From The Minnesota Independent:

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, Hirschmann has said, “Obama, like Hitler, is ‘a charismatic leader who promises full pocketbooks.’ Obama’s pro-choice stands, she writes, resembles those of Hitler, who ‘brought abortion to a systematic level and declared the killing of unborn babies a national duty.’”

Hirschmann also told the Gazette, “He could pave the way for a future Antichrist. Obama scares me because he has no record and people flock to him. Hitler also had no record, people flocked to him and both wrote a book. Christians laid flat and Hitler came to power, just like with Obama.”

Tickets for the fundraiser are $75 in advance, $100 at the door.

Also of note, CCHC warns that “Genetic testing could be used for purposes found immoral in the Hippocratic medical tradition” on the front page of its Website.

Here’s video of Bachmann encouraging supporters to attend the CCHC dinner:

And here’s a promotional flyer:

“Senator Lieberman should be commended today for sticking with his principles and standing against efforts by Democrat leaders in Washington to ram through a controversial and massive government health care bill,” says NRSC spokesman Colin Reed in a statement aimed at Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.)–a liberal in a red state who has shown no sign of bucking the public option, but faces a (somewhat remote) re-election threat if Gov. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) runs next year. “The question many in Washington and in North Dakota are waiting to have answered, however, is where do Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad stand? Will they stand with Harry Reid and his partisan government-run health care bill or will they stand with North Dakota taxpayers who are already facing an unimaginable federal debt?  Both Senators have had more than enough time to study this issue and understand its consequences on North Dakota taxpayers – it’s time they made their position clear as Senator Lieberman did today.”

The NRSC is sending more or less the same statement to reporters in Louisiana, Nebraska, Florida, and Indiana. The latter two states were blue in 2008 but red in 2004.

Benjamin was unanimously approved by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Oct. 7, but Senate Republicans are holding up all [Department of Health and Human Services] nominees over a so-called gag order on insurance companies that have been critical of Democratic efforts to reform health care.

“We’ve not received any recent calls from the administration about their nominee,” a senior Republican aide said. “There won’t be any time agreements for confirmation of HHS nominees until their actions have been fully reviewed.”

At issue is an investigation of insurance companies by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of the HHS, which announced the probe last month after a letter surfaced from Humana to seniors critical of the Senate Finance Committee’s health care bill.

CMS officials charged that the letter contained misleading information, a claim Republicans have disputed.

That’s it. Because of that, HHS is working without a surgeon general during the H1N1 outbreak. Local newspapers in the deep South have noticed, and called for Benjamin to get an up-or-down vote, but this issue really hasn’t gotten anywhere in the beltway.

While Benjamin has waited in limbo, Democrats — who ostensibly run the Senate — have held two hearings on whether the president is appointing too many czars.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) today presented his long-awaited proposal to overhaul health care. While Baucus calls his $856 billion plan (though in a letter to Baucus, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cost a total of $774 billion) a “good” and “balanced bill” that “can pass the Senate,” it has been met with sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle.

Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) — both members of the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who negotiated the bill — said they aren’t thrilled with the final product. Enzi said he’s “disappointed that deadlines took precedence over agreement of the bipartisan group of Finance Committee members, as we worked on a final health care bill.” He added that the plan is too costly for him to support.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) also isn’t satisfied with the plan:

“This is a first step in the process, and those of us as members of the bipartisan Group of Six fully intend to keep meeting, moving forward and continuing to work with the chairman during the committee process toward crafting a bill that I, and hopefully other Republican members of the Finance Committee, can support.”

The Baucus bill, which lacks a government-run insurance program favored by liberals, is also in the Democrats’ line of fire. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the bill already passed by the House “clearly does more to make coverage affordable for more Americans and provides more competition to drive insurance companies to charge lower premiums and improve coverage.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who said yesterday that there was “no way” he would vote for the Baucus bill in its current form, signaled that he would have “dozens of amendments” during committee markup.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) kept her cards closer to her chest:

“I’m going to remain open,” said Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu. “I’m committed to a more market-based approach.”

Finally, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) made some news when he declined to predict unanimous opposition from House Republicans to a Democratic health care reform package.

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“I think you will see overwhelming Republican opposition,” said Pence. “Will it be unanimous? I defer you to the whip’s office.” I asked again about the suggestion that the Republicans might, possibly, not vote unanimously against a Democratic health care bill as they voted against the stimulus package and the president’s budget.

“You should anticipate overwhelming Republican opposition to government-run health insurance,” said Pence. “I didn’t say ‘possibly not’ unanimous. We’ll leave ‘unanimous’ to the other [leadership] offices.”

At issue here is a very small number of Republicans. But any number of Republican votes for a health care bill could be pivotal; each one gives an endangered or Blue Dog Democrat room to vote no.

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Watch it:

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Methodology: Classifications are based on senators’ stated positions on the public option — a government-run health insurance program to compete with private insurers. “Likely supporters” are senators who have indicated that they would probably vote for a bill with a strong, untriggered public option. “Likely opponents” are senators who have indicated that they would not vote for a bill with any kind of public option. “On the fence” senators have expressed reservations about a strong public option, displayed openness to weaker public option proposals (such as a trigger or an opt-in or opt-out option), or, in the case of Sen. George LeMieux (R-Fla.), have not yet expressed any views on the public option. These classifications are necessarily fluid and inexact. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), for example, has expressed support for a public option, but he has said that a public option could not pass the Senate, and his Finance Committee bill does not contain a public option; he is listed as “on the fence.”

It also bears noting that while people tend to toss around 60 votes as the magic number for passage, 50 supporters could theoretically suffice here. Some conservative Democrats, like Mary Landrieu (La.), have expressed strong reservations about the public option yet say they are unlikely to support a filibuster. If all Democrats and Independents vote for cloture, only 50 votes (plus Vice President Biden’s tie-breaker) would be needed for passage.

We will update this scoreboard frequently as senators change and clarify their views on health care legislation. Stop by daily for the latest news!

Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) (WDCpix)

Democrats pushing for a government-backed insurance option as part of their health reform strategy are finding out the hard way that, by taking single payer health care off the table early, they have little leverage now to force a strong public plan.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Unlike the Republicans, who adopted the strong conservative position of resisting almost every Democratic reform proposal from the start, Democratic leaders ruled out the liberal single-payer proposal early in the debate. Now in search of a centrist compromise, GOP leaders have plenty of room to maneuver, while Democrats are left facing proposals that either dilute the public option or eliminate it outright. Indeed, the Senate Finance Committee is expected on Tuesday to unveil long-awaited reform legislation promoting the creation of private health cooperatives, not a public plan.

For many health reform and patient advocates, the developments have been a disappointment. After gaining both the White House and large majorities in Congress this year, the Democrats have made comprehensive health reform their top domestic priority. On the campaign trail last year, then-Sen. Obama came out in enthusiastic support of a strong public insurance option to compete with private insurers as a way to control premium costs, which are skyrocketing. In Congress, Democratic leaders in both chambers also gave clear endorsements to the public option. Even conservative Democratic Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who chairs the Senate Finance panel, promoted such of plan in a November 2008 policy paper detailing his “vision for health care reform.”

Republicans have adamantly opposed such a plan. But they’ve also had the advantage of knowing for months that Democrats wouldn’t push for anything more liberal. In August of 2008, for example, Obama said that the best option for health reform might indeed be single payer — which would eliminate private insurers in favor of government-backed, Medicare-style insurance designed to provide universal coverage. But he also conceded that it would be too difficult to launch quickly.

“People don’t have time to wait,” he said.

In May, the White House’s top health official told lawmakers that single payer coverage “is not something that the president supports.”

In the House, Democratic leaders held just one hearing this year on single payer, almost as an afterthought. And Baucus, for his part, ignored single-payer supporters until June, when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the only upper-chamber lawmaker to support single-payer health care, set up a meeting between advocates and the Finance chairman.

The message to Republicans was clear: Single-payer health care would be off the table from the start.

By choosing the public option — not single payer — as the left-most negotiating point, Democrats left themselves with few places to go but toward more conservative proposals for insurance reform, experts say, including the co-op model and a system of triggering public plans only if private insurers fail to meet certain cost and coverage targets. In the blood sport of congressional negotiating — which dictates that you over-ask, and then move toward your goal during the subsequent bartering — Democrats were asking merely for the public plan they wanted in the final bill. The move, some experts say, provided Republicans with greater leverage to fight the public option. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), a lead negotiator for the Finance proposal, has said bluntly that a public plan can’t pass the Senate. Even Obama, in a speech on Capitol Hill last week, walked back his support for the proposal by not insisting that it be included in the final reform bill.

Quentin Young, national coordinator with the Physicians for a National Health Program, a single-payer advocate, said greater congressional support for single-payer coverage early on would have given Democrats greater sway to press their public option proposal now in the face of Republican opposition fueled by August’s town-hall protests.

Not that all Democrats are resigned to defeat. House leaders have promised a floor vote on a single payer bill, introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), which has 86 co-sponsors. Young said the vote, the first of its kind, “in a way legitimizes single payer,” which has never had a vote in the chamber despite decades-worth of proposals endorsing it. Young also theorized that Democrats were forcing the single payer vote in order to “put something up to the left of the administration with hopes of pulling some Republicans to the center.”

Julius Hobson, former lobbyist for the American Medical Association and now a senior policy analyst at the Washington law firm Bryan Cave, pointed to another reason that the single-payer vote is significant: It might rally support from some liberal Democrats who are threatening to oppose the final bill if they deem it to be not progressive enough. The vote, Hobson said, “doesn’t allow any of the various factions to say they didn’t get a shot on the floor.”

The comments arrive as the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of Senate Finance Committee members, continue their slow negotiations in search of a bill that can win support on both sides of the aisle. Baucus told reporters Monday that he expects to unveil the legislation Tuesday. Last week, Baucus released an 18-page draft summary of the bill, which proposed the creation of regional health cooperatives, but no pubic option. Tuesday’s proposal is expected to offer the same.

Some key Republicans, however, are already voicing doubts that the Baucus bill will attract any GOP support.

There remains the possibility that Democrats could somehow ram a public option provision through the Senate. Indeed, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who was recently named to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) atop the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, vowed over the weekend that the Democrats’ final bill would include a public option.

“Mark my word — I’m the chairman — it’s going to have a strong public option,” said Harkin, who as recently as this summer reiterated his long-time support for a single-payer system.

Still, following Kennedy’s death, the Democratic majority in the Senate fell to 59, meaning that party leaders will need to entice at least one Republican to defeat an almost certain GOP filibuster. All eyes are on moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe (Maine) as perhaps the most likely Republican to stray from the party line on health reform. Yet over the weekend, Snowe reiterated her opposition to the public option, telling CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “there’s no way to pass a plan that includes the public option.”

Neither single payer nor the public plan are as unpopular among the public as some on Capitol Hill and K Street like to portray. Indeed, a 2007 poll conducted by The Associated Press and Yahoo found that 65 percent of Americans support adoption of “a universal health insurance program in which everyone is covered under a program like Medicare that is run by the government and financed by taxpayers.” A more recent poll, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation in July, found that 24 percent of the public “strongly favors” single payer, with another 27 percent “somewhat” favoring the proposal.

Furthermore, a study released Monday by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that 63 percent of doctors support the public option, while another 10 percent favor a single payer system that would eliminate private insurers altogether.

Young, who practiced medicine for 61 years before joining Physicians for a National Health Program in 2007, said his group sides squarely with the 10 percent. The public plan wouldn’t accomplish the Democrats’ coverage and cost-containment goals, he said, because it would leave in place the private insurers who “account for virtually all the problems we’re confronting.”

“It’s funny that both the conservative critics and the liberal supporters [of the public option] argue that it’s a stepping stone [to single payer],” he said. “We don’t believe it.”

The numbers are ticking up due to the inclusion of a number of new, positive polls. CNN has the president’s approval rating at 58 percent, up from 53 percent. Rasmussen Reports has Obama at 52 percent, his highest rating since mid-July. (When RR showed Obama slipping to 45 percent, it got a Drudge Report banner headline.) On Friday, the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll showed Obama’s numbers rising from 53 to 56 percent.

So has the end of the August town hall revolt and the impact of Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress been pumping up his poll numbers? I quote from a new email from Gary Bauer to his American Values mailing list.

The latest Rasmussen poll finds that President Obama’s approval rating has improved considerably since his address to Congress last week. It’s normal for a president to get a “bounce” in the polls after a major speech. How long it lasts remains to be seen, but any improvement in the polls for President Obama will strengthen the resolve of congressional liberals to ram healthcare “reform” through Congress as soon as possible. And we are resolved to defend our values at every opportunity.

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