The Wonk Room

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has overhauled his cabinet, replacing conservative officials with more moderate leaders. While the new faces don’t guarantee reform, the king “at last has acted to remove individuals who have used their positions to block his tentative efforts at reform.”

Stephen Walt examines Richard Perle’s effort to exonerate himself, his neoconservative friends, and their ideology from any blame for the Iraq debacle: “The bottom line is simple: Richard Perle is lying.”

North Korea announced that it is preparing to launch a rocket carrying a communications satellite; “the statement is Pyongyang’s clearest reference yet to what neighbors believe may be the imminent test of a long-range missile.”

Former energy lobbyist James L. Connaughton, “the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality for all eight years of the Bush administration,” is heading to Constellation Energy to “direct the company’s environmental and energy policy work as well as its lobbying priorities.”

President Obama nominated law professor Jon Cannon, the author of an influential 1998 memo that explains how to use the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gases, to be Deputy Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Climate protection is a real job motor for Germany.”

“Health care costs will top $8,000 per person this year, consuming an ever-bigger slice of a shrinking economic pie, says the report by the Department of Health and Human Services, due out Tuesday.”

Few Americans are “very confident” that Social Security and Medicare are in shape to provide benefits throughout their retirements, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The Huffington Post is reporting that the president will provide “many billions of dollars” over a “ten-year period” to fund health care in the upcoming budget.

The New York Supreme Court has ordered Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain to disclose the names of employees “who got $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the firm merged with Bank of America Corp.”

Mark Thoma discusses breaking up large banks: “If there are good reasons to have banks so large their failure could bring down the entire system, a situation that gives them quite a bit of political leverage, I haven’t heard them.”

Inside Higher Ed highlights a study finding that 37 percent of the jobs created by the stimulus require an associate degree or greater.