Who Runs Gov

* Gallup adds more context to Obama’s drop below 50%, noting that while only Ford, Reagan and Clinton have hit this point faster than Obama did, all presidents who’ve crossed that threshold rebounded.

* GOP leaders keep laying the groundwork to portray any Afghanistan escalation short of 40,000 new troops as a betrayal of the commanders.

* Oh, man. GOP Rep Steve King is really, really, really frightened of what could happen as a result of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s trial. No word on what he thought of Bush’s claim that terrorists should be tried in U.S. courts.

* Chris Matthews worries that KSM will win the argument.

* It’s worth recalling that the health care bill vote really will be a tough one for some Dem Senators.

* Sam Stein: Why does GOP need six weeks to study a bill they’re all going to oppose?

* I’d wondered how yesterday’s finding that a majority of GOPers think ACORN stoll the election for Obama compared to public sentiment after the 2000 recount. Jason Zengerle digs up the answer. Caveat: The recount court fight actually, you know, happened.

* Why is John McCain claiming the Senate climate change legislation is partisan when it’s being pushed by a Democrat, a Republican and an independent?

* David Kurtz: Sarah Palin’s emerging role as kingfish, er, kingmaker in GOP primaries is very good news for Dems.

* Jonah Goldberg defers judgment on whether Palin is qualified for the presidency.

* Sign making the rounds on the right: “Free Nobel Peace Prize with an order of shrimp tacos.” No chicken or beef? Seems un-American.

Got anything else?

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Officials in a small Michigan town featured in a new video about Guantanamo by Liz Cheney’s national security group want her to know that they’re not falling for her “fearmongering” — and tell us they want Gitmo detainees in their town.

Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, has released a short documentary starring several residents of little Standish, Michigan, slamming the Obama administration over a proposal to transfer some Guantanamo detainees to the town’s maximum security facility, one of several facilities being discussed.

The vid, which is below, ominously warns that unnamed “politicians” want Gitmo detainees placed in their “small farm town,” without saying who the politicians are or whether they’re Federal or local. A resident says those politicans “aren’t listening to us little people in Standish.”

But Standish’s City Manager tells us that local leaders and residents want the facility, and dismissed Cheney’s efforts as “fearmongering.”

Cheney is “certainly not representing the views of our community,” the City Manager, Michael Moran, told our reporter, Amanda Erickson.

While some local residents do appear to have expressed mixed feelings or opposition to the plan, Moran says that they’re an isolated minority that Ms. Cheney’s video elevates out of proportion in a way that’s “off base.”

What’s more, the Standish city council recently passed a unanimous resolution expressing support for bringing Gitmo detainees, citing job losses in the wake of the closing of the facility.

Seems that the good people of Standish just don’t have Liz Cheney’s understanding of the nature of the threat.

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The compelling and emotional ad featuring children worried about getting sick and dying — the spot that won the ad contest created by Obama’s political operation — will begin airing nationally next week, I’m told.

Organizing for America will air the ad on national cable and in D.C. beginning Monday, in an effort to up the moral and emotional urgency of the health care debate with the message that the lives of an untold number of individual children hang in the balance:

The ad contest, and the decision to air the winner with donations to OFA, are meant to contrast the grass-roots support for reform with the big-money interests bankrolling expensive ads against the proposal, keeping Obama’s list engaged and excited at a time of rising engagement by the GOP base.

“The winning video shows that our supporters’ creativity and passion is more than a match for the slick ads and partisan spin doctors on the other side,” Obama adviser David Plouffe wrote in an email announcing the winner early this week.

“There are eight million uninsured children in America — we all deserve health care,” the little girls say in the ad. With disagreements among Congressional Dems still unresolved, leaving the fate of reform uncertain, the spot is an effort to raise the stakes of failure and to keep people focused on the big picture, the urgent need to succeed.

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For the first time, President Obama will drop below 50% in today’s Gallup tracking poll, a Gallup official confirms.

“He will be just below 50% when we update today,” Gallup spokesman Eric Nielsen says. Gallup updates at 1 PM daily.

Obama had repeatedly skirted 50%, only to bounce back up again. When Gallup updates today, it will mark at least the third poll finding Obama dropping below 50% — Quinnipiac and Fox both had similar findings this week.

But the Gallup tracking poll’s finding is likely to generate considerably more discussion, because of Gallup’s reputation and because they’ve been doing daily tracking for some time, enabling them to put the numbers in a larger context. Indeed, I’m told Gallup will be posting an analysis of Obama’s drop below the 50% threshhold today. Should be interesting.

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You may have seen the new Rasmussen poll finding that John McCain is locked in an uncomfortably close GOP primary with conservative challenger J. D. Hayworth.

So who will save McCain’s hide and career? Bill Kristol has a suggestion:

Still, who could help McCain beat back a populist conservative challenger? Sarah Palin. I predict that Palin will come to Arizona next summer to campaign for McCain, will make an impassioned case for him, and will help him win. She will thereby repay McCain for his confidence in picking her last year, help keep McCain as a crucial voice in the Senate for a strong foreign policy, and get credit for being a different kind of populist conservative — a Reaganite, not a Buchananite, populist — than the immigration-obsessed, voter-alienating (he was ousted in 2006 in a Republican district) Hayworth.

Yeah, okay, because Palin is known to harbor a bottomless reserve of gratitude towards the McCain camp for plucking her from relative obscurity and turning her into a national celebrity, right?

In all seriousness, Kristol is close to Palin — the Weekly Standard crew stays in close touch with her — so this possibility can’t be dismissed.

Imagine what a great story it would be if Palin swooped in and saved McCain by playing Pied Piper to Palin Nation on his behalf — winning over the hordes that never have been able to bring themselves to trust him. On the other hand, if she declined to do that, it would be an even better story.

Either way, the whole storyline is a tantalizing one.

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It’s worth noting that “centrist” Dem Senators are being surprisingly candid about why they’re remaining undecided — publicly, at least — on the simple procedural vote to bring the health care bill to a debate.

It’s the leverage, stupid.

Here, for instance, is Mary Landrieu, explaining why she has yet to agree to vote Yes:

“I have leverage now, I’m using it to the best of my ability, I’m going to use it on the Senate floor,” Landrieu said.

Landrieu’s “leverage” is paying off: She can now tell her constituents that she has secured in the bill some $100 million in additional Federal aid for low-income residents in her state.

Senator Ben Nelson, meanwhile, is being no lessforthcoming. In remarks to reporters, Nelson said he is not happy with the current abortion language in the Senate bill. But then he turned around and said that if the public option is further weakened or jettisoned, in accordance with his wishes, it could help mollify him on the abortion question.

“If there’s no public option, perhaps some of the problem goes away,” Nelson said, subtly.

It’s always seemed like a foregone conclusion that the bill would be brought to a debate; the only question has been what each moderate Senator’s price would prove to be. And to be clear, Senators are supposed to milk the process on behalf of their constituents, as Landrieu seems to be doing.

But it’s interesting to note how comfortable these Senators are in revealing that they’re mainly holding out on a simple vote to debate the bill in order to increase their leverage. It’s a measure of both their power and of how casually we’ve come to accept Senatorial self-aggrandizement and the perversions of the process that attend it.

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Update: I forgot to mention that a couple of days ago, the news broke that Reid had killed a provision to strip insurance companies of their anti-trust exemption for Nelson’s sake, further indicating why he’s been holding out.

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* CNN poll: Percentage who blame Republicans for the economy down sharply, percentage who blame Dems on the rise.

* Senator Mary Landrieu says she thinks Harry Reid will be able to pull health care off, perhaps signaling a Yes vote to move the bill to a debate.

* White House not terribly eager to profer FBI and Pentagon witnesses to Joe Lieberman’s hearing into the Fort shootings, says it would compromise criminal investigation.

* Interesting read from Jonathan Allen on anger at Rahm Emanuel among Hispanic lawmakers.

* Karl who? Dick who? Reviving fears of terrorism not even on the radar of Republican governors charting the GOP’s comeback strategy.

* But it’s very much on Liz Cheney’s radar: Now she’s telling local officials in a small Michigan town that they’re wrong for wanting to take the Gitmo detainees.

* Obama’s claim to soldiers that they “make a pretty good photo op” was a joke.

* Senate health care bill’s public option with opt out would leave about a third of the country without access to it.

* Charles Krauthammer: Plans to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York have given 9/11 “a second life.” Or so he hopes, anyway…

* Ron Paul and Alan Grayson are rocking the House with their push to subject the Federal Reserve to more scrutiny.

* Rudy Giuliani still debating whether 9/11 is enough to get him elected to the Senate.

* And Sarah Palin’s endorsement of profiling in response to Fort Hood puts her at odds with Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

What else is happening?

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* Everyone’s taken a whack at the new poll finding that a majority of Republicans think ACORN stole the election for Obama.

But the toplines are pretty surprising, too: Less than two thirds of respondents overall think Obama legitimately won, and over a quarter think it was stolen! Efforts to delegitimize this presidency bearing fruit?

* A party source emails that the DNC raised $11.5 million in October — more than the RNC’s $8.7 million and a record for a non-presidential year under current campaign finance regs. That gives Dems $12.3 million in cash on hand, versus $11.2 million for the RNC — though Dems do also have $4.4 million in debt to none for the Repubs.

* In another sign of the emerging importance of job losses, the House Dem and GOP number-two leaders went unusually hard at each other today. Steny Hoyer’s office unveiled a new attack line: Republican “ideas” parrot Democratic actions.

* To which Eric Cantor’s office rejoined: “The three million workers and their families who have lost their jobs are not about to congratulate Democrats for wasting $787 billion from the taxpayer’s wallet.”

* Indeed, unemployment does appear to have Dems in a political panic.

* Mike Huckabee pushes back on “deplorable” GOP attacks on Obama, says he’s “proud” that the “commander in chief” went to Dover.

* Senator Ben Nelson is still not happy with the Senate bill’s abortion language.

* But Nelson also appeared to admit today that his complaints are partly about gaining leverage for other reasons.

* Wow. Senator Arlen Specter comes out against any troop escalation in Afghanistan, insists it has nothing to do with being locked in a Dem primary.

* Nifty video: Haley Barbour can’t bring himself to say that Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

* Chris Van Hollen get frequent stimulus critic Dick Armey to admit that he never read the economic recovery bill.

* Obama is really, really, really not heeding demands that he hurry up and make his decision on Afghanistan.

* And here’s today’s very odd installment in the Virginia Foxx chronicles.

Got anything else?

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The Gallup organization is pushing back hard on an ugly new attack from Rush Limbaugh, who said today that Gallup is oversampling blacks in a deliberate effort to keep Obama’s daily tracking approval from dropping below 50%.

“It is a complete fabrication,” Gallup spokesman Eric Nielsen emails me.

On the air today, Rush questioned why other polls have shown Obama dropping below 50%, while Gallup’s daily tracking poll has him flatlining at exactly that number.

“Gallup has it just teetering there,” Rush said. “And they’re doing everything they can — they’re upping the sample of black Americans to keep him up at 50%.”

A look at the methodology of Gallup’s tracking poll, though, shows how unlikely this really is. Gallup interviews 1,000 randomly selected adults daily, then weighs the data each day to match “targets from the U.S. Census Bureau by age, sex, region, gender, education, ethnicity, and race.”

So for Rush’s charge to be true, Gallup officials would have to be actively stacking the sample, along racial lines, for no other reason than to prevent Obama from dropping below 50%. “This has been our methodology since Jan 2008 and it has not changed,” Nielsen adds.

Of course, it’s always possible that Gallup has been infiltrated by an army of ACORN workers who are holding Gallup officials hostage in a last ditch effort to game Obama’s numbers in this one poll to prevent his presidency from going under.

This blog doesn’t make a habit of flagging Rush’s every lurid utterance. But even by Rush’s standards, this one is such a casually reckless smear, so nonchalant in its play on racially-charged paranoia about this president, that it really deserves to be flagged as a reminder of where we are today.

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The internals of the new Fox News poll show the network actually polled Obama’s bow — and perhaps didn’t get the desired answer:

When the president of the United States is traveling overseas, do you think it is appropriate for him to bow to a foreign leader if that is the country’s custom or is it never appropriate for the president to bow to another leader?

Yes, bow when it is the proper custom: 67%
No, it is never appropriate: 26%

Even more interesting, a majority of Repubicans, 53%, says the Bow is appropriate, too, versus only 40% who said it isn’t.

It’s another sign, if you needed one, of how far off to the right some contemporary conservative discourse has drifted. It’s also a mark of how absurd it is that some traditional news orgs actually felt obliged to, er, bow to the pressure to cover this particular line of criticism.

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Update: Of course, it’s always possible that the poll’s question is flawed in that it didn’t make it clear enough how deeply Obama bowed and how weak and prostrate he really looked.

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With Republicans hammering the Obama administration for trying suspected 9/11 terrorists in a New York court, a Democrat points out that in 2006, George W. Bush seemed to say outright that terrorists should be “tried in courts here in the United States.”

There was no outcry at the time.

In a news conference on June 9th, 2006, Bush described his discussions with the prime minister of Denmark over the fate of Gitmo detainees this way:

I assured him that we would like to end the Guantanamo. We’d like it to be empty. And we’re now in the process of working with countries to repatriate people.

But there are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world. And, therefore, I believe they ought to be tried in courts here in the United States. We will file such court claims once the Supreme Court makes its decision as to whether or not — as to the proper venue for these trials. And we’re waiting on our Supreme Court to act.

At the time, Bush was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on the military commissions he had established to try alleged members of Al Qaeda. At the presser, he said the administration was waiting for the high court to determine the “proper venue” for trying suspected terrorists, and seemed to say U.S. courts were a valid venue if it came to it.

At a minimum, Bush clearly saw no problem with bringing suspected terrorists to the U.S. for trial — something that the Obama administration is now doing, drawing widespread criticism on the right.

The high court subsequently struck down Bush’s commissions, and later that year, the GOP-controlled Congress and the President passed legislation reviving the system of military tribunals that the Obama administration is now eschewing.

Bottom line: When Bush suggested that U.S. courts were an appropriate venue for trying terrorists if it came to it, the idea wasn’t viewed as even remotely controversial. Thanks to Ryan Derousseau for research help.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, under fire from the White House and Dems for plans to commission a study that could determine that the health care reform proposal is a job killer, is now reconsidering whether to go forward with it.

A spokesperson for the Chamber, in emails to me, repeatedly declined to say whether the group would be proceeding. If the Chamber, one of the reform proposal’s most determined and well-funded opponents, shelves the planned study it would be a victory for the White House and other critics who attacked it in advance as evidence of an orchestrated effort to undermine reform.

Asked repeatedly whether the Chamber would go forward with the study, a Chamber spokesperson, Blair Latoff, emailed this reply several times: “We haven’t determined that but an economic study would clearly be valuable going forward.”

Last week, the Washington Post roiled the health care debate by reporting that the Chamber was trying to raise $50,000 to hire a “respected economist” to undertake a study that could help the Chamber, which is headed by Tom Donohue, make the case that “the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy.”

WaPo also reported that an internal Chamber email appeared to conclude in advance that the pending study would hand opponents of the proposals “a powerful lobbying and grass-roots document.”

The Chamber’s planned effort was widely panned, with the White House blasting the news as proof of a secret and “intentionally skewed” effort to “safeguard the insurance companies’ bottom line at the expense of the American people.”

Now, however, it’s unclear whether the study will be going forward at all.

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Some on the right, such as Sarah Palin, John McCain, and various conservative commentators, have quickly jumped to the conclusion that the Fort Hood shootings were an act of terrorism.

But according to the internals of a new CNN poll that just landed in the old in box, the American people aren’t prepared to buy this claim yet:

As you may know, a soldier named Nidal Hasan recently shot and killed thirteen people in Ft. Hood Texas. Based on what you know about this matter, do you consider Hasan’s actions to be an act of terrorism, or do you consider this to be an act of murder with no direct connection to terrorism?

Terrorism 45%
Murder 47%
No opinion 8%

It’s true that this is a statistically insigficant spread. And a recent CBS poll found that more see the shooting as terrorism, 48%-38%. But unlike today’s CNN poll, the CBS question didn’t offer people the option of labeling it “murder.”

Indeed, the CNN poll finds that a majority, 55%, are not willing to rush to the judgment Palin did when she declared the shooter a “terrorist” and endorsed profiling, saying we should “profile away.”

Palin and other conservatives are working hard to use recent events — the Fort Hood shooting, the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial, and the debate over Gitmo detainees — to revive fears of terrorism and turn it into a national issue again, in hopes that criticism of the current administration’s terror policies will carry emotional weight with the public. We’ll see how far they get.

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* Eric Holder has an encounter with the 9/11 families over his decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in New York.

* David Axelrod, on criticism of Obama’s failure to gain any major breakthroughs during his foreign trip: We’re not in the “immediate gratification business.”

* Tapper lists the trip’s disappointments.

* The full Senate health care bill is here, and the full CBO score is here. Please let me know if you spot anything interesting.

* Shocker of the day: Drudge is playing up the bill’s length. Doesn’t that one ever get old?

* Gallup: The percentage of Americans rating the current health care system has soared all the way up to … 38%.

* Obama needs to show results from Karzai in advance of any troop buildup in Afghanistan.

* Good read: Sarah Palin really does appear to think she’s running for president, or at least some consultants hope she can be persuaded to do so.

* Understatement of the day: Peter Wehner notes that if the GOP needs to become the party of ideas, then “Palin is not the solution to what ails it.”

* I’m with Jason Linkins on this one: Fox News’ latest transgression doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

* Joe Lieberman continues to urinate on his Democratic constituents.

* And here’s the head-spinner of the day: Karl Rove blasts the White House for…trying to manage press coverage.

What else is happening?

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* The CBO score has landed! The Senate bill will cost $849 billion over the next decade, getting over a key Obama hurdle; cuts the deficit by $127 billion; covers 31 million people.

* Early cautionary words from Jonathan Cohn and Ezra Klein, who adds that it cuts $650 billion in the second decade.

* It reportedly includes a public option with an opt-out, which means Reid can’t be too worried that the provision will scuttle the effort to get 60 votes to move the bill to a debate.

* Health care news coming fast and furious: Senator Ben Nelson tentatively suggests he may, just may, be able to support bringing the health care bill to a debate.

* David Kurtz is not particularly impressed.

* Between the score and Nelson, it’s looking like a foregone conclusion that the health care bill will, in fact, proceed to a debate, but let’s not lose sight of the incredible fragility of the Democratic majority.

* Tiny Illinois town begs to be sent Guantanamo detainees. Maybe Rudy should go talk some sense into those small-town folks, who clearly don’t understand the nature of the threat.

* Obama at 50% or below in two national polls: Quinnipiac and Gallup.

* Conservative filibuster veterans marvel to Dave Weigel about the inability of the Obama crew to get their nominees through.

* The ACLU seems prepared to give Obama breathing room on his announcement that the closure of Guantanamo will be delayed. The ACLU’s statement noted that the news is “troubling” but added that it’s important that the closure is “done right.”

* And a new talking point alert! GOP Rep Marsha Blackburn, on the new recommendations against mammograms for women under 50: “This is how rationing begins.”

Got anything else? Tons of news will be dribbling out tonight on the Senate health care bill. If you see any good stuff, let us know!

Update: It looks like the Senate bill has language restricting taxpayer-funding of abortions, but eschews the Stupak language. Obviously, more detail needed.

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