NBC News is reporting that, in an effort to give the economy some badly-needed stability and reassurance, President-elect Barack Obama will announce his economic team Monday. According to Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell, Obama will make the announcement himself, and will take questions from reporters.

If Todd and Mitchell are right, there will be some big names included in the roll out. They say Tim Geithner -- the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and a longtime Treasury official -- will be returning to his old haunt, this time as Treasury Secretary, and that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will be Commerce Secretary. The Wall Street Journal, too, has a report about the big Monday announcement, and the paper also says Geithner will get the Treasury nod.

Earlier this fall, Salon's Andrew Leonard wrote in favor of this pick; Leonard's been following Geithner for some time, dating back to a prescient speech the latter gave in 2006 entitled "Hedge Funds and Derivatives and Their Implications for the Financial System." You can read more in this post, and in this one responding to the news.

Obama transition aides declined comment on the report; a longtime Richardson aide hasn't responded to a voicemail message from Salon.

Update: Bloomberg News' Rich Miller chimes in with his own report saying Geithner's the guy at Treasury. Miller also adds another big name to the mix, saying former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers -- who stirred controversy with comments he made about women while president of Harvard -- will get a "senior White House role."

Hillary Clinton has reportedly been wavering about whether or not to leave the Senate for the State Department, but according to the New York Times, she's now made her decision. Clinton is ready to accept the nomination to become secretary of state, the Times' Peter Baker reports.

Baker sources his story to two unnamed "confidants" of Clinton's. He writes:

Mrs. Clinton came to her decision after additional discussion with President-elect Barack Obama about the nature of her role and his plans for foreign policy, said one of the confidants, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the situation. Mr. Obama’s office told reporters Thursday that the nomination is “on track” but Clinton associates only confirmed Friday afternoon that she has decided.

“She’s ready,” said the confidant. Mrs. Clinton was reassured after talking again with Mr. Obama because their first meeting in Chicago last week “was so general,” the confidant said. The purpose of the follow-up talk, he added, was not to extract particular concessions but “just getting comfortable” with the idea of working together.

A second Clinton associate confirmed that her camp believes they have a done deal.

Baker says nothing will be official until after Thanksgiving. That's consistent with previous reports about the timing of any announcement.

Contacted by Salon, Obama transition aides declined comment.

Update: Philippe Reines, a senior advisor to Clinton, e-mails Salon's Mike Madden, "We’re still in discussions, which are very much on track.  Any reports beyond that are premature."

Yet another public figure's privacy has been breached: Verizon says some of its employees, without authorization, accessed President-elect Barack Obama's personal cell phone records.

In its report on the incident, Reuters paraphrases Michael King, a telecom analyst, as saying, "a telephone employee accessing billing information could likely see the numbers a customer had called, how long conversations with those people were and when he called them."

Earlier this year, as you probably remember, Sarah Palin's e-mail was hacked. That didn't happen here; Verizon says the phone was voice only, and didn't have data services like e-mail. Still, it provides yet another example of why, as the New York Times discussed in an article last week, Obama will probably have to give up his BlackBerry upon taking office.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has checked out of a hospital and plans to return to work Friday afternoon after collapsing while delivering a speech Thursday night.

In an e-mail he wrote to Justice Department employees, Mukasey said "All tests at the hospital have come back with good results, and I feel fine." The attorney general, NBC reports, "had a clear MRI and normal CT scan, and doctors have ruled out a mini-stroke or TIA." That's good to hear, especially because the early reports about what happened to him -- he was shaking and slurring his words shortly before he collapsed -- were worrisome.

The ceremonial "pardoning" of a Thanksgiving turkey is an old tradition. So by now, most people have learned that it's best to stage that kind of photo op in a nice, picturesque setting, away from the reality of what's happening to the birds that weren't spared.

Apparently, Sarah Palin's press people haven't quite figured that one out yet. As you can see in the video below, when Palin spoke to reporters after pardoning one turkey, a farmer was working in the background, slaughtering its less-fortunate compatriots.

President-elect Barack Obama appears close to selecting James L. Jones, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, to be his national security advisor. Jones is the former Supreme Allied Commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Politico reports that Jim Steinberg, who served as Bill Clinton's deputy national security advisor, and Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni are also under consideration for the role.

Additionally, according to ABC News' Jake Tapper and Martha Raddatz, Democratic sources have said that retired four-star Navy Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the former commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command, seems to be Obama's top choice for director of national intelligence.

Obama has not officially offered the jobs to either of the front-runners.

Tapper and Raddatz also report that many of Obama's advisors want Steinberg to become the national security advisor, while Obama is adamantly in favor of Jones. Jones was an outspoken critic of the Bush administration's policies in the Iraq war.

Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) still leads in his race against Al Franken, but with the recount almost halfway done after two days, that lead is shrinking.

Before the recount began, the two men were separated by 215 votes. At the end of the day Wednesday, it was 174 votes. By the end of counting Thursday, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Coleman led Franken by just 136 votes.

Over at Minnesota Public Radio, they've put together an interesting feature -- a game that lets you see examples of challenged ballots and give your opinion as to the voter's intention. It's clear that all of this is art, not science.

Multiple outlets are now reporting that Hillary Clinton's nomination to be secretary of state is all but assured, and that there will be an official announcement shortly after Thanksgiving.

This, of course, assumes that nothing unexpected happens to block the nomination, and that Clinton herself wants the job. But the Associated Press' Nedra Pickler writes:

Transition aides said the two camps have worked out financial disclosure issues involving Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the complicated international funding of his foundation that operates in more than 40 countries. The aides said Obama and Hillary Clinton have had substantive conversations about the secretary of state job.

Clinton has been mulling the post for several days, but the comments from the transition aides suggested that Obama's team does not feel she is inclined to turn it down.

Similarly, Politico's Mike Allen says two unnamed "senior Obama aides" told him "they expect her to accept."

Separately, the New York Times reports that "Democratic leaders in the Senate are prepared to give Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a still-undefined leadership role there if she does not become Barack Obama’s secretary of state... The discussions about an enhanced position for Mrs. Clinton are factoring into her deliberations over joining the cabinet."

President-elect Barack Obama may already be in the process of alienating the dovish elements of his coalition for change.  According to a story in Thursday's Los Angeles Times, some of the names being discussed as potential Cabinent members in the Obama administration -- current Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Sen. Hillary Clinton, for example -- have antiwar groups worried about the new president's foreign policy.

"There's so much Obama hero worship, we're having to walk this line where we can't directly criticize him," Kevin Martin, the executive director of Peace Action, told the Times. "But we are expressing concern."

Kelly Dougherty, of Iraq Veterans Against the War, agreed, saying, "Obama ran his campaign around the idea the war was not legitimate, but it sends a very different message when you bring in people who supported the war from the beginning."

It seems that the antiwar groups might have gotten ahead of themselves, and started expecting too much from Obama. During the campaign, he'd made it clear that his plan to withdraw from Iraq over the course of his first 16 months in office would be subject to change if the situation on the ground changed. "I've always said that the pace of withdrawal would be dictated by the safety and security of our troops and the need to maintain stability. That assessment has not changed," he said in July. And a former Obama foreign policy advisor told the BBC in March that her boss' plan is a "best-case scenario." 

Besides, while Cabinet appointments clearly affect policy, there's not necessarily a perfect correlation between the two. In some ways, Obama's decisions on these appointments could help him successfully implement a more liberal foreign policy. Writing for CNN.com on Wednesday, Steve Clemons argued this point, saying:

If Obama wants to change the strategic game on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Cuba, Russia and other challenges, he will need partners who are perceived as tough, smart, shrewd and even skeptical of the deals he wants to do. Clinton is all of these.

Clinton may be the bad cop to Obama's good cop. Because she is trusted by Pentagon-hugging national security conservatives, she may legitimize his desire to respond to this pivot point in American history with bold strokes rather than incremental ones.

Bill O'Reilly has competition for his reputation as the most dedicated soldier fighting against the "War on Christmas." In a column in Thursday's Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger, the deputy editor of the paper's editorial page, put himself on the front lines. Henniger argues that our inability to say "Merry Christmas" was a main factor leading to our current economic crisis. Henniger writes (h/t ThinkProgress):

This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy...

Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.