So there I was, driving to my friends' house for dinner and babysitting last night when Howard Dean called me.

I'd been scheduled to talk to him after his appearance at the Philadelphia Free Library yesterday, but there was some kind of miscommunication and it didn't happen.

Anyway, he apologized for the mix-up and we had an interesting discussion. (Remember, none of this is verbatim. I was driving while we talked, and I've reconstructed as best I can.)

The first thing I said was, "Every single problem you described at today's talk, logistical and financial, could be solved with single payer."

His response was along the lines of "And your point is?" As in, let's deal with what we have in front of us, I suppose.

So then I asked him what he thought the strategy was behind the administration starting the debate with the public option instead of single payer. "I think it was a terrible mistake," he said. "I think they were worried it would be called socialism." (Naturally, I agreed.)

Let's see. What else? He said the reason the focus of the campaign is on the finances of health care is because Obama was actually put in the White House by the under-35 voters, and while they're socially liberal, they're very conservative on the deficit and are convinced they won't be able to count on things like Social Security.

"You don't have to tell me," I said. "My kids are Ron Paul fans." He laughed and said, "Then you understand."

"Tell them if this bill doesn't pass, their sick parents will have to move in with them. That ought to do it," I advised.

(And I said that while the under-35 votes may have put Obama in the White House, I suspected the bulk of individual contributions came from baby boomers and he might want to look into that.)

I said the real problem with the current health care system was a matter of human dignity. I told him about a friend who's struggling with brain injury and has been turned down three times for Social Security disability. "They keep telling her she can work, but who's going to hire someone who doesn't know ahead of time if she'll be too sick to work?" I said.

He said yes, there's no question that the present system was a nightmare for the chronically ill or handicapped.

I told him I was really hoping the bill's final version included lowering the Medicare age to 55, "since I turn 55 next week."

"I'd like to see it lowered to 50, that would make a lot of sense," he replied. We talked about how it would lessen the cost burden on employers and increase the chances of the over-50s getting rehired.

We also discussed the positive ripple effects we could expect from the public option - that it would lower the costs of auto insurance, and take work-related injuries out of the worker's comp system.

I talked about the strange Beltway bubble and asked if people working there really understood what was at stake out here.

He said no, it wasn't my imagination, the people in the Beltway really do live in a different universe - "especially the Senate. It really is like a club," he said. He corrected himself: "No, it is a club. And they're most concerned about their personal relationships with the other Senators, and then everything else. It's very strange."

Don't they understand how angry everyone is out here? I said. "If they put us in a position where we're paying more money for less coverage, it's going to be war." He said no, they really don't - although he keeps trying to tell them. He said we're looking at a real political disaster if they screw this up. "Because I'm on the outside, I get to say those things," he said.

Dean says not to worry about the Baucus bill, that the final version won't look anything like it "but everyone's sort of tiptoeing around, no one wants to say it out loud. They have to pass a bill out of Finance first, and then they'll change it."

I told him the perception from here is that the Baucus bill was the one that had the White House approval, and he said, "I can understand why you have that perception, but I don't think so at all."

I told him many of us despaired of any real change, and he reacted immediately. "You absolutely shouldn't be thinking that way," he said. He believes there's a "95 percent chance" of a real public option, and if there isn't one, the bill shouldn't pass.

No point to throwing billions of dollars to the insurance industry if we don't get the public option, he said.

"Do you think the people working on this bill actually understand that?" I said. "Maybe I'm being cynical here."

"Yes, they do," he said. "The bill was basically written by the insurance industry. I do think they know [it's a giveaway]." He said it was written by two former insurance industry lobbyists, they knew what they were doing.

But the good news is, he really does believe there's going to be an affordable public option, and all this will be a moot point.

I told him a lot of us were counting on him, and if he told us to support the final bill, I'd feel okay about supporting it.

Here's hoping.

Sam Seder filling in for Cenk Uygur on The Young Turks takes a call from a conservative who resents paying for health care for his fellow citizens, but doesn't mind paying for the Iraq War. Why in the hell is this man not on the radio every day of the week?

As usual, if Bill Kristol's lips are moving, it's pretty safe to assume he's either lying or has no clue what he's talking about.

Bill Kristol, who writes frequently about health care and advises the Republican Party about how to vote on bills, is misinformed on the basic facts of the situation. And even his misinformation isn't terribly coherent: Later in the interview, he says that the Army health-care system -- which is fully socialized -- is the best health-care system we've got, and the reason we can't give it to all Americans is that it's too expensive. Socialized medicine, in other words, works. The rest of us just don't deserve it.

To be fair, I don't believe that Kristol believes that. When he says that the danger with Obama's plan is that it "would put us well on the road to government-run health care," I take him at his word. But it is interesting to watch what happens when his adoration for all things military collides with the distrust of all things federal. Turns out that the conservative in Kristol is no match for the militarist.

Ezra has some nice charts as well showing the error of Bill Kristol's talking points.

Ooopsies! Someone got caught with their pants down...literally:

Sources in Washington and Nevada say Republican Sen. John Ensign, a rising star in the Republican Party considering a 2012 presidential bid will hold a press conference later today in which he will acknowledge an extramarital affair.

Ensign, a member of the Senate GOP leadership, flew back to his native Las Vegas today in anticipation of the public announcement, sources said, missing a vote considered key to the Nevada tourist industry.[..]

Elected in 2000 and reelected in 2006, Ensign has been a leading conservative among Senate Republicans, playing a key role in demanding the resignation of Larry Craig in September 2007. Ensign called Craig a "disgrace" after he was arrested in June 2007 in an airport men's restroom on disorderly conduct charges. Craig resisted the calls from Ensign to resign but retired from the Senate last November.

Per TPM, the woman worked on the Ensign re-election campaign and her husband worked as one of his Senate staffers. The reason it came to light now?

For a guy who harbored presidential ambitions, this is tough blow to his hopes for 2012. So something had to give. What was it?

Late Update: Politico has more detail, including a reported demand for money from the husband of Ensign's lover: Political insiders in the Senate and in Nevada told POLITICO that Ensign began an affair with a staffer several months after he separated from his wife. When Ensign reconciled with his wife, the sources said, he gave the aide a severance package and parted ways.

Sometime later, a Nevada source said, Ensign met with the husband of the woman involved and had what this source described as a positive encounter. Sources said that the man subsequently asked Ensign for a substantial sum of money - at which point Ensign decided to make the affair public.

Ouch. So cheating on your wife and extortion from former employees? How does that square with this statement made in 2004 regarding the sanctity of marriage:

“Marriage recognizes the ideal of a father and mother living together to raise their children,” Ensign said. “Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded. For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America has relied.”

Ensign, in his comments, noted that Nevadans had amended the state constitution to guarantee the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. Ensign emphasized the need to preserve the will of Nevadans who voted overwhelmingly to preserve marriage as well as the need to preserve the will of the majority of Americans.

“I am deeply concerned that a few unelected judges and some locally elected government officials have taken steps to redefine marriage to fit their own agenda,” said Ensign. “It is not right to mold marriage to fit the desires of a few, against the wishes of so many, and to ignore the important role of marriage.”

Yeah, good to see you uphold that sanctity, but my uncle and his partner of 15 years are somehow a threat to it.

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Mary Matalin thinks having a few more "conviction conservatives" like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh out there would be a winning formula for the GOP in future elections. I wonder if she actually thought this one through ahead of time.

I don't think it bodes well for Republicans to be using phrases which include the word convict and Dick Cheney or Rush Limbaugh in the same sentence. The only thing that magnifies for me is a reminder that if they were both treated like most Americans who aren't rich or well connected, they would both have already served some time in prison.

KING: So, James, what do the Republicans need to end this personality, Rush versus this guy? They need an election, I guess.

CARVILLE: Yeah they do. And, you know, my friend and my mentor Mark Shields once said that political parties are like churches. Figure out what party is trying to drive out the heretics and which party is trying to get the converts. And all of the people that they drive out that they say are heretics, we're glad to take them as converts.

And I think that's part of the problem here is, I'm not the member of a movement, I'm the member of a political party that I'm glad to say that embraces people of some different ideologies and tries to get things done.

And the Republicans, right now, consider themselves -- a lot of them consider themselves part of a movement more than a part of the Republican Party. Senator Jim DeMint said he would rather have 30 real conservatives than 52 -- or 51 that are not that conservative.

As one commentator very briefly observed that if they continue their policies, he'd be lucky to have 30. I think they're going through a time where they're trying to figure out what they are and they have some that want to start up an inquisition and they have some that want to start up a -- you know, a bunch of missionaries. We'll see which way it goes.

MATALIN: John, if we had 30 good conviction conservatives, they'd have a magnifying force. Look what Dick Cheney has done in just a couple of weeks with one strong cogent voice.

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TIME Magazine: Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?

The most urgent question is the meaning of economic conservatism. Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a conservative who keeps a bust of Reagan on his desk, surprised me by declaring that the Reagan era is over. "Marginal tax rates are the lowest they've been in generations, and all we can talk about is tax cuts," he said. "The people's desires have changed, but we're still stuck in our old issue set."

I give it one day. Once Rush mentions it on the radio, McHenry will be bowing and scraping before his altar.