A little late night fun: digging to find the origin point for a made-up GOP budget number. First, Ensign. Then traced back to McConnell and then ultimately to Judd Gregg.

Meanwhile, on the 'reality, what a concept' front, I'd totally missed this. But HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today released a state by state breakdown of what the Senate bill would mean in different states -- how many more people could get insurance, how many would qualify for subsidies and tax credits to purchase insurance, etc. Worth a look.

A political scientist TPM Reader begs to differ with TPM Reader JB on the filibuster and the difficulty of getting hard bills through the senate ...

I am a political scientist who has studied the Senate filibuster. As much as I'd like to agree with JB's post, it misses the mark in important ways -- leading people to blame Obama and Reid for what is really way beyond their control. (Note: that is not to say that Reid hasn't made mistakes or Obama has not made mistakes -- but that is a separate question).

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It's all tea leaves. But it looks like President Obama may be making or already made his decision on Afghanistan tonight.

From TPM Reader JB, an old senate hand, now decamped to distant parts ...

As you know, I used to work in the Senate. When I did, the threat of extended debate was made fairly often: usually to delay legislation until some matter of parochial concern to one or more Senators was dealt with, occasionally to threaten with extended publicity the passage of legislation thought to be unpopular.

It was always understood that legislation thought deeply inimical to one or more states' most vital interests might be opposed with every resource at the disposal of an individual Senator or group of Senators. The inhibitions -- all of them unwritten -- against deploying those resources routinely, though, were considerable. If this had not been the case, legislation like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (which overhauled the entire federal tax code), the Goldwater-Nichols bill of that year restructuring the Pentagon, and the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments could never have been enacted.

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It seems like we may have another case for those Fox execs eager to discipline or fire staffers for 'errors'/flagrant fibs meant to misinform views. This one's about the Public Option allegedly being financed by taxpayer dollars as opposed to premiums from people buying into the program.

This quote is from the same piece David linked below on Charlie Crist. But I think it may be a quote that ends up on a book they write about the GOP or perhaps even the country in 2010 ...

"It's hard to be more conservative than I am on issues -- though there are different ways stylistically to communicate that -- I'm pro-life, I'm pro-gun, I'm pro-family, and I''m anti tax." ... "I don't know what else you're supposed to be, except maybe angry too."

See the rest here.

Earlier this year, the RNC got in some trouble when dissident committee members tried to push a symbolic measure calling on the Democratic party to rename itself the "Democrat Socialist Party." Now another group is pushing for a purity test at the next RNC meeting in January to make sure all GOPers in good standing assent to catechism of key Hoffmanite principles.

Every election cycle, TPM has the niche of sniffing out each sides' robo-call campaigns. And in the last two cycles, one of the expanding threads of the story is the effort of robo-call outfits to get around state laws prohibiting the practice in certain states. (Like, if Indiana prohibits robocalls, can Indiana law touch me if I'm placing the calls from Montana?) Now we've got the next stage of the story as a new GOP group tries to knock out anti-robo-call statutes in several states.

While many of us had naively construed the string of phony crowd scenes and other hijinks as Fox News editorial policy, apparently it ain't so. Fox News execs are now threatening warnings, suspensions and even firings over the string of recent video editing and fact-checking errors, all of which seem to have had the effect of inflating public support for the Beck/Palin wing of the GOP.

What happened to the Public Option?

I'm reading through the responses to my earlier post about the Public Option and how much the now-emasculated version of it is actually worth. Some of the responses, to put it bluntly, amount to: this bill isn't great, or not exactly what I wanted it to be, so let's just pull the plug on the whole effort. Others say it's the Senate Dems' fault since they just should have ignored or plowed through the current set of rules forcing 60 vote majorities.

What does surprise me though and what I've seen few good answers to is why there wasn't more of a push from the outside on the question of 'up or down votes.'

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I've mentioned in several contexts that the one lesson Dems seem to have internalized almost universally is that starting on health care but not passing a bill would be catastrophic in political terms -- quite apart from the policy consequences. This new poll from PPP gives some concrete evidence that that's the case.

Currently PPP has the Dems with a 8 point margin on the 'generic ballot'. If they pass a bill with a public option, the margin drops to 5 points. If they pass nothing at all it falls to dead even.

While the range of abortion related amendments remains a major hurdle for a health care reform bill getting to President Obama's desk, it is clear, as it has been for some time, that the real fight hangs on the Public Option, especially in the senate. Depending on your count there are three or four senate Democrats who've made broad commitments that they will not vote for a bill that includes the so-called "opt-out" public option. And that probably means they won't vote for any bill with a public option at all.

What gets less discussion is how circumscribed the public option (in current House and Senate versions) has become and how much or whether it's even worth fighting for.

Let me explain what I mean.

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Red state Dem Dennis Moore announces he won't be running in 2010.

VIDEO: Al Gore declares plan to "outcrazy the crazy."

Though the crazy has gotten pretty crazy. So it's a steep climb.