The Rundown, 10/6

It's a big week for President Obama and his strategy in Afghanistan: he's summoned congressional leaders to the White House to discuss. On the more public side of defense matters, he'll deliver remarks at the National Counterterrorism Center.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, meanwhile, will pay respects at the memorial service for Norman Borlaug at Texas A&M. If you don't know who Borlaug was, watch this video. He was the Johnny Appleseed of genetically modified crops and feeding world populations.

And Czar Fever will be the subject of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: after the fringes of the right were thrown into a fury in the past months by the myriad "czars" President Obama has implemented, the committee will hold a hearing entitled "Examining the History and Legality of Executive Branch 'Czars.'" The head of the Congressional Research Service's American Law Division, among others, will testify. Senators could analyze the czar phenomenon in a cool, dispassionate, analytical way befitting the upper chamber...or the hearing could devolve into grandstanding and foreshadowings of imperial and/or Communist Russia. We'll see.