TPM reports that Reid is close to pulling off senatorial support for the public option - and the White House wants Olympia Snowe's trigger option instead.

In other words, the White House wants the plan that won't work, so they can claim it's a bipartisan plan. Or is it that the administration wants a plan that won't really work, and they're using bipartisanship as a cover? Just asking the obvious question, here:

Multiple sources tell TPMDC that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is very close to rounding up 60 members in support of a public option with an opt out clause, and are continuing to push skeptical members. But they also say that the White House is pushing back against the idea, in a bid to retain the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME).

"They're skeptical of opt out and are generally deferential to the Snowe strategy that involves the trigger," said one source close to negotiations between the Senate and the White House. "They're certainly not calming moderate's concerns on opt-out."

This new development, which casts the White House as an opponent of all but the most watered down form of public option, is likely to yield backlash from progressives, especially those in the House who have been pushing for a more maximal version of reform.

It also suggests for perhaps the first time that the White House's supposed hands off approach that ostensibly allowed the two chambers in Congress to craft their own bill has been discarded.

High level White House officials have floated the trigger idea a number of times, and it seems they continue to do so, even at this, crucial stage of the health care reform process, when their involvement is greatest. That has senators who support the public option concerned.

UPDATE: Big Tent Democrat has another take. So does Nate Silver.

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October 20, 2009 PBS News Hour

The tenure of Berkeley law professor John Yoo has come under fire amid a backlash over the role he played in the Bush administration, advising on the legalities of now-controversial interrogation tactics used on terror suspects. Spencer Michels reports.

SPENCER MICHELS: Since the beginning of the school year, protesters dressed as prisoners or detainees have dogged law professor John Yoo at the University of California at Berkeley. They want the university to fire him for advising the Bush administration, as an attorney in the Justice Department, that it could legally torture suspected terrorists to get information.

PROTESTER: This is a not just a question of academic opinions. This is a question of war crimes. People like John Yoo, these people should be fired.

SPENCER MICHELS: Forty-two-year-old John Yoo has taught here since 1993, except for 2001 to 2003, when he worked for the Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel.

During those years, after 9/11, the U.S. was interrogating prisoners, suspected terrorists, at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Yoo wrote several memos on how far the interrogators could go in pressuring prisoners to reveal information. Those memos argued that techniques such as water- boarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting a detainee's fear of insects were, in fact, legal.

Yoo's actions have reverberated throughout Boalt Hall, the Berkeley law school where Yoo teaches. Students and faculty are debating the bounds of academic freedom, and whether a professor should be held responsible for controversial work done outside the university.

DAVID ARABELLA, law student: I believe that he does have a right to teach here, because people can have controversial views. But, personally, I'm not going to enroll in his class.

SPENCER MICHELS: The law school dean, Christopher Edley, who has served in several Democratic administrations, has been besieged by messages, the majority against Professor Yoo.

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Ezra Klein talks about what everyone on the Hill knows: that the health-care deal will now get done by making it unaffordable for the people it's supposed to help. Only in D.C. is that considered a "victory." Well, I say it's spinach, and I say to hell with it!

The basic structure of the bill has three main planks working in conjunction with each other: The individual mandate creates a mechanism for a universal, or near-universal, system. A universal, or near-universal, system creates the conditions for insurance market reform. The subsidies make the individual mandate affordable for people to follow.

There are a few ways to destabilize this system. The most likely way is to reduce the subsidies so that the individual mandate isn't really affordable. That seems to be happening even as we speak. At that point, reformers have two options, both of them bad.

The first option is to reduce the value of the minimum insurance policy such that buying something the government considers insurance isn't very expensive. This means policies with high deductibles and co-pays, or policies that don't cover very much. But asking someone with a relatively low income to purchase a policy with a $1,500 deductible and significant co-pays is asking them to purchase something they can't really afford to use. So we're making them spend $7,000 or $8,000 a year on something they don't necessarily want and can't really take advantage of. That's a recipe for a huge backlash.

The second option is to drop the individual mandate altogether. Obama, who didn't have a mandate in his campaign plan, might be amenable to this approach. But here, too, there are problems. The young, healthy risks will hang back from the system while the older, sicker risks will flood in to take advantage of subsidies and new regulations that stop insurers from discriminating against them. The risk pool will reflect that, and health-care insurance will become even more unaffordable for the people who need it. And because it's less affordable because of the presence of the sick, it will become even less attractive to the healthy.

The happy news is that the difference between a plan with decent benefits that's affordable for people and a plan that's not affordable for people and doesn't offer decent benefits is not that large. Optimally, you'd want to spend about $1.3 trillion over 10 years. You could probably do it for $900 billion to $1 trillion. But you can't do it for, say, $700 billion, which is a number I'm hearing fairly frequently.

The difference between doing this right and doing this wrong is, in other words, about $30 billion a year, or $300 billion over 10 years. To put that in perspective, many of the legislators who are balking at the cost of health-care reform voted for the Kyl-Lincoln bill to reform the estate tax at a cost of $75 billion a year, or $750 billion over 10 years. You can make health-care reform work at a price tag that legislators are, in theory, willing to bear, at least when the tag is attached to tax cuts.

Isn't it interesting? Because I never hear them talk quite the same about costs when it comes to war. For example: "We really want to stabilize Afghanistan - but it has to be revenue-neutral" or "Yes, we know we said it was important to stabilize Iraq, but we simply can't afford this anymore."

No, the place where they decide to draw the line is... our health. War is seen as the absolute necessity and health care is seen as optional. That's just crazy.

I hope President Emanuel changes his position on this important issue.

When I lose patience with the pace of healthcare reform, I remind myself exactly how much detail work is involved. (Via MSNBC: Above, House Energy and Commerce Committee Special Assistant Mitch Smiley, center, thumbs through boxes of amendments to the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, on Friday.) So stay patient and keep calling, we're getting closer all the time. All three major committees have finished their version and will vote in September:

Reporting from Washington -- President Obama's ambitious plan to overhaul the nation's healthcare system got a major boost when a pivotal House committee passed a compromise bill Friday night, clearing the way for a floor vote this fall.

The bill was approved 31 to 28, with five Democrats and all of the Republicans on the energy and commerce committee voting against it. Despite the defections, enough liberal and conservative Democrats were able to come together to break the deadlock that had stalled the bill for weeks.

"We are a diverse caucus with many points of view," said committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills). "We've agreed we need to pull together."

To reach agreement, Waxman earlier this week had accepted conservative lawmakers' demands to limit the bill's price tag to $1 trillion over 10 years, exempt more small businesses from the employer-provided insurance mandate, and reduce the number of low-income people who would qualify for subsidized coverage.

But those changes provoked a backlash among liberals. To win them back, Waxman crafted a compromise that would restore low-income subsidies. The committee also added a major provision that would limit the premium increases that insurers could impose, and another that would let the government negotiate pharmaceutical prices under Medicare's prescription drug program -- a goal long sought by liberals as a way to reduce drug costs. (The idea was bitterly opposed by Republicans when the program was established in 2003, as critics questioned whether the government would secure discounts.)

The bill is designed to provide insurance for the 46 million people in the U.S. who now go without it; to curb healthcare costs; and to make it harder for companies to deny coverage or increase premiums.

"We have a historic opportunity to transform our healthcare system," Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), a leader of the panel's conservative faction, said ahead of the vote.

But Republicans said that despite changes made to address conservative Democrats' concerns, the legislation remained a costly, intrusive expansion of government power over medical care. Conservatives did little more than "pick the color of the lipstick on this pig," said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.).

The vote came just as House members prepared to leave town for a monthlong recess.

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Olympia Snowe wrote an op-ed in the NY Times today that's called: We Didn’t Have to Lose Arlen Specter.

How well have we done as a party with these groups? Unfortunately, the answer is obvious from the results of the last two elections. We should be reaching out to these segments of our population — not de facto ceding them to the opposing party. There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

The Senator joined Andrea Mitchell this morning and explained in greater detail how the far right "Club For Growth" type elements have destroyed the republican party.

One of the main takeaways from the phony controversy over the DHS' bulletin on right-wing extremism was the self-revealing way that mainstream conservatives attempted to obliterate from public view the very real existence of the ongoing threat to their well-being from right-wing extremists.

Why the frantic effort to obscure this reality? Because they know the ideological and associative distance between far-right extremists and mainstream conservatives has shrunk dramatically over the past 10 years. They dread the consequences of what will happen when the real ugliness starts to break out.

The Ugly Storm has been gathering for awhile. We've been reporting regularly on the increasing activities of far-right extremists, particularly the anti-Obama racism rampant throughout much of this contingent. Of course, it doesn't help when mainstream conservative media are fanning those flames, either. And it seems like it's getting close to an outright explosion.

My friend Max Blumenthal went to a gun show in California and emerged with the above video and the following report:

Fueled by the screeds of radio hosts Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and the lesser-known but increasingly influential online conspiracist Alex Jones, many gun-show attendees I spoke to were convinced Obama planned to usher in a Marxist dictatorship. They warned that the president’s power grab would only begin with mass gun seizures. “If Obama takes away our guns,” a young, .45 pistol-toting man from Reno told me, “it’s just a step into trying to take away everything else.”

Indeed, in their minds, average Americans opposed to the Obama agenda would be herded into FEMA-run concentration camps by a volunteer army of glassy-eyed liberal college graduates. “When they start imprisoning Americans, and people start seeing that we’re the enemy, then that’ll make it hot,” predicted one Antioch-based young man sporting a button for former Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul. “People talk about a revolution,” the young man continued, “an armed revolution. I think police crackdowns on individuals will tip the scales.”

More than a few gun dealers and attendees echoed the young man’s seeming enthusiasm for armed revolt. One Contra Costa, California-based gun dealer named Rich predicted during an otherwise casual off-camera conversation that “some nut” would assassinate Obama within one year of any Democratic attempt at gun-control legislation. While the prospect of organized right-wing violence against the federal government seems far-fetched at this point, the paranoid rhetoric I documented suggests the militia movement that organized against President Bill Clinton’s policies during the 1990s could experience a dramatic resurgence by mobilizing resentment against Obama.

The gun-show crowd is more the "Patriot" contingent of far-right extremism: obsessed with guns and conspiracy theories, yet capable of paranoid bursts of extreme violence by "lone wolf" actors.

Yet we're also seeing a similar upsurge in outright white-supremacist organizations. Newsweek also has a report on this trend from Eve Conant:

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      Quite possibly Quote of The Day in a Wednesday full of good quotes, including Noonan's naughty word, comes from Ted Anthony of the Associated Press:

The Republican message about the Palin offspring comes across as contradictory: Hey, media, leave those kids alone — so we can use them as we see fit.

If you doubt this scenario, consider this: On Wednesday morning, a teenage boy from Alaska stood in a receiving line on an airport tarmac, being glad-handed by the potential next president of the United States — because he got his girlfriend pregnant. TV cameras were lined up in advance. The mind boggles.

 It seems even the McFourniers at AP have had enough of the McCain campaign's bullying.