Can he support a public option if states could opt out of the plan, as the current bill provides? “The answer is no,” he says in an interview from his Senate office. “I feel very strongly about this.” How about a trigger, a mechanism for including a public option along with a provision saying it won’t be used unless private insurance plans aren’t spreading coverage far and fast enough? No again.

So any version of a public option will compel Mr. Lieberman to vote against bringing a bill to a final vote? “Correct,” he says.

Consequently, we’re left with 41 senators likely to oppose cloture for a bill with a public option, meaning that unless one of these senators changes his or her stance, there’s no way such a bill can win the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and receive a final up-or-down vote.

Either someone’s going to have to budge, or we’ll see a revised bill that lacks a public option (but might contain a trigger or another mechanism to pressure insurance companies to contain costs) — or Democrats could attempt to pass a public option through the budget reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority.

Keep checking the Senate Public Option Scoreboard for the latest updates.

The full text of the release is after the jump.

Inhofe Begins Hadley Center “Climategate” Investigation

Warns Participants to Retain Documents

Washington, D.C.-Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, today sent letters to several scientists, some of whom allegedly manipulated data to prove the scientific “consensus” of global warming, as well as to the inspectors general of several federal agencies, notifying them to retain documents related to the release of emails from the Hadley Center’s Climate Research Unit.

“The stakes in this controversy are significant, as it appears that the basis of federal programs, pending EPA rulemakings, and cap-and-trade legislation was contrived and fabricated,” Sen. Inhofe said. “Moreover, it appears that, in an attempt to conceal the manipulation of climate data, information disclosure laws may have been violated.

“I certainly don’t condone the manner in which these emails were released; however, now that they are in the public domain, lawmakers have an obligation to determine the extent to which the so-called ‘consensus’ of global warming, formed with billions of taxpayer dollars, was contrived in the biased minds of the world’s leading climate scientists.”

The letters are the first step in the investigation of the Hadley Center climate scandal. Last week, emails released by a computer hacker revealed that several leading climate scientists allegedly manipulated climate data and research used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These scientists also appear to have refused outside access to their raw data, obstructed freedom of information requests, and plotted ways to prevent the publication of papers in peer-reviewed journals by scientists who question global warming alarmism.

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

You may not live in Arizona…but no matter where you call home, would you respond to the attached invitation and please send a contribution to the FIT Trust?

That would certainly be a factor in the decision we will make at the “Hayworth Hacienda!”

The irony of using the Spanish word in an appeal for a possible immigration-focused Senate bid is really something.

The results are so strange that PPP’s Tom Jensen doesn’t have a theory. One possible explanation, though, is how health care has dominated the national political debate since early summer. It the spring, Romney bounced as high as 67 percent. The summer and fall have taken a toll on him. As Andy Barr astutely pointed out in September, Romney has been hamstrung by his health care record. As governor of Massachusetts, he compromised with Democrats and signed a mandate-driven health care bill, and ever since then Republicans have used that against him.

Inside the beltway, Romney is seen as a classic front-runner who’s picked his issues wisely–he’s four months away from publishing a book on “American greatness”–and retained smart campaign staffers. But Huckabee is leading the field in national and Iowa polls, and Palin clearly has the biggest following of any possible 2012 candidate.

“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.

Breast cancer screenings and advances in technology have reduced the mortality rate of patients who develop this devastating disease, but early detection of breast cancer is absolutely critical. To alter these recommendations, and to contradict the advice provided by countless doctors, will only serve to cause confusion and alter the behavior of patients, may (sic) of whom may be at a high risk of contracting breast cancer.

Spearheaded by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the Nov. 20 letter was also signed by GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), David Vitter (La.), Jon Kyl (Ariz.), Mike Crapo (Idaho), Jim Risch (Idaho), Jim Inhofe (Okla.), John Thune (R-S.D.), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), John Ensign (Nev.), Saxby Chambliss (Ga.), Richard Burr (N.C.), Pat Roberts (Ks.) and John Barrasso (Wyo.); the Democratic co-signers were Sens. Barbara Mikulski (Md.), Ben Cardin (Md.),  Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Arlen Specter (Pa.), Charles Schumer (N.Y.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and Patrick Leahy (Vt.).

No word yet about Harkin’s plans, but Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce health subpanel, has already said that he’ll hold a hearing on the topic early next month.

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.

“The unintended consequences could be significant,” Grassley warned.

If that scenario sounds familiar, it’s because the Alternative Minimum Tax — designed decades ago to target just a tiny sliver of high-income households — was similarly not indexed to inflation. As incomes have risen over the years, more and more upper-middle-class families have fallen into the bracket under which they have to pay the AMT. Some liberals don’t see a problem with that. But Congress, fearing a backlash at the polls, has stepped in each year with the so-called AMT patch, providing billions of (borrowed) dollars to prevent the tax from hitting those families.

The Democrats’ motivations are easy to surmise: Had they indexed the tax to inflation they would have generated much less revenue to pay for their health-care reform bill. And the proposed payroll tax increase is much less than the AMT. Still, it’s not too far a stretch to imagine that the lawmakers of the 2030s, also wanting to appease the voters, would also find it tempting to come up with the Medicare-payroll patch.

One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.

Tim Griffin, Barbara Comstock and Karl Rove (Tim Griffin for Congress, Comstock for Delegate, White House photo)

For a candidate making his first bid for office, Tim Griffin couldn’t be in better shape. One week after announcing his campaign against Rep. Vic Snyder (D-Ark.), the incumbent in Arkansas’s most Democratic-leaning district, Griffin had raised $130,000. A Public Policy Polling survey released last week found Griffin only one point behind Snyder, a statistical tie with a congressman who did not even draw a challenger last year.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“When I go around the district here in Arkansas,” Griffin told TWI before attending a D.C. fundraiser last week, “what I hear about is jobs, private sector versus the government, the national debt, and this health care bill.”

Asked again if his experience working the Bush administration ever comes up with voters, Griffin was insistent. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

Griffin’s experience isn’t unique. Nearly a year after George W. Bush left office, some of the Republican strategists who built their reputations on his campaigns, or in his White House, have re-emerged as prominent pundits, legal thinkers and strategists, and some have made the move back into the electoral arena. So far, they’ve had considerable success in winning and in setting up credible operations for 2010. In Minnesota, Sara Taylor, Bush’s former director of the Office of Political Affairs, is advising Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s (R-Minn.) PAC. In Virginia, Republican lawyer Barbara Comstock — who worked for John Ashcroft’s Justice Department and who helped defend I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby — won a tight election for a seat in the House of Delegates. That was a victory that some Democrats see as a prelude to a run for Congress when Comstock’s mentor Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) retires.

It’s a perplexing situation for Democrats. Bush’s presidency had staggered to an end. His approval rating did not rise above 50 percent for the last three years of his tenure; he did not hit the campaign trail for his party’s national ticket in 2008, and only addressed the Republican National Convention via a satellite feed. Democrats felled Republican after Republican in 2008 by putting their headshots next to Bush’s. In the year that’s followed, though, Democrats have watched former Vice President Dick Cheney (and his daughter Liz) resurface as a conversation-driving critic of their foreign policy. Bush Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo and Jay Bybee have thrived in their perches in academia and on the federal bench, respectively. In this year’s race for governor in New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine attacked his Republican opponent, Chris Christie, for having political conversations with Karl Rove while still serving as a U.S. attorney. Christie won the election anyway.

If there’s a way to turn service under Bush into a losing issue for Republican candidates, Democrats haven’t figured it out. Comstock’s upset victory in Virginia, in a race where both candidates spent nearly $1 million, came after months of attacks on her political service. Democrats went after the candidate’s ties with gimmicks like “Barbara Comstock’s lost resume” — experience like “initiated negative campaigning ’storyline’ against Al Gore,” references like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. TV ads and direct mail portrayed Comstock alongside the likes of Cheney and former Attorney General John Ashcroft. And Comstock didn’t wilt under the pressure. She welcomed backing from Republican allies up to and including Rove, who appeared at a September fundraiser on her behalf.

“Elections are always about the future and responding to what people are doing in their everyday lives,” Comstock told TWI, while also saying that she did not want to dwell too much on the attacks against her. “When you don’t do that, well, you look at some of these past elections for Republicans when people didn’t feel we were responding on those economic issues and we lost. In Virginia, we dealt with those real kitchen table issues.”

Democrats viewed Comstock’s win as insult added to an already injurious election night, a defeat that could have been prevented if she hadn’t been allowed to re-make her image. “Comstock ran an effective race,” said Matt Mansell, executive director of the Virginia House Democratic caucus. “She started communicating early and got the best of both worlds by presenting herself as a solutions-oriented moderate candidate while still getting fund-raising help from Ted Olsen and Mitt Romney and Karl Rove.” The party’s mistake, said Mansell, was not “to define her earlier as a Bush political hack.”

Not surprisingly, Comstock’s success has given a little bit of cheer to other veterans of the Bush administration who have been tarred by the association. Hans van Spakovsky, who was pilloried by Democrats over his work as voting section counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division, told TWI that his career options were limited by those attacks.

“They were so effectively able to ruin my professional reputation as a lawyer,” said Spakovsky, who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, “despite the fact that they were wrong on all of these issues. I couldn’t get confirmed to the FEC. When I was looking for jobs last year, it was very clear to me that at least one of the law firms I talked to in town blackballed me because I was in the Bush administration. It’s a real problem in Washington today that people on the left side of the aisle can’t seem to disagree with people without going after that.”

Tim Griffin’s re-entry into politics, said Spakovsky, was a source of new optimism. “I wish Tim Griffin the best of luck,” he said. “I’m happy to see people who are determined, like him, start to fight back.”

If local Democrats have their way, Griffin’s comeback won’t take him all the way to Congress. “If he’s the nominee against Vic Snyder,” said Mariah Hattah, executive director of Arkansas Democratic Party, “it would pit a proven public servant against a campaign operative who worked for Karl Rove, the master of the dark arts of campaigning.” Hattah getting into a striking degree of specificity for a campaign that is still taking shape, suggested that state Democrats would make voters aware of the “caging” scandal that dogged Griffin before he left the U.S. attorney’s office. “No one likes likes voter suppression,” she said.

David Wasserman, the House race editor of the Cook Political Report, said that Democrats’ chances at making Griffin toxic depend wholly on the political environment. “In any other year that line on the resume would be a huge vulnerability,” said Wasserman. ‘But when the environment is good, it’s like Democrats are wearing velcro, and the Republicans are wearing teflon.”

In the meantime, Griffin is keeping his head down, raising funds and leaving aside much talk of his resume in the Bush years.

“I’ve done a lot of things in my career,” Griffin told TWI. “I’ve been in the army for 13 years. I’m a major. I went to Iraq. I’ve been an army prosecutor, and I’ve done a lot of things. And whatever I’ve done, I’ve just tried to do a really good job. Look — that’s politics. I don’t expect anything different. I’d say that if you get an opportunity to serve your president and your country, you take it.”

A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Arizona voters finds Arpaio, famed for his crackdowns on illegal immigrants, leading Goddard, the state’s current attorney general, by 12 points – 51% to 39%. Seven percent (7%) prefer some other candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.

According to the survey, Goddard leads Republican Gov. Jan Brewer by a comfortable nine-point margin, and Goddard is virtually tied with State Treasurer Dean Martin. Brewer is the only one of the possible candidates who is officially in the race.

With numbers like this, could Arpaio be enticed to run for governor? And could he win?

Rumors have been swirling in Arizona for the past few months that Arpaio is mulling a gubernatorial bid, fueled by his antipathy for Goddard. The 77-year-old Arpaio was first elected in 1992, and he won re-election in 2008 by a commanding 13-point margin, with 55 percent of the vote. During that race, Arpaio raised more than $600,000 — an eye-popping sum for a countywide election. Effectively a modern-day political boss, “Sheriff Joe” is well-known for his heavy-handed tactics to combat illegal immigration and bragging about the harsh conditions in county detention facilities. He has launched investigations of numerous political opponents, including Goddard, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, the Phoenix New Times and the Maricopa County Superior Court.

While Arpaio remains extremely popular in Maricopa County — the home of Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe accounts for approximately 61 percent of Arizona’s population — Goddard has already proven himself in statewide races, having been elected attorney general in 2002, and re-elected in 2006 with 60 percent of the vote (pdf). A poll released last month by the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and KAET found Arpaio had a 61 percent approval rating among Maricopa County voters, while the same survey found 55 percent of Arizona voters approve of Goddard’s performance. Arizona has been trending Democratic in recent years, but a Gallup poll from January found party identification in the state was essentially a dead heat, and one would be hard-pressed to find anybody in Arizona without a strong opinion about Arpaio.

All of this seems to confirm Rasmussen’s findings: If Arpaio got into the race against Goddard, he would stand a pretty good chance of winning. It’s also a safe bet that Arpaio would raise a lot of money from out-of-state illegal immigration opponents.

The Obama administration has already clashed with Arpaio on a couple of occasions. In March, the Justice Department announced it was opening an investigation into allegations of racial profiling and unlawful searches and seizures, and last month Arpaio was stripped of his authority to enforce federal immigration laws under the controversial 287(g) program.

But if the Justice Department thought Arpaio was a handful as sheriff of Maricopa County, just imagine what he could do with control of the state’s Department of Public Safety, and Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislature.

(Via Eric Kleefeld)

This post has been updated.