Harry Reid's office is telling people Reid and Lieberman have a "private understanding" regarding cloture on health care:

The unpredictable Democrat-turned-Independent last week publicly stated he would join Republicans in filibustering the Democratic legislation after Reid (D-Nev.) announced he had included a government-run health insurance plan in the bill.

But sources said Reid's staff is telling liberal interest groups that Lieberman (Conn.) has assured Reid he will vote with Democrats in the necessary procedural vote to end debate, perhaps with intentions to change the bill.

"At the end of the day Sen. Lieberman will vote to cut off debate," said Richard Kirsch, national campaign manager of Healthcare for America Now. "He'll do what he has to do. He's making a lot of noise."

Take it for what it's worth.

UPDATE: Lieberman's office: "Senator Lieberman's clear position is that he will vote for the motion to proceed to the health-care bill because he supports health-care reform that will control costs and insure people who don't have it now, but will oppose cloture on a final bill if it contains a public option."

A few midday links.

* In my previous election prediction thread I forgot to mention tomorrow's marriage equality vote in Maine, on which Adam Bink has an update at Open Left. I always think people will do the right thing on these marriage equality votes and I am always disappointed, so this year I'm expecting to lose but still hoping to be wrong.

* Looking past health care: can a climate bill actually pass the Senate? Steve Benen has more.

* The Climate Race: How Climate Change Is Already Affecting Us. Via Boing Boing. In the American Southeast:

* Average daily temperature about 2 degrees higher with the greatest increase in winter.
* Days below freezing (32 degrees) reduced to four to seven per year.
* Average fall precipitation 30% higher since 1901, with the exception of South Florida.
* Moderate to severe droughts in spring and summer have increased 12% and 14%, respectively.
* Destructive potential of hurricanes has increased since 1970, due to an increase in sea surface temperature.

* 23 Private College Presidents Made More Than $1 Million. I was a little surprised not to see Brodhead's name on the list, until I remembered how much money we pay Coach K.

* Elsewhere in North Carolina, a majority favors the public option.

Fifty-four percent of North Carolina residents surveyed by Elon University said they would support a public option. Forty-one percent said they would use a public option plan should one become available.

It's crucial to recognize here that the health care reform that is under discussion is far less ambitious than what the public would actually support; nothing close to 41% of the state will be eligible for the very limited version of the public option that is actually going to be voted on.

* How is televised science fiction doing in the ratings? What this list really shows, Dollhouse aside, is how bad TV SF is right now. Even the shows I do watch—FlashForward, Fringe—aren't exactly what I'd call good.

Nobody's talking about it,, but at least the ambitious senior senator from Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter, hasn't forgotten about reconciliation.

SPECTER: Well as I have said I would consider that as a last, last, last, resort. I think that the institutional safeguard of 60 votes is a very important one. … [M]oving away from that institutional 60 votes is something I think would be a last, last, last resort. You might have to fight fire with fire when there are so many filibusters. The number is now 81. And a lot of nominations are being blocked and action is being blocked. …

On the issue of fighting fire with fire, maybe so, but I think that we are not going to come to this. I think we can muster the 60 votes and not have to face the reconciliation.

Q: Senator if I have this correctly, as a last resort, you would not oppose using reconciliation…

SPECTER: As a last, last, last, resort I would consider it, yeah.

I guess I missed it, but apparently Reid called it an "option" at the big press conference on Monday as well. Glad to see it.

Bringing a gun to a gunfight: why the opt-out public option compromise is great politics, if not ideal policy.

A few other late-night links.

* Philip Roth has surrendered to television on behalf of the novel.

"I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range."

* Chris Ware in the New Yorker.

* If Harry Potter Was Made in the 1980s, and Starred David Bowie.

* 'Man who threw feces in courtroom draws 31-year sentence for robbery.' Live and learn.

* The Telegraph covers the laws of internet discourse.

7. Pommer’s Law
Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”

* Scientology convicted of fraud in France. See also.

* Will D.C. let J.J. Abrams have a crack at Superman? After the success of the Star Trek reboot this seems like an obvious move—and it would certainly be better than all their other attempts so far.

* Is your city recession-proof?

* Why your dryer sucks. More here.

* And Ezra Klein puts the politics behind the public option very well:

For the real liberals, the public option was already a compromise from single-payer. For the slightly less radical folks, the public option that's barred from partnering with Medicare to maximize the government's buying power was a compromise down from a Medicare-like insurance plan. For the folks even less radical than that, the public option that states can "opt out" of is a compromise from the straight public option. Access to the public option will be a political question settled at the state level. It is not a settled matter of national policy.

In many ways, this is a fundamentally conservative approach to a liberal policy experiment. It's only offered to individuals eligible for the insurance exchanges, which is a small minority of the population. The majority of Americans who rely on employer-based insurance would not be allowed to choose the exchanges. From there, it is only one of many options on the exchange, and only in states that choose to have it. In other words, it has been designed to preserve the status quo and be decided on the state level. Philosophically, these are major compromises liberals have made on this plan. They should get credit for that.

The big news yesterday was, of course, Joe Lieberman's threat to join the Republican filibuster on the health care bill, proving right my suspicion of everything that guy does. Never a popular figure in the progressive blogosphere, Lieberman is especially loathed today; see Steve Benen, Open Left, Steve Benen, Nate Silver, Steve Benen, Kos, and Steve Benen, for starters. I confess that Jonathan Chait's take is pretty close to my own:

He's not a Democrat and won't be running on the Democratic ticket in 2012. Moreover, my read on him is that he's furious with the party, resentful of President Obama (who beat his friend in 2008) and would relish a Democratic catastrophe.

Lieberman strikes me as a creature of spite with a long list of enemies, and I think he'd happily be the lone vote to scuttle the sixty-year dream of health care reform if he thought it would hurt Ned Lamont voters. I've never trusted him as a reliable vote and I question the wisdom of continually bending over backwards to keep him "happy" when it makes no apparent difference in his actions. The man spoke at the Republican National Convention, for heaven's sake. He's not on our side.

For what it's worth, Ezra Klein says it's probably a bluff, and I hope he's right.

Sadly, Lieberman's threats are emboldening the other conservative Democrats to make similar threats.

I sure hope reconciliation is still in the tank if Reid's miscalculated.

Credit to Harry Reid, a person to whom I rarely give credit: a public option (albeit with opt-out) will be in the final Senate bill. Schumer is happy. Dodd is happy. Rockerfeller is happy. Gibbs says Obama is happy. Josh Marshall is happy. Durbin says the progressive wing made it happen. And Max Baucus is on-board. In fact, Open Left's whip count suggests that Reid has sixty votes for cloture, with only Blanche Lincoln still publicly non-commital.

It's being reported today that Reid's bill is ready and is being sent to the CBO for budget impact. Here's the Wall Street Journal on its likely contours:

Details of the legislation could change, but its broad outlines are becoming clear. Employers with more than 50 workers wouldn't be required to provide health insurance, but they would face fines of up to $750 per employee if even part of their work force received a government subsidy to buy health insurance, this person said. A bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee had a lower fine of up to $400 per employee.

The bill to be brought to the Senate floor would create a new public health-insurance plan, but would give states the choice of opting out of participating in it, a proposal that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada backed last week.

Of course, in the kabuki dance that is the American legislative process, neither this bill nor the House bill will actually become law, but rather the House/Senate conference bill, which will be some sort of amalgamation between the two.

For more on this subject, Steve Benen has another post this morning concerning cloture, suggesting Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln are the holdouts. As far as I know Evan Bayh is still uncommitted as well. Stay tuned.

Friday!

* The ping-pong match in the press over the public option continues. Nobody can figure out whether or not Pelosi has the votes, whether or not Obama supports an Olympia-Snowe-style trigger, or just what will happen with the cloture vote in the Senate. Ezra Klein compares the likely House and Senate bills, which leads Matt Yglesias to suggest a best-of-both-worlds approach. Meanwhile a Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll shows that public support for the public option remains steady at around 60%, which would be important if the Senate were a properly representative body.

* Lots of buzz today about Neill Blomkamp's next film after District 9, described by SCI FI Wire as a balls-out sci-fi epic.

* 'A Mid-Atlantic Miracle': Keeping public university costs down in Maryland.

* A judge has ruled the war crimes case against Blackwater/Xe will go forward.

* 'Living on $500,000 a Year': Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns. John Scalzi compares Fitzgerald's income and lifestyle to a writer's today.

* Fox News CEO Roger Ailes for president? This would take "fair and balanced" to a whole new level.

* And your entirely random chart of the day: The Population of Rome Through History. Via Kottke.

News keeps rolling out about the public option today; ABC is reporting that a public option is likely to be in the final Senate bill (about which Max Baucus is said to be "apoplectic"), and Open Left's informal whip count has 58 votes for cloture. (Most Important People in the Country by this count: Mary Landrieu and Evan Bayh.)

Open Left also discusses reports that suggest Pelosi's "robust" version will pass the House. Genuine health care reform seems very close today.

UPDATE: Steve Benen has some thoughts on Mary Landrieu and her stated opposition to the public option. Of course the real question is not whether she'll vote for the bill but whether she'll vote for cloture—and call me a pie-in-the-sky optimist but I find it hard to imagine, when push comes to shove, that any member of the Democratic caucus would cast the lone vote to destroy health care reform by denying it a floor vote. (Landrieu or Bayh would basically have to switch parties if they did, and no one jumps onto a sinking ship.) Because he's a proud member of the notoriously independent Connecticut for Lieberman caucus, I've been much more worried about Lieberman's loyalty than anybody else's—so I'm glad to see he's already confirmed he'll vote for cloture.

UPDATE 2: Apparently Landrieu announced today that she won't support a Republican filibuster. If Open Left's count is right, that just leaves President Bayh.

By popular demand, Politics Thursday.

* Health care madness: Olympia Snowe says she won't vote for cloture if there's a public option in the bill, while Ben Nelson says he'll support an opt-out. (By my calculations this once again makes Joe Lieberman the Most Important Person in the country.) It seems clear we'll get some sort of health care reform, but its specific content is still really unpredictable. Fingers crossed.

* Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Daggetmentum has topped 20%, with Jon Corzine now slightly leading Chris Christie as a consequence.

* Nate Silver crunches the numbers on the marriage equality referendum in Maine and concludes it all comes down to turnout.

* When You Marry: a 1962 handbook.

* Ryan's Facebook feed had this link to a random manifesto generator. I now feel ready for any particular revolution that comes along.

* T. Boone Pickens explains why the U.S. is "entitled" to Iraqi oil. Could anyone have doubted it?

* And an increasing number of Americans want to legalize it.

Tuesday!

* Elsewhere in actually existing media bias: Rupert Murdoch supposedly wants to buy NBC Universal, for what I can only assume is pure spite.

* Yesterday's bogus insurance industry "bombshell" seems to have backfired, galvanizing support for reform and making the passage of some sort of public option more likely. Olympia Snowe just cast a vote for the Senate Finance Committee bill on its way out of committee, saying, "When history calls, history calls."

* This American Life is doing back-to-back shows on the same topic (health care) for the first time in its history this week and next. This week's episode on the doctor- and patient-side pressure that contribute to rising costs is quite good, if perhaps a bit generous to the insurance companies; next week's episode, promisingly entitled "Somebody Else's Money," will focus on the insurance companies themselves.

* If classic games had achievements.

* At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.

In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?

* And bad news, everyone: we're post SF again.

Still waiting.

* It's not exactly Douchiest College honors, but Duke is #14 on the Times's ranking of top 200 universities worldwide.

* Bitter Laughter reports by way of Nate Silver that public option opt-out may be a compromise that can actually get through the Senate—and Steve Benen agrees it's not a bad thing.

* Also in health care: Olbermann's hour-long "Special Comment" from last night, which wasn't nearly as unbearable as I imagined it would be when I heard it was coming.

* A second NJ-GOV poll—albeit one taken before Fatgate—shows Corzine up, this time by three.

* Lots of talk today about this New York Times genealogy of Michelle Obama, focused on an enslaved ancestor who was raped by her owner.

* Pee before you fly. It's funny how low-cost, outside-the-box carbon solutions—like Stephen Chu's suggestion that we paint our roofs white—are never taken seriously. It's like our society has a death wish.

* The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.

Monday!

* Steve Benen covers the behind-the-scenes wrangling around the public option. Surprising to see a hack like Bill Frist on board. Is he trying to make up for his past?

* io9's ten essential Superman stories. Missing: Alan Moore's Supreme, Superman in all but name. (Also: Kingdom Come? Dark Knight Returns?)

* Conservatives have finally gotten around to removing the Bible's liberal bias.

* The life story of Richard Leroy Walters, a homeless man who left $4 million dollars to NPR.

* Superhero Status Updates.

* The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis.

* And Angel is ten years old today.

Post-exam link catchup.

* Today's abolish-the-Senate factoid: The 10 Senators on the Senate Finance Committee who voted for the public option yesterday represent millions more people than the 13 who voted against it. Dramatically depowering or outright eliminating the Senate should be near the top of any long-term political agenda for progressives. Also in Senate health care news: Tom Harkin says the public option has the votes to pass, while Ben Nelson thinks it's 2008.

* I don't usually play look-at-the-wingnut, but John Derbyshire says women shouldn't have the right to vote because we "got along like that for 130 years." Also, we should repeal civil rights legislation because it's wrong to "try to force people to be good." Well done, sir.

* Okay, a second round of look-at-the-wingnut: Newsmax ran a column yesterday advocating a military coup to solve "the Obama problem." Remember, conservatives love America and progressives hate America.

* Corzine continues to gain in New Jersey, with independent Chris Daggett now polling at 12%.

* Background ephemera from the new Red Dawn remake. It sounds like the Commies may have a point in this one.

* Where Superman gets his powers. At MeFi.

* New Scientist is having a flash fiction contest.

* Another entry in Jonathan Lethem's ten-million-part series on why he loves Philip K. Dick.

* People think torture works because it works in movies.

* New favorite song: Zork rock. (You know where I found it.)

* Also from Boing Boing: Trotsky: The Graphic Biography.

The big public option news yesterday was a New York Times/CBS News poll showing 65% of the country supports a public option plan, with just 26% opposing it. Even a plurality of self-described Republicans favor the public option. Of course, trivialities like widespread popular support are irrelevant given the undemocratic nature of the Senate, which offers only a hopelessly distorted representation of the population of the country at large (see chart). Regardless, it's comforting to see these results on the same day that Schumer and Rockerfeller are telling everyone the public option will happen, though Steve Benen isn't exactly optimistic. (Which is not to say Steve is pessimistic either. Things are just very much in flux.)

Quick links.

* At a newly revitalized Bitter Laughter: 73% of American Medical Association doctors want a public option.

* In the New Yorker, two takedowns of GOP insanity and obstructionism.

* Wal-Mart: actually not so great. Via MeFi, which includes a bonus link to a nice take-off on Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism Soviet-style state capitalism.

* Also via MeFi: The New York Times's Toxic Waters: "A series about the worsening pollution in American waters and regulators' response."

* And the thing from my lists I most enjoyed reading today just happens to be online: Thomas Pynchon's "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?" (UPDATE: My drive towards procrastination compelled me to write a brief HASTAC post on this.)

By 1945, the factory system -- which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become -- among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies -- conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns -- exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions -- most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of "human" as particularly distinguished from "machine." Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age -- curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

I'm still Twittering, so I'll just say here that was pretty dynamite. We'll have to wait and see whether and how much it moves the needle, but it seems like a corner has been turned; Democrats in the chamber seemed ecstatic, Republicans angry and small. The Teddy Kennedy tribute, segueing into a explicit articulation of the moral duty for health care reform, was spellbinding, and, for some members, deeply shaming. Another historic speech from a guy who really makes it look easy.

Doing some liveblogging at Twitter.

My 4000th post on this blog—something like 9,500 since starting Backwards City in May 2004—is devoted to the president's upcoming speech on health care. Robert Reich says the trigger is bunk. Ed Kilgore says it isn't. Even-the-liberal New Republic's Jon Chait explains why centrism is bunk. Millionaire Rush Limbaugh says you don't even need insurance. An end to the gang of six? Tea leaves suggest Obama may finally be ready to go it alone. Schumer talks up reconciliation. President Clinton's health-care speech from 1993. Steve Benen on where things stand. Ezra Klein on where things stand. Excerpts from the speech.

More health care links: Suzy Khimm looks at what the trigger could look like, while Jonathan Cohn and Steve Benen have more on why reform survived August intact. Meanwhile, Yglesias continues his campaign of public-option skepticism.

All in? The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama will back the public option in his speech to Congress tonight. Olympia Snowe's trigger compromise once again figures importantly.

UPDATE: Meanwhile the New York Times has on its front page analysis that argues health care reform is not nearly as embattled as some people believe:

While the month of August clearly knocked the White House back on its heels, as Congressional town hall-style meetings exposed Americans’ unease with an overhaul, the uproar does not seem to have greatly altered public opinion or substantially weakened Democrats’ resolve.