Dissent in the ranks? House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told reporters on Tuesday that a health-care package could pass without a public-insurance option, despite repeated insistence from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that the public option was crucial to getting enough votes for the package. This is the second time Hoyer has floated the possibility of leaving the public option out. (The first time, he was shot down by Pelosi.) Rep. Hoyer says that, although he supports the option and considers it "vital," he wants to pass a bill improving the health-care system with majority support—and he hopes progressives don't follow through on a vow to sink the bill if the public option is eliminated.

New details about Abdulla Ahmed Ali—the convicted ringleader of a plot to blow up seven British airplanes—paint a chilling picture of a would-be terrorist who, unbeknownst to those around him, dreamed of jihad since his teens. Ali hailed from a middle-class family that sent all but one of their eight children to college, yet from his teenage years, Ali said that he began to dream of jihad. Violent images from the Bosnian war profoundly disturbed him, and a trip to Pakistan in 2002 to aid refugees fleeing the conflict in Afghanistan further radicalized his beliefs. Ali, active in the antiwar movement, said he eventually became disillusioned with the potential of aid work and protests to affect real change. Still, he said he mostly kept his radical thoughts to himself, and a man who knew him for several years prior to his arrest told The Guardian that he doubted even his father and brother knew the lengths of Ali’s extremism.

The perils of social networking were on President Barack Obama's mind Tuesday when he answered questions from a roundtable of ninth graders in Virginia. One student asked Obama for any advice he might have in her pursuit of one day becoming president. "First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," Obama said, adding that young people tend to "do some stupid stuff." Agence France-Presse notes that the president is no stranger to the problems of our media-saturated age: Viral videos of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and an offhand comment about people "clinging to guns and religion" nearly derailed his 2008 campaign. In another lighthearted moment, Obama said that the person he would most like to have a meal with is Mahatma Gandhi, though "It would probably be a really small meal because he didn't eat a lot."

Karl Rove isn't the only public servant accused of politically motivated firings: Critics of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki say he's launched a purge of senior security officials to weaken a political rival before this winter's election. According to McClatchy News Service, Iraqi news sources reported three major interior-ministry dismissals Tuesday: the ministry's commander of operations, its head of internal affairs, and the director of its explosives division. Al-Maliki's supporters say the dismissals were actually "reassignments" in response to security breaches connected to an August 19 attack on government ministries that killed 100 people. But al-Maliki's foes say the dismissals are aimed at weakening Interior Minister Jawal al-Bolani, who is expected to challenge al-Maliki. As Iraq's campaign season kicks into high gear, lawmakers are crying out: "Maliki has the authority to bring about such changes," complained one Sunni legislator. "But like this? A decision by one man? High-ranking commanders dismissed without formal investigation? It looks political."

Steve Hildebrand, a top official in Barack Obama's presidential campaign, is urging the president to be bolder in his leadership and says that as one of "millions of frustrated Americans," he's "losing patience" with the administration for moving too slowly on issues such as health care and gay rights. Hildebrand, who is gay, first spoke out in a speech last month to the Queer San Diego Democratic Club. He added that the Republicans have no power "unless moderates and Blue Dogs give it to them," and that he wants Obama to succeed because Americans will punish Democrats if they fail to get things done as promised. Hildebrand is the most senior member of Obama's political team to have expressed such doubts. He served as deputy campaign manager in '08 and has been credited with Obama's win in the Iowa caucuses. Late in the campaign, Hildebrand became alienated from other Obama campaign staffers, who saw his comments to the press as too candid.

Army Archerd, the acclaimed columnist who covered Hollywood gossip for Variety magazine from 1953 to 2005, has died at age 87. He died of mesothelioma, a lung cancer that is often the result of asbestos exposure. Archer was a must-read during the glory days of Hollywood, and he was often used by the stars as a means to keep their names in the headlines. Archer is perhaps best remembered for breaking the story that Rock Hudson had AIDS, a major revelation that changed popular perception of the disease. Variety refers to him as "Hollywood's original blogger."

This is just not Annie Leibovitz's week—and it's only Tuesday. Tuesday is the deadline for her to repay $24 million in loans or risk losing her homes and the rights to a lifetime of photographs. The looming deadline comes after Monday's revelation that she's being sued for copyright infringement. (Italian photographer Paolo Pizzetti has filed a $300,000 suit against Leibovitz over a Lavazza coffee promotional calendar.) It's unclear what, if anything, Leibovitz will do about the debt. But if the photographer does not get a loan extension, lender Art Capital has said nonpayment gives it the rights to her negatives, intellectual property, and homes.

As NBC gets set to welcome Jay Leno to his new home at the 10 p.m. slot, New York magazine looks at the place of his longtime late-night rival, David Letterman. Right now, he’s beating Leno’s successor, Conan O’Brien, but Conan’s got the kids watching his show. Where does that leave Letterman? Former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan finds a serious comic, whose brittle humor seems perfectly suited for our confused times. “David Letterman,” Kaplan writes, “might be the last grownup on network television.” More meditation than reportage, the cover story explores the entertainment power of CBS’ $32 million man, who, Kaplan finds, is “something like the scarred protagonist of his own comic novel.”

What would Bubba do? Former President Bill Clinton urges his party to "don't even worry about the Republicans" in his first in-depth interview since Barack Obama took office. On health care reform, Clinton says that Democrats must deliver and that key lessons from his 1993 plan's defeat have been forgotten because "the victors get to write history." The conventional wisdom, for example, that Clinton's White House lost key Congressional allies' support by giving them a complete bill is wrong because the House Ways and Means Committee—the most important committee in the House—had asked for a finished bill. But despite a rough August, the former president thinks Obama is doing the right thing. "[T]here's a lot that's like my first year, but it's going to have a different ending—he's going to get health-care reform." Clinton also discusses the Supreme Court's decision in the 2000 presidential election and the 2010 midterms.

Next week Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol will be published. Until then, we'll all have to suffer through its marketing frenzy. In advance of the publication of the book, a follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, the publisher has hired Special Ops Media, a marketing company, to tweet clues about the author. Oddly, no one at Special Ops has been allowed to read it, but Matt Lauer has, and this morning—having signed an agreement not to reveal too much—he commenced the Today Show's weeklong countdown to celebrate the book's release. Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos told customers on his company's homepage that their stockpile of copies is being kept "under 24-hour guard in its own chain-link enclosure," and 70,000 copies have been pre-ordered. Booksellers, in hopes that Brown's book will boost sagging sales, are stocking related titles about, say, the secrets of the Freemasons. Says a store buyer: “It was a mini-industry for a while, and that would be just dandy.”

Adding to the ever-increasing death toll, four U.S. soldiers were killed in Kunar province in eastern Afghanistan. A U.S. Army spokesperson called the incident a "complex attack." The news follows a record-setting August, which was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan in the nearly eight-year war. Separately on Tuesday, President Hamid Karzai passed the 50 percent-vote threshold necessary to claim victory in the presidential election held August 20. But the U.N.-backed Election Complaints Commission claims to have found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" in the tallying and has ordered recounts and ballot audits.

New York state has been dumping thousands of mentally ill people into huge privately run retirement homes in violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act, according to federal judge's ruling on Tuesday. The judge ruled that in housing 4,300 mentally ill people in often poorly run homes, New York denied them the access to services "in an integrated setting appropriate to their needs." Advocates had argued that the state could better serve people in their own apartments than in adult homes, and that the homes had begun to mirror the large state-run mental hospitals, closed in the '60s and '70s, that they were meant to replace.

If President Barack Obama was really trying to brainwash the nation’s students, as some conservatives have alleged, then his message must have been subliminal: In his speech at a Virginia high school, President Obama challenged the nation’s students to take control of their own educations. “Every single one of you has something to offer,” he said. “And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what it is.” The speech was televised to schools around the country. "When I was your age," Obama said, "I was a little bit of a goofoff. My main goal was to get on the varsity basketball team and have fun." At the site of the speech, there was only a small band of protesters, with one holding a sign saying, “Mr. President, stay away from our kids.”

Clay Marzo is one of the best surfers in the word. He also has Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. In September's Outside magazine, Jonah Lehrer explains what one has to do with the other. Asperger's syndrome can cause impaired social interactions and difficulty communicating, but it also creates intense preoccupation with a subject. For some, that means an obsession with coffee makers or 19th century trains. For Marzo, it's surfing. Says a fellow champion surfer, "Clay's kind of a surfing freak... [he] definitely knows things that I don't know." Marzo's mom is often in the position of communicating for him. "He remembers every single wave," she says. "They all kind of look the same to me, but not to Clay."

Want to know what's going on in the world? The Atlantic's Robert D. Kaplan suggests you tune into Al Jazeera. The Arab television channel is "a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously," Kaplan writes. The network, according to Kaplan, eschews big-name bloviating and focuses on smart analysis from folks you may not have heard of. It is actually interested in news that may not concern the power players in Washington or London. But the channel is not perfect, Kaplan says. Al Jazeera's ability to cover news without the West's perspective doesn't mean it is free of a point of view: "Because its cause is that of the weak and the oppressed, it sees itself as always in the right, regardless of the complexity of the issues, and therein lies its power of oppression."

A bomb containing 600 pounds of homemade explosives was found along a road in Northern Ireland, Irish police said Tuesday. Army officials believe that the bomb was planted by Republican dissidents. While warnings of the bomb circulated last week, this weekend officials discovered a command wire leading across the border. Twenty people in the area were evacuated from their homes before the explosive was disarmed, and police have launched a major investigation for suspects. “There could have been a devastating outcome to this incident,” the police chief said. “The actions of terrorist criminals in planting this device in the Forkhill area put local people and police officers at significant risk.”

He may have lost $25 billion during the financial meltdown, but Warren Buffett has smartly capitalized on the crisis. He poured billions into Goldman Sachs and General Electric, and greatly benefited from the public bailouts of his stock picks. But now, The New York Times reports, Buffett is worried that the stock market might have more trouble ahead. Berkshire Hathaway is buying fewer stocks, and is investing in corporate and government debt. “We are not out of problems yet,” Buffett said. “We have got to get the sputtering economy back so it is functioning as it should be.”

Greed is back: this week, Oliver Stone will begin filming a sequel of his 1987 film Wall Street. Wall Street 2 will be set against the contemporary backdrop of the fall of Bear Stearns, and several scenes take place in the Federal Reserve building – instead of the trading floor, as they did in the original. And, good news for fans of the 1987 film: Michael Douglas will reprise his role at Gordon Gekko in the new movie. In the first scene of the sequel, Gekko gets out of jail, and, according to Stone, is “looking for that second chance.” To prepare for the role, Stone took Douglas to a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side to meet Samuel D. Waksal, who spent five years in prison for securities fraud at ImClone Systems. “That was for Michael to meet a guy who had been in jail,” Stone said. Says Stone of the new film: “We wouldn’t have done this movie in 2006. Things were too loose. I didn’t want to glorify pigs.”

Man’s best friend is best served fried: A new study from the Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm found that dogs in all regions of the world can be traced back to a single lineage, suggesting a single domestication event in southern China about 11,000 to 14,000 years ago. Dogs have long been on the menu in this part of China and, in fact, bones have been found with cut marks on them. Though this may have been their origin, they must have spread for other reasons, since most people do not eat them—likely, their work as guard and sled dogs.

Not surprising, but shocking still: The Bush administration tried to soften the language on a treaty that punished “enforced disappearances” between 2003 and 2006, so that officers at the CIA’s secret prisons would not be prosecuted, The Washington Post reports. Documents reveal that in 2004, the administration sought to limit prohibitions on those who placed detainees outside of legal protections. The documents, which were released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act made by Amnesty International, suggest that the administration’s goal of detaining terror suspects directly contradicted the language of the treaty. A senior Bush official told The Post that Guantanamo was “a complicating factor” in their deliberations on the treaty. Though 81 countries have now signed the treaty, the Bush administration ultimately didn’t endorse it. A White House official said the Obama administration is now reviewing its predecessors’ stance on the treaty.

At the AFL-CIO Union picnic on Monday, President Barack Obama was back in fiery campaign mode, stumping for his health-care plan that's been mired in Congress. “Every debate at some point comes to an end,” he said. “At some point it’s time to act. Ohio, it’s time to act.” Obama backed the public option, saying it would "help improve quality and bring down costs," although CNN reports the Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) will submit a public option-free proposed bill. The president also addressed last year’s financial crisis and its detrimental effect on the middle class. “Wealth was valued over work, selfishness over sacrifice, greed over responsibility, the right to organize undermined rather than strengthened,” he said of the culture on Wall Street.

It appears the Senate will be without a Kennedy: Teddy’s nephew, Joseph P. Kennedy II, announced on Monday that he will not seek his uncle’s seat. Kennedy posted his decision on the Web site of Citizens Energy Corp., the nonprofit he founded to deliver free heating fuel to the poor. "My father called politics an honorable profession, and I have profound respect for those who choose to advance the causes of social and economic justice in elective office," Kennedy said in the statement. "After much consideration, I have decided that the best way for me to contribute to those causes is by continuing my work at Citizens Energy Corporation."

Here's one Republican who isn't worried for the nation's children on Tuesday. Former first lady Laura Bush, a onetime teacher, defended the president’s contentious decision to deliver a back-to-school address and said she thinks he is doing a good job overall. “I think he has got a lot on his plate, and he has tackled a lot to start with, and that has probably made it more difficult,” Bush tells CNN. She also said she isn’t surprised Obama is having trouble reaching across the aisle to Republicans, since her husband encountered similar problems when he tried to practice bipartisanship. "He was disappointed that that was not the way it worked out in Washington," she said. "I'm sure President Obama didn't expect it to be that way [either]. All of us need to do what we can to come together on issues." Both Laura Bush and George W. Bush are currently working on their memoirs.

In the case of Kraft and Cadbury, ifs and buts are not merely candy and nuts, but the potential makings of a $50 billion "global powerhouse." Kraft Foods Inc., the second-largest food company, is persisting in its takeover bid for Cadbury PLC, despite Cadbury's rejection of its $16.7 billion bid. After the bid, Cadbury shares shot up as much as 42 percent, while the company scrambled to cut costs and lift its profit margins, with the hopes of generating enough cash to pursue its own acquisitions. And now, it has escalated to war: Cadbury said that Kraft's bid undervalued the company, and has vowed to fight the offer. “It’s a jewel,” said one person close to Cadbury. “And it has a global footprint that people will die for.”

Another knock against Dick Cheney: According to The Times of London, Cheney “nearly destroyed” Britain’s efforts to bring to justice three men plotting to blow up an airliner by ordering the early arrest of the plotters’ link man in Pakistan in 2006. Consequently, British police had to arrest their suspects before they had finished gathering evidence against them. “We believed the Americans had demanded the arrest and we were angry we had not been informed,” writes Andy Hayman, who briefed the man who briefed Tony Blair on the case. “We were being forced to take action, to arrest a number of suspects, which normally would have required days of planning and briefing.” Another source tells The Times of London that the decision to arrest the link man can be traced back to Cheney. The three plotters were convicted Monday.

A teenager from Georgia has upset her fourth rival at the U.S. Open on Sunday, becoming the youngest woman to advance to the quarterfinals since Serena Williams 10 years ago. The unseeded Melanie Oudin beat 13th-seeded Nadia Petrova in four sets. The 17-year-old has already blasted through former no. 1 Maria Sharapova and fourth-seeded Elena Dementieva in the tournament, dazzling the crowd with her ability to best older, more experienced rivals with her never-say-die game. Oudin will next face off against the 2004 champ Svetlana Kuznetsova or No. 9 Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark. “I know that I can compete with the best in the world now,” Oudin said after her win. “And I will know that forever.”

After allegations of voter fraud, Afghanistan's Electoral Complaints Commission has ordered a partial recount of the ballots in Afghanistan's August 20 presidential election. The commission, which has received 2,000 complaints since the election, ordered the recount because of "clear and convincing evidence of fraud in a number of polling stations." The recount will take place in polling stations where over 600 votes were cast, where voter turnout reached 100 percent, or where one candidate received 95 percent or more if the number of votes exceeded 100.

Cover your children’s ears, conservatives: President Obama will tell schoolchildren to “set your own goals for your education—and to do everything you can to meet them” in a televised speech on Tuesday. The White House released the speech in an effort to mollify a right wing that was protesting that Obama wanted to indoctrinate students with his “socialist” agenda. Obama’s speech urges students to pay attention in class and study hard. The chairman of Florida’s GOP, who set off the conservative craziness last week, tells ABC News, “It’s a good speech. It encourages kids to stay in school and the importance of education and I think that’s what a president should do when they’re gonna talk to students across the country.”

That mess Congress left before it went on vacation is still there: House Democrats are "in almost the exact position they were in when they left the Capitol in late July,” according to The Washington Post. Details on a possible compromise in the Senate, meanwhile, emerged: Senator Max Baucus, head of the all-powerful Finance Committee, released his plan on Monday: It would impose new fees on some sectors of the health-care industries, and not on individuals; offer low-cost insurance to those under 25; offer a pared-down version of Medicaid; not require employers to offer coverage; and—notably—not offer a public option.

Almost a year ago, Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. A Reuters reporter tracked down the investment bank's CEO, Richard Fuld, who has since been named in nearly 40 different legal actions and handed subpoenas for three different grand-jury probes. "You don't have a gun; that's good," were Fuld's first words. "You know what? The anniversary's coming up," he continued. "I've been pummeled, I've been dumped on, and it's all going to happen again. I can handle it. You know what, let them line up." Fuld, 63, took the reins in 1994 and built the bank into the fourth-largest in the U.S. until it collapsed September 15, 2008. Fuld was called a villain and protesters demanded that he be jailed. But he maintains he was not out of touch with the bank's problems, and friends think he could make a comeback. "He's keeping a low profile but doing a lot of power lunches," a top executive at an investment bank said. "He's keeping in touch with friends on Wall Street."