The press is reporting that Democrat Martha Coakley has called to concede to Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election. The AP has called the race for Brown, who takes over the Senate seat that “had been held for more than half a century by Edward M. Kennedy or his brother, John F. Kennedy.” The Republican will finish Kennedy’s unexpired term, facing re-election in 2012.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the right-wing lobbying giant, is celebrating its power to “influence” the race between Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown to fill the seat of the late Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy. In a blog post, the Chamber promoted the television ads it ran to portray Scott Brown as a friend of business for supporting the continuation and extension of Bush-era tax cuts. However, the Chamber also discussed its real priority of killing health care reform, saying Brown’s election would “allow Republicans to block legislation, including health care reform opposed by the Chamber.” This barrage of conservative corporate cash is the beginning of a $100-million-dollar campaign to block reform:

The Chamber’s efforts in support of Brown’s Senate bid is a preview of what will be a massive effort to support pro-business candidates in November’s congressional midterm elections. In his annual State of American Business speech on January 12, Chamber President and CEO Tom Donohue promised the “largest, most aggressive voter education and issue advocacy effort in our nearly hundred-year history.”

“A Brown win in today’s special election,” the Chamber says, “could pay immediate dividends by throwing into question the future of health care reform legislation pending in Congress.” A large part of Chamber’s efforts have been underwritten by nation’s biggest health insurers, which were “quietly pumping big money into third-party television ads aimed at killing or significantly modifying the major health reform bills moving through Congress.” The funds were solicited by America’s Health Insurance Plans — the lobbying arm of the insurance industry — and funneled to the Chamber.

On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months to the roughly 100,000 Haitians living illegally in the United States. The announcement was made after lawmakers from both parties called to grant the status that is available to a small number of federally-designated countries suffering armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances.

But not every lawmaker is satisfied with the decision. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) called the measure “amnesty” last week, saying “illegal immigrants from Haiti have no reason to fear deportation, but if they are deported, Haiti is in great need of relief workers, and many of them could be a big help to their fellow Haitians.” On the Fred Thompson show yesterday, King appeared to walk back his deportation comments while still rejecting Temporary Protective Status:

KING: Well, the first thing that happened was we hadn’t even gotten through the after shocks and people were still crying out from under the rubble and the open borders amnesty crowd jumped on that and used the Rahm Emanuel axiom, which is never let a crisis go to waste. And it began to call for Temporary Protective Status for the illegal Haitians that are in the United States, which about thirty, thirty thousand of them have been processed for deportation but not sent. And maybe there’s another hundred thousand of them here. And my objection to that is that, first, the Department of Homeland Security suspend the deportations to Haiti. That is the proper thing. We can’t be sending people back into a chaotic atmosphere. By the same token, we don’t need to be knee jerking a decision that grants amnesty to people that have contempt for American laws. So, I say take a deep breath on that. Don’t deport them. But don’t give them Temporary Protective Status because those who are here illegally from Haiti if they get TPR, it’s almost an automatic green card, which is a path to citizenship. We shouldn’t award people who broke American laws because there’s a disaster in Haiti.

Listen here:

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) attacked the extension of TPS yesterday as well, telling right-wing radio talker Laura Ingraham that it “has nothing to do with trying to help the people of Haiti during this tragedy. It looked like a convenient way to be compassionate.” Listen here:

As the Wonk Room’s Andrea Nill pointed out last week, “Allowing undocumented Haitians who are already living in the U.S. to legally work would help them earn the honest wages they need to send back money to their families and get their country back on its feet.” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) wrote on CNN last week that “it makes no sense to tell Haitians already here that they can stay in the U.S. in the wake of the earthquake, but cannot legally support themselves.”

After Democrats agreed to drop the public option and the Medicare buy-in provision from the Senate health care bill in December, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) took to the Senate floor to “declare” his support for the legislation. “The fact is,” Lieberman explained, “31 million more Americans will be able to have health insurance as a result of this legislation.” “That is a giant step forward for our society.” Lieberman praised the “insurance market reforms in this bill” and emphasized his desire to “support” the final conference report.

But today, during an appearance on Fox New’s Your World with Neil Cavuto, Lieberman refused to defend this “giant step forward for our society.” Without explicitly criticizing the Senate legislation, Lieberman said that the close election polls in Massachusetts demonstrated that Americans are “skeptical about this health care bill” and “unhappy about what’s happening in Washington”:

I think we’re at a point where there’s not a single Republican who really will vote for this bill as it is now or as it was moving to be in the conference committee. So this is going to be a loud message from Massachusetts and whether it’s right or wrong, I was impressed again by one of the national polls I saw yesterday that said two things. One is, opposition to the health care reform is very large among independents, unregistered with the party voters. And you know, Massachusetts is thought of as a blue state, it generally does vote Democratic but almost 50 percent of the voters there are unaffiliated so they got the liberty to move back and forth and they’re moving obviously now.

Watch it:

Lieberman’s effort to align with “independents” and distance himself from “what’s happening in Washington” is highly disingenuous. After all, the Senator ignored the wishes of his constituents — who had approved a statewide public health insurance system with a public option in 2009 — and vowed to filibuster any reform bill that included a public plan or a Medicare buy-in for younger Americans. His refusal to compromise with Democrats stripped the Senate bill of its most popular provisions.

Today, Lieberman is paying the price for orchestrating much of “what’s happening in Washington.” According to a recent survey from Public Policy Polling, Lieberman has alienated Democrats, Republicans and independents and his approval rating stands at just 25 percent. Fifty-nine percent of Connecticut independents and 55 percent of Republicans oppose the senator. During his interview with Cavuto, Lieberman did not dismiss the possibility of switching parties if the GOP takes control of Congress after the midterm elections.