Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mi.) joins us to remember Senator Ted Kennedy as a political colleague. We also have New York Times Reporter John Broder, who wrote a piece in for The New York Times on Senator Kennedy.

We remember Senator Ted Kennedy with various speeches he made throughout the years. Joining us to put Kennedy's life and career in context are Kevin Cullen, columnist for the Boston Globe, and Carl Hulse, chief congressional correspondent for The New York Times.

With only 10 percent of ballots in, the Afghan election commission says President Hamid Karzai and top challenger Abdullah Abdullah each have about 40 percent of the vote; Karzai holds a slight lead. If neither candidate gets a majority, there will be a runoff vote.

A panel convened by President Obama to study the H1N1 flu, or "swine flu," presented a report Monday with a "plausible scenario" in which as many as 90,000 people could die of the flu this fall.  To help understand this prediction, we're joined by Dr. Richard Wenzel, chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University and former President of the International Society for Infectious Diseases.

As part of our week-long series of health care roundtables, we’re talking with young people. They're coveted by health insurers, but with low salaries and high resilience, they’re often the least likely to buy in. We hear from Savlan Hauser, an architect in Oakland, California who has been buying her own catastrophic health insurance plan for the last three years; Nik Bonovich, a freelance journalist in Sacramento, California, who’s been buying premium health insurance since February; and Golnar Adili, who's been going without health care coverage for the past three years.

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The average doctor visit lasts just 17 minutes, according to online medical journal Medscape.  Plans for health care reform aim to allow doctors to spend more time with patients, but until then, doctors recommend getting the most out of even short visits. They say it doesn't make sense to leave anything out. Dr. Charles Mouton is professor of community health and family practice at Howard University, and he gives us some advice on how to break the silence and talk to your doctor most effectively.

President Obama may soon face a new obstacle to his plan to reform health care: a growing pool of budgetary red ink. The White House Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office will release new estimates today on the size of the U.S. deficit.  Both agencies are expected to say the deficit will reach $9 trillion over the next decade, which is a $2 trillion increase from previous projections. We speak with Linda Bilmes, Harvard professor of public finance and co-author, with Joseph Stiglitz, of the book "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict."

Michael Jackson died of a fatal drug overdose including the anesthetic Propofol, according to court documents unsealed on Monday. Jackson's death will now reportedly be treated as a homicide. To shed light on the latest news, we speak with Allison Samuels, national correspondent for Newsweek magazine; she has been following the Jackson case since his death two months ago.

This morning, President Obama will nominate Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to a second term.  The President will do so during an appearance at Oak Bluffs School on Martha’s Vineyard, where the First Family is vacationing this week. Joining us to talk about Bernanke's performance during the current economic crisis is our friend Dan Gross, columnist at Newsweek and Slate and author of the book "Dumb Money," as well as Richard Bove, banking equities analyst and a Vice President at Rochdale Securities.

Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint federal prosecutor John Durham to investigate alleged prisoner abuses at CIA prisons during the Bush administration.  Durham has a long reputation as a no-nonsense, under-the-radar prosecutor who’s gone after career criminals and corrupt government officials for decades.

For more on this elusive figure, we talk to Durham’s old boss Kevin O'Connor, former U.S. Attorney for the State of Connecticut. And for more on the ramifications of the decision to investigate the CIA's interrogation techniques, we turn to New York Times Reporter Scott Shane.

In an attempt to slow the spread of HIV, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention might begin recommending circumcisions for all infant boys. The announcement comes out of this week's National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta. The CDC likely won't release a formal draft of the proposal for another four to six months, but speculation on it already has emotions flaring.

For more on the debate, we are joined by Dana Goldstein, public health reporter and associate editor for The American Prospect magazine; and Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Ever since it was founded eight years ago, Wikipedia has declared itself "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." But soon, not everyone will be able to edit every article. Starting in a few weeks, the Wikimedia Foundation will require changes made to entries about living people be approved a new class of experienced editors.  The move aims to curb abuse by vandals... but it complicates Wikipedia's wide-open ethos. We speak to Noam Cohen, who writes the "Link by Link" column for The New York Times.

Read Cohen's article on the changes ahead for the online encyclopedia, "Wikipedia to Limit Changes to Articles on People"

Today, preliminary results come in from last week's hotly-contested presidential election in Afghanistan. Both leading candidates, current President Hamid Karzai and leading challenger Abdullah Abdullah, have claimed victory by margins large enough to avoid a run-off election.  For a look at the potential impact the early results could have both there and in the U.S., we talk to Christine Fair, professor at the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, who is just back from Afghanistan as an election monitor; and Martin Patience, BBC correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan.

While newspapers and magazines have lined their pages with details of Bernie Madoff's deceit, the literary world is still trying to cash in on the embezzlement drama. The sixth book on the life and times of the convicted Ponzi schemer hits bookstores today.

The book was penned by Sheryl Weinstein, former CEO of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and one of Madoff’s investors. We speak to Motoko Rich, who covers the publishing industry for The New York Times, along with author and journalist Erin Arvedlund, whose book “Too Good to be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff” just came out this month.

The Justice Department recommended yesterday that Attorney General Eric Holder re-open and examine cases of alleged abuse of suspected al-Qaeda members.  The abuse allegedly took place in secret CIA prisons during former President George W. Bush's administration. To go over the details, we have Vijay Padmanabhan, visiting assistant professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York City, and Mark Danner, author of the book “Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror.”

Read the Inspector General's report on interrogations (via NYTimes)

What are the biggest moral challenges we face today? We're joined by two people who have given a lot of thought to cultural challenges around the world, including poverty, racism, and the systematic oppression of women. Nick Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times, and his wife Sheryl WuDunn a former New York Times correspondent.

They are authors of the new book “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide,” and wrote the article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, "The Women's Crusade."

We're joined by Peter Baker, White House correspondent for The New York Times, to talk about similarities between the continued war in Afghanistan and other ill-defined conflicts in America's past. He outlines this in his article for The New York Times, "Could Afghanistan Become Obama's Vietnam?" 

We're looking ahead to today's release of a 2004 report by the CIA inspector general that details harsh interrogation techniques used in CIA prisons. The report is said to contain details of techniques used in  secret CIA prisons, including threatening an al-Qaeda inmate with an electric drill and a gun. We speak to former CIA Director James Woolsey about what he thinks the CIA will do as the reporrt is released, as well as his post-CIA interest in green energy and the national security implications of "oil's monopoly over transportation."

Having run out of money two weeks ahead of schedule, the Cash for Clunkers program officially ends at 8 p.m. tonight.  Now that it's winding down, how are car dealers and automakers going to get people to come in and buy cars without the $4500 incentive?

We speak to Bill Underriner, owner of Underriner Autos in Billings, Montana; and Mark LaNeve, vice president of sales for General Motors.

All this week, we'll be hosting mini-roundtable discussions about how health care reform could affect different groups of Americans. We kick it off this week with one of the groups who stands to be the most affected by any systematic reform: doctors themselves.

With us today are Dr. Kevin Pho, a primary care physician in Nashua, New Hampshire who also blogs at KevinMD.com, Dr. Charles Prestigiacomo, a neurosurgeon and associate professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and Dr. Tyeese Gaines Reid, who is currently in her third year as an emergency care resident at Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.

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