All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

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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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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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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On “Washington Unplugged” Wednesday, Jonathan Weisman, from the Wall Street Journal, said the president’s trip to Asia this week has “kind of snuck up on him but actually there are a lot of issues on the table.”

Weisman noted issues including the new government in Japan, the Singapore conference with Asian countries, his visit to China (“the great banker of the United States”) and the stalled free trade agreement with South Korea.

“This is the test of his vow to engage our enemies as well as our friends,” Weisman said of a potential handshake between President Obama and the Burmese leader in Singapore . “Nobody has talked to the Burmese Junta and this is the president of the United States.”

Moderator and senior White House correspondent Bill Plante mentioned that while the volatile south Asian economy may not be a “sexy” headline grabbing topic, it will front and center next week.

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

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Congressman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D- New Jersey) said on "Washington Unplugged" Friday that illegal immigrants should be eligible to receive the scarce H1N1 vaccines if they fall into the high risk groups,.

"We should do the vaccination strictly based on whether its a high risk group because, you know, disease has no barrier based on whether you are documented or not," Pallone told moderator John Dickerson. "If you end up not inoculating people who are undocumented and they start spreading the disease then that hurts everyone."

Dickerson asked the congressman how he would respond to the argument that the already unproduced and scarce vaccine should be distributed to United States taxpayers first.

"That's acting against your own self interest," Pallone said. "That's like saying all of the poor people have a disease so we won't inoculate them, and somehow the rich people are going to immune. You've got to be practical about this and not worry about whether somebody has papers.'

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Reporters Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe covered Alaska Governor Sarah Palin nearly from the day Senator John McCain announced her as a presidential running mate.

Now, they have a new book out titled "Sarah from Alaska: The Sudden Rise and Brutal Education of a new Conservative Superstar," which tells the story of the high-profile politician through the eyes of hundreds of interviews.

"She is such a polarizing figure and many of the media reports out there are one dimensional so we wanted to get both sides out there," Conroy told CBS News Political Director Steve Chaggaris on "Washington Unplugged" Thursday.

Conroy said that while the official response to the book from the Palin camp has been "no comment," one loyal senior adviser called the book fair earlier this week.

Walshe chimed in, explaining that they had interviewed almost 200 people for the book, including Palin's family and friends.

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Off-year elections are almost always fodder for spinners from both sides of the political divide, and it's no surprise that strategists on each side of the aisle have very different takes on the lessons of Election Day 2009. On "Washington Unplugged" Tuesday, Republican Kevin Madden and Democrat Joe Trippi did agree on one thing, though – that the electorate is very "volatile" right now.

"There have been ten to twenty percent swings on issues in the last three hundred and sixty five days" since the 2008 presidential election, Madden said.

That's where the agreement ended. Madden was encouraged by yesterday's results, which incuded victories for two Republican gubenetorial candidates.

"We crafted a pro-active, modernized message to reach those independent voters who are swinging elections," Madden said. Of the independent voters, he said, "we've got them back for one night."

Schieffer said that before Republicans pat themselves on the back too hard, they should acknowledge that both Democrats candidates in New Jersey and Virginia were not particularly impressive.

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On "Washington Unplugged" today, Marc Ambinder said he thinks the New Jersey gubernatorial race has the biggest potential to be a referendum on President Obama, considering how much support the president has given Democratic candidate John Corzine.

"He has spent a lot of time there. He has spent a lot of time in the White House recording robo-calls," Ambinder told moderator John Dickerson. "This is kind of the one race where he has invested a lot of himself in."

The CBS News political analyst said this is the race that he will be watching tonight.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, meanwhile, joked about media and analysts reading too much into these races.

"Of course it is a referendum," he said, "because we will all be sitting here saying it is a referendum on way or the other."

"We are always looking for a story here and let's face it these are kind of random contests," Milbank said. "If everything goes one way," he said, analysts will have more to base the referendum theory on.

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CBS News Washington Bureau Chief Chris Isham said on "Washington Unplugged" Monday that the Afghanistan Election Commission "dodged a bullet" in cancelling the runoff presidential election in Afghanistan following the decision by challenger Abdullah Abdullah to drop out of the race.

"I think they would have had a lot of problems with security, with weather, low turnout…and there probably would have been additional fraud and the results of that election could be as bad as the first one," said Isham.

"It would have been an absurd election because Abdullah had pulled out and everybody knew he had pulled out," he told Bob Orr. "Karzai would have been racing against nobody so it would have been an absurd election."

The commission decided to cancel the runoff after Abdullah announced he was dropping out of concern about a new round of electoral fraud.

Abdullah's decision leaves Karzai weaker than he would have been had he won following a runoff, Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said.

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