Welcome to GRITtv's new format! We're coming to you from our new studio in SoHo, shooting higher resolution video. We'll be bringing you 30 minutes of content 5 days a week from now on, featuring more of our friends from around the country, more field reporting, and some other new surprises as well. Hope you enjoy!

To kick off our new format, the always-astute Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, joins Laura in studio to talk about recent news: the Obama administration's spat with Israel over settlements, the recent California Republican party convention, and the new "coffee party" movement.

A spate of profiles of Timothy Geithner hit the news recently, from Vogue to the Atlantic and several places in between. Most of them seem to sound an optimistic note on the Treasury Secretary and former chief of the New York Federal Reserve, but we ask a couple of experts what's really going on with the economy--and if Geithner deserves any of that praise.

Robert Johnson is the director of economic policy at the Roosevelt Institute and the former chief economist for the Senate Banking Committee. Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America. They both have some words for the Democrats on what happens if don't wise up.

Nahr al-Bared ("Cold River") refugee camp in Lebanon is home to 20,000 displaced Palestinians, struggling to rebuild their home after its destruction in 2007. The camp has been around for some 60 years, and in this excerpt from "Checkpoints and More" by A Films, residents of the camp tell their stories.

Finally, Laura reminds us that while some profiles of Geithner may be cheering the former New York Fed chair, he's also implicated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers.