Following in the footsteps of House health care leaders, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, plans to hold a hearing on contentious new recommendations for screening breast cancer, Harkin’s office said this afternoon.

The senator has yet to announce a date, but with the health reform debate likely to occupy the upper chamber for most of December, scheduling the hearing this year would be a tricky proposition.

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Via Brian Faughnan, here’s former Rep. J.D. Hayworth testing the waters for a 2010 challenge to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

There is something you can do right now…you will find attached an invitation to an event scheduled for Dec. 5, featuring Joe Arpaio, “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” “Sheriff Joe” has very graciously agreed to raise funds for the “Freedom In Truth Trust.” The FIT Trust is the fund that was established to help us satisfy legal debts incurred during the 2006 campaign. You can read more about it at http://www.jdhayworth.com/fit-trust.html

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Breaking news from The Associated Press:

A Kentucky census worker found naked, bound with duct tape and hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest killed himself but staged his death to make it look like a homicide, authorities said Tuesday.

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With a sprawling, multi-million dollar mansion in Sandy Springs, Ga., sitting empty for two years, some enterprising folks nearby had an idea: Fill it with a big party.

According to USA Today, the Halloween bash at the six-bedroom mansion was a huge success, drawing 1,000 people. It ended only when traffic gridlock got so bad police had to be called.

But the party wasn’t an isolated event. Similar unauthorized parties are taking in place in other cities with vacant homes — evidence of how the problem of empty and foreclosed homes are causing neighborhood blight and other problems. Although some places, like the Phoenix metro area, are showing some signs of progress in dealing with vacancies, there’s been no widespread solution.

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This New Orleans mayoral campaign ad, via Daily Kos, really is one of the more head-turning political TV spots of the cycle. (It gets a bit less interesting after the first 15 seconds.)

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This is a surprising result from Public Policy Polling, the occasionally partisan group which nonetheless called the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races accurately. Mitt Romney’s favorable rating among Republican voters has fallen to 48 percent–a plurality, but a weak one. And the trend lines are even more interesting. Since April, when PPP started asking the question, Sarah Palin’s favorable number has moved from 76 percent to 75 percent; Mike Huckabee’s has moved from 67 percent to 65 percent. Romney, alone, has seen a statistically significant drop from 60 percent down to 48.

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A bipartisan group of 22 senators representing are calling on the leaders of the chamber’s health committee to examine the new breast cancer screening guidelines that have ignited a recent firestorm on and off Capitol Hill.

“These recommendations, which have been widely criticized by patients and doctors alike, could prove devastating for women at risk of breast cancer,” the lawmakers wrote to Sens. Tom Harkin (D- Iowa) and Michael Enzi (R-Wyo.), the leaders of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

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Yesterday, I picked apart the “Climategate” scandal, arguing that climate change skeptics’ position — that the leaked emails proved the science behind global warming was fraudulent — didn’t hold water, simply because the emails just weren’t that incriminating. Well, there’s another, far more important reason why their argument is flawed, and that’s the overwhelming evidence that global warming is, in fact, slowly (or not so slowly) changing our planet as we know it.

Case in point: a study released today by 26 leading climatologists, which finds that the climate situation is actually far more dire than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had led us to believe.

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As President Obama plans to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a new poll finds the public split on the deployment.

Palin 2012: the apocalyptic film, as envisioned by SNL.

Steele: Palin has the “gravitas” to be president.

The conservative 60 Plus Association launches a $2 million ad campaign in nine states to scorch health care reform.

But most Americans think that the reform won’t affect their lives.

There are only 17 women in the Senate, but four could be the key players in the battle over health care.

As some see a global warming slowdown, greenhouse gases have reached their highest levels since the pre-industrial age.

Smoking is down this year, but only slightly.

The social media imperative: A record label executive gets arrested for not tweeting.

It was inevitable that conservatives would attack the Senate health care reform legislation over the proposed o.5 percent hike in Medicare’s payroll tax for the country’s highest earners. Now they’re drilling down into the specifics.

Sen. Charles Grassley (Iowa), senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has asked the Joint Committee on Taxation to analyze the future effects of the Democrats’ tax increase. Specifically, Grassley is wondering why the proposed hike isn’t indexed to inflation, leaving more and more Americans to fall subject to the increase each year.

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