Wednesday night, post-Zizek-lecture links.

* President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday. Probably the best of a bad set of options.

* How Food Preferences Vary by Political Ideology. I have to confess they have my number on Chinese/Japanese/Thai, not eating fast food, and delicious, delicious Samoas—but my love of pizza and PB&J proves that beneath my leftist facade beats a deeply reactionary heart.

* Already linked everywhere: Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels’ Generous Offer.

* Ezra Klein: Four ways to end the filibuster. Related: Steve Benen, Harold Meyerson, Kevin Drum.

* GOP Death Spiral Watch: Lindsay Graham censured by the South Carolina GOP for acknowledging the existence of climate change.

* Salon: Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl is possibly the best movie about family, community and poultry thievery ever made.

Tuesday night politics roundup: Steve Benen once again makes the case for health care incrementalism. Bill Clinton makes the case for not losing. The Senate probably won't pass the Stupak amendment. Open Left, noting a PPP poll suggesting Olympia Snowe can't win a Republican primary in Maine, predicts she'll switch parties; Nicholas Beaudrot concurs and suggests a Mugwump caucus. Contrary to reports, the climate bill does not make Obama dictator. Paid sick leave is a good idea. The GOP is unlikely to take back the House in a context in which it draws all its support from the South. Why employment might not fully recover until 2013. How we can destroy the filibuster. Is Marxism relevant today?

I've become extremely disillusioned about the existence of the U.S. Senate lately, so I'm gratified to see anti-Senate sentiment taking hold in well-read publications like The Nation and The New Yorker. The focus in both pieces is on the filibuster and other strategies of obstruction, but, as I've argued, the structural problem is much more fundamental than that; any system of representation that undercounts New York by a third and California by a sixth while overrepesenting each of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, and the Dakotas by 1000% is in deep need of repair.

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."

Monday night.

* Nathan Fillion says Dr. Horrible 2 is moving ahead.

* The History News Network has your first JFK post of the season.

What McHugh claimed to have witnessed next was shocking. "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed," McHugh recalled. He claimed that LBJ was crying, "They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's a plot. It's going to get us all.'" According to the General, Johnson "was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing."

Of course, opinions on LBJ differ.

* And speaking of the Kennedy assassination: how great was last night's Mad Men? Knowing they would eventually have to do an assassination episode, I worried they wouldn't find the right approach—but I think they pretty much nailed it. I like too that it came an episode early; like most people I was thinking it would be next week. Pandagon and Ta-Nehisi Coates have their usual Mad Men posts up, if you're interested; I usually read the Television without Pity forums too.

* Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC): Everywhere I go in my district, people tell me they are frightened. … I share that fear, and I believe they should be fearful. And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room — this very room — and what may happen later this week in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.

* And Steve Benen has your chart of the day: filibusters since the 1960s. That last spike is since Democrats recovered control of Congress in 2007.

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.

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.

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.

Republicans are now demanding that the health care bill be subject to the dreaded superfilibuster, suggesting that they think they're going to lose their fight to scuttle it. Meanwhile, TPM and FiveThirtyEight take separate looks at the reconciliation process that could be used to pass the public option and financing aspects of the bill, while Joe Klein throws in the towel on journamalistic "objectivity" in the face of the GOP's descent into total batshit crazitude.

Matt Yglesias has a good post explaining why it's not merely special pleasing when liberals and progressives argue to abolish the filibuster after making use of it during the Bush years when we were in the minority. (It's especially not special pleading on Matt's part, who, if I remember correctly, opposed the filibuster even when it was saving us from unbridled Bushism. He was more or less wrong then—we needed it badly—but he's pretty much right now.)

As Matt notes, the filibuster has moved from a comparatively rare measure of last resort to the first option on the table, leading to a widening perception that it does or should take 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. There are three plateaus on the chart: the Reagan/Bush years, the Clinton-and-then-Bush-2 years, and the post-2006 pre-post-Bush environment. We can draw two conclusions from this:

1) Republicans are driving this movement, as the leaps in intensity correspond to moments of Republican Party weakness (the 1990s, 2006-2008);
2) there are way too many filibusters nowadays.

What we need to do, of course, is abolish the Senate entirely. But failing that we need to weaken the filibuster significantly. As a procedural loophole it can function as an important minoritarian protection, as it did against the ideological extremism of the GOP over the last decade—but it can remain so only in a context in which it is not being used routinely. Either the Republicans reign in the obstructionism or the Democrats reign it in for them.

Meanwhile, no one outside the Beltway cocktail circuit has any use for the Republican party.