Within days, General Motors Corp. is due to file for bankruptcy, triggering a reorganization that will convert more than $40 billion in aid the government has extended to the company into a 72.5 percent ownership stake.

To get any kind of positive return on the money it loaned, the Obama administration is hoping GM shares will rise in value when the company emerges from its Chapter 11 proceeding.

But there's also the added complication of pensions.

GM has made pension promises totaling about $100 billion in current dollars. Thanks to the financial crisis, investments in the company's pension funds are worth about $20 billion less than the obligations.

There were always hints that Barack Obama was going to try to be the first community organizer president, and now the mass-mobilization drive that became famous during his campaign is gearing up to tackle two of the biggest issues before Congress.

One of them probably won’t be much of a challenge. It’s the other one that presents the real test.

This morning, Organizing for America, the Democratic National Committee group that’s supposed to continue the work of the campaign organizing drive, launched an “action center” to campaign for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. There, Obama supporters can sign an online petition of support; write a letter to the editor of their local paper, with talking points helpfully supplied; or call their senators.

The White House just announced that President Obama is going to pay a visit next week to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Facility in Germany, where U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan go for medical care. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it was the subject of one of those brief but intense campaign crises last summer, when Obama, returning from a high-profile European tour, canceled a visit to Landstuhl at the last minute.

A quick recap: During his campaign trip to Europe last July, Obama had planned to visit the troops at Landstuhl, then canceled. The campaign of his Republican rival, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, quickly launched a television ad accusing him of changing his plans because “the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.”

Perhaps one of the networks will decide to package all the back-and-forth about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and create a new reality show. Call it "Judging Sonia."

The White House on Wednesday continued its multi-day unveiling of President Obama's Supreme Court pick by hosting a conference call with six legal experts and continually pumping up the 54-year-old jurist's personal story and her legal and academic bona fides.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said Sotomayor had made courtesy phone calls to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as well as to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. Face-to-face meetings will take place as soon as the Senate returns to work on June 1, Gibbs said.

Administration officials acknowledge the need to control the narrative of Sotomayor's life story, in order to muffle fusillades from conservative talk-radio hosts and bloggers that portray the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals judge as a closet racist and a judicial activist intent on making policy from the bench.

So how much of a heads-up did the White House give senators about President Obama's decision to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court? Not much, according to several lawmakers who reported receiving hurried calls from various quarters of the West Wing on Tuesday morning.

Newly minted Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., from Sotomayor's home state, said she got word early Tuesday when President Obama rang. Gillibrand, who's courting Hispanic voter support for her 2010 Senate race, had urged Obama to name a Latino to diversify the high court's lineup and went as far as drafting a May 1 letter with Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., to the president recommending the president consider Sotomayor or his interior secretary, Ken Salazar.

"I spoke with President Obama this morning and told him that he had made a historic and fantastic decision," Gillibrand said in a statement on Tuesday, adding, "Judge Sotomayor will bring invaluable experience and much needed diversity to our nation's highest court."

Observers of the Presidency always take note of how the pressures of the job brings changes to the man - more lines on the face, more gray hair. So how is Barack Obama holding up under the stress and what how has it affected his family life?

This is what he told C-SPAN in an interview taped Friday and aired today:

"No, we don't feel a lot of stress," he said of First Lady Michelle Obama and the kids. "We don't think in those terms. We think in terms of mom and dad and kids and now a dog and how do you make sure that your kids are doing their homework, brushing their teeth, treating each other nicely.

When I think about Michelle, I am thinking, am I listening to her and responsive to some of the things she is going through. And I think she is trying to do the same for me. And, we really think of ourselves as a family like every other family. We've got some issues like every other family has that they have to work through.

There’s an interesting development that almost got lost yesterday in the escalating partisan warfare over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claims that the CIA misled her about interrogation tactics. Sen. Arlen Specter may be getting some traction with his idea on how to avoid future misunderstandings between Congress and the executive branch: Start keeping transcripts of the intelligence briefings for top lawmakers.

Specter, D-Pa. (we’re still getting used to that too), wrote a letter yesterday outlining his suggestion to CIA director Leon E. Panetta, White House counsel Gregory Craig, and the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees. His idea: To avoid any future misunderstandings about what was said in the intelligence briefings, keep transcripts of every briefing given to the Gang of Eight — the four top intelligence committee members and the four highest-ranking House and Senate leaders.

In an interview on MSNBC yesterday, Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein of California said Specter might be on to something. She said she’ll discuss the proposal with other committee members and suggested it could become a provision of the annual intelligence authorization bill the committee will start writing soon.

President Obama may not get a lot of help from Congress in designing the detention system he says he wants: something that can hold people who haven’t committed any terrorists acts, but probably will, in a way that’s consistent with the Constitution.

So far, congressional Democrats have no idea how he can do that — which pretty much leaves him with the burden of figuring it out himself.

In his speech on the Guantánamo Bay controversy this morning, Obama said that even after the detention facility closes, he wants to develop a system for holding detainees “who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people.” He called this “the toughest single issue that we will face,” which is an understatement, but he made it clear he’ll ask Congress to be involved in designing the system — a clear break from the Bush administration, which deliberately tried not to involve Congress.

All the talk resonating through the Congress and the White House about energy efficiency, clean energy investments and green jobs begs the following question: Exactly where is the money going to come from?

Probably not via the cap-and-trade plans circulating in the House and Senate, which focus on curbing carbon emissions and forcing utilities to draw on more existing renewable energy sources. And likely not from the credit markets, which are only functioning these days thanks to massive intervention by the Federal Reserve.

For all their social utility, next-generation energy projects are a somewhat risky investment because of fluctuating fossil fuel prices, an incomplete national transmission grid and the lack of a proven track record for the technologies involved. The government can offer loan guarantees and tax credits to reduce some of the risk, but those incentives are always subject to the whims of Congress.

Which is why there is an intensifying push to create a so-called Green Bank, which would provide a dedicated source of funds for renewable and energy efficient initiatives.

So how’s the Guantánamo Bay debate going so far for Senate Democrats? They’ve already said they’re going to strip out the money President Obama wanted to close the detention facility. But that hasn’t protected them from having to debate the issue. Republicans are still filing amendment after amendment to the supplemental spending bill to ensure that the Democrats keep talking about what to do with the detainees.

Senate majority whip and Obama friend Richard J. Durbin, what have you got?

It was up to Durbin, Obama’s Illinois colleague during his Senate days, to figure out how to argue against the Republican amendments without having a solid post-Gitmo plan to talk about — exactly the situation Senate Democrats wanted to avoid. So in a floor speech this morning, Durbin tried a talking point most Democrats haven’t even mentioned. We already have terrorists on U.S. soil, Durbin said, and they’re not roaming around in our neighborhoods because they don’t get out of prison.

Poor Harry Reid. At this afternoon’s regular Tuesday press briefing, the Senate majority leader was trying to talk about the credit card regulation bill the Senate had just passed, a major priority for President Obama and congressional Democrats. Clearly, he wanted to get lots of questions about that.

But all the reporters wanted to talk about was the apparent Democratic rebellion against Obama on another front: the Senate leadership’s decision not to fund the $80 million Obama wanted to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. The money will be stripped out of the supplemental spending bill for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

President Obama has asked Congress to send him a credit card regulation bill by Memorial Day. That day is fast approaching. But the bill has been complicated in the Senate with the addition of a gun amendment that liberal Democrats hate, and there’s probably no way to avoid the issue in the House.

How will the House Democrats get the bill to Obama by the deadline? According to Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., they’ll probably do the only thing they can do: Have separate votes on the credit card bill and the gun amendment, and then merge them together and send the whole package to Obama for his signature.

It’s an acknowledgement that the pro-gun rights majority is now strong enough in both the House and the Senate that neither Obama nor the Democratic leadership are willing to pick fights with them — or put their own priorities in jeopardy.

Decades before before the policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the United States and Israel developed similarly opaque ground rules for discussing Israel's nuclear capabilities.

Under an informal and secret agreement dating to the administration of Richard M. Nixon, Israel is understood to have pledged not to be the first nation to test or introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. The United States, apparently in exchange, agreed not press Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -- a global pact to limit the spread of nuclear weapons that went into force in 1970.

Though Israel is widely believed to possess a nuclear deterrant, it has never acknowledged it, and the subject has not come up in U.S.-Israeli talks in connection with other regional issues, such as a Palestinian state.

Which brings us to Monday's meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Ever since President Obama's auto task force ousted General Motors Corp. Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner before it approved writing the automaker another bailout check, the administration and federal regulators have been deflecting questions about whether they're willing to impose a similar brand of justice on bank executives.

Wait no longer. Banking regulators have reportedly told Bank of America Corp. -- the recipient of $45 billion in federal bailout funds -- to shake up its 18-member board and install more outside directors with banking experience. The move raises questions about the future of CEO Kenneth Lewis, who had indicated he would remain at the helm until the financial crisis is over.

Lewis has had an ambivalent relationship with the feds since the financial crisis began. No doubt this is because many of the bank's problems stem from its acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co. -- a move Lewis said was forced on him by Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

But the White House's interest in bank management apparently extends far beyond BoA. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bahr is indicating more bank executives will be replaced in the coming months as regulators evaluate the results of stress tests the Treasury Department and Fed administered to 19 big institutions.

"There will be an evaluation process," Bair tells Bloomberg Television, in an interview to be aired this weekend. "We're requesting it as part of the capital plan."

Asked if chief executives will be replaced as part of the process, Bair replied, "Yes."

The tests found the combined losses of big lenders like BoA, Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. could reach $599.2 billion over the next two years, if the economy continues to worsen. Ten of the banks were ordered to raise $74.6 billion in capital from private sources.

Already, civil liberties groups are furious at President Obama for reportedly deciding to keep using military commissions to try suspected terrorists, with new rules to give more protections to the detainees. They feel betrayed and think Obama has flip-flopped on an important constitutional issue.

“It is troubling that President Obama has apparently chosen to revive the flawed military commissions he rightly denounced during his campaign,” Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, said in a statement this morning. “Military commissions are designed to provide lesser due process protections for terrorism suspects than our federal courts do.”

But if you read the words of Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., you’ll find it’s not clear that he has ever been totally against the idea of military commissions. He certainly left that impression as a presidential candidate, and to some degree, even as a senator.

So far, President Obama has shown he’ll be a lot more flexible with Congress on health care than Bill Clinton was. No pen-waving, veto-threat moments this time. And now it appears that the mass-mobilization drive that’s left over from his campaign will be flexible in mounting a health care campaign, too.

Organizing for America, the mobilizing drive founded by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, is raising funds for its campaign to help Obama get a health care overhaul bill through Congress. The plan, according to the fundraising e-mail that went out today, is to “train volunteers, hire organizers, place ads, hold local educational events, bring constituent voices straight to Congress, and make sure your real life stories are heard louder than the lobbyists’ spin.”

But Organizing for America supporters aren’t laying out the policy specifics they’re organizing around. They certainly won’t make any special push on the hot-button issues, such as whether there should be a government-run public health plan to compete with private insurers. Instead, according to spokeswoman Natalie Wyeth, the group will stick to the three general principles Obama outlined yesterday: the final bill must cut health care costs, allow Americans to choose their own doctor and health plan, and give all Americans access to “quality, affordable health care.”

The issue of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding has always been a bit of a sideshow - an interesting subplot in a larger story that’s really about the people who made it happen. But it does touch on an important question of congressional oversight: What, if anything, can members of Congress do to protest something they can’t talk about openly?

By suggesting today that there wasn’t really anything she could do about the waterboarding once she knew about it — other than try to get the Democrats back in power — Pelosi opened the door to helpful suggestions from Republicans about other kinds of protests she could have tried.

At her weekly press conference, Pelosi said one of her aides told her in 2003 that other lawmakers had been briefed about the use of waterboarding, and that it was “appropriate” to let Rep. Jane Harman of California, then the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence committee, write a letter of protest to the CIA general counsel.

Remember all that talk, after Arlen Specter switched parties, about how the Republicans wouldn’t be able to filibuster anymore? That idea was always overblown, but even if you accept it on its face, the GOP seems to have found a backup plan.

Gun amendments.

It’s perfect. They’ll always have just enough support to pass, but they’ll also bother just enough Democrats that even must-pass bills — and top priorities of President Obama’s agenda — will get tripped up once they’re attached.

Case in point: The Senate bill to tighten regulation of credit cards just became a tougher sell to the House yesterday after senators approved an amendment by Tom Coburn, R-Okla., to allow people to carry firearms on visits to national parks. Coburn’s office says he’s concerned about reports of violent crime in the parks and wants visitors to be able to defend themselves. But now, the credit card bill, which sailed through the House the first time, isn’t likely to be as popular over there unless the final version of the bill strips the amendment out.

The Obama administration's push to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (PL 101-549) hit a bit of a speed bump Tuesday, with the release of an Office of Management and Budget memo that concludes the policy could bring serious economic consequences to factories, small businesses and localities across the country.

The nine-page document, which was immediately circulated by administration critics and environmentalists, faults the EPA for developing a one-sided rationale for the regulation that, among other things, didn't take into account positive effects of climate change in some regions.

"It might be reasonable to conclude that Alaska will benefit from warmer winters for both health and economic reasons," the document states, adding that new public health initiatives like cooling centers could mitigate the effects of heat waves in less fortunate parts of the country.

It’s rare that you get bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill so quickly on anything, but the verdict on today’s announcement of a voluntary cost-cutting initiative by health industry players was strikingly similar on both sides of the aisle: It’s meaningless.

If it makes you feel any better, though, Democrats and Republicans had different reasons for saying it’s meaningless.

Some Democrats are convinced that the health care industry’s sudden interest in controlling costs — something they could have done years ago — is all about gaining enough leverage to stop Congress from including a government-run public plan in the health care overhaul it will debate this year.

Here’s the one-sentence statement of Democratic Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York: “This commitment to cost-cutting is a good-faith gesture by the health care industry, but it does not mitigate the need for a public plan option in the upcoming reform bill.”

The mass pledge by health care providers today to reduce $2 trillion of spending reflects some cold political calculations by hospitals, doctors and other key players about President Obama's to reshape the U.S. medical system.

Chief among these is that Obama is likely to prevail in his efforts to expand access to public insurance and allow the government to negotiate Medicare outpatient prescription drug prices.

In speeches and policy pronouncements, Obama has successfully twinned an overhaul of the health system with the broader economic recovery. And with fortified Democratic majorities in both houses, the administration is working hard with Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and other allies to move legislation in the next two months.

If White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's correct and you need a crisis to get things done, Friday's employment report showing companies cut fewer jobs in April might be a sign the Obama administration's window for big policy initiatives could be closing just a bit.

The Labor Department said the jobless rate rose to 8.9 percent as payrolls were trimmed by another 539,000 positions. That's bad, but not quite as bad as the 699,000 jobs lost in March.

President Obama used the occasion to launch a new plan to allow jobless individuals to return to college without losing their eligibility for unemployment insurance. Under the initiative, the Labor Department will urge states to update rules that generally require the unemployed to be looking for work as a precondition for collecting aid.

As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama fairly ridiculed his Republican opponent John McCain's crusade over congressional earmarks, saying the targeted spending only accounted for about $18 billion of the federal budget.

How then to explain the scene on Thursday, where President Obama proudly portrayed $17 billion worth of program terminations and reductions in his fiscal 2010 budget plan as a substantive step toward fiscal sanity?

"We can no longer afford to spend as if deficits don't matter and waste is not our problem," Obama declared. "We can no longer afford to leave the hard choices for the next budget, the next administration -- or the next generation."

President Obama’s budget hit list is out today, and it includes a notable leftover from the Bush administration’s hit list: Even Start, a family literacy program created by a former Republican chairman of the House education committee.

Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration says it’s time to get rid of the Even Start program, currently budgeted at $66 million a year, because it doesn’t work. “The most recent evaluation found no difference between families in the program and those not in it across 38 of 41 outcomes,” Office of Management and Budget chairman Peter Orszag notes in a blog post on the White House Web site.

It certainly doesn’t sound promising. Here’s the catch, though: According to the administration’s Terminations, Reductions and Savings volume, the “most recent evaluation” was done in 2003.

John McCain and Lindsey Graham seem to have grappled with the Guantánamo issue a bit more than some of their colleagues. But the former Republican presidential nominee and the former military prosecutor have arrived at the same conclusion as Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga.: Some of the detainees will have to be held indefinitely even after President Obama closes the detention facility.

In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, Graham, R-S.C., and McCain, R-Ariz., conclude that “preventive detention will continue to have a place in the war on terror.” Their reasoning: many of the Guantánamo detainees are not just criminals, but “warriors” who are “fundamentally committed to the destruction of our way of life.” Therefore, they conclude, “the law of war” is what should apply, not the traditional legal system.

So when President Obama faces decisions on what to do with detainees who can’t be tried, but are too dangerous to release, Graham and McCain say it is “well-established that combatants can be held off the battlefield as long as they present a military threat.” They advise that the United States create special national security courts to hear appeals, with annual reviews to determine whether a detainee still poses a security threat.

Hey, it’s worked before. Trying to bounce back a bit after last week’s lousy week for the GOP, Senate Republicans returned to a classic theme today: national security and the terrorist threat.

Specifically, they’re warning about the prospect of terrorists running loose in our neighborhoods.

Today’s talking point after the weekly Senate Republican luncheon was about how closing the Guantánamo Bay detention center within a year will be a lot harder than President Obama thinks. And to make it that much harder, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said he’ll introduce a bill Wednesday that would bar the use of federal funds to release former detainees on U.S. soil.

President Obama's commitment to transparency may be playing well in public opinion polls, but it's left lobbyists feeling, well, just a little unloved.

First, the president issued an executive order in January prohibiting his staff from accepting lobbyist gifts and imposing tough revolving-door restrictions on ex-lobbyists who come to work for the administration and officials who leave government and go the other way. Then, his administration banned direct lobbyist contact with government officials when discussing details of the economic stimulus package (PL 111-5).

All of this has left professional Beltway fixers and trade association officials convinced the administration is either being too cautious, or maybe a little obsessed with imposing cumbersome and unnecessary rules. So there was more than a passing interest when Norman Eisen, Obama's special counsel for ethics and government reform, addressed a George Washington University conference on special interests and public policy on Tuesday and took audience questions.

As the Federal Reserve prepares to announce the results of "stress tests" it ran on the nation's 19 largest banks, White House officials are tamping down speculation they will need to go to Congress for another infusion of taxpayer money to keep the most troubled institutions afloat.

After all, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner already is busy recruiting private investors to vacuum up those bad mortgages and other assets that are weighing down bank balance sheets.

And the president, at his news conference last Wednesday, made it clear that he doesn't want to stay in the business of running banks and car companies at a time when he's got to manage two wars and wrestle with an economic crisis.

One more note about the Senate’s newest Democrat, and then we really promise to move on. There’s been a lot of wishful thinking among Democrats that Arlen Specter might help them pass their health care plan, since he has been so active in pushing for more federal funding for biomedical research.

President Obama himself, in his prime-time news conference last week, suggested that “having Arlen Specter in the Democratic caucus will liberate him to cooperate on critical issues, like health care, like infrastructure and job creation, areas where his inclinations were to work with us, but he was feeling pressure not to.”

But there are a lot more issues involved in a health care overhaul than just research funding. In fact, that barely even makes the list. For many Democrats, the test that will determine whether the final health care bill is a meaningful overhaul, or just a pretend one, is whether there will be a government-run public health plan to compete with private insurers.

So on Meet the Press yesterday, David Gregory finally pinned Specter down: Would he support a health care bill that includes a public plan option?

“No.”

What timing: Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter announces his retirement just as Senate Democrats are on the verge of getting the 60 votes they need to end filibusters.

It could make a difference, but only if President Obama nominates someone who’s a real lightning rod, for ideological or other reasons. The history of Supreme Court nominations shows that the Senate tends to give the president his way, and only rejects or filibusters the nominees on the rarest occasions.

As of April 2007, the Senate had confirmed 122 nominees to the Supreme Court, rejected 12, took no action on 10, and effectively killed three nominations by not taking any action on them, according to Guide to Congress, a reference volume published by CQ Press.