much of what she said."

"Will you tell the Muslim people their lives are as precious as our lives?" she yelled, as she was being escorted out. "Can you take the drones out of the hands of the CIA? Can you stop the signature strikes that are killing people on the basis of suspicious activities? Will you apologize to the thousands of Muslims that you have killed?"

"That will make us safer," she added.

Here's the video, via TPM.

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On Wednesday afternoon, in a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder for the first time formally acknowledged that U.S. drones had killed four U.S. citizens -- including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Bearing out long-held concerns in the human rights community over the description of these strikes as "targeted" killings, only one of these U.S. citizens (al-Awlaki senior) was on the government's kill list.

The New York Times' typically administration-friendly report suggests that Obama's speech will hail the dawn of a new age of high precision, unproblematic drone strikes. The language used in Holder's letter, however, alongside recent disturbing comments from top Pentagon officials, give us reason to doubt that the boundless, limitless War on Terror is coming to any sort of clean end.

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From TIME's press release on the picture:

Pictured left to right in the attached photo: Greg Orme (Allman's date and Obama's friend), Allman, Obama and Obama's date Megan Hughes.

TIME is also releasing a note Obama wrote in Allman's yearbook at the end of his senior year that reads, in part, "You are extremely sweet and foxy, I don't know why Greg would want to spend any time with me at all! You really deserve better than clowns like us; you even laugh at my jokes!"

Read the full story here.

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“It’s pretty inconceivable to me that the president wouldn’t know,” Boehner said on Fox News on Wednesday. “I’m just putting myself in his shoes. I deal with my senior staff every day. And if the White House had known about this, which now it appears they’ve known about it for about a year, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t have come up in some conversation.”

“They could have attempted to insulate the president from this news,” he continued. “But with as many people that were involved in the audit, the number of people involved in the investigation, somebody — and the number of people in the White House that knew — it really is inconceivable that he wouldn’t have known about it.”

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From the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. has been in talks with the Afghan government about transferring Afghan detainees from Guantanamo. Human-rights advocates believe these detainees could be among the first transferred.

A U.S. official said the transfers to Yemen would begin slowly, starting with two or three detainees, to ensure Yemen can keep track of the detainees and prevent them from joining militant groups. The official said that transfers to Yemen could still be months away.

As the Washington Post reports, though, the Pentagon is still asking Congress for over $450 million to maintain and upgrade the facilities at Guantanamo Bay, a move that's at odds with the President's announcement:

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On the eve of the president's speech at the National Defense University, the Obama administration revealed for the first time that a fourth American citizen had been killed in secretive drone strikes abroad. The killings of three other Americans in counterterror operations since 2009 were known before a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy acknowledged the four deaths.

Obama's speech is expected to reaffirm his national security priorities — from homegrown terrorists to killer drones to the enemy combatants held at the military-run detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — but make no new sweeping policy announcements. The White House has offered few clues on how the president will address questions that have dogged his administration for years and, critics say, given foreign allies mixed signals about U.S. intentions in some of the world's most volatile areas.

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Acting IRS director Stephen Miller walked the plank, even though there’s no evidence he had anything to do with the wrongful targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status, and the commissioner of the agency's tax exempt and government entities division, Joseph Grant, is retiring early. I’m not defending either man; bad things happened on their watch and that’s what happens to people at the top. Yet the woman at the center of the scandal, Lois Lerner, the IRS director of exempt organizations, still has a job --  and that makes no sense.

I don’t like scapegoating, but Lerner seemed like a reasonable candidate to lose her job even before she delivered a tin-eared self-defense in front of Darrell Issa’s House Oversight Committee – and then pleaded the Fifth Amendment, exercising her constitutional right to avoid self-incrimination,

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Even if we are to take Carney at his word, his remark comes as little assurance. The president may believe that journalists should never be prosecuted for doing their job. What's at stake, then, is what this administration considers the job of a journalist. In the context of the ongoing war on leaks and an administration invested in the tight control of information, the presidential view on protected journalistic activity seems a far cry from a robust Fourth Estate.

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According to a pool report, after asking that the teleprompter in the room be taken down, Biden joked: “You can’t tell Barack that the teleprompter’s down. The standing joke in the office is Barack’s learning to speak without a teleprompter; I’m learning to speak with one.”

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"Most often" and "typically," though, are the operative words these days. While I'm obviously hesitant to invoke the 37th president terms for the aforementioned reasons -- and while I agree with my Salon colleague Alex Pareene and my pal Steve Almond that the IRS and Benghazi brouhahas most certainly do not warrant Nixon references -- I do believe Nixon's legacy is nonetheless applicable to the revelations about the Obama administration's posture toward press freedom.

Those particular revelations, of course, aren't happening in a vacuum. Instead, they relate to an administration whose known obsessions suggest this is part of a larger, dare I say Nixonian, pathology -- one defined by a hostility toward the most basic democratic ideals.

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The men remain at large while the FBI gathers evidence. But the investigation has been slowed by the reduced U.S. intelligence presence in the region since the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks, and by the limited ability to assist by Libya's post-revolutionary law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which are still in their infancy since the overthrow of dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The decision not to seize the men militarily underscores the White House aim to move away from hunting terrorists as enemy combatants and holding them at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The preference is toward a process in which most are apprehended and tried by the countries where they are living or arrested by the U.S. with the host country's cooperation and tried in the U.S. criminal justice system. Using military force to detain the men might also harm fledgling relations with Libya and other post-Arab-Spring governments with whom the U.S. is trying to build partnerships to hunt al-Qaida as the organization expands throughout the region.

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Citing a Tuesday poll from the Washington Post showing that President Obama's approval on the economy is at 48 percent, up from 44 percent in April, Silver writes: "The economic mood may have been lifted by two highly visible indicators — record-breaking stock prices and rebounding housing prices — along with a series of improved jobs reports."

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This time around, he'll start with higher-name ID -- "I think we started off last time around at 18 percent and now we're pushing 75 to 80 percent" -- and more support from national Democrats, who were initially skeptical about his chances and didn't get heavily involved until mid-October. "I don't think they jumped in at all," Graves quipped of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, before quickly excusing them in a typical Minnesota-nice fashion: "There was lower-hanging fruit, I don't blame them."

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Clearly Obama is a horrible boss, and the White House is a toxic work environment, probably, where people are afraid to report bad news to their superiors. Just like Nixon, times ten thousand.

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