Next Thursday, former Vice President Cheney will give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute making a global case for the Bush administration's use of torture and indefinite detainment of suspected terrorists as core parts of its War on Terror.

Here's AEI's description of the event ...

In April 2009, almost eight years after the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, the Obama administration released four memos from the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel. These memos, which justified the use of harsh interrogation techniques against high-level al Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, have reignited a fierce debate about the United States' counterterrorism strategy.

Amid claims that the interrogation methods amount to torture and that those who approved them should be prosecuted or censured, it is clear that we know surprisingly little about the scope and efficacy of the Bush administration's national security policy. Many questions linger: What type of information did enhanced interrogation methods yield? Were lives saved as a result? Could that intelligence have been effectively collected by other means? How effective was the terrorist surveillance program in detecting the threat of al Qaeda and its operatives in the post-9/11 period? Will inhibiting these procedures cost more American lives?

On May 21, former vice president Dick Cheney will speak at AEI to address these critical issues and provide a blueprint for keeping America safe in the future.

The Congress party has pulled off a dramatic election victory, giving Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a second term in office.

President Obama officially announces the nomination of Utah's Republican Governor (and previously a potential presidential candidate) Jon Huntsman to be Ambassador to China. That and other political news in today's TPMDC Saturday Roundup.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Many have suggested that Gov. Jon Huntsman (R) of Utah, whose sanity and 21st century views have set him apart from many in today's GOP, as a potential presidential candidate in 2012. But that probably just became much less likely as tomorrow he'll resign the governorship and accept President Obama's nomination to serve as Ambassador to China.

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will visit the White House for what is likely be a pivotal first visit with President Obama. Given both parties' interest in avoiding public disagreement we probably will not get any immediate sense of the substance of their conversations. But the two men, all protestations to the contrary, are on a collision course.

President Obama wants a peace settlement based on a two state solution and he's signaled through top advisors that he wants a settlement during his first term of office. And Obama, unlike President Bush, actually appears to mean it. Netanyahu wants continued settlement expansion and no Palestinian state. Publicly this is muddled over by claims that he wants to focus on building up the Palestinian economy on the West Bank, as preparation for some possible, maybe autonomy or independence to happen in the never specified and never-to-happen future.

Then there's the question of Iran. The Netanyahu government has spent its brief time in office aggressively pushing the line that any work on the Palestinian front can't happen until the threat of the Iranian nuclear program is definitively ended. That has the dual benefit -- if the premise is accepted -- of forcing the US to shelve its entire approach to Iran, follow the Netanyahu government's lead and close the door on any work toward a final settlement with the Palestinians.

What it all comes down to is that Obama wants a peace deal and Netanyahu doesn't. And Netanyahu is making a big push to tie Obama's hands or get him to back off his policy.

Add to this that Netanyahu has been Prime Minister before. And a very big reason he stopped being Prime Minister the first time is that he got crosswise with the US President -- something that amounts to the third rail of Israeli politics. An Israeli PM who can't successively manage the US-Israel relationship usually can't last long.

So both men have strong domestic imperatives to limit any appearance of disagreement. But each also wants to follow a policy that is completely in conflict with the one the other wants to pursue. My hunch (and my hope -- and hopefully I'm not confusing the two) here is that Obama has many more cards than Netanyahu but that Netanyahu doesn't fully grasp that and that over time he'll overplay his hand and find himself out of office like he did a decade ago. But at some point, and probably soon (remember, he's got the speech in Cairo early next month) Obama will start having to put his own cards on the table and putting clear limits on what he'll accept.

I'm going to start this weekend by meditating on this photo of Dick Cheney zipping around on a segway.

TPM debuts the official Dick Cheney Torture Media Tour slide show.

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

I'm a little unclear on this. I'm listening to Chris Matthews saying that CIA Director Leon Panetta just dished out some smackdown to Nancy Pelosi, claiming that the CIA records are accurate and that Pelosi is wrong. Only his memo doesn't say that at all. It's really not any different -- in terms of who's right and who's wrong -- than what he said when he released the original memos. Look what it says. It's highly hedged.

Alas, Politico, CNN, AP and almost everyone else seems along for the spin.

Paul Begala cheers on Dick Cheney's efforts to dismantle the GOP.

Michael Steele: Obama will take away our guns so we won't be able to defend ourselves from Khalid Sheik Mohammed once he brings him here from Gitmo.

As TPM Reader BR notes, they don't make Wall Street sharks like they used to ...

I saw your post on Charles Millard, by chance, just as I was reading about a fascinating historical parallel. The book I'm reading is After Wilson, The Struggle for the Democratic Party 1920-1934, by Douglas B. Craig, University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

The very conservative DNC Chair John J. Raskob, who had been the treasurer of DuPont and General Motors and later was a leader of the anti-New Deal Liberty League, in 1929 wrote what Craig calls a famous article called "Everybody Ought to be Rich" in the Ladies Home Journal. Here's Craig on p. 151:

He suggested the creation of a "Working Man's Investment Trust" which would invest workers' savings in gilt-edged securities. By agglomerating individual workers' small savings, the trust would be able to buy large quantities of stocks and reinvest the dividends. If workers deposited $15 per month in such a scheme, he predicted, they could expect to have accumulated a retirement fund of $80,000 at the end of twenty years.

But wait a minute! Craig reports on the next page that:

Raskob himself recognized that stock prices in 1929 were unrealistically high, and he refused to countenance the creation of the trust until they stabilized.

Obviously, the standards of our robber barons have declined since 1929...

Over at Cafe, we've been discussing Kim Bobo's impressive new book, Wage Theft in America.

Today, Steven Greenhouse weighs in with a basic Q: what don't corporate executives understand about "Thou Shalt Not Steal?"

You can find the week's discussion here. Join us.

Former Sen. Graham explains how the press is getting bamboozled into focusing on Nancy Pelosi's briefing at the expense of figuring out what US torture policy was.

Maybe we're lucky that President Bush didn't get his hands on all the Social Security money just in time to blow it all an extremely over-heated stock market. But not all is lost. Not long after his Social Security privatization scheme went down in flames, President Bush appointed Charles Millard the head of the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation. And the former Lehman executive decided to invest a good bit of it into the stock market and real estate. This was back in 2007 and 2008. It's not clear how much of the funds had been subjected to the new "strategy" before the markets crashed.

That was where things stood before investigators looked at it and saw a suspicion pattern of communications with big investment houses just before Millard piled tons of money into their funds. And now senators are asking for a criminal investigation. Moe Tkacik reports on the latest. And here's our run-down of the key facts from the draft report of the Inspector General's audit.

If we need torture to keep the country safe, why did Bush and Cheney stop doing it in early 2004?

Contrary to media spin, GOPers think their party does have a clear leader. Just none of them agree on who it is.

Xe, the rebranded military contractor formerly known as Blackwater, has just rolled out a new dirigible-themed branding campaign to emphasize their move away from earlier high-tech mercenary product line.