South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's (R) prescription for fixing the Republican Party's problems: A smaller, more ideologically pure tent. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

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.

President-elect Obama gets briefed by Condoleezza Rice on the Mumbai situation while Dem Congressional leaders forge ahead with plans to have big economic and health care initiatives on Obama's desk when he takes office. Those and other political news items of the day in today's TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

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.