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.

“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.

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.

I miss Mitt Romney.

“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.

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.

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.

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

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

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?