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It was nice to hear at least one person in Congress talk about the dangers we're facing with these so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations and that is this moment of panic being used to ram a bad deal through that includes things like cuts to Social Security. Rep. Keith Ellison appeared on Al Sharpton's show on MSNBC and explained why he could not vote for any deal that doesn't protect the working class and our social safety nets and that "if you're talking about cutting Social Security, I'm not with that program."

I'd feel a lot better if I was hearing the same thing from Harry Reid. It might be a good time to remind him not to give away the store to McConnell and Boehner in the next few days.

Update: Here's more from Digby on these negotiations: Fiscal cliff notes 12/28 and she included some additional contact info for Reid:

So Reid and McConnell are supposed to try to work out some deal that will pass both houses and if they don't the president wants an up or down vote on extending the Bush tax cuts for those making less than 250k a year and Unemployment Insurance. He's pretty much daring the GOP to filibuster in the Senate --- and/or Boehner to take the heat for not allowing a vote on middle class tax cuts. [...]

Keep in mind that if Reid and McConnell come up with something, the likely outcome is that Democrats will have to be the majority in both houses to pass the deal. That means most of the Republicans will be allowed to vote against spending cuts and tax increases while most of the Democrats will be expected to vote for spending cuts and tax increases. Despite the fact that the taxes were scheduled to go up anyway, this will be called a Democratic victory. Why, Villagers might even bestow upon them their greatest accolade and call them "grown-ups."

I think the sequester will be taken care of --- nobody's going to allow the defense industry to lose even a penny. Nobody. Either break off the middle class tax cuts now as the president proposes as his fallback plan or let everyone vote for tax cuts after the first and then allow the debt ceiling games to begin. (It's got to happen some time.) I see no reason to capitulate on spending at this point. If that's what it takes, go over the cliff. Why should Democrats become the tax collectors for the austerity state?

If you are of a mind to call Senator Reid's office and leave him a message, you can do so here. (And be sure tell him to keep Kent Conrad and his big "ideas" off the table. Conrad's the lamest of ducks and has no business involving himself at this point.)

Reid's office:
Phone: 202-224-3542 / Fax: 202-224-7327
Toll Free for Nevadans: 1-866-SEN-REID (736-7343) - Restricted to calls originating from area codes 775 and 702

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Well, it looks at though we're in for a weekend of political theater. As Lawrence O'Donnell noted when talking to Sen. Kent Conrad about the latest coming out of the Senate tonight, it appears Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is not done pulling political stunts. Apparently McConnell just told Leader Reid that he will not negotiate directly with him, and will only negotiate with President Obama.

McConnell also told Reid that he would not allow Reid's bill to pass with a simple majority vote, so in other words, he's going to allow the Senate to filibuster. This means that the Senate would not be allowed to vote on Reid's bill until Sunday at 1am and in the mean time, the House would be voting on Reid's bill sometime tomorrow.

If McConnell wants to filibuster Reid's bill, I say it's time for them to break out the cots, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen since the Senate already adjourned tonight. It would be nice to see a clean bill pass that simply raises the debt ceiling instead of these bills they've been negotiating passing. I guess we'll find out shortly if that's too much to hope for or not. In the mean time, they're taking this dangerous game of chicken with our economy right up to the wire with more stalling from Republicans.

UPDATE: Here's more on the latest from The Hill -- Reid alters debt plan to attract GOP support:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has revised his plan to raise the debt limit in a last-ditch bid to attract Republican support.

The biggest change is that Reid would give the president almost unilateral power to raise the debt limit, borrowing an idea introduced by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Reid would have President Obama request a $2.4 trillion debt-limit increase in two installments of $1.2 trillion each. The requests would be subject to congressional resolutions of disapproval, but these would do little to restrict the president.

Obama could override any resolution of disapproval, and it would take a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress to override him.

According to a Senate Democratic aide, Reid also increased the total level of spending cuts from $2.2 trillion to $2.4 trillion, in part by using the January baseline -- a budget maneuver House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) used on a previous version of his debt-limit plan. The January budget baseline does not count cuts Congress implemented in legislation passed this spring to avert a government shutdown.

So far Reid has had trouble attracting Republicans to his bill. Moderate Republican Sen. Scott Brown (Mass.) said he would vote for it, but otherwise it has received scant bipartisan support.

Reid filed a motion on Friday evening to end a GOP filibuster of his plan, setting up a vote for early Sunday morning. Reid would need 60 votes and support from at least seven Republicans to advance his proposal.

Reid accused McConnell of filibustering at the "worst possible time" by not allowing a simple majority vote, while McConnell said Republicans would support an immediate vote with a 60-vote threshold. Read on...

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Even though she admits that the now defunct deficit commission acknowledged that "reforming" Social Security didn't have anything to do with taking care of our country's debt, CNN's Candy Crowley does her best job of carrying water for its former commissioners Simpson and Bowles. How pitiful is it when even a deficit hawk like Kent Conrad is sounding like the rational one here?

That commission went nowhere but the media continually pretends it reached the required consensus for their recommendations to be voted on. It didn't. And of course when talking about "reforming" Social Security, you know that's code for either raising the retirement age or means testing it, which turns it into a welfare program. Americans shouldn't be expected to work until they're dead before they can go on and retire.

They need to raise the income cap or for that matter get rid of it. How early could they afford to allow Americans to retire if they lowered the percentage for everyone, and took the cap off completely? I'm tired of hearing them pretend that we can't afford to take care of our senior citizens and that they think all of us should be working until we're on the job in walkers because our politicians refuse to ask those that can afford it to pay more in taxes. People who do physical labor for a living cannot be expected work until they're 70 years old and should not be expected to just because some of those that don't are living longer.

CROWLEY: But now we find that even though the debt commission which you signed onto said, OK, and we are going to deal with Social Security and everyone says, oh, that's not part of the debt, that's not what's causing all of this. OK, that having been said, the debt commission said, deal with Social Security at the same time. Do you still believe that? Because the White House doesn't seem to believe it and you have got some fairly powerful Democrats that don't. Do you?

CONRAD: Look, I signed on to the fiscal commission report that reduced the debt $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Four trillion, trillion with a T. Not talking $100 billion, $4 trillion. That's what's needed.

But we did separate Social Security. We didn't use any of the savings from Social Security for deficit reduction.

CROWLEY: Should you reform Social Security as a part of this overall negotiation that you want to do for a 10-year plan?

CONRAD: Certainly Social Security needs to be reformed. I personally think it's best to separate the two, as we did in the commission. In the commission, we used the savings on Social Security to extend the solvency of Social Security, not for deficit reduction.

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Oh goodie. This is the type of bipartisanship we're going to get to look forward to after the new year. ConservaDems and Republicans both agreeing that more pain needs to be inflicted on the working class. On Fox News Sunday, both Sen. Kent Conrad and Rep. Jeb Hensarling agree that President Obama's Catfood Commission's co-chairs didn't go far enough with their recommendations.

Of course they disagreed on what the recommendations even were or what specifically each of them would do differently. Neither of these two explained how those recommendations or their suggestions here are supposed to get Americans back to work. We've been cutting the tax rates for businesses for decades now and it's created jobs alright, in India and China. Someone want to explain to me how simplifying the tax code is going to stop outsourcing? I'd like to have that "adult conversation" Mr. Hensarling.

WALLACE: Senator Conrad, let me start with you. You voted for the deficit commission plan which would cut $4 trillion by the year 2020 from the deficit. It didn't pass. But you are the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. How much of this do you intend to put in your plan this next year? And what do you think the president is going to do?

CONRAD: What I think is really necessary now is that there be a summit that involves the president. You know, when Judd Gregg and I first proposed this notion of a commission three years ago, we designed it so the president's people were at the table. The secretary of the treasury was the chairman of the commission. The head of OMB was one of the 18.

When we didn't get sufficient votes in the Senate to advance that proposal, the president, by executive order, created this commission but did not include his representatives.

I think if we're going to reach conclusion, we've got to have the leaders of the House and the Senate, Republican and Democrat, and the president or his representatives at the table. And I think that's the next logical step.

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The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, who has already shown she'd rather bash unions than get her facts straight was at it again on during the panel segment on ABC's This Week. Marcus described anyone who is opposed to the report issued by the Catfood Commission's co-chairs as "behaving incredibly childishly" and thinks we should be listening to the adult in the room, Mr.-We-Need-Some-Shock-Therapy Kent Conrad.

Thankfully Paul Krugman was there for some push back but he was outnumbered by the wingnuts on the panel three to one.

AMANPOUR: The deficit commission, we had two members just -- just -- just earlier. You've written very, very strongly about a lot of the proposals, among other things, saying this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans.

KRUGMAN: Yes. I think the most important thing to understand is that the commission did not do its job. It has a bunch of ideas for reducing the deficit, some good, some really bad, some of them not ideas about reducing the deficit at all.

But, you know, anybody, it's easy to come up with ideas. I can come up with ideas for reducing the deficit while padding my tummy and rubbing my head, you know?

AMANPOUR: What should they have done?

KRUGMAN: What they -- what they were supposed to do was produce something that was good enough to have an up-and-down vote, something that a lot of people could sign on to, and they did not do that.

In particular, now, leaving aside the distributional stuff -- which is awful -- the core of the deficit problem, everybody who's serious knows the core is health care costs, and you have to reduce health care costs, not reduce them, but reduce the rate of growth. The way you have to do that is by deciding what you're going to be willing to pay for.

They completely wimped out on that. They simply assumed they were going to reduce the rate of health care cost growth. And they said, how are we going to do that? By monitoring and taking additional measures as necessary.

So the report was completely empty on the only thing that really matters and then had a whole bunch of things which involved large tax cuts for the top bracket. What on Earth is that doing in there?

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I'm no expert on this but I think Politico is misreading this one. Conrad: Reconciliation can't be used for comprehensive reform:

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) threw cold water on the idea of using the reconciliation process Sunday during an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"Reconciliation cannot be used to pass comprehensive health care reform," said Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. "The major package would not be done through reconciliation."

Asked by CBS host Bob Schieffer to elaborate, given that the White House suggested earlier Sunday that they could pass the main bill with a simple majority of 51 votes, Conrad said that reconciliation was not, in fact, an option.

"I am the chairman of the committee in the Senate, and I think I understand how reconciliation works and can't work," he said, arguing that the so-called Byrd Rule would prevent the use of reconciliation for the main health care bill. "The only possible role I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package."

Conrad said only "side car" issues could be affected through the reconciliation process.

Well, yeah. What part of what's been going on already does the staff at The Politico not understand? As Conrad tries to explain here, no, the health care bill cannot be passed with reconciliation. It already passed the Senate. The House would have to pass the Senate bill and then there can be some fixes done with reconciliation. Now whether they have the votes or not in the House with the Stupak bunch mucking up the works is another matter.

I'm no fan of Conrad but it looks to me that all he was trying to do here was beat back the Republican talking points that the health care bill is going to be as they keep calling it "jammed down the throats" of the American public with a reconciliation budget vote. Since when is getting sixty votes for something that they already passed after months of debate and hearings "jamming something through"? That's just utterly ridiculous. A lot of us including myself might not like what they passed, but they did pass the Senate bill with 60 votes. I think Conrad was just stating the obvious here. I also think The Politico is trying to twist this into something it's not but coming from that Drudge gossip rag, I'm not surprised.

Transcript via Nexis Lexis below the fold.

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Sen. Arlen Specter told Fox News' Chris Wallace that the Republican Party was the party of "no, no, no" when it comes to passing meaningful health care reform. While Specter believes the public option is "gaining momentum" within the Democratic Party, the GOP is the "party of obstructionism," said Specter.

UPDATE: Joe Sestak and Ned Lamont will be on C&L live chatting with us tomorrow, Monday Oct. 19th at 3pm PST/6pm EST so don't miss it.

From The Colbert Report:

Senator Max Baucus will pay for your medical bills from the $3.2 million he's received from the health care industry.

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Keith Olbermann talks to Sen. Jay Rockefeller about the foot dragging by the Republicans during the amendment process on the health care bill. Rockfeller still intends to try to have a public option included in the final bill. When Keith said it didn't appear that they have the votes to get it passed, Rockeller said "nothing is impossible, and that particularly includes the public option".

From TPM: Schumer And Rockefeller: We Will Get Public Option:

I just got off a conference call with Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV). They are confident -- very confident -- that health care reform will include a public option.

"The health care bill that is signed into law by the President will have a good, strong, robust public option," Schumer said.

How that will happen remains an open question. But the Senators assured reporters on the call that we're all going to get a taste of their passion and persuasiveness on this issue at the ongoing Senate Finance Committee hearings on Friday.

"I think it's a great idea," Rockefeller said of the public option. "Chuck Schumer thinks it's a great idea. And we're going to be all over it tomorrow."

Schumer said there will be a "full-blown debate" and that "even though the public option might be the underdog in the Senate Finance Committee, don't count it out."

"Tomorrow is the opening day in our big fight," he said.

Reporters tried to press on how, exactly, a public option would make its way out of the Senate Finance Committee, let alone make it to the President's desk. Will a public option amendment be tacked onto the Baucus bill? Will it be added on the Senate floor? How many votes do the Democrats have on a public health insurance option? Will they try to pass it through a 51-Senator reconciliation vote?

Rockefeller responded to TPM's question by saying "I think we have a good shot of getting it out of the Finance Committee."

He continued: "Don't rule it out. Don't fall victim to this feeling that it's not going to happen."

Chuck Schumer appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show and added this:

Schumer: Well tomorrow is really the first day of the fight. It won't be the last. We are going to offer Sen. Rockefeller and myself, two public option amendments and have the Finance Committee vote. Your viewers should know that this is the beginning of the fight because the Finance Committee is more conservative than the Senate as a whole. The Finance Democrats tend to come from rural and redder states. We'll then move to the floor of the Senate where the public option has a better chance than in the Finance Committee and then we'll move to Conference Committee with the House where it has a better chance still because the House has been very strong.

And my prediction is that at the end of the day we will have some form of public option, and a good form of public option in the final bill. Tomorrow's fight to be honest with you is uphill given the membership of the Finance Committee but we want to start the debate because the more the public hears what the public option really is the more they like it.

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Sen. Kent Conrad told Fox News' Chris Wallace that there are not enough votes in the Senate to pass a public option for health insurance. "The fact of the matter is there are not the votes in the United States Senate for a public option. There never have been," said Conrad.

Conrad is one of six Senators attempting to negotiate a bipartisan health care bill.