President Obama heads to New Orleans tomorrow — his first trip to the Big Easy since becoming president. His plans include a visit  to a charter school and holding a town hall meeting while he’s there. But some residents think the four hours he’s spending in their city is too short a time to hear the problems facing the city. Today we ask some New Orleans locals what they want the president to address. We hear from Clarence White, a social worker with Unity Welcome Home, a homelessness outreach organization; Diana Pinckley, with Woman of the Storm, a coastal rebuilding group; Eric Jensen, director of youth engagement for the Afterschool Partnership; and Bill Barrow, staff reporter for The Times-Picayune.

• Washington Takeout: Congresssional Democrats are attacking an antitrust exemption that lets insurance companies avoid federal oversight. Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason explains why.
• Sports Takeout: The Takeaway's sports contributor, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, has the latest on sports, including his thoughts on why conservative and controversial talk show host Rush Limbaugh has been dropped from the group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams football team. Was it something we said?
  
• Listener Takeout: We hear our listeners' reactions to our health care coverage and our conversation on women in the military.

Yesterday the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the symbolic threshold of 10,000. New York Times finance reporter Louise Story says the news is interesting, but it doesn't say much about the overall health of the economy. Something that might: the banking sector. Also joining the conversation is New York Times economics correponsdent Edmund Andrews with a look at how the U.S. Treasury wants some bailed-out banks to start paying back their loans.

Monty Python, the British comic troupe with a penchant for absurdist humor, retelling historic and biblical stories, and above all, glorifying Spam, are celebrating the 40th anniversary of their hugely influential comedy show, "Monty Python's Flying Circus." We look back on their work (which is, much to the Pythons' surprise, still making audiences laugh four decades later). Click through for more of our favorite clips.

BBC correspondent Adam Mynott joins us with a report on increasing violence in Pakistan. Earlier today, eleven people were killed when a car bomb exploded near a police station in the northwestern town of Kohat. Pakistan's second-largest city, Lahore, was recently the site of clashes between police and suspected militants who attacked a federal security building and other police training centers, killing at least 21 people. The latest attacks came days after a militant raid on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

This morning we're discussing technology companies who have made diversity a priority. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up Google, they made diverse hiring a goal. It wasn’t for the sake of being politically correct — they thought it would be good for business. We speak to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search product and user experience at Google (and one of Google’s first employees); along with Xerox’s chief diversity and employee advocacy officer, Philip Harlow. We also look at how minorities lag behind at research universities with Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma, who authored a report: "A National Analysis in Science and Engineering Faculties at Research Universities (opens a PDF)."

In the high-volume debate about heath care reform, one major player has been notably quiet: the health insurance industry. For the most part, the industry has given faint support to reform, but that changed this week. Health insurance companies are buying up ad time in a number of key states as part of a coordinated push to make sure their concerns remain part of the reform debate. We speak to Brad Fluegel, executive vice president and chief strategy and external affairs officer for the health insurer WellPoint. We hear also from Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesperson for America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), a trade group for insurance companies; and Jon Gruber, a health care economist at MIT who helped Massachusetts develop its universal health insurance plan.

EDITOR'S NOTE: After our segment aired, Jon Gruber disclosed that he has been paid at least $297,600 by the Department of Health and Human Services to model costs and effects of health care reform for the Obama Administration.  We did not discover or disclose that in our interview.

• Washington Takeout: Washington Examiner White House correspondent Julie Mason says President Obama will face a tough crowd when he visits New Orleans tomorrow. Many city residents are upset that it's his first visit to the city and are unimpressed with his short, four-hour visit.
• Sports Takeout: The Takeaway's sports contributor, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, previews Game 1 of baseball's National League Championship Series taking place in Los Angeles tonight. Will the LA Dodgers or the Philadelphia Phillies take the lead as the teams vie for a slot in the World Series?
• Business Takeout: New York Times finance reporter Louise Story takes a look at why Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has surrounded himself with policy advisors from Wall Street firms. 

For decades, motivational speakers like Tony Robbins have told us that positive thinking can vastly improve our lives. But Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer famous for the 2001 bestseller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," thinks they might be wrong. Her new book is called "Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America," and she tells us why she thinks positive thinking might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

A new program called Operation Proper Exit brings Iraq war veterans back to the battlefields that haunt them. The New York Times foreign correspondent, Rod Nordland, followed a group of eight soldiers as they sought emotional closure after their physical wounds had healed.

For more, read Rod Nordland's article, Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace, in today's New York Times.

New York Times foreign correspondent Dexter Filkins recently returned from Afghanistan, where he talked with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and traveled with American soldiers in one of the country’s most dangerous regions. From his headquarters in Kabul, McChrystal was preparing an analysis for President Obama on what it would now cost – in time, dollars and lives – for the U.S. to win the war. Filkins joins us to report on what it will take for McChrystal’s much-vaunted counterinsurgency approach to work.