But also there’s this: Republicans are hoping to attach a number of amendments related to ACORN and immigration — provisions that have delayed floor action on the UI bill indefinitely, according to the offices of both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The agreement ends after that.

The Republican amendments include at least two provisions related to ACORN; one related to the E-Verify program; one to pay for the UI benefits with unspent stimulus money; and one providing tax relief.

Reid’s office says the amendments are unrelated and therefore have no place in the debate over jobless benefits. “These are tactics that Republicans have used in the past to delay,” a Reid aide said. “It seems as if they aren’t negotiating in good faith on this.”

For its part, McConnell’s office conceded that “some of the amendments” are related to ACORN and immigration. But, a spokesperson said, the “related” changes would improve the bill.

Earlier this month, a group of Senate Democrats introduced a proposal to expand unemployment insurance benefits by 14 weeks nationwide, with a 20-week extension benefiting those states with unemployment rates higher than 8.5 percent. The House has already passed a more stingy version of the bill, granting a 13-week extension only in those states with unemployment topping 8.5 percent.

Senate Democratic leaders have twice tried to get the consent of GOP leaders to pass the bill, only to be shot down over procedural sticking points.

An Oct. 22 update is here.

Some movement here, also as of Oct. 22.

But that was a week ago. Today Cook updated its map to rank Reid’s seat a “toss up.” Would voters oust someone as powerful as Reid in favor of a freshman lawmaker? Ask Tom Daschle if it’s ever happened before.

“I don’t think the problem is messaging,” McConnell said Wednesday in a conference call. “The problem is what he’s trying to sell. I think there is a serious blowback and a negative reaction across the country to what they are proposing.”

Two thoughts. (1) Everything in Washington is messaging. As James Mongan, president and CEO of Partners HealthCare, said Monday, even controversial proposals like individual insurance mandates can be successful when framed within a context that’s acceptable to the public. And Republicans, having not-too-long-ago sold an idea as bad as the Iraq War with a messaging campaign that imagined Baghdad as a threat to Boise, know this better than anyone.

And (2) Obama’s speech, while being staged on Capitol Hill, isn’t really intended to sell health reform immediately to Republicans, who appear dead set on denying the Democrats a political victory regardless of the proposal eventual put forward. Indeed, it was Republicans who floated the lies about the Democrats’ bill promoting abortions and euthanasia, then turned around and pointed to the inevitable outcry over those imaginary provisions as justification for opposing the broader reforms. Rather — and more importantly — Obama’s speech is aimed at an American public that’s grown more skeptical of health reform over the past few weeks in hopes that voters will turn around and pressure their congressional representatives to support the plan. Even McConnell would have a tough time opposing the Democrats’ reforms if Kentucky voters came out in overwhelming favor of the bill.

[T]here are no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills, and to say that there are is to debase the debate.

With his comments, Krauthammer joins an ever-growing list of conservative commentators and health policy experts who’ve blasted the “death panel” claims as inaccurate, malicious or both.

What the Democrats bill does — and what some Republicans have supported in the past — is to have Medicare pay doctors for late-life decision-making services when patients request such counseling. That means it’s exactly 100 percent voluntary.

Krauthammer doesn’t like the idea, arguing that the effect of the “chats” will be “to gently point the patient” toward choosing death over the expensive treatments that might prolong life for just a few months.

[W]hy get Medicare to pay the doctor to do the counseling? Because we know that if this white-coated authority whose chosen vocation is curing and healing is the one opening your mind to hospice and palliative care, we’ve nudged you ever so slightly toward letting go.

This is an odd remark, which seems (1) to question the wisdom of the doctors who do this counseling, (2) to toss doctors into the same mythical category of government bureaucrats hell-bent on killing off seniors to save costs, and (3) to doubt the ability of patients to make their own decisions based on the advice they’re given.

Still, Krauthammer, who is a psychiatrist, adds that the proposal is “not an outrage,” and “it’s surely not a death panel.”

It’s safe, at this point, to place those claiming otherwise squarely in the category of folks trying to kill health care reform, rather than debate it.

The backlash was instant and powerful. As conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak later wrote in their book about Johnson, the scene in the Adolphus “outraged thousands of Texans and Southerners. Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, who had not campaigned for his party’s national ticket since 1944, telephoned Johnson that evening to offer his services.” The Johnson biographers concluded that while no one could prove the case, it is “a credible hypothesis” that the Adolphus incident swung Texas and perhaps other closely contested Southern states to the Democrats.

The comparison is apt. The crowds descending on the town hall discussions have been larger than lawmakers expected — and certainly more raucous — but there’s no indication that the most vocal detractors represent anything but a small minority of folks who didn’t vote for Barack Obama and now want to air their frustrations over his victory. The evidence comes from the detestable signs, the off-topic rantings and the general sense that many are participating only to disrupt the discussion rather than take anything from it.

It all makes for riveting TV, but “what doesn’t make the news,” Broder notes, “is what the reaction is among the larger population of voters whose views will ultimately influence the fate of health-care legislation.”

It’s this much larger group that Democrats should keep in mind as they continue their health reform push. And if Broder’s right, Republicans would do well to take that advice as well.

This wasn’t spontaneous generation at all these town halls because people are asking the same questions … and putting up the similar type of signs and talking about socialism, which is what people talked about in 1965, when Medicare and Medicaid came about and certainly that’s not socialism.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal supported Cohen’s assessment on Saturday, noting that “the nearly all-white audience was not a snapshot of the mostly African-American 9th District that Cohen represents.”

Adding further to the portrait of the day’s saga, Talking Points Memo yesterday pointed to local reports revealing that one attendee brought a gun to the gathering, though broke no laws in doing so.

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), interviewed along with Cohen Tuesday, said the town halls are just a sign of a healthy democracy.

“It is a great show of democracy and it should be occurring,” Gingrey said. “I mean, that is the American way.”

After a few jabs at the press, Palin ran through a laundry list of her accomplishments in office, including an ethics reform package (which, ironically, she now names as one reason for leaving office early, as “frivolous” complaints dog her) and kick-starting a public-private natural gas pipeline project — a longtime dream for the state. Palin, with a near unanimous vote in the legislature last year, has the state on the hook for $500 million for a completed proposal. The building portion will take years and billions of dollars, if it actually happens at all.

Certainly she was trying to end on good terms with Alaskans, but she didn’t forget about the CNN crew either. Since announcing her decision to leave office earlier this month, Palin’s been positioning herself as an “energy expert,” quickly penning on op-ed for The Washington Post that blasted President Obama’s cap-and-trade energy plans. She spent a good portion of her  address today talking about “renewables,” her gas pipeline project and the need to tap into Alaska’s natural resources (but she did not invoke her 2008 campaign mantra, “Drill Baby, Drill”). She also claimed Alaska could wean itself off earmarks if it were allowed to more fully tap its energy sources. (Palin has taken credit for being an earmark reformer, despite many, many examples to the contrary.)

Arguably, her farewell speech’s best moment came when she tossed the crowd some red-meat on gun control. Blasting wildlife groups that recruit “Hollywood starlets” to run campaigns against her record on hunting rights — presumably referring to the Defenders of Wildlife attack ad describing Palin’s wolf bounty proposal (cash for every severed left foreleg turned in by hunters) — Palin yelled to the crowd, “We eat, therefore we hunt.”

Surprisingly, she steered clear of one of her signature issues, abortion. During her 2006 gubernatorial bid, she tended to avoid talking about her abortion views (its not a rallying point among Alaskans). On the 2008 trail the issue became part of her national persona and she had an arsenal of euphemisms and suggestive anecdotes, like “culture of life,” and her continued talk of her son Trig, born with Downs syndrome,  that made her point (none of which came up today).  As TWI’s David Weigel recently reported, anti-abortion rights activists are eager to welcome her aboard. With her sights apparently set on cementing herself as a national figure and legions of devoted fans supporting her, today’s goodbye is almost certainly not the end.

Then it gets a little more difficult to understand. Graham says he “takes a back seat to no one” in his love of the law, and adds that the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel issued guidance about U.S. anti-torture statutes “in a way I wouldn’t have looked at them” and that he “disagree[s]” with. Waterboarding, for instance, is illegal, and he tells any member of the armed services “you will be prosecuted” for doing so. But it’s … OK for the CIA because “the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the war on terror.” That, however, was a unilateral declaration by the … Office of Legal Counsel.

Despite unanimous opposition from House Republicans to the Democrats’ $787 billion economic stimulus plan, members of the GOP are now cheering certain elements of the bill that will benefit their districts, The New York Times reports today.

Just hours after voting against the bill on the House floor last week, Representative John L. Mica of Florida issued news releases lauding the inclusion of $8 billion for high-speed rail projects around the nation. Mr. Mica said the bill would also help pay for a commuter train project in his Central Florida district.

“If we could put a man on the moon, we should be able to move people from city to city quickly instead of wasting time on a congested highway,” said Mr. Mica, the ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. “I applaud President Obama’s recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America’s future.”

This is no surprise. A bill like the stimulus puts Republicans in a pickle, as their political instinct to decry the federal spending runs smack into the reality that the money pays for services their constituents need, particularly in the middle of a disastrous economic environment. Nor can GOP leaders fall back on the tired line that the stimulus represents another case of the Democrats’ “tax-and-spend” tendencies — not with $287 billion in tax rebates included in the package.

Instead, you get “small-government” Republicans like Rep. Don Young (Alaska) cheering the enormous spending bill as “a victory for the Alaska Native contracting program and other Alaska small business owners,” The Times reports.

The Republicans defend this inconsistency with the claim that they can support certain elements of the stimulus without having voted for the package as a whole.

A spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Jennifer Crider, characterized the trend more accurately. It is, she told The Times, “the height of hypocrisy.”

Obama GOTV literature today.

“I feel great and it was fun, I had a chance to vote with my daughters,” Obama told reporters later on the airport tarmac, “I feel really good.”

Another reporter asked if Obama felt “sentimental.”

“You know I’m sure I will tonight – that’s when polls close,” he said, just before the campaign plane departed for Indiana. “The journey ends but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal. I noticed that Michelle took a long time though. I had to check to see who she was voting for,” he added.

Obama voted at Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School. With more than 50 state and local judges on the ballot, the Democratic presidential nominee spent quite a bit of time at the booth. NBC’s “Today Show” carried a live feed of the long ordeal, and, at one point, an anchor felt compelled to tell viewers that voting did not usually take that long, so people should not be dissuaded from turning out today. A pool report detailed the family scene:

Michelle, Sasha and Malia accompanied [Obama]. Malia went into the polling booth with Michelle and Sasah hung out in her own polling booth looking very grown up. She then looked on as Obama cast his ballot. Later, she hugged Obama’s leg looking impatient… Michelle took longer than Obama to finish her ballot. She did not look up from the ballot at all, while Obama grinned occassionally at his daughters.

With seamless timing, the Obama campaign had Sen. Joe Biden cued up to vote for the cameras as soon as Obama left the booth.

Meanwhile, it seems there will be no footage of President George W. Bush voting today. Both nominees ended up running against the incumbent. Bush already voted by mail to avoid being seen today — and maybe further damaging the possibilities of Sen. John McCain.