After hours and hours of debate, the Senate voted down Senator Lisa Murkowski's (R-AK) amendment to reverse the EPA's finding that greenhouse gasses harm the environment, 53-47. This amendment was also known as the "Big Oil Bailout" because if it had passed, greenhouse gasses would no longer have been considered a pollutant and we could blithely skip down the garden path burning oil, polluting more wetlands with spilled oil, and killing more animals.

It was enormously frustrating to me (but not surprising) to see six Democrats vote with Republicans. For the record, Senators Bayh, Lincoln, Rockefeller, Nelson (Neb), Pryor and Landrieu all voted for the amendment.

One of the more remarkable moments in the debate leading up to the vote was Senator Lindsey Graham, who twists like a pretzel in his efforts not to deny the science while still supporting ending the EPA's authority to make this finding and enforce it.

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Newshoggers: Not a chip off the old block

Attackerman: The Taliban's military commander has been captured. Obama sure doesn't know how to deal with terrorism, huh?

Liberal Values: Republicans were for mandates, purchasing pools, and effectiveness research before they were against them

RealClimate: IPCC errors: fact and spin

Amped Status: The Economic Elite vs The People of the United States

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Blaming the wife...Fox News at its finest...TV's conservative bias...Krauthammer vs Krauthammer...Another plagiarist?...What's killing newspapers...Socialist rag...dis is “News”?...NYT editor 'stands behind' contested 'pimp' story...Thomas Friedamn, nation-builder...Keeping 'em stupid...Corporate Media Cave-In

First I want to say that I had an incredible time at Netroots Nation. What a treat to see so many in the liberal blogosphere gather to discuss health care and virtually every other issue we face. Kudos to all the politicians who showed up to represent their positions as well.

Anyway, a huge topic that was raging through the weekend was the state of the 'public option.' Since the Baucus Dogs haven't finished their bill we still don't have the goods to really make any sense of what the House of Lords is going to put forth. We do have the Senate HELP committee bill, but the Baucus Dogs are trying to muck up the works by stalling the process and trying to empower the teabaggers. Any member of Congress that is affected by the lunatic fringe appearing at these events should resign immediately.

I was talking to Digby at length about it over the weekend and she said she had a meeting with Mike Lux and he laid out a possible scenario to her that could come to pass even if Grassley, Bayh, Conrad, Baucus, Nelson and the rest of the paid off shills of the health insurance industry come out with a bill that doesn't have a 'public option.'

He later wrote about it in his piece: The News of Its Death Is Greatly Exaggerated

Here are a couple of possibilities for getting a bill passed:

A. The first is that conservative Senators are given a fig leaf compromise on the public option, so that they can say to people they forced a compromise, and then are brought over with all kinds of other incentives that make them more comfortable with the bigger bill.

B. The second is that the conference committee simply breaks the bill in half, one half being the less controversial part that everyone agrees upon, the other being the public option and the financing, both of which can go through the reconciliation process. Then Obama and Reid muscle the 50 votes they need for support.

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For those of you keeping score:

WaPo :

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) announced today that he will forgo a run for president in 2008, citing the "long odds" he would face as a candidate who is not well-known nationally.
In a statement released early today, Bayh said, "After talking with family and friends over the past several days, I have decided that this is not the year for me to run for president and I will not be a candidate for the presidency in 2008."

The main reason for Bayh's decision was a belief that his chances of winning the Democratic nomination in a field likely to include such political heavyweights as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) were not high enough to justify the commitment of time and manpower over the next two years.

ABC News:

Democratic jockeying for the White House in 2008 intensified on Sunday with Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh taking the first official step toward a run and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton gauging support among fellow New York lawmakers.

Bayh said he would set up an exploratory committee to raise money and help assess his prospects. He plans to decide over the upcoming holidays whether to seek the Democratic nomination and announce his decision early next year.

[..]Clinton, who easily won re-election to a second term on Nov. 7, "is reaching out to her colleagues in the New York delegation and asking for their advice and counsel and their support if she decides to make a run," a top adviser, Howard Wolfson, told The Associated Press.

...Before he spoke, Bayh told reporters that he does not support efforts by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., another potential 2008 presidential candidate, to censure Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping. Bayh said it's not clear whether the law requiring court approval before surveillance was broken, and he instead favors revisiting and possibly updating the law...read on"

That's so big of him. Bush sticks his thumb in the eye of the FISA laws and Bayh takes the Republican stance instead of being a man of conviction. Nobody knows exactly what Bush and his super-duper-secret wiretapping program has done, but hey, no problem here. Way to go. Time to call his peeps.

Evan Bayh
463 Russell Building
Washington, DC 20510
Washington, DC (202) 224-5623
Indianapolis (317) 554-0750
Evansville (812) 465-6500
Fort Wayne (260) 426-3151
Hammond (219) 852-2763
Jeffersonville (812) 218-2317
South Bend (574) 236-8302

The meme perpetrated by the Bill O'Reilly's and James Brady's of the the media world to try and discredit us will not work. We're real, engaged, making things happen and they all know it.

FDL finds this:

Cokie Roberts: "They were interested to see how Senator Russ Feingold's call for censure worked with the blogosphere, mainly, and also in polls. Because Democrats backed away from his call just dramatically, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi of California didn't want anything to do with it.

They waited to see what we were going to say? While there were a few in the blogosphere who decided to sit this one out, the people who took a stand to back Feingold came out looking pretty good. The opinion polls show that there is a lot of public support for censuring the President and it feels like there is a sea change taking place as Democrats (though not Evan Bayh) warm up to the idea of representing what a large part of the country already feels. I guess we're not so fringe after all...read on"