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:

Blanche Lincoln is addressing the Senate right now. She's touting the Senate Finance Committee bill - which she voted for, by the way. She wants the final bill to be closer to the "common-sense, deficit-reducing bill" in the Senate Finance Committee, and that she will work hard to do that. That seems to tip that she'll vote to proceed debate, since otherwise, could you fix the bill at all? We'll know in a moment.

Eve Gittelson is in Little Rock covering the event today.

I think the entire progressive blogosphere can get behind the Senate Majority Leader on this one: "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Saturday morning criticized a Washington Post columnist who called Democratic healthcare bills 'budget-busters.'"

It is important to remember that this is not the debate about the Senate health care bill, the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act." This is a debate about whether to allow the bill to come to the floor where it can be debated and amended. The Republicans are threatening to use the Senate's unlimited debate clause to prevent the bill from coming to the floor where it then can be debated. They are threatening to never stop debating (this is what a filibuster technically is) the vote on the motion to proceed. This is how the Republicans plan to use their right of unlimited debate to actually stop any debate on health care reform. When trying to explain how the Senate has become a broken, undemocratic, unconstitutional perversion of its original self, I recommend using this as an example.