More here.

Photos courtesy of TPM Reader SS.

Bill Richardson meets with the Obama team about Secretary of State position.

From Bloomberg ...

General Motors Corp., seeking a federal bailout as its cash dwindles, would cost the government $200 billion should the biggest U.S. automaker be forced to liquidate, a forecasting firm estimated.

A GM collapse would mean ``more aid to specific states like Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana, and more money into unemployment and extended benefits,'' Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts, said today in an interview.

We've been fielding emails all day in response to this morning's post on 'drift'. And the ones that have particularly stuck out to me are the ones about bailing out the auto industry. Quite a few readers are of the opinion either that the Big Three are ground central for global warming and/or they've spent thirty years making cars that can't compete with Japan, etc., so just let them fail. It's over. They've had their chance. It's done.

I have to tell you this just strikes me as nuts -- and beyond being nuts represents a great failure of imagination.

The auto industry -- directly and indirectly -- employs a ton of people. Even in ordinary times having that all gone down the tubes would mean a massive shock to the economy. If we can avoid having that happen now, why would we possibly let them happen in the face of what already promises to be a massive recession?

Second, on the question of the environment. There is no question that the internal combustion engine is at the heart of the climate crisis. But getting rid of Detroit won't get rid of cars. More to the point of creativity -- one of the things about crisis is that it opens opportunities would never exist in normal times. People have been looking for ways to get Detroit to get serious about developing cleaner, more fuel efficient cars for years. At this point, we're beyond that. We need to get serious about cars that don't use gas at all. If the whole domestic auto industry is all but asking to be taken into federal receivership, that tells me that the people running the federal government now have quite a lot of leverage.

I don't pretend to know the mechanics or precise solutions. But these are times that call for boldness -- and more than just boldness, which gets said a lot -- but creativity to rises to the challenge of the moment.

TPM Reader RS ...

Here is something progressives really need to address. On Sunday morning political shows, three Democrats are confirmed as guests: Carl Levin, Barney Frank, and Charlie Rangel. It's as if Democrats didn't just win huge electoral advances in the Presidential, House, and Senate elections. So we get the same thing we've had the past 8 years--republican hegemony on Sunday. Kyl? Check. Gingrich? Check. Steele? Check. Jindal and Shelby? Check and check? Just look at The Page for the whole list. When is the "liberal media" going to give some of the oxygen to Democrats?

This is unquestionably true. The bookers and producers of the Sunday shows are committed to the continuing dominance of conservative/Republican marquee guests. No question about it. And this is going to be one part of the rewiring of Washington that will take longer and face more resistance than possibly any other. The big interests and institutions that go to Washington to buy influence are quickly reacting to the changing political complexion of the city. The TV bookers and opinion act like nothing's happened.

Discredited McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann on Sarah Palin. He says he found her "brilliant."

My morning review of Atrios for economic analysis and news confirms/deepens my concerns expressed below. His point more seems to be delay rather than the lack of some broader plan. But I think these are more points of emphasis than anything.

Presidential transitions are notoriously perilous interludes. The normal calculus of power and responsibility is upended. In recent decades there was seldom enough occurring for it to matter all that much. But that's not the case now. And just in the last day or so it's crystallized in my mind that we may be on track for some serious problems.

First, the management of the almost trillion dollars of bailout money. It's good news that Paulson has dropped the entire toxic debt reverse auction idea in favor of direct infusions of capital into the financial services companies. But there's an unmistakable make-it-up-as-you go-along
quality to it. And while that's probably inevitable and even benign to some degree, there's a lot of hundreds of billions of dollars being assigned by people who will be able to wash their hands of the whole matter in about two months. And that's a problem.

Next, the auto industry. Could GM really go under in the next couple months because the Democrats who'd bail the company out are currently at the mercy of the electorally discredited Republicans who want to use the crisis to crush one of the last major manufacturing unions? The continued existence of a domestic auto industry is more than a strictly economic issue. Henry Blodget says we should use the money for "on retraining and job placement than on propping up perpetually weak companies that can't fix themselves." I assume he's making a move into comedy. Because job training and placement into what exactly? Maybe he's become another Bob Reich on worker retraining. But what jobs does he imagine we're going to feed these often older workers into in anything like the short or near term in the middle of a massive recession? Whatever you think should happen it should happen as a matter of considered national policy, not because the Democrats won't be able to break a filibuster or overcome a veto until late January.

I'm inclined to think that at least in the short-term GM may be bluffing, that if relief is in the offing in 60 days that they can find some way to hold on until then. At least I hope so.

Moments of national crisis require experimentation and open minds. But more than anything they demand energy and direction, a plan -- one where the different moving parts interlock together in some rational way. But this feels like drift.

As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the biggest background stories of the coming months is the rewiring of Washington, speficially the rewiring of the para-government (which includes the lobby shops, the think tanks and much more) for a period of Democratic dominance. Here's another piece in the Post on what's happening in the lobbying sector.

The gist: it's a good time to be a Democratic staffer with a decent resume looking for work on K Street.

Perhaps like others of you out there, I was checking this afternoon at the Alaska election return website to see if there was any other movement on the Stevens-Begich numbers. After I saw that wasn't happening I checked in to see what the deal was and when the rest of the counting was going to take place.

This is what I found from an article in the Anchorage Daily News ...

The state still needs to count at least 15,000 questioned ballots and an estimated 25,000 absentees. With all the absentee votes coming in, this will be one of the biggest turnouts, if not the biggest in terms of ballots cast, the state has ever seen. That's despite questions in the media and on blogs about why turnout appeared low on Election Day.

Most regional elections headquarters will count their remaining ballots on Friday. But the most populous region, based in Anchorage, won't count its ballots until either Monday or Wednesday, state elections chief Gail Fenumiai said.

To get some perspective, it was roughly 60,000 votes counted on Wednesday that accounted for the roughly 4,000 vote swing from Stevens to Begich.

Secretaries of State don't usually last more than a single presidential term. And sometimes they don't make it that long. So, for the life of me, I do not understand why Hillary Clinton would want to give up what is in all likelihood a senate seat for life to run the State Department for Barack Obama.

Late Update: This post, not surprisingly, has generated a big response. And a few of you have suggested that this is a way for Hillary to angle for another shot at the presidency in 2012 or 2016. But that strikes me as deeply, deeply improbable. Never an easy thing to challenge a sitting president of your own party, next to impossible to do it from his own cabinet. I don't have an answer on why either party would want this appointment. But that ain't the reason.

From TPM Reader KT ...

If one were so inclined, couldn't one take the combination of (a) Palin's statement about the relationship between G-d and her possible Senate career and (b) Stevens' almost immediate (miraculous?) drop into a position where he now trails Begich, as proof that of divine intervention?

60? Still a very long shot. But 59 could totally happen. In today's episode of TPMtv, we bring you up to speed on the very latest on the still-to-be-decided Senate races ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

From Roll Call ...

Sen. Norm Coleman (Minn.) called Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) Thursday afternoon and told him he was dropping out of the race for National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman to focus on the recount in his 206-vote win over Democratic challenger Al Franken.

Dingbat Fox hosts aren't much on economic history.

(ed.note: Apparently this particular doofus's name is Martha MacCallum.)

From the AP ...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said Wednesday she would consider serving in the Senate if God gave her the opportunity and Alaskans wanted her to take the job. The state's senior senator, Republican Ted Stevens, fell behind as the count resumed in his re-election bid.

One quick thought on the health care debate.

Obviously, the unfolding financial crisis creates a serious, though far from unanswerable, question of funding. But I want to set that question aside for a moment to focus on the question of political capital. I just think this is very straight forward. 'Political capital' is an inherently, intentionally fuzzy concept. But to the extent we put any stock in it, realistically, no president will ever have more political capital to act on this issue.

Obama clearly ran on the issue. He won by an overwhelming electoral majority and a decisive popular majority. He not only has sizable congressional majorities. He has ones that expanded for the second straight election and to some significant degree on his coattails.

None of this is to say that the big move on health care won't always be an epic struggle. It will be incredibly hard. But realistically speaking congressional majorities do not get much larger and presidents don't get much more powerful. So if we're saying that he lacks the political capital, I think that is another way of saying that, in the normal course of political physics, there's no amount of political capital that would be sufficient to make the Democrats take the plunge.

That may well be the case. But if it is, it would mean that the bi-annual ruckus about the uninsured is not so much policy advocacy as a sort of regular chumming of the political waters -- with the real final act always just over the horizon.

I don't even say this as a matter of advocacy. I think it's just straight political physics. And it's something worth considering.

From TPM Reader DW ...

I work for a major health care reform advocacy organization that has spent the much of the last two years planning for the next 200 days. The fight for comprehensive reform has been long and hard, to little positive result. But we felt really, really good about it all summer long, especially (though we weren't not allowed to say it publicly) in the case of an Obama win.

The financial crisis changed everything, obviously. In our weekly meetings to plan for the transition, the immediate reaction from our more well-connected consultants was that comprehensive reform was off the table entirely, and the new president and Congress would be forced to opt for a piecemeal approach over the first six to ten months of the administration would start with an emergency increase in FMAP, the federal matching program for Medicaid, since state budgets have mostly evaporated. An SCHIP expansion would follow soon after, and potential courses of action then branched out into Part D-tweaking, health IT, and possibly incremental increases to Medicaid.

A couple things have changed since then, however. Baucus' bill is a step in the right direction, Obama has seemed to signal that he isn't afraid to spend aggressively in a recession if it helps the economy. (In a series of strategy sessions we had this week, we discussed the challenge of convincing the public that additional spending is justified when they see a trillion dollar deficit on the evening news. Democrats and prgoressives should hammer home that meme as much as possible: spending is necessary in a recession, even in deficit; it helps jumpstart the economy.

It's going to come down to a whip count in the Senate. If Baucus' bill has legs, they should move on it quickly, before the honeymoon is over and Senate Republicans have the balls to use a filibuster.

Ed Kilgore examines the anatomy of conservative self-deception.

I'll have some more thoughts on this later.

Happy Birthday to us! As some of you know, today is TPM's 8th anniversary. The site started out on November 13th, 2000, just as it was becoming clear that the Florida recount wasn't just a matter of a few days of confusion but a full-blown multi-week, multi-branch theft of the presidency. It's been a great eight years -- at least great in terms of running TPM, if far from great more generally speaking. And it's weird when I stop to think that I've now spent a decent chunk of my life now running this site.

Let me take a moment to thank all of our readers for your many tips, your readership, and for your contributions, which provided the critical bootstrap of support that allowed us to fund our original expansions from one to multiple sites. And also a heartfelt thanks to TPM's current and past employees, whose dogged and often unsung work has made all of this possible.

As I noted last week, we've got an ambitious plan for 2009. So we believe the best is yet to come.

From Bloomberg ...

The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said in September they would comply with congressional demands for transparency in a $700 billion bailout of the banking system. Two months later, as the Fed lends far more than that in separate rescue programs that didn't require approval by Congress, Americans have no idea where their money is going or what securities the banks are pledging in return.

Now Palin's headlining (literally or figuratively, I'm not sure) the Republicans Governors Association conference.

Late Intervention Update: TPM Reader DH begs to differ: "I beg to differ about getting Palin off the center-stage of Republican leadership. The more she solidifies her status in the GOP, the harder it will be for them to move the party towards a pragmatic, centrist image that attracts independent voters in congressional and presidential elections. The GOP is already defaulting to her. That's good for Democratic candidates. 'Palin 2012!'"

I quite agree from a partisan perspective. The more Palin the better. But I think we also need to think about this from the broader perspective of national dignity. And simple human decency. You're at a party and someone's drinking too much and starting to do embarrassing things. Even if you don't like them, and even if the unlovely part of you thinks it's kind of funny, still someone should step in. On the other hand, if Rush and Sean, are up for it, maybe we just tap another keg?

Via this TPM Reader blog, I found out that Beliefnet.com has just published the full transcript of an interview Obama gave in March 2004 to the then-religion reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Cathleen Falsani. The interview is principally about Obama's religious beliefs but also, inevitably, draws in many other issues.

I don't know anyone more wired about what's going on in the foreign policy and national security world than Chris Nelson of the Nelson Report, a DC insider sheet on foreign & defense policy and international trade. And in tonight's edition he seems quite confident that Gates is staying on at the Pentagon "well into next year, if not also through completion of the pivot from Iraq to Afghanistan/Pakistan."

Because once just isn't enough for Sarah Palin ...

The last counting of absentee ballots has Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) down to a 971 vote margin over Mark Begich. The vote counters got through about half the absentee and questioned ballots today; and it took Stevens' margin from over 3k to just under 1k. More counting tomorrow.

Thanks to TPM Reader SP for the tip.

Late WTF Update: TPM Reader sends word that LS sends on word that Begich is now ahead by 3 votes. And she sends along the the link to the state of Alaska elections site that appears to confirm this.

No Question About it Update: Yep, the ADN confirms it. Begich by three votes.

How Cow Update: Man, you guys are on this like friggin' hawks. LS got to the send button first. But if our inbox is any indicator a lot of TPMers are all over this.

Roll Call says Biden's picking Ron Klain to be his Veep Chief of Staff.

For those interested in cinematic trivia, Klain was the guy Kevin Spacey played in HBO's Recount.

From a senate staffer ...

Understand that on the Hill, after Rummy, Gates was like a blast of fresh air. People found him candid and responsive (as opposed to arrogant and dismissive). I think most Democratic senators actually like and respect him, and most staff seem comfortable with keeping him on for some defined period.

Maybe that's a sad reflection of how low Rummy set the bar -- that we celebrate mere competence and professionalism -- but there you go.

I think TNR has this just right ...

The greatest risk for Democrats is not that Obama will try to do too much, but that their terror of failure will lead them to waste an historic opportunity. This is not a Clintonian moment. It is more like the moment Lyndon Johnson inherited in 1965, or the one Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933--a chance to reshape American government. The Democrats have it in their grasp to master the great problems of public life if they can summon their collective nerve. The only thing they have to fear is fear itself.

This is why, perhaps paradoxically, I'm not overly concerned at the rumored cabinet appointments that have some people worried. For a strong-willed president, cabinet officers are there to execute the president's vision and plan. And experience in government is an asset in execution, if it can be detriment to breadth of vision and ambition.

Obama promised big things; and I take him at his word.

More on this later.

(Hat tip to Sullivan for the link.)

Top labor leaders are getting together tomorrow in DC to put together their campaign to push for key agenda items from the new administration and new Congress.

Not surprising, but still interesting to note, is that the personnel decisions at Treasury don't seem that high on their list of concerns.

With the cable nets acting as Palin's enablers, who will organize the intervention?

Why Robert Gates? In today's episode of TPMtv we look at the ties between Barack Obama and the Brent Scowcroft foreign policy world that could keep Bob Gates at the Pentagon ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Georgia Republicans: Too many people ended up voting.

Krugman has some background/viewpoint on Baucus taking the lead on health care in the senate.

I know a lot of you in the K Street/DC lobbying and meta-lobbying world read TPM pretty closely. So please remember to ping us when you hear about personnel changes and other such happens as the city gears up for the new administration and new congress. Anonymity, of course, guaranteed.

Late Update: Along these lines, from Roll Call ...

In the latest example of top GOP lobbyists being shown the door at trade associations and corporate offices, Richard Hunt, senior managing director for government affairs at the downsizing Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, is leaving the group on Saturday, according to an e-mail announcement from the group's chief executive officer, Tim Ryan.

As you know, there was a lot of chatter yesterday about Obama keeping Bob Gates on at Defense for some indeterminate period of time. And we can talk a lot about whether or not that's a good thing. But what I'm not hearing a lot about in this discussion is the role of Brent Scowcroft. And I don't think any of this can be properly understood without reference to his role.

One thing to understand about Bob Gates is that he's a Scowcroft guy.

Scowcroft, to the best of my knowledge, never endorsed Obama. But he also, very pointedly, didn't endorse McCain either. And going back many months he's been an important player, far in the background and not for public consumption, in the Obama world. Remember, Hagel, who's sort of been Obama's Joe Lieberman (in the good sense) is very close to Scowcroft. He and Powell are close too. He's the guy who brings all this stuff together.

It's also worth knowing that Scowcroft has also been involved in a multi-year rearguard battle against the neocons in the Bush administration, especially in key efforts trying to block sundry wars with Iran, shut down John Bolton, etc.

This is not to say that Scowcroft is pulling anyone's strings. But to understand the Gates' decision (which I understand is going to happen) you need to look at this on-going conversation and perhaps even de facto alliance with the Scowcroft/GOP foreign policy world.

Sarah, it's over.

After every presidential election, the US government releases the so-called "Plum Book", a list of the seven thousand or so political jobs in the gift of the new administration. The new one was released this morning and you can see it here.

The Post's Lois Romano did a write-up on it last week.

There's a nasty stomach virus going around the city. And it took me out of commission all of Tuesday. So I woke up today having seen little if any of what had transpired over the previous 36 hours. And as near as I can tell, suddenly none of us like Obama any more because he's sending all the wrong signals, appointing all the wrong people and generally making a hash of everything so that it's basically already a failed presidency.

Perhaps I overstate a bit for effect. But aren't we getting ahead of ourselves a bit? Putting together an administration, especially after the drama and disasters of the last eight years is a complicated, complex operation, with many different moving parts. I want to see the whole picture come into focus.

Can someone tell Palin the election's over?

The situations are very different. But does anybody remember that Bob Gates was CIA Chief at the end of the first Bush administration and made a big play with Clinton to retain him in the new administration?

As it happened, Clinton didn't bite and instead picked James Woolsey as his first DCI, arguably the worst appointment he ever made.

John Hinderacker, arguably the most influential conservative blogger in the country ...

Obama thinks he is a good talker, but he is often undisciplined when he speaks. He needs to understand that as President, his words will be scrutinized and will have impact whether he intends it or not. In this regard, President Bush is an excellent model; Obama should take a lesson from his example. Bush never gets sloppy when he is speaking publicly. He chooses his words with care and precision, which is why his style sometimes seems halting. In the eight years he has been President, it is remarkable how few gaffes or verbal blunders he has committed. If Obama doesn't raise his standards, he will exceed Bush's total before he is inaugurated.

At the feet of masters.

Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) says Obama is planning to create a American Gestapo.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force. I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

I mentioned on Friday that at his first press conference President-elect Obama was deferential to President Bush and his continuing tenure in office through January 20th, but not overly so. And now comes word that in his meeting today with President Bush, Obama pressed him on three economic agenda items -- stimulus package and aid to the auto industry and homeowners. Don't wait till I'm president, Obama told Bush, according to NBC. Do it now.

Palin to spend weekend sorting through clothes to see what belongs to the RNC.

He not busy being born is busy dying -- Bob Dylan.

Looking back over the campaign, everyone now seems to see that there were a few key moments when John McCain did things that surrendered whatever chance he had to beat Barack Obama. At the top of the list has to be the choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nominee -- a choice that seemed fatal from the first for those who had eyes to see it, and soon revealed itself as such over the concluding weeks of the campaign. And McCain staffer and alter-ego Mark Salter is now conceding that the campaign suspension is probably another.

But what is easy to miss in these key moments is that most of them weren't simply what McCain did but how Obama reacted -- and the critical synergy between the two.

The campaign suspension was the key example.

It wasn't just that McCain suspended his campaign (and tried to postpone the debate). That wasn't the point at all. He unilaterally suspended his campaign and dared Obama not to suspend his. That was the key. Either Obama had to follow McCain's lead and suspend his campaign or reveal himself as the self-serving, all-about-himself, unpatriotic freak McCain's campaign had spent so many millions of dollars to portray him as. It was a classic play at the Republicans' 'bitch-slap' theory of electoral politics, with all the gendered weight and macho-hierarchy-setting the unlovely phrase implies.

But Obama didn't budge. I think there were a lot of Democrats who were really worried that McCain had put Obama in some kind of box or that Obama would see it as such and react accordingly. But he didn't.

And it went from McCain bigfooting Obama (with all that would have entailed), to Obama turning the stunt around on McCain. It undermined one of McCain's key selling points against Obama -- that he was tougher, more seasoned under pressure -- and further cemented the image of a man who was erratic and showed questionable judgments under pressure.

A high-level senate Democratic source tells me former President Clinton is making calls on Sen. Lieberman's behalf.

I can also confirm, on the same basis, what Huffington Post has already reported, that President-elect Obama is signaling to Senate leadership and other party officials that he wants Sen. Lieberman to be in the Democratic caucus in the 111th Congress.

That doesn't mean he doesn't want him punished in some way. I have the sense -- though this is more speculation on my part -- that he's agnostic on that question. But he wants him in the caucus -- which would seem to give Lieberman some real leverage.

I'll have more on the Lieberman story soon.

Late Update: Kos has some more thoughts gaming out the options for Joe.

Just out from MSNBC ...

MSNBC has voted for four more years of Keith Olbermann and the top-rated "Countdown with Keith Olbermann," it was announced today by Phil Griffin, President, MSNBC. The new four-year agreement calls for Olbermann to continue as host of "Countdown;" additionally, Olbermann will play a prominent role in MSNBC's coverage of all major news events. He will also continue to co-host NBC's "Football Night in America" studio show.

I'm still waiting to find out more about how the Russia-Georgia War started and just what Randy Scheunemann knew about it. It turns out Tom Hayden is wondering too.

Over the next few days, one of the things I'm going to be doing is mapping out what I expect to be some of the big stories over the coming year. Some are obvious (new president); others there will be no predicting. But one in a middle category we're going to be following closely is the rewiring of K Street. Of particular note is a topic the Washington Post dug into over weekend: the way that the K Street firms (and the larger DC service economy) are digging in to get a slice of the $700 billion bank bailout.

The big bucks, of course, will go to financial services companies. But just who gets the big bucks and on what terms? That's where K Street comes in. Everyone on Wall Street is going to want to make their case and that means hiring people with access to help make the case -- to the folks in the Treasury, the Congress and myriad people in the regulatory agencies.

We'll be watching closely.

But the angling for the bailout money is only one part of the story. For more than a decade and especially from 2000 to 2006, Washington was totally wired for access to the GOP. No surprise. That's where the power was. If you wanted influence in DC, you weren't going to waste your money on Dems since they didn't have any. It was even more so, since with the Tom DeLay/Grover Norquist 'K Street Project', the Republicans were far more systematic than anyone had previously been in forcing trade organizations and lobbying shops to hire Republicans. It became a big question just who was coopting who.

Now, at least for the next two years, the Democrats have more power in their hands than the Republicans did at any point between 1994 and 2008. And yet many of the big trade orgs and all the similar places are staffed with people who were put there to access the GOP. Some of that had already begun to change after 2006. But it will start changing with a vengeance now -- not just because Democratic dominance is secured for at least two years but because so much is now on the table.

Two other points to consider.

One characteristic of K Street under Republican rule was that the interests with the most money were, as a general matter, in sync with the people they were trying to influence. Oil companies, Phrma, the Business Roundtable, etc. They all wanted things that -- by and large -- Republicans were ideologically inclined to give them. Democrats get a lot of money from the same people. But there is at least much more tension with the Democrats, though how much will be the big question. It also means that Republicans will likely never get shut out the way Democrats did because even if they lack power they still share interests.

The other point is that it's not just the lobby shops and trade organizations. There's also 'deep lobbying'. Who runs the think tanks? Who's giving them the biggest grants? What are they studying? There will be plenty of shady deals to go around. But it's not just the shady deals. It's the big picture. The rewiring of the whole town. Like I said, we'll be playing close attention.

TPM Reader DG: "I can't believe Obama is already sitting down with an unpopular, aggressive world leader without preconditions."

Hitting the ground running, I guess.

Robert Reich on how to save the economy.