Pakistan is reportedly backing out of its plan to send its spy chief to India to aid in the Mumbai terror investigation. "A representative of the ISI will visit India, instead of its Director General Lt Gen Shuja Pasha, to help in investigating the Mumbai terrorism incident," the Times of India quotes a spokesman for the Pakisani Prime Minister as saying.

It's still not clear to me why we're not doing this bank bailout thing more like the Brits. The UK is 'bailing out' the Royal Bank of Scotland, which operates Citizens Bank here in the US. But it works a little differently over there. The government ended up buying almost 60% of the company, after the bank's existing shareholders bought only a tiny percentage of a new offering. So the government owns 60% of the bank and the government's shares are held by something called UK Financial Investments LTD, which has a charge to "protect and create value for the taxpayer as shareholder, with due regard to financial stability and acting in a way that promotes competition."

I had a conversation with a friend a few days ago, in which I agreed that I shared his concerns about direct government ownership of major stakes in these institutions. But as long as that voting power (based on the ownership stake) is insulated from political appointees at Treasury or wherever else -- as they seem to have done in the UK -- by creating a separate chartered entity, I really don't see the problem.

Not that this is an ideal situation. Clearly you'd want some orderly plan for the government to divest itself of this stake over time, as economic conditions warrant. But here you actually have some decent chance for taxpayers to recoup their investment. And you have people with a charter to maximize taxpayer value and stabilize the economy on the bank's boards. It's really pretty demoralizing, after all, to see the taxpayers pony up all this money and then have the banks tell us to go screw ourselves when we complain that they're not using any of the money for making loans.

Yes, there are many layers of complexity. But at the end of the day I still get a pretty strong 'something for nothing' feel about most of these bailout deals.

Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele facing resistance in bid to lead RNC as groundswell of support for anonymous nobody type leader grows.

Al Qaida #2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri says Americans should combat financial meltdown through mass conversion to Islam.

About the economic crisis, that is.

India's NDTV is now reporting new details, based on Indian intelligence sources, of the Mumbai attack, including the total number of attackers, their origins, etc. We'll have video shortly. Key details seemed to be that there were 40 attackers, half were there in place and in advance and half were brought in on speed boats from the sea. 29 were Pakistani, 11 were Bangladeshi.

I should emphasize here that while reports sourced to off-the-record statements from intelligence agencies should always be treated with caution, that is particularly the case here. The Indians come at these terrorist incidents with strong (and not at all unfounded) assumptions about Pakistani involvement. That may very well be the case. But we should wait for firmer evidence before taking these reports as the final word.

One new development from Mumbai this morning is the claim that the attackers were launched from the sea (remember Mumbai is a port city). The idea -- though the reports remain very sketchy -- is that a merchant ship of some sort launched a group of speed boats that brought the attackers ashore. The Indian Navy is searching reportedly searching for the purported 'mother ship'.

CNN is reporting that at least two of the terrorist attackers from the Mumbai attacks were actually British nationals.

We're looking for further confirmation.

Late Update: Times of London identifies the two as "two British-born Pakistanis."

I knew this happened since we reported on it months ago. But last night I met someone who'd applied for a DOJ career position a couple years ago, didn't get the job and then later got one of the official letters informing him that he'd been rejected because he didn't meet the ideological criteria that was being applied during the Gonzales-Goodling era. He was offered the opportunity to apply again. On one level, that's no surprise to me. We led some of the reporting on this very issue. But it's something else to actually meet someone whose career got stymied because of these hacks.

When we're not running TPM or raising our two kids, my wife and I spend a lot of what leisure time we have in the evenings watching a few key TV series we like. Most are either reality TV competition shows (don't ask) or so-called 'police procedurals'. I used to be a big fan of Dexter. But I feel like it's sort of losing me this season. Same with Heroes.

So we've checked out a lot of the new series this season. But the one that's really got me is Life on Mars, only I'm not completely sure why.

From some googling around a few moments ago, I just found out that the show is based on a show by the same name that runs on the BBC.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Late thirties New York City cop gets near fatal (perhaps actually fatal?) knock to the head and through the magic of ridiculous TV Show premises he's transported back in time to 1973 where he's thrust back into his own life, only 35 years earlier. Since he was raised in New York, he starts running into younger versions of people from his own life - even himself eventually. And of course much of the meat of the plotlines -- aside from the general, 'hey, look, everybody's dressing like it's 1973' -- centers around the culture clash between 2008 and 1973 methods of policing.

The entire series is shot in a sort of yellowish, sienna tone. I was alive in 1973. And I don't remember things being any yellower. But somehow it works to set the period stage.

For some reason it's got me kind of hooked. But I'm not sure completely why. The cast is good -- Harvey Keitel, Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos, Gretchen Mol. The lead is played by Jason O'Mara, who's great. But I've never heard of him before.

One key to the show is that it manages to avoid the obvious cliches of going back in time to 1973. How it avoids them I'm not sure, because it's also full of them. They're everywhere. But the writing and character-development must be strong enough to make the characters come to life. Also key is Jason O'Mara playing Sam Tyler. I think what draws me in is the tension at the center of his character, at once going native as a denizen of New York circa 1973 but with an undertone of complete disbelief in the life he's leading and subtext of absurdist humor. The as-yet-unexplained super small martian lander robots that make brief appearances and on at least one occasion escaped into his ear help sustain that latter strain.

Have you watched it? You like it? No? Why do you think it works?

A Special TPM Thanksgiving message, featuring Quasi-President Bush ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

We've heard a number of reports over recent days putting the total government bailout costs at several trillions of dollars. But there are a lot of apples and oranges being thrown around. There are directly appropriated US government spending on the TARP. Then there's Fed lending, which is different. Then there are various loan guarantees and agreements to backstop questionable assets. These are all very different kinds of expenditures and some of them don't even really count as 'spending' in the ordinary sense we understand the term. To start disentangling the mess, we've put together an initial run down of the many different kinds of spending, loans and loan-guarantees and what the amounts are with each.

Adm. William J. Fallon, you'll remember, was the first Navy officer who was commander of CentCom, the US military command that covers the Middle East and much of Central Asia. He was shown the door after one year after a controversy over his comments -- perceived as critical of the President's Iran policy -- which appeared in an interview with Esquire.

One clever person once quipped that the silver lining to the neocons' war on terror craziness was that at least it distracted them for a decade from their primary aim of fomenting a war with China. Along those lines, here's a passage of an interview with Fallon in yesterday's Boston Globe that TPM Reader JT flagged to our attention ...

"When I was in the Pacific [as the head of the US Pacific Command from 2005 to 2007] there were people with different viewpoints. One of the challenges I saw out there ...was that we had one long term issue and that's called China. It seemed to me that of all the things we needed to deal with we had better figure out how we are going to come to grips with the future relationship between the US and China."

They are the owners of most of our debt. Between China and Japan they are sitting on $3 trillion dollars [of US debt]. People say 'look at all [the rest of] these problems in the world.' They are all interesting. For my money, if you fix the problems here most of those others go away because it is our behaviors that are the cause of some of our challenges."

The size of the country and its influence is staggering. So we've got to figure this out. There were people who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here because sooner or later we're going be at war with China. I don't think that's where we want to go. And so I set about challenging all the assumptions and I came back here about once a month and sat down with Secretary Rumsfeld. I'd walk through what I was thinking, why I was thinking that way. There were people who didn't like that."

[My reputation became] "Fallon loves the Chinese, doesn't see any problem with this." [I responded with] "What are the priorities, guys? Do you want to have a war? We can probably have one. But is that what you really want? Is that really in our interest? Because I don't think so." We had a lot of initiatives underway [on military-to-military relations with China] and some of that stuff didn't go over too well back here.

"I wish that [the Secretary of Labor] would have been among them. I hope they take that job seriously." -- David Bonior, Obama transition team member and former Michigan congressman.

I miss Mitt Romney.

As regulars know, we're rolling out expanded coverage of Congress and the Executive branch for 2009. And for that we're hiring two new politics reporter-bloggers. We just hired the reporter-blogger who will be covering Congress, right up there on Capitol Hill each day. And we'll be announcing who that will be on Monday.

"Russia was ready for this war, but the Georgian leadership started the military action first," -- Erosi Kitsmarishvili, Georgia's former Ambassador to Moscow, speaking Tuesday before a Georgian parliamentary commission investigating the war.

Though I might have chosen differently in one or two cases, overall, I'd say I'm very pleased with the announced or prospective nominees so far from Barack Obama. But for those who are more critical, I try to keep focusing everyone's attention back on the salient point. With a strong president, appointees, particularly cabinet appointees execute policy. They work for the president. They execute his policies. I think we have a strong president. And unless and until I see policies that don't square with the platform he ran on (which I don't expect) I see no reason to revise that judgment.

I think I've officially seen a few million online picture books of Obama from over the last several weeks of the campaign. But this one from the Boston Globe's website has to be the best.

For your holiday viewing pleasure, we're preparing a video reel of the best moments of the 2008 election cycle. We'll probably do one for the primaries and another for the general election. Now, by "best", sometimes that will mean the worst, the weirdest, in addition to the truly great moments. But we're looking for those key moments on video that you simply could not leave if you expected any 2008 election retrospective to be complete.

So, our team is hunting through the TPMtv archives. But we need your help too. What were the key, can't-do-without moments? Send us your choices at the comments email with the subject heading "Best of 2008."

You've probably noticed Mark Halperin's claim that the level of pro-Obama bias in the election coverage this year was so bad it was "disgusting." I'll leave it to others to analyze what "disgusting" means when deployed by someone who takes his journalistic cues from Matt Drudge. But whatever Halperin says, the financial crisis has taken so much of the oxygen from post-mortem discussions of the campaign that a few commentators do seem to be putting together a conventional wisdom that the political press this past year was wildly pro-Obama.

It's amazing how quickly political amnesia takes effect. Going into this year, there was probably no national politician more liked or more favorably covered in the nation than John McCain. Remember, the DC press corps was McCain's "base." For virtually the entire election cycle, national political reporters continued to grade McCain on a curve. There are numerous examples.

Toward the end of the campaign, basically in September, McCain took a series of steps that began to crack his credibility and reputation. He and his campaign told a series of falsehoods that were so outside the bounds even by the normal standards of political lying and took a number of steps that where so erratic and reckless (Palin, campaign suspension, etc.) that the nature of his coverage finally began to change.

McCain did that. Halperin should stop complaining, put some limits on pandering to the curdled resentment of the right.

From TPM Reader BW, disagreeing with a point I made yesterday ...

"There seems to be a pretty clear consensus at this point that letting Lehmann fail in the way it did, for instance, was a category error."

One might also question the conventional wisdom that says that letting Lehman go into bankruptcy was such a key factor.

It is true that market seems to have received a signal at the time of Lehman's bankruptcy. But, given the actual and proximate consequences of Lehman's bankruptcy, which were very mild, one probably ought to consider the possibility that AIG's insolvency might have had something to do with what happened.

The problem that has frozen market trust is the uncertainty surrounding credit default swaps, and the huge cash and collateral demands that they can entail -- demands on vivid display in the case of AIG, which was ruined, seemingly overnight.

AIG was rescued, but it doesn't matter. What frightened the horses was just how much cash AIG has needed.

Lehman's bankruptcy caused barely a ripple. The functioning parts of the Lehman investment bank were almost instantly absorbed at Barclays, with no operational disruption of the broker-dealer function, which is where one might fear an investment bank failure would impact the market. Geithner and Paulson may have been right. Lehman's failure was so long anticipated that the market was well-prepared. No one was prepared for AIG.

I have little idea how the writers of narrative journalism, like the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin decide between Lehman and AIG, when both events occurred simultaneously, but I suspect they ask industry insiders. And, industry insiders have a strong interest in blaming the failure-to-bailout, since such blame is useful politically, in motivating future bailouts. But, as a matter of objective economics, it doesn't make all that much sense. And, as a basis for criticizing Geithner's competence? Please.

And quite a few disagreements with BW ...

From TPM Reder JS ...

I wouldn't put BW on your short list for the financial reporter/blogger position. someone who writes "Lehman's bankruptcy caused barely a ripple" has no idea what is going on in the financial system. Allowing Lehman to file for bankruptcy had two immediate consequences. It caused a big default in the commercial paper market and required the writers of credit default swap protection for Lehman debt to post collateral. The violent response in short-term funding markets suggests that market participants were -not- anticipating a Lehman bankruptcy. At my firm we certainly were not. What resulted was a "run" on the commercial paper market and a desperate grab for U.S. Treasurys among the hedge funds and banks who wrote Lehman credit default swaps. And, after a few days of metastasization, there you have your short-term funding crisis. AIG had almost nothing to do with it. It is quite possible that something else would have triggered such a crisis, since the preconditions were there. But the Lehman failure was in fact the trigger. Those who made the decision to let Lehman fail must bear some responsibility for what followed.

And TPM Reader GG ...

Lehman's failure affected the system in three ways which your reader underplays. First, the Reserve Fund's writedown of its Lehman bonds forced them to break the buck and suspend redemptions, which led to a fairly scary run on money market funds generally. These funds are the bread and butter buyers of commercial paper (short term bonds), so when they started hoarding cash to meet redemptions, the banking system stress was almost immediately transmitted to the real economy. Second, several billion dollars of hedge fund assets were locked up in the UK division of Lehman. Depression era laws prevented that in the U.S. Third, global trade is (still) largely conducted via letter of credit. With the possibility of well-known names disappearing, that system has broken down catastrophically. (Pull up the Dry Goods Shipping Index for confirmation.)

Bloomberg ...

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, less than a week after indicating he would let the Obama administration decide how to use the second half of the $700 billion financial fund, is considering asking for the money.

Fareed Zakaria: "Some of us--especially those under 60--have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books. Well, this is it. We're now living history, suffering one of the greatest financial panics of all time. It compares with the big ones--1907, 1929--and we cannot yet know its full consequences for the financial system, the economy or society as a whole."

Set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission? Prosecute them all? Leave it Congress? Just forget about it and move on? This week at TPMCafe we're discussing what to do about continuing secrets, lawlessness and law-breaking of the Bush administration. We're focusing discussion around a new article out in the Washington Monthly, 'Last Secrets of the Bush Administration: How to find out what we still don't know'.

Joining for the conversation are Scott Horton, New York attorney specializing in human rights law and the law of armed conflict, and regular contributor to Harper's; Suzanne Spaulding, lawyer specializing in national security issues, including homeland security, intelligence, and terrorism; Daniel Larison, Ph.D student at the University of Chicago and host of the blog, Eunomia; Mickey Edwards, former congressman (R-OK), lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson school, and Vice President of the Aspen Institute; Anne Weismann, Chief Counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington; and finally, Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies.

You can join the conversation in progress here.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty: "We have a divided government."

Late Update: Here's the full quote ...

We have a divided government, we have a divided country facing an historic challenge, so hearing him out and trying to find some common ground is a good and worthy goal, but we need to see the details obviously and see what he has in mind

Bill Kristol was just on Fox sounding surprisingly sane.

Shorter Austen Goolsbee: We only have one president at a time. But Bush is hardly even being president at the moment. So there's plenty of room for a big fraction of Obama starting now.

(ed.note: Not that I disagree.)

I'm sold, as I think most people are, on the proposition that the collateral damage of the failure of major financial institutions is simply too great to allow. There seems to be a pretty clear consensus at this point that letting Lehmann fail in the way it did, for instance, was a category error. What's not as clear to me is the public interest in maintaining the equity of the companies' current shareholders.

Late Update: He's not necessarily addressing the same point. But Krugman thinks the Citi deal blows.

From TPM Reader DB ...

What makes Citi's sponsorship of the new stadium even more absurd is that although the Mets paid for a decent amount of the construction, a lot was subsidized as per this article in the Times. So basically the tax payers give money to Citi to get naming rights to a stadium that the tax payers partially built so the Mets can raise ticket prices to a level that your average New Yorker cannot afford. But hey, the Citi execs will still have their luxury boxes!!!

Robert Borosage, co-director of the progressive Campaign for America's Future, releases a statement on Obama's economic team ...

It's not the personnel, it's the policy. And on this, Obama has been clear. He's announced a massive recovery plan based on putting people to work with public investment in areas vital to our future.

The crisis we face makes Rubinomics irrelevant. Deficit spending must go up, finance must be re-regulated, trade imbalances must be reduced and manufacturing can no longer be scorned.

Obama is choosing experienced hands for the crisis, trusting that their experience does not impede the new thinking needed to get us out of this hole. He'll set the direction. And so far, he's on course.

Late Update: Much less my cup of tea but also of interest is this from US Chamber of Commerce ...

President-elect Obama has chosen a strong, experienced economic team. Restoring the nation's economic health must be our top priority and the Chamber stands ready to work with the new administration to spur growth and job creation.

This team brings a wealth of knowledge to Washington and an understanding that any sustainable economic recovery will involve the business sector.

Tim Geithner has a deep understanding of our capital markets and the experience and credibility to tackle our nation's biggest challenge--restoring our economy and rebuilding our financial markets.  He has been directly engaged in all the steps taken so far to address this unprecedented crisis and is well qualified to lead the Treasury Department.

Larry Summers' knowledge of economic issues and past experience as Treasury secretary will serve President Obama well.  Likewise, Christina Romer and Melody Barnes will bring an understanding that any sustainable economic recovery will involve the business sector.

For nearly a century the Chamber has successfully worked with both parties through varying economic conditions. Today's challenges are unprecedented and call for strong communication and support between the next administration and the backbone of our nation's economy, America's business community."

From Justin Rood at ABCNews ...

AIG, Citibank and a number of other federally bailed-out financial institutions have no plans to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in sports team sponsorships, even as they take billions in taxpayer support, ABC News has found.

In boom times, the sponsorships were seen as a way to advertise the firms' "brands" and appeal to potential customers. Even today, at least one bank told ABC News that a naming deal was increasing its revenue. But critics, including a member of Congress, say the decision to continue them now is hard to defend.

Struggling Citibank just sealed a multi-billion-dollar emergency "backstop" deal with the U.S. government. The financial behemoth, suffering with billions in bad mortgage-related assets on its books, recently shed 53,000 workers and saw its stock price lose over half its value. Yet it's in a 20-year contract to pay the New York Mets $400 million to name the team's new stadium "Citi Field."

As other have reported and we've now confirmed, the plan is now that the new Congress will have a stimulus bill in the half trillion dollar range ready for President Obama to sign on the first day of his presidency -- January 20th, 2009.

So that suggests some calendar math.

Even with big Democratic majorities and the incentive of crisis, you still don't get this sort of legislation through Congress in a day. So if the new Congress gets sworn in January 6th, I think it's realistic to say that you need bill basically written -- at least the major line items -- when both chambers convene.

Today is November 24th, one month before Christmas and the New Year's Holidays. The severity of the crisis and the realities of the transition will keep things moving much more than usual over the holidays. But still, the holidays block out some time.

All of which suggests to me that to keep on a realistic schedule, the basic outlines of how to spend that half trillion-plus dollars needs to be worked out over the next four weeks. And there's a lot to figure out.

'Stimulus plans' are generally numbered in the tens of billions of dollars. $500 billion is the number we're talking about now. And I think you have to assume that number grows. Extensions to unemployment insurance and other counter-cyclical spending is critical. But it doesn't put a dent in that overall price tag. So clearly to spend that kind of money you need to fund programs that do more than inject money directly into the economy. You need to fund major new programs that will likely shape the economic direction of the country for years, perhaps decades into the future -- major spending on infrastructure, laying the cornerstones of a green energy economy and more.

Four weeks.

From ABC ...

Democratic sources tell ABC News that President-elect Obama's transition team is working with lawmakers on Capitol Hill so that on Obama's first day in office, Jan. 20, 2009, an economic stimulus package has passed both houses of Congress and is awaiting his signature.

Only a few weeks ago, the numbers under discussion were in the $100 - $200 billion range. Now we're hearing numbers in the $500 billion range. And from what I can glean from the economists whose opinion I most respect, that only gets us to the threshold level of what will be needed.

Late Update: Needless to say, with so much money on the table, a lot of the people who got us into the mess will be lining up and lobbying for hand-outs. The bottom line, I think, is that the money has to go toward building real stuff -- primarily infrastructure -- and pumped into the hands of people who will immediately spend it, i.e., middle and lower-income people who will spend it on necessities.

This is really going to be a titanic struggle. It would be fascinating, even fun to watch it unfold if it weren't that all our futures depended on the result.

Politico: Obama prioritizing gym over church.

Politico: Gates not Republican enough to count as a Republican.

If we're serious about oversight, can we get the makers of Q-tips to finally come clean about what their product is really for?

I mean, enough of the lies. It's a new day.

Pope Benedict: Enough with the interfaith dialogue stuff.

I'd been growing a little pessimistic. But Nate runs the numbers and says Franken actually appears to be a very slight favorite to pull it out.

One country cannot stand a once in a century economic crisis, two wars and Norm Coleman. We have limits.

Our irascible anonymous TPMCafe blogger looks at the emerging Obama economic team.

Scowcroft's the guy.

Obama rolling out economic team at 11 AM Monday in Chicago.

Special thanks to TPM Reader JY for flagging this old video.