All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

It's only November, but fears over the H1N1 virus have already hit a fever pitch, with some Americans uneasy about their lack of access to a vaccine that's in relatively short supply.

There are signs, however, that H1N1 may turn out to be less deadly than many feared. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a report last week which shows similarities between H1N1 and other strains circulating in the population since 1988. According to the NIH, healthy adults may have a degree of immunity that can blunt the severity of an H1N1 infection.

Quest Diagnostics, which provides clinical laboratory services globally, also released a report last Friday stating that rates of infection by the H1N1 virus may have peaked in late October due to the impact of H1N1 vaccinations and changes in physician test-ordering practices.

So how bad is this pandemic really turning out to be? Some medical experts are calling for officials to inform the public that, despite the hype, the worst-case scenario has not, and likely will not, come to pass.

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Updated 12:52 p.m. ET

Rep. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat and the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, is the latest lawmaker to call for a new tax aimed at the rich to pay for a troop increase in Afghanistan.

White House Budget Director Peter Orszag has suggested it could cost the government $40 billion per year to send the 40,000 new troops sought by top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal. (The Pentagon puts that figure somewhat lower.) Obey tells CBSNews.com the cost of the war could "destroy the other things we are trying to do in our economy."

In interviews with CBS News and ABC News, the Wisconsin lawmaker said that he favors a "war surtax" in which high-earners pay five percent of their incomes and lower-earners pay a smaller percentage, down to one percent.

"What we are saying is if this war is worth fighting, then it is worth paying for," Obey said on Monday's edition of CBSNews.com's "Washington Unplugged." (Watch at left.)

"We would impose a one percent surtax on anyone with taxable income that would rise to about two percent if you are making roughly $200,000 dollars, and once you get up into the stratasphere in terms of four or five hundred thousand dollars in income the surtax would be higher than that," he said. "Whatever the cost of the war is would be paid forthrough that tax. Because if we don’t do that that war will bleed every dollar in the budget away from any other initiative and it will block us from making the investments we need to make in our own economy."

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On Saturday, the Senate will vote on whether to begin debate on the health care reform bill introduced by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) earlier this week.

Reid "wants to get that wind under his belt before all these senators leave for Thanksgiving recess and don't see each other for another week or so," CBS News' Capitol Hill Correspondent Nancy Cordes said on "Washington Unplugged" Friday.

She said members of the Senate leadership are increasingly confident that they will get the sixty votes needed to start debate on the health care bill. Right now, Cordes said, Reid has the solid support of fifty-eight senators.

"We are getting smoke signals from just about everybody at this point that in fact they will vote yes to actually start this debate in motion," Cordes told Bob Schieffer. "They are not saying how they will vote in the end but the consensus seems to be, 'why not start debating it then you can bring up amendments to try to change the parts of the bill that you don't like, and then in the end you can always vote no again?'"

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On "Washington Unplugged" Thursday, CBS News' Marc Ambinder said that while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has an uphill battle getting the health care he bill introduced last night passed, not all hope is lost

He noted how important the votes of Democratic Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.) , Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), as well Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), are to the bill's chance of passage. "Their biggest stated concern is that the bill will add to the deficit over ten years," Ambinder explained, adding that the White House and Democratic leaders are encouraged because the Reid plan was estimated to decrease the deficit.

"It removes a major obstacle to moderates supporting it," he said. And the White House may have reason to rejoice.

"The White House strategy amounts to three words," CBS News White House correspondent Mark Knoller said. "Get it passed."

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On "Washington Unplugged" Wednesday, Mississippi's Republican Governor, Haley Barbour, told host Bob Schieffer that he expects Sarah Palin "is going to sell a lot of books."

"Whether she intends to run for something else, or where she's headed, I'm not privy to that," he said, noting that he is focused on 2010 as opposed to 2012.

"My wife and I like her," Barbour said of Palin, the former Alaska governor. "She's a heck of a lot smarter than she gets credit for."

Barbour, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, also said Democrats are "whistling past the graveyard" if they don't recognize the lessons from Republican victories in this year's two governors races.

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Sarah Palin's new autobiography "Going Rogue" has recieved its share of media attention as well as a fair amount of criticism for including discrepancies with her own and her former campaign aides stories. CBS News' Scott Conroy, Republican Strategist Matt Mackoviac and the Huffington Post's Sam Stein debated these contradictions on "Washington Unplugged" Tuesday.

The Huffington Post's Sam Stein recieved emails from former McCain aides which contradict some of Palin's claims in the book. "It's minor stuff but it gets to the credibility gap that is sort of plaguing Sarah Palin right now," he told moderator Nancy Cordes.

One such e-mail disproves Palin's argument in "Going Rogue" that she was shielded from the press by the McCain campaign at large, campaign director Steve Schmidt specifically. On whether to appear on "Saturday Night Live," an e-mail from Schmidt shows Palin was hesitant because of the content of the sketch show and Schmidt says "do it if you want, don't do it if you don't."

"In the book she describes it much differently. She says that she was gung ho on the idea and that she was the one who had to convince Schmidt to do it," Stein explained.

Scott Conroy, co-author of "Sarah from Alaska" has also been fact checking "Going Rogue."

"From the reporting that we have done for our book. We reported for eight months. We had 190 interviews for our book. There is a lot of stuff in there that does not match up with what Sarah Palin has been saying and some of it is provably false," Conroy explained, noting Palin's claim that her stylist also worked with Katie Couric. "That is just one example that can demonstrably be proven false and does not really help Sarah Palin in her efforts to win this 'he said she said' battle with the McCain folks."

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Reverend Al Sharpton, Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have teamed up for a national tour to spotlight education reform, and the trio stopped by "Washington Unplugged" Monday to discuss why their efforts to encourage cooperation on the issue.

"I think you guys think if nobody walks away [with] a black eye that we did not have a meeting," Sharpton joked to CBS News' Fernando Suarez.

"When you have Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich show up to talk about an issue together you tend to get a lot more attention than if either one of us shows up buy oursleves," Gingrich said. "And that's led already around the country to a conversation about education reform."

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Attorney General Eric Holder's decision last week to try five detainees from the Guantanamo Bay prison facility in New York City, among them self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, has come under fire from many Republican lawmakers and some family members of those killed in the terrorist attacks.

Most Democrats are defending the decision, noting that New York has been the setting for other high-profile terrorism trials. But Republicans argue that the detainees are war criminals and should be tried in military tribunals.

Several questions have been raised since the announcement, chief among them this: Will New Yorkers be in more danger than they otherwise would be when the trials takes place? And on the other side, will it serve to illustrate the ideals of the American legal system?

On Monday's "Washington Unplugged," Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, the former Commanding General of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team in Iraq and now a Senior Advisor with the National Security Network, and Hamilton Peterson of Keep America Safe, who lost his father and stepmother on United Flight 93, debated the issue.

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CBS News National Security Analyst Juan Zarate said on "Washington Unplugged" Friday that trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo Bay detainees in U.S. civilian courts was "an important decision, and appropriate."

"I think these are defendants that can be prosecuted, will be prosecuted," he said, adding: "This is a good set of defendants to put into the criminal legal system."

Host Bob Schieffer noted that the decision is already drawing strong criticism from people like New York Republican Rep. Peter King, who says the decision to hold the trial in New York City makes it a terrorist target.

"Well, I think security is always an issue with these cases," said Zarate. "But I think New York has handled big time cases before, dating back to the '93 World Trade Center case, and I think they know how to handle it."

"New York's at the top of the list for Al-Qaeda anyway, so I'm not sure that this necessarily ups the ante that much," he added.

Watch the entire conversation above. Also on Friday's show are interviews with Maggie Mahar, author of "Money Driven Medicine," and Claire Danes, Zac Efron and Richard Linklater of the film "Me and Orson Wells."

"Washington Unplugged" appears live on CBSNews.com each weekday at 12:30 p.m. ET. Click here to check out previous episodes.

Ronald Neumann, the former United States Ambassador to Afghanistan from July 2005 to April 2007, did not mince words on "Washington Unplugged" Thursday when he told CBS News' John Dickerson "the whole process" of assessing whether to send more troops to Afghanistan "has sent a message of some weakness."

"It scares people, Afghans, Pakistanis. Is the United States on the way out?" the current director of the American Academy of Diplomacy said.

For this reason, Neumann argued, the president deciding to put off making a decision on troop increases for a few weeks while his joint chiefs assess the situation in the Karzai administration will likely not hurt U.S. standing in the region.

"[W]e have already paid that price, so if one takes another week or two to refine this, and its a process that probably is necessary for our national consensus, I don't think that that has an additional price," he told Dickerson.

Neumann explained that the real question of America's reputation abroad is how close President Obama's final decision is to General Stanley McChrystal's recommendation for an additional 40,000 troops.

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