The Senate’s ConservaDems don’t appear to have the necessary 60 votes to change or remove the public option from the Health Care Reform bill. So why was the opt out provision introduced?

Liveblog of the U.S. Senate’s vote on cloture on the Health Care Reform bill. A vote for cloture will permit debate of the bill to proceed after the coming holiday break.

The Republican Senate leadership has been putting enormous pressure on Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln to vote “no” on the motion to proceed. She led everyone to believe she might, until she said she wouldn’t.

I’ll be doing a little bit of liveblogging the Senate health care debate today leading up to the cloture vote at around 8 pm EST.

Mary Landrieu isn’t satisfied with her hundred million dollar bribe just to proceed to debate in the Senate. She now says that triggers are inevitable.

With Green Metropolis, New Yorker staff writer David Owen roughs up the American environmental movement’s most sacred cows (including the grass-fed ones). The book expands on a 2004 article Owen wrote for the New Yorker, called “Green Manhattan,” and in the longer work New York City remains his frame of reference. Eco-friendly suburbanites and small-town residents are only kidding themselves, he argues, as long as they live in sparsely settled, spaciously appointed, auto-dependent communities. If they really want to reduce their carbon footprint in any significant way, they should live in densely-settled, pedestrian-friendly, public-transit-oriented cities like New York.

It looks like Harry Reid is getting ready to sell out the labor unions, the progressive community, the Democratic base, and the majority of the American people. The vast majority of Americans want a public option as part of health care reform. Reid fully has it with in his powers to get a health care bill passed with a public option. He could use reconciliation to pass a bill with a simple majority. He could even use the “nuclear option” to eliminated the silly filibuster, like Bill Frist threatened to do only a few years ago.

Here you can see the horrible choices facing someone who came for the Little Rock health fair: do I see a doctor about the Stage-Three cancer diagnosis I got seven years ago that bankrupted me, or do I try to see a dentist about the immediate and agonizing pain from this abscessed tooth?

Arkansans who speak with our Eve at the Little Rock health fair today are embarrassed that they can’t afford to go to the dentist or the doctor. They seem almost ashamed that they don’t have the finances to pay for health insurance.

Well she talked a good game, but in the end, Blanche Lincoln blinked. She didn’t take me up on my dare to filibuster health care. She’ll get another when the cloture vote on the final bill comes up, but for now, she says she’ll allow debate to proceed.

But I get the feeling she didn’t like our ad: