Majority Leader John Boehner's spokesman says Barack Obama's latest 11-page healthcare proposal is "shorter than a comic book," which is bad. Needs more pages! But not as many as the House bill, which Boehner called "1,990 pages of bureaucracy."

A year after telling Congress to please fix health care, and months after both legislative bodies passed health care bills, President Obama has released his own Health Care Reform Bill, which is apparently a fancy website.

At a town hall in Nashua, New Hampshire, Barack Obama said, of health care reform, "we've had to go into overtime, but now we're in the red zone." Oh man, we were at the 2 before. Now it's anywhere between goal and the 20? And is this regular season or post-season overtime? (Or college?)

Health Care reform is on either the two- or the five-yard line. So get excited!

If the Senate oks (unspecified) changes to their health care bill, Nancy Pelosi says she can get it through the House. She is a pretty good Speaker! The reconciliation process requires only 50 votes, but amendments are hypothetically unlimited.

"I don't see the votes for [passing the Senate bill] at this time." -Nancy Pelosi

Democrats should either ram through a vote before Brown is seated or pass the Senate bill and improve it through reconciliation. Barack Obama just took the first option off the table and Barney Frank has ruled out the second.

Partly because a decent public servant turned out to be a shitty candidate and partly because the national media loves a "collapse of a frontrunner" narrative, there will perhaps be a Republican Senator from Massachusetts pretty soon.

Senator Ben Nelson would like the Medicaid deal he finagled for Nebraska to apply to all the other states, according to a hilariously ass-covering public letter he sent Harry Reid.

Merging of the Senate and (superior) House health care bills will be expedited by avoiding a formal conference committee. This is good, because the GOP cannot pointlessly obstruct, and bad, because it once again freezes out the House.

Mere hours after we asked whether Rush's hospitalization means he's hitting the pill bottle again, an energetic Limbaugh took to the small screen to announce that he is healthy as an ox, and no, he is not high on Oxy.

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is everywhere! Why? Because he owns a hippie grocery store chain, is himself hippieish, and also he is a conservative libertarian dude! That makes the things he has to say newsworthy!

Nevada Senator Harry Reid has been pulling a few too many all-nighters trying to push the health care bill through the senate. When it came time to vote for Reid to vote on his own baby, he accidentally said "no."

The abortion issue will probably be at the center of attempts to finalize and sign the healthcare bill, if Senators like Ben Nelson are involved. People will be bandying the phrase 'pro-life' around to refer to anti-abortionists. They should stop.

After what feels like seventeen years and 14 million column inches the Senate passed the healthcare bill 60-39 today (no Republicans voted for it). Assuming they agree on a final version with the House, here's what it will mean.

Thanks to the media-hating GOP, the poor saps who cover Congress will be spending Christmas Eve in the Capitol watching Communism happen in the form of a vote on the healthcare bill. Their White House counterparts will be in Hawaii.

Ugh. Shut up, bill-killing liberals. You know who has more liberal cred than all of you? Bernie Sanders, who secured $10 billion for community health and then voted for cloture.

Remember the "botax" that Congress was thinking about including in the health care bill, which would impose a five percent tax on cosmetic surgery procedures? It was dropped from the bill over the weekend as part of a concession to the American Medical Association, which had lobbied hard against its inclusion for obvious reasons. The nation's tanning salons don't have as much of a presence on Capitol Hill, apparently, because the 10 percent tax on "indoor tanning services" was kept in, and is expected to contribute $2.7 billion to fund health care reform over the next decade. [NYDN, WSJ]

According to the wonks (and the anguished wails of conservatives), we'll have a health care bill signed by the State of the Union. And it may even incrementally improve between now and then. What did we learn?

Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, you cantankerous mufuh, you always need a little push. He got it with 13 hours of negotiations. Nelson puts Democrats at 60. Nobody's arguing that Joe Lieberman remains an asshole.