Joe Biden and his wife are off to tour the veep residence with the Cheneys. That and the day’s other transition news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

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?

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.

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.

Ed Kilgore examines the anatomy of conservative self-deception.

I’ll have some more thoughts on this later.

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.

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 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.

Dingbat Fox hosts aren’t much on economic history.

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

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.