Carjacked joins a hefty body of literature critiquing our automotive transportation system, including my own work Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, released in 2000. Do we need another critique of car culture? My answer is a resounding yes. While such books all tell us about the problems cars cause and about better, greener, more economical and socially just approaches to transportation, what they say gets swamped by the ongoing tsunami of marketing messages that coax us to embrace automobiles. As the authors of Carjacked write, this relentless marketing leads us to “take the car for granted as a social good, which renders it nearly invisible as the source of a range of problems.”

The House Rules Committee released a nine-page “manager’s amendment” incorporating a series of changes to the reconciliation text that came out earlier this week. It looks mainly technical in nature, and my Congress-speak isn’t perfect, so I’m delving into this a bit more and will report back anything worth reporting.

I didn’t think this was going to be carried live, but Nancy Pelosi is introducing the President right now on C-SPAN. I’ll update. …Harry Reid showed up. I assume he’ll be passing around the Senate letter which apparently has over 50 firm commitments for passing the reconciliation sidecar. Reid: “I have a signed agreement to [...]

A major development: Chris Carney (D-PA) will vote yes on the health care bill. Carney was sort of part of the Stupak bloc, but wasn’t on the list of Democrats who co-sponsored Bart Stupak’s ultimately failed amendment. Carney was present at a meeting between Speaker Pelosi and three anti-choice Democrats (Carney, Kathy Dahlkemper and Steve [...]

A couple updates on the whip count: • Dennis Cardoza seemed to say in the House Rules Committee that he would oppose the effort to “deem and pass” the bill with one vote: Cardoza, a previously undecided lawmaker who’d voted to pass Democrats’ healthcare bill in November, said he would vote against the process his [...]

The White House is floating the idea to journalists that they will issue an executive order to “clarify” the government’s position on the use of federal funds and abortion.

For a generation, the name at the top of the list of political heroes of the anti-abortion movement has been Henry Hyde. Bart Stupak wants to put his name at the top of that list for the next generation, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops is trying their best to make that happen. For the USCCB and for Stupak, the world is a black and white place, and those in authority tell those lower down the totem pole which is which.

God help us.

According to a source involved in the health care negotiations in Congress, Henry Waxman is telling Democratic caucus members that Bart Stupak’s deal with Nancy Pelosi is dead. Stupak had called a press conference to announce the deal at 11am this morning, but has now canceled it.

(see the update)

OK, so NRO has not always been right (understatement of the year), but they claim that Stupak told their sources that he’s “finished with Pelosi” and the enrollment corrections bill is dead. So I’ve taken a second look at the numbers to reflect what we know, and the challenge facing the Democratic leadership.

With all deference to D-Day’s whip count posts, I think Matt Yglesias has the underlying dynamic of the upcoming House vote on the healthcare reform bill right: This is one of these situations where now that the vote has been called, the votes will be there to pass the thing. . . . Now that [...]