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Rachel Maddow highlights some excellent reporting on several Astroturf groups opposed to health care reform, and no surprise here but who is helping to promote them? Fox "News" of course.

From Think Progress--Exclusive: Attacks On Health Reform Orchestrated By Yet Another Shadowy Corporate Front Group — ‘CMPI’

The AP--THE INFLUENCE GAME: Front group fights health bill

And from Mother Jones--The Tea Party's Favorite Doctors

MADDOW: At this very moment, tonight, there is a high-stakes battle under way in the nation`s capital. It is an arm-twisting, vote-wrangling, down-to-the-wire, choose your cliche efforts to get health care reform past. Senate Democrats are trying to hold off Republicans while keeping their own conservatives in line. That`s the battle on health reform that`s happening on the surface.

Just below the surface is a battle for public opinion that is being shaped by a lot of different interest groups, but by some groups in particular that are trying to shape the debate while disguising their own role in doing so. As health reform proceeds and these folks get more desperate and more sloppy, some great investigative journalism done recently by "The Associated Press," by the Center for American Progress and by "Mother Jones" magazine has uncovered some of the inadvertent hilarity in who`s behind the opposition to health reform.

If you happen to be an avid viewer of the FOX News Channel, you`re probably not watching me. But let`s say you are. You have probably seen a lot of analysis on health reform on FOX News by a FOX News medical contributor named Dr. Marc Siegel.

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It's too bad Rachel Maddow isn't on MSNBC a bit earlier in the evening. There is not another show on cable television doing the type of reporting and muckraking she is night after night and some of the best interviews as well--tonight's interview with Frank Schaeffer being no exception. Rachel reports on the lastest round of attacks coming from the religious right against President Obama, this time with the use of Psalm 109:8 as reported by the Christian Science Monitor.

Biblical anti-Obama slogan: Use of Psalm 109:8 funny or sinister?

There’s a new slogan making its way onto car bumpers and across the Internet. It reads simply: “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

A nice sentiment?

Maybe not.

The psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”

Presidential criticism through witty slogans is nothing new. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, and hats with “1/20/09” commemorated President Bush’s last day in office.

But the verse immediately following the psalm referenced is a bit more ominous: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

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Here's Rachel's take.

MADDOW: And then there's this, a Biblical quote making the rounds in anti-Obama circles, as reported this week in The Christian Science Monitor: Pray For President Obama - Psalm 109 Verse 8. What's Psalm 109:8? Well, it reads 'Let His Days Be Few, And Let Another Take His Office.' Let his days be few. Uh, it's followed immediately by another verse: 'Let His Children Be Fatherless, And His Wife A Widow.'

And don't forget, that sentiment is now being merchandized on bumper stickers, on mouse pads, on teddy bears, on aprons, framed tiles - those are nice - keepsake boxes, T-shirts. Let his days be few, ha, ha, on a teddy bear. Is anybody else creeped out by this?

Frank Schaeffer joined Rachel to weigh in. Video and transcript below the fold.

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Rachel follows up on TPM's reporting on the C-Street house--C Street House No Longer Tax Exempt:

Residents of the C Street Christian fellowship house will no longer benefit from a loophole that had allowed the house's owners to avoid paying property taxes.

Previously, the house -- despite being home to numerous lawmakers -- had been tax exempt, because it was classified as a church. That arrangement had allowed the building's owner, the secretive international Christian organization The Family, to charge significantly below market rents to its residents. In recent year, Senators John Ensign (R-NV), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Sam Brownback (R-KS) and Jim DeMint (R-SC), and Reps. Zach Wamp (R-TN), Bart Stupak (D-MI) and Mike Doyle (D-PA) have all reportedly called C Street home.

Natalie Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Office of Tax and Revenue for Washington D.C., told TPMmuckraker that her office inspected the house this summer. "It was determined that portions of it were being rented out for private residential purposes," she said. As a result, the tax exempt status was partially revoked. Sixty-six percent of the value of the property is now subject to taxation.

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Jeff Sharlet followed up with more insight from his time spent there researching his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. At least one good thing has come out of all the attention Bart Stupak has drawn to himself and to the formerly very secretive C-Street House.

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Following the news that President Obama has rejected all four of the proposed policies on Afghanistan from his military consultants, Seymour Hersh joined Rachel to discuss his latest article at The New Yorker, Defending the Arsenal.

MADDOW: Tonight's breaking news, "The Associated Press" reporting that President Obama has rejected all of the options given to him on the way forward in the war in Afghanistan. Any decision he makes about Afghanistan will, of course, have to take into account our friend-nemy across the border in Pakistan. And as Seymour Hersh details in this week's "New Yorker" magazine, U.S. dealings with Pakistan specifically on issues of fighting the Taliban and keeping that country's nuclear arsenal out of the hands of militants, they're going from complicated to full-on Gordian Knot territory.

Joining us now is Seymour Hersh, staff writer for "The New Yorker" magazine.

Mr. Hersh, thanks very much for coming on the show tonight.

SEYMOUR HERSH, THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE: Sure.

MADDOW: Before we talk Pakistan, I do need to ask your reaction to this breaking news from "The Washington Post" and "The A.P." tonight that the U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, now says, "Don't send more troops because of Afghan corruption," and the president, tonight, reportedly rejecting all of the options that have presented to him for sending more troops.

HERSH: Look. It could be huge. Of course, it's very early, but it could be huge, simply that the president is finally saying, "I'm taking control."

The one thing that mystified a lot of people, a lot of my friends on the inside was this decision to let General McChrystal write a report. We always compare Mr. Obama that to President Lincoln. But Lincoln did not let George McClellan write a report on how to win a war against the South.

There's no general in history that will write come back, given that assignment and say we can't win. This is basically a war at best that's going to be a stalemate-a 10-year stalemate, you know, x thousands and x the money, et cetera.

And so, Obama is just putting his foot down, and that's great. He's saying-he's making a political gamble in a sense. I-it's a little too early to say, but he's-he's grabbing it. He's grabbing it, and he hasn't been grabbing it until now.

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Rachel runs down the list of intelligence leaks by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the man who the Republicans feel is the best choice to be the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. This was a follow up from last night where Maddow focused on the leaking of Maj. Nidal M. Hasan's email conversations with cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi.

As Think Progress noted, Marcy Wheeler also reminded us today of some of Hoekstra's finer moments.

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Rachel Maddow wins my semi-famous "Don't Sugarcoat It" award for her talented muckraking in this segment. It's becoming abundantly clear to everyone in the left-wing activist community that without loophole-free campaign finance reform we are unlikely to change anything in Washington lobby/legislator love-fest. With an assist from blogger David Sirota, Maddow exposes the business lobby that would attempt to hide their desire to continue to import products made from child, slave, and prison labor. Given the American public's unending appetite for cheap plastic junk, it's easy to see why those profiting from that hunger would want their gravy train to continue. Sadly, Maddow must remind us, all of us, that, um, slavery is wrong, even when it occurs across the oceans.

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Rachel Maddow runs down the list for us of C-Street family members who also voted for Bart Stupak’s anti-abortion amendment yesterday. Nothing like having what amounts to a secretive religious cult making health care policy for women in the United States. As Rachel noted that list includes:

Rep. Bart Stupak D-MI
Rep. Joe Pitts R-PA
Rep. Ike Skelton D-MO
Rep. Mike McIntyre D-NC
Rep. John Tanner D-TN
Rep. Lincoln Davis D-TN
Rep. Dan Boren D-OK
Rep. Heath Shuler D-NC

Jeff Sharlet joined Rachel to discuss The C-Street Family's ever growing influence within the Democratic Party.

Maddow: What are Congressman Stupak and Congressman Pitts’ connections to C-Street and The Family? Is one of them more deeply involved than the other?

Sharlet: Yeah, well Congressman Pitts has been involved with The Family since 1976 and in the 1980’s he was instrumental in bringing anti-abortion politics into this kind of elite fundamentalism that until that point had been focused on economics and foreign affairs. Bart Stupak meanwhile has been living at C-Street since at least 2002 when he told the Los Angeles Times “we kind of don’t talk about what happens here”.

Maddow: Are there signs that The Family had anything to do with the Stupak-Pitts amendment? I mean this is quite a legislative coup that they’ve pulled off.

Sharlet: Well, you have to consider that Congressman Pitts is what The Family calls a core member. This is a little like being on the board of directors. You can go on line and find video of him talking about the objectives of the group is to create a god led government. He has worked over the years to prevent not only abortion but AIDS education overseas and so this has been a life-long project for him going back years and years and years. Stupak is a little bit newer to this issue and I think what you really have to question here is Pitts who’s been active in this for a long time and was bringing up these amendments I think in Stupak and his brother in The Family as it was called, found a Democrat to carry the issue for him.

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Rachel breaks through some of the spin on the election results from last night. Unlike most of the pundits in the “mainstream” media who have been doing their best to paint what happened in New Jersey and Virginia as some sort of shift by the electorate back to the Republican Party, Rachel does a very nice job keeping the results in perspective. As Rachel also notes, the Tea Baggers are gearing up for more conservative challengers in 2010 and for some more Astroturf protests on Capitol Hill, undeterred by the loss in NY-23.

MADDOW: But we begin tonight with the end of election 2009 and the very exciting beginning of election 2010 -- which, of course, starts with the breathless spinning of last night's results.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOV. HALEY BARBOUR ®, MISSISSIPPI: There's no question that these elections propel Republicans into 2010.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We won one in California, we won the big one in New York 23, where the Obama agenda was at play were in the two congressional races, both of which were won by Democrats.

REP. ERIC CANTOR ®, VIRGINIA: Taking away from this, you know, we look to '010. People have clearly made a choice in our state. They have said no to the one-way street of the economic policies of the Obama administration and the Pelosi Congress.

MICHAEL STEELE, RNC CHAIRMAN: Assume the Heisman position. Yes, baby.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I told you!

STEELE: There you go. That's my moment.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Yes, baby.

Spin aside, the political map in this country did change last night. Before last night, here was the partisan breakdown of governor seats across the country: 22 Republican governors and 28 Democrats.

After last night, this is what it looks like. Yes, I know, stunning, right? Republicans picked up Virginia and New Jersey. So, we're now at 24 Republicans and 26 Democrats.

In terms of congressional races, last night California's 10th district stayed blue, but it got a little blue-ier as moderate Democrat Ellen Tauscher was replaced by progressive Democrat John Garamendi.

The congressional race that got all of the attention last night was, of course, in the northeast. It was New York's 23rd congressional district.

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Rachel Maddow talks to former Lieberman political rival Ned Lamont about what is driving Sen. Lieberman to obstruct health reform and threaten to filibuster his own caucus. As Ned notes, it was Republican money that got him elected and he's showing that political allegiance now. I think he doesn't care what party it is as long as his pockets are being lined.

Maddow: I have a feeling you're going to say "I told you so" but I have to ask. Does it surprise you that Sen. Lieberman would join Republicans to filibuster health reform?

Lamont: It surprises me in this sense, that everybody thought that our race three years ago was just about the war in Iraq, whether it was a good idea to invade or not, but we spent an awful lot of time talking about health care reform and during that race I accused Sen. Lieberman of dithering and after twenty years in the Senate not doing anything on fundamental health care reform, and he was the one that came back and said unilaterally "I support universal health insurance for all Americans and I'm going to fight for it". So I'm surprised that a few years later he is dithering again.

Maddow: I know...I went back and looked at some of the contemporaneous coverage from your race and I know back in September of 2006, during that fight Sen. Lieberman told reporters on a conference call “I have long supported the goal of universal health care. Ned Lamont can talk about it. I’ve been doing something about it all the time I’ve been here.” If he does end up being the one guy who stops it, if it is his filibuster, what do you think the political costs will be of that?

Lamont: Look the people of Connecticut are ready to have a vote. They want to have a vote on fundamental health care reform and they want the choice of a public option. Sen. Chris Dodd and all of our Congressionals are on board with that and it’s Sen. Lieberman who’s the outlier, so I think there will be political consequences if a Sen. Lieberman is the one person who stands in the way, who obstructs our opportunity to have a fundamental vote on health care reform.

Maddow: What do you think those consequences will be though? One of the things that we have to think about is what happens in Washington, whether or not the Democrats and the Senate allow him to keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee—there’s also the question of whether he faces political consequences at home. He seems to be planning to run again.

Lamont: I believe—I probably wouldn’t know—I’d be the last person in Connecticut to know whether he’s going to run again but I can tell you this; there’s an awful lot of folks here who are looking forward to the opportunity of challenging Sen. Lieberman. You know during our race a few years ago he said nobody wants to have a Democrat elected president as much as I do. He supported health care reform. Nobody wanted to get the troops home more than he did. Three years is a long time. I think there are a number of folks, independent, moderates, Republicans and Democrats who are disappointed where the words aren’t matching the action and are looking for a change.

Maddow: Why do you think he doesn’t just become a Republican?

Lamont: I think he’s been a Democrat for an awful long time, but I think tactically he’s probably looking at his options right now. I’ve got to believe when you walk away from health care reform, when you deny your fellow Senators the right to vote on health care reform, that seems to be somebody that knows he was elected in 2006 with overwhelming Republican support. I think that’s his base.

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Lawrence O'Donnell took his turn filling in for Keith on Countdown and Rachel Maddow called out the Cheney's for their continual lying on her show the next hour. CREW's Melanie Sloan joined Rachel later in the segment to discuss the newly released interview by the FBI which did not reveal much--other than his willingness to throw Scooter Libby under the bus. More on that from Marcy Wheeler:

Hung Out to Dry: One Former VP Chief of Staff

If I were Scooter Libby right now, I’d be seething. I’d be utterly disgusted with the way Dick Cheney hung me out to dry, over and over and over, in his interview with Fitzgerald. Cheney denies any knowledge of issues he and Libby worked on together repeatedly and he denies that his own orders and instructions had anything to do with activities that ultimately (though Cheney of course didn’t admit this) ended up outing Valerie Wilson.

There are three general categories of information about which Cheney hangs Libby out to dry.

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Transcript from Lexis Nexis below the fold.

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From The Rachel Maddow Show Oct. 29, 2009. Rachel reports that Evan Bayh is now walking back from his comments made on CBS News and has released this statement:

Senator Bayh will support moving forward to a health care debate on the Senate floor, where he will work hard to address his concerns and craft affordable legislation that reduces the deficit and lowers health care costs for Indiana families and small businesses.

Maddow: In other words according to his office's statement today Sen. Bayh is now promising to allow the bill to come to the floor, but would he still like Lieberman filibuster the final vote with Republicans? Would he block a majority vote on the final bill and force his party to get sixty votes to pass health reform instead of fifty? Well, exclusively this afternoon Sen. Bayh told us this.

He told us that his position on health reform is not the same as Sen. Lieberman. Sen. Bayh told us it is extraordinarily unlikely that he would filibuster health reform. He said there is nothing in the bill he is aware of now that would cause him to vote to filibuster and he said that he currently "can't think of a set of circumstances under which he would vote against cloture.

What does this mean? It means that it's been a very big 24 hours for health reform. Sen. Bayh's statement as of 24 hours ago indicated that he had walked through the door that Joe Lieberman had opened--that he was willing to go even further than Joe Lieberman—not only willing to filibuster the final bill on health reform, but to filibuster any debate as well, both of those perceived threats from Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana have been walked way back. Which means that Joe Lieberman stands alone—Joe Lonely.

And round and round we go. Lieberman needs to be stripped of his chairmanship and as I said in my post yesterday, if Joe Lieberman wants to filibuster his own caucus, break out the cot and the diapers Joe.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Glenn Greenwald about Joe Lieberman's threat to filibuster the health care bill if it contains a public option, Evan Bayh quickly following suit and the financial gain being made by both men and their spouses for doing so.

Maddow: Sen. Lieberman has made it very clear that he plans to oppose health reform that includes a public option. He’ll filibuster it in fact which would be historic. What do you think is motivating him?

Greenwald: Well I think you have to look first of all at a Research 2000 Daily KOS poll that was taken last month that shows that a margin of 68 to 21% of Connecticut voters, the people who he’s essentially representing, favor a public option. That’s a 47 point margin which is almost impossible to find on almost any other issue. So when you ask why he’s doing this, it’s clearly not because the people he’s supposed to be representing favor it.

I think clearly what it’s about is primarily that fact that the industry that he’s serving by doing this—by preventing competition with the public option—is an industry from which he receives very substantial benefits. He’s drowning in campaign contributions from the insurance industry, the health care industry, the pharmaceutical industry—more than $2.5 million.

In early 2005 his wife was hired by a large P.R. firm, Hill & Knowlton, in the pharmaceutical division, which at the time was representing the health care giant Glaxo in major legislation before the Senate. And several months later Joe Lieberman was on the floor of the Senate offering legislation that would directly steer huge amounts of incentives to that company in order to develop vaccines.

So I think what you’re seeing here is the kind of legalized corruption, legalized bribery that runs the United States Senate; only in this case it’s particularly sleazy and transparent because Lieberman is ready to gut the major initiative of the Democratic Party.

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Rachel Maddow talks to Steve Benen about the Republican infighting going on in the New York 23rd District's special election. As Steve noted yesterday:

Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd continues to pick up endorsements from leading right-wing figures. Yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) bucked his party and threw his support to Hoffman. Reps. Tom Cole of Oklahoma and Dana Rohrabacher of California did the same thing.

Transcript from MSNBC.

MADDOW: This is Betsy Markey. She‘s the Democratic member of Congress representing Colorado‘s fourth district. Betsy Markey got elected to that seat last November when she defeated a three-term, very far-right Republican incumbent named Marilyn Musgrave.

Even Colorado‘s—even as Colorado was thought of as a pretty safe Republican territory, the incumbent Republican, Ms. Musgrave, just got clobbered by the Democrat in this race. She lost by 12 points, wasn‘t even close.

This race is ringing a bell for you maybe because it‘s the only House race from the last election that we were still covering a week after the election was over, because not only did Marilyn Musgrave make news for being a conservative Republican who got trounced in what was supposed to be a safe seat, on this show at least, Ms. Musgrave also made news because even a week after she lost, she still hadn‘t conceded the race, nor had she called to congratulate Betsy Markey who beat her.

We called Betsy Markey‘s office today and confirm that even now, almost a year after that election, Republican Marilyn Musgrave still hasn‘t conceded the race. It‘s possible she still thinks she‘s in Congress.

Well, today, in “The New York Times,” we learned that one of the things Marilyn Musgrave is up to now is campaigning in a New York congressional race that‘s attracted a whole host of ambitious conservatives to rail against the locally-chosen Republican in the race in favor of a more conservative candidate.

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Rachel Maddow reports on some breaking news from The New York Times-Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.

More broadly, some American officials argue that the reliance on Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful figure in a large area of southern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, undermines the American push to develop an effective central government that can maintain law and order and eventually allow the United States to withdraw.

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Steve Hynd has more over at Newshoggers--Karzai's Narco-Trafficking Brother Is On CIA's Payroll

The New York Times, in what must be a measure of how sure they are of their information, rolled out the big guns today - Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen - to write the story of how Afghan president Hamid Karzai's brother has been on the CIA payroll for years. [...]

What the CIA has done, and done for most of the last eight years apparently, directly undermines any population-centric counter-insurgency that was ever possible in Afghanistan. The leaking of its ties to Karzai's brother is a disaster of nightmare proportions for any chance of COIN success there, the icing on the cake. Added to all the other factors - the election, the civilians bombed, the abysmal state of the Afghan security forces, the very fact of a foreign occupation - the occupation has passed its tipping point for sure. [...]

Although that will be bolting stable doors after the horses have all bolted. It's a pity in many ways that this will land on Obama's doorstep when it was obviously a Bush administration initiative. My advice to the current White House would be to forget about the usual "we don't comment on intelligence operations" bulls**t. We're talking a potential Iran/Contra level mess here - spill the beans.

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Oh you've just got to love this. As Rachel notes, right in the middle of a health care crisis with the swine flu, Republicans are playing politics with a Surgeon General appointment to get even with the Democrats for wanting to investigate a health insurance company. Isn't that special?

Maddow: Next up—remember when President Obama nominated a new Surgeon General? If you don’t remember that it’s because it happened a really long time ago, way back on July 13th when the President announced that Regina Benjamin, a family physician from Alabama who’s going to be his pick. Dr. Benjamin was finally and unanimously approved by the Senate Health, Education and Labor and Pensions Committee earlier this month, but she hasn’t received a full vote in the Senate.

Senate Republicans are holding up her nomination as a favor to the health insurance industry. As we reported on this show last month the health insurance company Humana sent out a mailer targeting seniors that was designed to scare them about health reform. The mailer said in part “millions of seniors and disabled individuals could lose many … important benefits and services”. This is not only quite in poor taste and factually dubious, but quite possibly in violation of the marketing rules that Humana has to follow as a provider of part of Medicare.

Rules designed so that Medicare patients won’t be confused about who’s sending them information about their benefits—confused about whether it’s the insurance companies or the government.

Well Democratic Senator Max Baucus responded to that mailer from Humana by urging the Department of Health and Human Services to take action, which they did in the form of starting an investigation into Humana’s mailer. It is still ongoing and as Roll Call newspaper now reports it is because of that investigation that Senate Republicans are holding up the nomination of Dr. Regina Benjamin to the Surgeon General of the United States.

So the time where there have been a thousand deaths from swine flu and the President has declared a national emergency, we as a country don’t need deserve a Surgeon General because Republicans want the health insurance industry to be left alone to scare old people about health reform.

Country first?

No Rachel, I think that would be insurance lobbyist first.