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.
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.
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.”
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’.
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.
Al Qaida #2 leader Ayman al-Zawahri says Americans should combat financial meltdown through mass conversion to Islam.
Former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele facing resistance in bid to lead RNC as groundswell of support for anonymous nobody type leader grows.
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.