The jockeying continues among members of the Senate Finance Committee to get enough votes to pass a health care reform bill.

The Hill reports [1] that committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus is optimistic that an assessment of the cost of the bill by the Congressional Budget Office will not force the committee to rework its provisions.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal [2] writes that the idea of a state-based public option plan, rather than a national federally based plan, is being increasingly courted by some moderate Democrats:

A new proposal by Sen. Tom Carper would spell out how to boost competition in the private market by enacting government-run plans at the state level. States could act alone or in concert with others to gain more leverage in the marketplace, and would be bound by the same rules established for private companies using the national insurance exchange envisioned by the Senate Finance bill. Another option would entail states opening their workers' employee-benefit plans to the general public.

But one key Republican in the debate, Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, cast doubt on the Carper idea. She favors creating a federally run health plan as a fallback option that would come into force only if other changes to the system fail to expand coverage as expected. "A fallback can work and would work, in the event the private insurance industry failed to produce results," she said.

Time's Karen Tumulty [3] says that it's still not clear how Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will pilot the public option debate through the Senate floor deliberations.

Will he include the plan, as the HELP Committee bill did, inviting a certain effort to strike it out of the bill by amendment on the floor? Or will he offer a bill similar to the Finance Committee's, which does not contain the public option, and see an effort to add it on the floor? "Reid's not tipping his hand," says one of his aides.

A new Associated Press poll [4] suggests that the tide of public opinion on health care reform is swinging away from Republican critics.

The public is split 40-40 on supporting or opposing the health care legislation, the poll found. An even split is welcome news for Democrats, a sharp improvement from September, when 49 percent of Americans said they opposed the congressional proposals and just 34 percent supported them.

TPM blogger tmccarthy0 asks [5]: "What will we do about our current incarnation of Conservadems who are owned by the Insurance Industry?" She lists the Democrats who have gotten the biggest political contributions from the corporate players in the health care debate:

Max Baucus: Insurance Industry, $558,075; Pharmaceuticals, $507,313; Health Professionals, $504,641
Kent Conrad: Heath Professionals, $239,533; Insurance, $233,625
Ben Nelson: Insurance, $441,586; Health Professionals, $225,776
Blanche Lincoln: Health Professionals, $298,700; Pharmaceuticals, $153,304
Thomas R. Carper: Insurance: $238,680

I mean seriously, since at least two of these senators were instrumental in defeating health reform in the early 1990's, isn't it time they paid the price, shouldn't everyone know what they did, and what they are doing right now?

Afghan War Opposition Mobilizes, Adjusts

As President Obama seeks a middle ground [6] between the his military advisers and skeptics on Afghanistan, antiwar protesters today plan to make their voices heard. The Washington Post gets inside [7] one group's plans:

With public opinion polls showing a majority of Americans opposing the war, organizers wanted at least 1,000 people to march through downtown, risk arrest by creating a ruckus at the White House and draw President Obama across the manicured North Lawn to meet with them.

… It would also set the stage for 42 rallies and protests scheduled to take place Wednesday around the country. After decades of decline in the antiwar movement -- from throngs of half a million to fringe rallies to almost nothing at all -- the job of organizers in Washington was to generate momentum for a historic week.

The Christian Science Monitor [8], meanwhile finds that another antiwar group, Code Pink, is refining its approach after talking to ordinary Afghanis.

Code Pink, founded in 2002 to oppose the US invasion of Iraq, is one of the more high-profile women's antiwar groups being forced to rethink its position as Afghan women explain theirs: Without international troops, they say, armed groups could return with a vengeance - and that would leave women most vulnerable.

Though Afghans have their grievances against the international troops' presence, chief among them civilian casualties, many fear an abrupt departure would create a dangerous security vacuum to be filled by predatory and rapacious militias. Many women, primary victims of such groups in the past, are adamant that international troops stay until a sufficient number of local forces are trained and the rule of law established.

The WSJ says [9] that in The White House, the war debate "is becoming a battle of two books -- both suddenly popular among White House and Pentagon brain trusts."

The two draw decidedly different lessons from the Vietnam War. The first book describes a White House in 1965 being marched into an escalating war by a military viewing the conflict too narrowly to see the perils ahead. President Barack Obama recently finished the book, according to administration officials, and Vice President Joe Biden is reading it now.

The second describes a different administration, in 1972, when a U.S. military that has finally figured out how to counter the insurgency is rejected by political leaders who bow to popular opinion and end the fight.

The two books -- "Lessons in Disaster," on Mr. Obama's nightstand, and "A Better War" on the shelves of military gurus -- have become a framework for the debate over what will be one of the most important decisions of Mr. Obama's presidency.

On the war funding front, The Senate has voted [10] by an overwhelming margin for a defense appropriations bill that would give another $128 billion to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The $626 billion measure, passed 93-7, also would ban outright any transfer of accused enemy combatants from the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility into the United States. Current law permits transfer of detainees to face trial or go to priso

The underlying bill combines $128 billion for overseas military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan with $498 billion for the rest of the Defense Department's budget. An analysis by congressional researchers puts the tally for Afghanistan at about $300 billion and for Iraq at more than $700 billion since Sept. 11, 2001 -- totaling more than $1 trillion.

The bill must now be reconciled with a measure that passed the House this summer and will then be presented to Obama for his signature.