Monday morning open thread

Joe is back from the hospital, got back last night, and he's doing well. His voice is coming back, and while he's still a bit out of it, he said he might blog a small amount today if he's up to it. It's going to be an interesting week for our Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner. I'm really astounded by the anger I'm seeing on the left. On the right, you have to take any and all criticism with a grain of salt. But people on the left are ticked. I ran into Paul Begala at CNN, and he told me had just compared Geithner to Rumsfeld on the segment he had just done. I know Chris in Paris has been ticked about the Geithner appointment from the beginning - and as Chris is our business expert, I put a lot of stock in that. It's becoming increasingly clear that Chris was right.

As for the blog, any of you who weren't here on Saturday may have noticed that we finally launched AMERICAblog 2.0 (thank God). A number of folks passed along suggestions to increase the font (we did) and to tone down the red on the right-hand side (we did that too), among other things. Please feel free to give us feedback, it's the only way we know what works and what doesn't. And if you have a favorite site that you think we should add to our various link and update boxes on the site, please pass those along too - we promise we'll check them out.

Oh, and John Amato posted a short clip of my appearance on CNN yesterday. I was pretty exhausted. But I think it went okay. On with the news...