as a news peg, let me show you Loretta Sanchez’ tweet from the well of the House:

Looking forward to casting my vote on this historic health care bill! House is currently set to vote around 11pm EST.

I think a “No” vote after that statement would be, well, odd. So she’s a yes.

Here’s part three of the liveblog on the House of Representative’s health insurance reform vote (live on C-Span). With the announcement of a deal with Bart Stupak (D-MI) it seems very likely that the bill will pass.

Statement of NOW President Terry O’Neill: “President Obama Breaks Faith with Women”

Members of the pro-choice caucus are livid after the White House released the Executive Order on abortion to the media without showing it to them.

Bart Stupak finally had his press conference. He announced he has agreed to vote “yes” for the HCR bill after an executive order on abortion was agreed to with the White house.

Because of the ongoing debate on health care reform, FDL’s front page will look a little different today. Today’s book salon, featuring Charlie Stross’s The Trade of Queens: Book Six of the Merchant Princes, hosted by Paul Krugman is going on now and can be found here.

So, the obvious question: what am I, of all people, doing as host of this symposium? Shouldn’t I be writing about financial catastrophe or something?

The short answer is that Charlie Stross is one of my very favorite authors – one of the handful of living writers of whom I find myself wondering, “When’s his next book coming out? What’s he going to do this time?”

The long answer is that what drew me to science fiction, more than four decades ago – before I got into economics, and in fact part of the reason I went into economics – was a certain kind of possibility: the creation of fictional worlds, different from our own but not too different, as a way to play with ideas about who we are and where we’re going. And I do mean “play” – not being too serious, mixing ideas about society, economics, politics, and so on with derring-do and romance is crucial to keeping things light enough to tolerate.

And nobody does this better than Stross.

Based on the earlier schedule, the House appears to be taking two hours for every hour allotted to debate. We are at 4pm eastern, when they scheduled this to be completed at 3pm eastern.

All indications are that a deal has been reached, which would be consequential for passing the health care bill. “Eight or nine” Democrats, including Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), will announce the deal at a 4 p.m. press conference, according to an anti-abortion Democrat. “We’ve changed [our votes],” said Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio). Driehaus said he’s [...]

STATEMENT FROM COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR DAN PFEIFFER Today, the President announced that he will be issuing an executive order after the passage of the health insurance reform law that will reaffirm its consistency with longstanding restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion. While the legislation as written maintains current law, the executive order provides [...]

Bart Stupak has scheduled his third press conference in less than a day, presumably to announce the state of play on health care and the abortion language. The first two press events were cancelled, so that’s always a possibility here.