"I can't see a way in which I can vote for cloture on any bill that contained a creation of a government-operated and run insurance company," the Connecticut senator said. "It's just asking for trouble."

What kind of trouble? This kind:

"Well all the history we have of health entitlement programs, including the two big ones that I dearly support, Medicare and Medicaid, is that they end up costing more than we're prepared to pay, and they add to the debt, and then they add to the burden on taxpayers."

Hmm. Where have we heard that argument before?

So does this kill the opt-out compromise?

Harry Reid doesn't think so, especially if he can get Olympia Snowe, a proper lady person who is "frightened" of the public option, back to the table.

[Pic: The Washington Post]

There will most likely be a public option in the Senate bill. Harry Reid, who will decide what the bill finally looks like, is leaning toward an "opt-out" public option, so that no one in Mississippi is forced to accept government health care to treat their rickets. Olympia Snowe, who will not vote for the health care bill no matter what she tells you but who might vote to break a hypothetical filibuster, prefers a "trigger" public option. "Triggers" are what Congress does when it wants to avoid creating programs or implementing policies without actually officially voting against them. Max Baucus is still being a dick for the hell of it.

Harry Reid thinks he has enough votes to pass a bill with a strong, opt-out public option, and he is like one or two solid votes away from a cloture vote on said bill.

The White House is skeptical of his vote-counting, though, and in a meeting late last week, they pushed him to keep trying to get Olympia Snowe on-board.

This upset Reid, because he thinks the White House should just get his back and announce that they support the thing he wants to do. But the White House doesn't want to openly support anything until passage looks like a sure thing. They are kinda big political babies about that kinda stuff, as Jon Corzine could tell you.

But it was not Obama "pushing" for a stupid trigger compromise so much as it was the White House wanting to make sure Harry Reid really knows what he's doing, because honestly that is always an open question with that guy.

As the Times says:

In pushing to include a government-run health insurance plan in the health care bill, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, is taking a calculated gamble that the 60 members of his caucus could support the plan if it included a way for states to opt out.

Ok. But wait. This is wrong? In including it in the legislation, Reid is just betting that 60 people won't vote to strip it out.

See the options were a) don't include a public option and hope it is added or b) include a public option and hope it isn't removed. If you include it in the bill, it takes 60 senators to strip it out. If you don't include it, it takes 60 to put it in. Reid is heavily tipping the scales in favor of a public option here, presumably because the fact that it's always polled well is news now for some reason and because of White House influence in those closed-door meetings that we talked about before.

So now if you are a "moderate" Senator who was all "I dunno about this public option thing I mean I might be a US Senator but I know the government wants to kill grandma 100% of the time" you are in a tough spot. Your options will be a) vote for a bill with a public option, b) cast a symbolic vote against a bill with a public option but don't do anything procedural to prevent it from passing, of c) kill the whole damn thing.

Snowe claimed she will filibuster(!), but as usual she is just playing games to get people to pay attention to her.

But the House is probably going to pass a strong, Medicare-plus-5% public option by mid-November, so if Centrist Senators want to throw their little fits until they get their way, they will most likely be forcing a compromise that looks a bit more liberal than the Senate Finance Committee bill. Like, the compromise might be the state opt-out provision, so that no one in Mississippi is forced to accept affordable health care, because they would rather go bankrupt and die, thank you.

Easily caricatured Nevada Sen. Harry Reid is in a "flap" because he got mad at the hometown Las Vegas Review Journal and then he went to some luncheon and saw the paper's advertising director—"a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers"—and Harry Reid told the guy he hopes his paper goes out of business because it totally sucks, and also does not like Harry Reid. This prompted an indignant editorial, which is about the extent of the "flap" at this point, due to the rapidly waning influence of newspapers. "Flaps" aren't what they used to be.


Some joker sent a fake bomb to the Naples Daily News, but when bomb techs finally opened it all it did was play "Call Me" by Blondie. That's kind of a good one, let's get real.


Cami McCormick, a CBS News correspondent, was injured by an IED while on assignment with a US Army unit in Afghanistan. She's now being treated, but no specifics are available on her condition. Get well soon Cami.


Magazine circulation news! Of the bad sort. Overall newsstand sales were down about 12% in the first half. And women's magazines did the worst—Ladies Home Journal, for example, fell 46%. No extra pennies in the supermarket checkout line, MYSTERY SOLVED.

Majority leader Harry Reid suddenly became Lindsay Graham talking about John McCain:

"The president didn't get one standing ovation, but several of them," Reid said. "He was really - kind of reminded me of the days when I was an athlete and the coach was giving you a pep talk before the game. You came out of that pep talk that the coach gave you ready to take on the world. We're ready to take on the world."

Max "Useless Fuckhead" Baucus was positively effusive!

"It was a, really, a wonderful meeting, led by a terrific man, our president, Barack Obama," Baucus said. "And one of the Senators was saying to me as we walked out, ‘You know, it's just so wonderful to hear him speak,'" Baucus continued. "You know, it's like a symphony. It's like just a great meal. He is so good. He just has it together. He has all the right reasons."

Wow. They sound like they want to kiss him, right? "It's like a symphony." All he was doing was asking you to get the fucking health care bill out of your fucking committee, Max. He was not reading poetry.

Anyway Max promises that some day, perhaps "the end of September," he will give up on carving out a "bipartisan compromise," which is his word for "useless tweaking of the status quo that is acceptable to some of the most conservative Senators, none of whom will actually vote for it anyway."

See, back in May, the Senate voted 90-6 against paying to close the illegal overseas prison, because Obama planned to transfer some of the prisoners to the US. As the Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid said, at the time:

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that none of Guantánamo's detainees should be transferred to the US to stand trial or serve time in prison. "We don't want them around," he said. "I can't make it any more clear … We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States."

This utter refusal by the President's own party to do something mildly politically difficult proved a bit of a setback for the Gitmo task force! Congress refuses to allow these people to come to the US, and so other countries may be a little reluctant to take them off our hands. It is hard to come up with a good plan to close the site now, right?

Oh, boo hoo, Democrats in congress say now, our own cowardice ruined your little task force?

House and Senate Democrats on Tuesday had a message for the White House regarding President Barack Obama's insistence on closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: No plan for the detainees? No money.

"They will have no money available until we get a plan. It's that simple," House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense Chairman John Murtha (D-Pa.) said. "It's my bill."

Yes, well, wanting a plan before you pay the money is understandable, but when you all had a competition to see who could play into bullshit Republican fearmongering the hardest last spring and proved that any Guantanamo-closing plan that involves closing Guantanamo would end up causing all of you to wet your pants, it is hard for us to take you at your word, here, Congress.

Roll Call reports that Reid told Max Baucus to stop "chasing Republican votes on a massive health care reform bill," because bipartisanship is not in and of itself a goal, because Republicans and Democrats have fundamentally incompatible philosophies of government, and because their policy aims are completely at odds. And the thing is, the Democrats are actually in charge!

According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus that several in the Conference had serious concerns and that it wasn't worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.

But, you know, he is still dealing with all these "moderate" Democrats, who are like three guys, and the votes of those three guys are so important, even though they have no coherent agenda beyond "taking something liberal and making it less liberal." And if Reid actually had balls, instead of just the illusion of balls that this anonymously sourced story suggests, he would just demand that his entire caucus vote for cloture and then allow Senators to "vote their conscience" on the HELP bill as it currently stands.

(Meanwhile Rahm Emanuel either went off message or remained on message and either way the White House is still following their philosophy of just letting Congress do things by themselves so that at the very least something gets passed.)

Because the leader of the Democrats is still Mr. Harry Reid, a useless, spineless Democrat who does not actually care about passing liberal legislation, at all. And the most powerful Democrats in the Senate are, of course, the "centrists" who refuse to support any bill until whatever the Republicans want done to it is done to it (that is centrism!). And two Senators are near-death and hence not able to vote for anything.

Here is Harry Reid's press secretary:

"While this is, of course, good news to the people of Minnesota, President Obama, and the Senate Democratic, Franken's mere presence alone will not mean that the Democrats will be able to jam through our agenda, or make it any less critical for Democrats and Republicans to work together."

Well, it is not actually critical, anymore, to get Republicans to "work together" with Democrats. It is actually only critical for Majority Leader Harry Reid to get Democrats to actually vote with Democrats.

But Bernie Sanders has a crazy idea: a straight up-and-down majority rules vote on health care legislation! Achieving this, of course, requires a 60-vote supermajority for cloture, which would be a de facto vote for the health care legislation. Also that would be socialism.

It might happen! Still, it is not actually worth it, getting too excited about Al Franken in the Senate. Unless you are Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who are just pissing themselves with joy, because they have a new and exciting boogeyman they can hate with great intensity for six years.

[Photo: Getty]

The ad is about Guantanamo Bay, and how Barack Obama is trying to close it, but Senate Democrats are all assholes who are now trying to block that. It is a legitimate point, that Senate Democrats are assholes, but how this helps the Republican party, to point out that all the major debates about governance in this country are happening on an intra-party basis completely excluding the so-called opposition, is unknown.

Also what the hell does this have to do with the Daisy ad?? They cut out the damn mushroom cloud so there is literally no message here beyond "a little girl can't decide something, and Harry Reid is a dick." But, you know, we probably shouldn't pay any attention to web ads, because they are only designed to be written about, not to be watched by humans.

Meanwhile, in yet more "Harry Reid is a dick" news, the Washington Post reports the startling news that hey there are already terrorists being held in prison in the US, alongside all the murderers in the supermax prisons. HARRY REID WILL NOT ALLOW CHARLIE MANSON TO LIVE AMONG US.

It is curious that the Post couldn't land a single Republican to complain about Emanuel and his heavy-handed tactics. And it may actually undermine the story's point somewhat—if the GOP is too scared to offer routine criticism of the president's right-hand man for a newspaper profile, then clearly his vengeful habits haven't been completely exorcised. He's just become more discreet. And he's probably thrilled to have the Post calling him a namby-pamby valet. It's an information operation! The guy is that good.

But as the Post puts it, "Rahmbo" has taken a more conciliatory tack than many expected in corralling lawmakers to advance the Obama agenda. He was supposed to be a shiv-wielding maniac, but the Post takes a look at how he's actually been going about his job and found a polite, thoughtful, accommodating young man.

Republicans Peter King and Olympia Snowe stepped forward to sing Emanuel's praises—"He always takes my calls," Snowe said—and the Post couldn't find a single GOPer to badmouth him. The only critical quote is from Newt Gingrich, from the Today show last month, comparing Emanuel to H.R. Haldeman.

He's taken to sending batches of cookies to lawmakers to get them through late-night legislative sessions, and even lets a pussy like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid push him around:

During a recent Senate debate, Reid asked Emanuel to lean on three Democratic holdouts. When Emanuel reported back with a single convert, Reid chastised him that "batting .333 isn't good enough for the major leagues" of Congress. Emanuel responded with a string of expletives but tried again and produced a second vote.

The old Rahm would have pushed Reid's eyeballs out with his thumbs for saying something like that.

The deal provides $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, for example, including money that could benefit a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.

Money for rail transit: yay! Money to build a 300-mph monorail from Vegas to Disneyland: fuck you! Fuck you, Harry Reid, and fuck you, Mickey Mouse.

What's the MTA's budget shortfall looking like right now? They're cutting service and raising fares and "The Second Avenue Subway" will never, ever happen, and you're shipping old suckers from Main Street, U.S.A. to the slots in two hours.

The "high-speed" train from Boston to New York to DC run at about 45-mph half the trip and costs more than a fucking plane ticket and you are building a 300-mile shuttle bus from the Criss Angel show at the Luxor to your car in the Donald Duck lot.

Will Joe the Biden please visit Harry Reid and punch him in his face for us? Or at least talk at him until he gives up?

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan—whose daughter Lisa is the Illinois Attorney General, a political rival of Blago, and a possible Senate candidate herself—called on lawmakers to go back to Springfield next Wednesday for a rushed impeachment vote (that may take until January 13).

Following that simple majority vote (predicated on US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald's playing of additional recorded evidence to a House investigative committee next Tuesday), the impeachment heads to the Senate where they'll "rush" a trial. Then, pending a successful two-thirds majority vote, Blago will be impeached, finally. This will take a year.

Meanwhile Blago's appointee for Obama's vacant Senate seat, Roland Burris, is on a collision course with wackiness! Where "wackiness" means "a Senate that will refuse to seat him." The 111th Congress begins its session on January 6, and they have no real legal ability to just not seat a legally appointed Senator, so sources say Majority Leader Harry Reid will just stall for a couple months, if necessary. Of course their job is easier if either Blago or Burris or both resign, which they won't.

The Senate also hopes Illinois' Lt. Governor will appoint a candidate of his own, or something, so they can pick which one they'll seat, whenever they get around to seating anyone.

So this should all be over by either mid-January or maybe March or maybe in 2010.

(Meanwhile Rahm Emanuel's seat is still open and no one seems to care!)