I literally cannot watch this. I will check in later to see how it’s going. In the meantime, talk among yourselves and post any news you hear.

Think Progress reports that protesters outside the Capitol Building are carrying signs threatening gun violence if health care reform passes.

I’d say they are behaving like baboons, but that would be an insult to baboons.

Update: Think Progress reports that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MD) was spit on by a protester. Several reports say they called Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) a “faggot.” Class to the end.

Here’s the plan: There will be three votes. The first is on a resolution that will set the terms for the debate. The second vote is on the amendments, and the third is to the Senate bill. The idea is that by voting for the amendments first the House wants to make it clear it is only passing the Senate bill as amended.

Meanwhile, the White House is working on an executive order meant to mollify the Stupak crowd. I hope it simply clarifies the existing bill and doesn’t open a door to further restrictions.

Update: I’m getting frantic emails from various feminist organizations calling for people to call the White House to stop the “capitulation” to Stupak. We don’t know what’s in the executive order yet. I suspect it’s just going to re-state the status quo, but we’ll see.

Rachel Maddow said on television last night that the Movement was losing steam. It appears it has.

Also, please note that the next several hours before tomorrow’s vote are going to be insane.

The anti-abortion block in the House remains the biggest threat. Steve Benen and Brian Beutler explain the contortions Nancy Pelosi is going through to get some of the Stupak gang on board. In a nutshell, the deal may be to allow for a separate vote on putting the Stupak amendment language back into the House bill.

Note that such a vote, if it happens, is extremely unlikely to pass, but that hasn’t stopped Jane Hamsher from using the issue to rally “progressives” against the bill.

Let us all reflect on how grand it is to have purity of principles when you’ve got plenty of money and insurance to pay for your cancer treatments.

Steve Benen writes that “There are still a few liberal Dems who voted for reform in November, including Massachusetts’ Stephen Lynch, who intend to vote with right-wing Republicans because they don’t see it as liberal enough.” If the more-progressive-than-thou types would stop grandstanding and get behind the bill, Pelosi wouldn’t need any of the Stupak votes. This is a wonderful example of how grandstanding is an indulgence progressives would be better off without most of the time.

If you aren’t disgusted enough yet, check out this Kate Pickert post at Time.com, which begins:

Marcelas Owens, a young boy who’s been appearing on TV and at press conferences with Democrats who are trying to sell their health care plan, is a new fascination for some right-wing pundits, who have been saying incredibly cruel things to and about the Owens’ family and tragic history. Owens’ mother died in 2007 of pulmonary hypertension – a rare condition that requires constant expensive medical care – after she lost her fast food restaurant job and her health insurance.

Pay special attention to the discussion in the comments on What Would Jesus Do about health care reform. My favorite:

Jesus wouldn’t go around forcing people to pay for someone else’s healthcare, either. Forced charity is theft, and it is not a Christian concept.

So who cares if a couple of talk-show hosts say something “mean” when the people they’re opposed to are committing evil?

In a just universe, the person who wrote that would spend eternity copying and re-copying the Beatitudes on parchment with a bad felt-tip pen.

Finally, Dana Milbank says a true thing — running on a promise to repeal health care reform is unlikely to be a successful strategy for Republicans.

Beyond that, it’s doubtful that opposition to the measure will ever again be as high as it is now. Fox News polling found that 45 percent of voters would favor repeal, while 47 percent say leave the reforms alone or add to them. With the big insurance subsidies years away, the initial changes stemming from the legislation would be relatively modest — and that should come as a surprise to an American public told by Republican foes of the legislation to expect a socialist takeover of the United States.

What Americans would see — or at least what Democratic ad makers say they’d put on Americans’ TV screens — are the benefits that would take effect this year: tax credits that encourage small businesses to offer health coverage; a $250 rebate to Medicare beneficiaries who hit the prescription-drug “donut hole” (the checks would start going out June 15); allowing young people up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ health policies; and, above all, a ban on refusing coverage to children with preexisting conditions.

There will certainly be ads this fall saying Republican Congressman X voted against tax breaks for small business and voted to deny Junior his life-saving treatments. These modest changes to the health system probably wouldn’t be widespread and noticeable enough to limit Democratic losses at a time of 10 percent unemployment. But, at the very least, voters would see nothing to justify the Republicans’ apocalyptic predictions.

I think that’s true, and I suspect enough of the troglodytes understand this is true, which is why they will stop at nothing to kill health care reform.

Update: I keep reading that there are something like 206 certain “yes” votes, and ten more are needed to pass. Wikipedia says there are 255 Dems in the House. If every Dem not in the Stupak gang would vote for the bill, then a compromise with Stupak would not be necessary to pass the bill. So why are people angry with Pelosi or Obama or me about Stupak? Why not get angry with the other holdouts?

Update update: It seems the Stupak attempt to use the HCR bill to further restrict abortion has been killed already. Everyone can stop hyperventilating.

Here’s another example of gross dishonesty — at Weekly Standard, a column by John McCormack titled “Read the Bill: Senate Plan Would Pay for Abortions at Community Health Centers.” So I waded into this thing expecting McCormack to explain where he found this in the bill, since he wants us to read the bill. But he doesn’t source the bill. He sources two memos, one from United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the other from National Right to Life.

In fact, federal dollars can’t be used to pay for elective abortions now, and there is all kinds of language in the bill that makes it crystal clear federal policy on funding abortion will not be changed by the bill. And I can prove it — read the bill. Here’s the Senate bill; the section regarding abortion begins on page 2077.

Instead of reading the bill, McCormack cites propaganda screeds about the bill so that he can lie about what’s in the bill. Classy. You can read the memos he sites, but the arguments in them are refuted by the bill itself. For that matter, most of the arguments in the memos are refuted by the National Catholic Reporter. See also Timothy Noah.

No one at National Right to Life has ever been the least bit squeamish about making up nonsense to support the cause, but I want to make special note of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. At a time when sexual predation by Catholic clergy has become an international scandal, and when it’s become public that the institutional church has been covering it up and allowing it to continue for decades, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has some cojones producing a deceitful memo to attempt to insert their influence over U.S. health care law.

I’m saying that if the lot of them had a shred of conscience, they’d be very quietly doing penance someplace, not brazenly bearing false witness in order to control the sexual behavior of American women. It’s good to see American nuns and other Catholic organizations coming forward to say the Bishops don’t speak for all Catholics.

If I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I’d do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe and the United States as possible.

You know that if any Democrat or progressive were to say “If I were [some foreign country] I would do whatever it took to create as much trouble for the United States as possible” none of us would ever hear the end of it. It would be thrown up in our faces every time we said we were just as patriotic as they were.

But if a righties says it, IOKIYAR. Especially when the foreign country is Israel.

Recently the Obama Administration has been clearly and solidly opposed to more Israeli settlements in east Jerusalem, and this has put many a rightie’s panties in a twist. (Worthy of note: A majority of Israelis think President Obama’s treatment of their country is “friendly and fair.”)

I honestly don’t understand the thing with Israel and U.S. righties. I get that there’s a fundamentalist Christian connection and a powerful Israel lobby that owns a lot of U.S. lawmakers. But even rank-and-file righties who aren’t overly religious and who aren’t being paid under the table think knee-jerk loyalty to the government of Israel is part and parcel of what it takes to be a patriotic American. They’ve come to believe that America’s and Israel’s interests are identical, and if they aren’t it’s America that’s in the wrong. I can only assume their hatred of Palestinians overrides their love of country.

Back in 2002 then congressman Dick Armey said, “My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel,” and nobody blinked. I remember watching and hearing him say this on television, on one of the political talk shows (Chris Matthews, I think, but I can’t swear to that), and I sat and waited for the more-than-obvious follow-up question — isn’t our no.1 priority to protect the United States? — and it was not asked. Nor was there even a trickle of WTF? commentary after. Weird.

Update: the LA Times article linked spoke of Parker’s “short TV career” without noting that Parker starred in the “Daniel Boone” series, which ran for six years.

Some of you might remember that the Lincoln-like Mr. Bush in 2007 was interviewed by an Irish reporter, Carole Coleman, and was so enraged that Coleman pushed him for more complete answers that he complained to the Irish government and managed to ban the interview from U.S. television. The White House also canceled another interview that had been scheduled between Coleman and First Lady Laura Bush.

By contrast, the Baier interview of Obama has been described as an “interrupt-a-thon.” Katie Connolly wrote,

Baier focused his questions on process, hardly a surprise given that’s what the public debate is largely over right now. Obama did his best to circumvent and focus on policy—which, after all, is the point of the bill. That dynamic wasn’t unexpected. What was unusual—and at times downright jarring—was Baier’s repeated interruptions. He tried time and again to pin the president down, but Obama was having none of it. “I think this conversation ends up being a little frustrating … because the focus entirely is on Washington process. And yes, I have said it, that is an ugly process. It was ugly when Republicans were in charge, it was ugly when Democrats were in charge,” he told Baier.

Scroll down to see just a snip of the Baier interview of Obama. Baier clearly was belligerent; Coleman was politeness itself in comparison (see below).

According to a Democratic source, CBO has finished its work and will release the official preliminary score later today. But here are the basic numbers: The bill will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years and reduce the deficit by $130 billion during that period. In the second 10 years — so, 2020 to 2029 — it will reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion. The legislation will cover 32 million Americans, or 95 percent of the legal population.

Righties are already nay-saying this by saying the report is not official and Dems are “spinning” what is not yet the official report, and how dare they? We must wait for the “official” report, and not hastily jump to conclusions. Note that these are the same folks who yesterday misidentified a promotion by a physician recruitment company as a survey conducted by the New England Journal of Medicine and reported false information all over Media World.

The HCR vote is scheduled for Sunday.