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Many of you might not know that in addition to being a network of news blogs, TPM is a community with thousands of members. Anyone who wants to can sign in to have his or her own blog, comment on the posts of other readers or TPM staffers, or recommend favorite posts to others.

Today we’re announcing myTPM, an upgrade to the current system and a new set of tools that allow you to customize your community experience and choose your favorite contributors to follow. I explain in today’s TPMtv…

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

PS: A written explanation of the new tools is here.

Don’t forget, Spring Internship apps are due today!

TPM is looking for two full-time interns to work out of the office here in NYC and help us stay on top of breaking news, manage our growing multimedia system, and do the research that is vital to our muck-tastic reporting.

What the job lacks in financial reward it more than makes up for with first hand experience in a new media newsroom. Former TPM interns include TPM staff, a handful of professional bloggers, and even a few writers at mainstream national newspapers.

If you’re interested in joining us, email talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com with the subject “TPM internship.” Send us a resume, a few references, and a letter explaining why you want to be a TPM intern. Because this is a non-seasonal call for interns, applications will be processed on a rolling basis. So first come, first interviewed.

We hope to hear from you.

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.”

Don’t miss this.

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.

This week at TPMCafe we’ll be hosting the first week of a month of great Book Clubs. Getting things started: Todd Gitlin’s The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.

In the book, Gitlin offers a landscape view of the Bush years and argues that liberals need a “big tent” Democratic Party to counter the bulldozer GOP. Gitlin explains in his introductory post:

The Democrats have no choice but to remain a big-tent party. The Republicans made the mistake of turning themselves into a bulldozer party, but they couldn’t bulldoze reality fast enough to keep from falling into a ditch. Now, if we don’t blow it, there’s a new center of gravity coming into American politics—not a flabby center of splitting differences, not a blah-blah of bipartisanship, but a new story and replenished values.

Read Gitlin’s full post for more, and check in all week at the Book Club for an all-star discussion with Digby, Matt Yglesias, Heather Booth, Ed Kilgore, Mark Schmitt and our very own Josh Marshall.

Don’t forget, applications for TPM’s Fall Internship are due this Friday!

Also, if you’re a design, code or video expert who thinks a TPM internship isn’t for you, think again. In addition to writing, research and media monitoring, we want a few interns who can help with TPMtv, do design work and generally support all of our various technological efforts.

So email us!

I’ve only just now caught up on watching all of the 26 videos we produced at YearlyKos over the weekend, so I suspect you might be a bit behind, too. In case you don’t have time to watch them all, some favorites of mine you might have missed:

The distinguished Juan Cole calls the DailyKos community his “homies”:

Max Blumenthal, of videoblogging fame, explains the Freud-on-steroids method to his wonderful madness:

Time’s Jay Carney woos the netroots and attacks the pseudononymous all at once:

And finally, debate moderator Matt Bai gives his postgame take on the debate and explains how he achieved netroots cred:

We had a grand time. Thanks to everyone who chatted with us and to TPMtv leader Ben Craw for his tireless editing.