One Democrat says the Stupak amendment has enough votes to pass, but it will likely be a close vote. This summer (when the GOP caucus had one more member), pro-lifers lost a vote to ban taxpayer-funding of abortion in Washington, D.C by a 216 to 213 margin. Of course, then a few Republicans weren't present for the vote, some people like Tim Ryan of Ohio voted against the bill because of "home-rule" issues, and the vote wasn't an up-or-down vote on a pro-life measure but rather an attempt to block the entire bill from proceeding. Stupak's amendment has a better chance of passing.

Update: This Politico post I link to above by Patrick O'Connor reports that the Stupak amendment "effectively bar insurers that participate in the exchanges from offering coverage for abortions." That's not quite accurate--the Stupak amendment bars plans purchased with federal subsidies from covering elective abortions. Insurers would be free to sell supplemental plans and private plans that cover abortions.

Update: The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn writes that the Stupak amendment "would bar abortion coverage altogether." That's not true. The amendment allows people to purchase supplemental plans that cover abortions. Read the amendment here.

Cohn also writes that a "lobbyist" tells him that Obamacare may yet fund abortions because "The vote is better in the Senate." If Cohn and his lobbyist source mean that Senate Democrats could get 50 of their members to support taxpayer-funded abortions, I suppose that's correct. But they can't get 60: Ben Nelson and Bob Casey won't go along for the ride, and neither will Evan Bayh and a few others in all likelihood.

Obama is endorsing the House bill, which Nancy Pelosi wants to vote on this weekend, but the House bill currently allows the public option and federally subsidized plans to cover elective abortions. Today, Gibbs danced around questions from ABC's Jake Tapper, who asked why the House is still debating about coverage of abortion and providing coverage for illegal immigrants when Obama's made himself clear.

Later, another reporter asked Gibbs:

Q: Is [Obama] urging [Pelosi] to compromise on the abortion issue, seeing as that is where the holdout Democrats are?

MR. GIBBS: I don't know when the last time they spoke so -- I know that there's discussions about that going on, on Capitol Hill.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD followed up to ask if President Obama believes the current language is acceptable:

TWS: Does the President believe that the current language -- some Democrats have argued that the current language does bar federal funding of abortion because it would theoretically be through private [segregated] funding. Does he believe that that language fulfills his pledge or --

GIBBS: I'm not going to get involved in those --

TWS: Or does he think it needs to be changed in some way?

GIBBS: I'm not going--

TWS: He doesn't have a position?

GIBBS: I'm not going to do the negotiating here.

So the White House press secretary is unwilling to say if the bill's current language on abortion--which has been in the bill since it passed the Energy and Commerce committee this summer--fulfills Obama's pledge to ban funding elective abortions. But he was clear about his bottom line: "The president wants the House to pass this," Gibbs said. Even if the White House doesn't seem to be entirely clear about what "this" is.

From Major Garrett's exchange with Gibbs today:

Garrett: Getting back to what Jake (Tapper) was asking about earlier, there are still some unresolved issues, so I'm just curious if the president supports it in its unresolved form or its resolved form?

Gibbs: The president wants the House -- the president wants the House to pass this. The president wants the House to pass health care reform. ...

Gibbs: I'm glad we got to... six questions to get to the fact that the president would travel from here to the House to say, "Pass the bill."

Strategic Reassurance, we hardly knew ye.

Vulnerable freshman Democrats abandoning ship on health care.

Apparently they learned the wrong lesson from the Deeds Disaster in Virginia.

Oh wait, two more Dems just bailed on the health care vote.

Hoyer isn't sure they have the votes yet, the vote may get pushed to Sunday or next week.

ACORN offices raided by the police, Hannah Giles not found.

10.2 percet unemployment = success beyond their "wildest dreams"

As of press time, the Prime Minister's Office said no formal meeting had been scheduled with US President Barack Obama during the visit, which could last through the week. No departure date has been set.

Netanyahu and Obama last met in New York in September on the sidelines of the opening of the United Nation's General Assembly session.

Obama plans to speak at the UJC event on Tuesday, in what will be his first speech to a Jewish audience at a public event since his election a year ago.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor told The Jerusalem Post that nothing had been planned in terms of a Netanyahu-Obama sit-down while the prime minister is in town. "There is no scheduled meeting," he said.

No direct, presidential diplomacy? Or is that just for our enemies? Of course they will, ultimately, have a meeting -- not even the deep hostility this administration harbors for the Israeli government blinds them to the political fallout that would come from such a diplomatic diss. This president has already stirred fears among otherwise liberal, yellow dog Democrat Jews. And he's already convinced the Israeli public that he is not a friend -- his favorable rating in Israel hovers somewhere around 5 percent. The White House doesn't need any more trouble on this front.

Bibi knows the White House will call, though maybe not before they spend another couple days digging the hole a little deeper. Presumably this stall is some kind of "smart power" play, part of some hidden, grand strategy that will see Iran and North Korea give up their nuclear programs, Hamas lay down its arms, and China sign on to cap and trade in a win-win-win-win four-way trade (remember, this isn't a zero-sum game!). But it fits a general theme: Obama likes to treat his friends like enemies and his enemies like friends. While the White House gives Bibi the cold shoulder, State Department officials are on their way home from meetings with the Burmese junta.

And why do they keep sending Vietor to deliver the bad news?

Today, Robert Gibbs lamented some of the offensive signs at Bachmann's anti-health bill rally (of which there were some, but not enough to even fill out HuffPo's 12 Most Offensive slideshow):

"I will continue to say what I've said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People -- imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Hopefully we can get back to a discussion about the issues that are important in this country that we can do so without being personally disagreeable and set up comparisons to things that were so insidious in our history that anybody in any profession or walk of life would be well advised to compare nothing to those atrocities."

Let's help Gibbs out with this in particular:

Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Let's see if we can imagine that, Bob. Click here, and just keep scrolling.

Or, here. You will be scrolling for a solid five minutes to exhaust the Hitler images employed by the left for eight solid years against Bush, and that's in just two blog posts. They were ubiquitous; far more prevalent that Nazi imagery in the Tea Party movement. Saying what Gibbs said, or repeating it credulously, requires an incredible amount of dishonesty.

Hmm, let's try a search on Flickr, just so we're sure I'm not cherry-picking.

Looking for something more recent? How about Alan Grayson's health-care Holocaust in America crusade, by which Gibbs was markedly less "stunned" despite the fact that Grayson's an elected official making Holocaust comparisons on the floor of the House. Imagine.

Before Gibbs took leave of his senses and all sense of history today, the White House had a more petulant response to the gathering, at which actor Jon Voight spoke. Yesterday, Gibbs very kindly stopped himself from making a "Deliverance" joke about the attendees. Considerate.

I would argue that the White House Press Secretary implying a joke about how protesters are rednecks prone to anal rape would fall into the category of "stunning" and "personally disagreeable," but I digress.

I guess this is what they meant by "audacity."

From everything you have heard or read so far, do you favor or oppose Barack Obama's plan to reform health care?
Oppose 53
Support 45

The numbers were the other way around in August: 50 percent supported and 45 opposed.

Eight people have been shot, two of them fatally at an office building at 1000 Legion Place in dowtown Orlando. Police are looking for a suspect wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans. A witness tells FOX 35 the shooter is a former worker who was employed in the building.

He is 40-year-old Jason Rodrigues, driving a Silver 2002 Nissan SUV.

Update: The gunman has been arrested. He is reported to be a disgruntled ex-employee of a company in the building on which he opened fire. He was fired in 2007.

Asked by a reporter outside the police station why he did it, Rodriguez replied: "Because they left me to rot."

Mike Bernos, spokesman of the engineering firm Reynolds, Smith and Hills, said Rodriguez was an entry-level engineer who was fired in June 2007 after working there for a year.

"His performance wasn't up to our standards, so we terminated him," Bernos said. There had been no contact between the company and Rodriguez since then.

In an interview with FOX News' Shepherd Smith, a woman who identified herself as Rodriguez's former mother-in-law described the suspect as a tremendously jealous and paranoid individual.

"He was a little unpredictable. Very jealous. He would imagine things sometimes, like for example: 'People are after me, people are looking for me, they hate me,'" recalled the woman, who did not give her name.

"He was under medication...to help his mind,"

"If I am not mistaken, they had him in a mental [facility] about six months ago,"

"I know he had mental problems,"

"He was crazy. He was crazy,"

Obama said he met today with FBI Director et al to discuss "what caused one individual to turn his gun on fellow servicemen and women.”

It's hard not to be reminded of Obama's famous post-9/11 remarks, which first came to light in the New Yorker last summer. This from a speech the week after the attacks in which he likewise wanted to know, what would cause a bunch of Muslim fanatics to fly airplanes into American buildings:

We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.

You have to wonder: Will Obama still find that the fundamental tragedy was not the murder of 13 Americans at the hands of a terrorist, but the failure of our society to address his grievances before he was forced to turn to violence? Are we still to blame for our indifference to poverty, ignorance, helplessness and despair?

Smith also flags this passage, which Jones seems to have freelanced:

[O]f all the problems the administration faces globally, that if there was one problem that I would recommend to the president that if he could do anything he wanted to solve one problem, this would be it," he said, in a passage that's not in his prepared text, then continued: "Finding a solution to this problem has ripples that echo, that would run globally and a affect many other problems that we face elsewhere in the globe. The reverse is not true. This is the epicenter, and this is where we should focus our efforts and I’m delighted that this administration is doing so with such enthusiasm and commitment and I hope that it will bare the fruits of that labor will be visible in the near future."

The announcement by Abbas that he will not seek another term as president of the PA, Smith says, is "a mark of the trouble currently at the 'epicenter,' and how far off that near future is now looking." Yes, the peace process is a mess, and Obama actually must take the blame for some of the current trouble -- things are worse than they were when Obama came into office, and they are worse mostly because of the arrogance with which this administration approached the conflict.

Still, though Jones's comments were troubling, this view -- that the Arab-Israeli conflict is our most pressing foreign policy challenge -- has been repeated again and again by the president and his chief of staff. Jones may have gone off text, but it is almost certainly the consensus view inside the White House that the Arab-Israeli conflict is, as Obama once said, the "constant sore" that "infect[s] all of our foreign policy."

"It seems quite odd to place the conflict ahead of Afghanistan, Iran, and China, among other White House priorities," Smith says in a follow-up. And of course the reverse is true, contra Jones. Solving the Iran problem -- imagine what the peace process would look like if Israel didn't feel an existential threat from Iran and if Hamas didn't have a state sponsor -- would have "ripples that echo" across the Middle East and beyond.

The Guardian newspaper reported on Thursday that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has requested a response from Iran in regard to evidence that the country has experimented with the creation of advanced implosion devices designed for use in nuclear weapons.

The report, which was compiled by using the data of numerous intelligence agencies over an extended period charges that Iranian scientists have been working on creating the components in a “two-point implosion” device. Such a device is used to bring about the chain reaction in a nuclear fission warhead. Furthermore, the device would be smaller than other nuclear implosion devices, which would in turn give Iran the ability to create much smaller warheads and therefore require a smaller missile system to deliver it to its target.

This is huge. Conventional wisdom was that Iran would first try to build a working bomb, then move on to more advanced designs to shrink and fit on to one of their ballistic missiles. Now we learn that Iran is skipping that step and moving directly to a compact, fully deliverable weapon.

More concerning is what comes after solving two point implosion: the Teller-Ulam bomb, more commonly known as the hydrogen bomb. The Iranian regime has been very clever in its development of a nuclear weapons program. Using a horizontal model where they first lined up all the necessary "ingredients" for advanced nuclear weapons --heavy water plants, experimental reactors, plutonium refining plants and uranium enrichment facilities -- means that they can shoot directly for a thermonuclear device instead of toying around with a Fat Man or Little Boy like we did in the 1940s. North Korea's program was vertical, doing just enough to create some sort of functional device. It was a dud. Iran's will not be.

This is bad news. It means that as soon as Iran successfully tests a bomb (if they even test one, remember the first time we detonated a uranium gun-barrel type bomb was over Hiroshima, so reliable was the design) they will immediately be able to mate the weapon to one of their Shahab missiles, capable of reaching Israel. If Iran develops a solid-fueled rocket as well, they'll have a potential thermonuclear launch-on-warning capability just like the five members of the Security Council.

It's a flash from MSNBC, with no details yet: Dem leader says House health vote may be delayed due to lack of support

Update:

A House leader says Democrats haven't yet lined up enough votes to pass their health care overhaul bill.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland says the vote that House Democrats had scheduled for Saturday could slip to Sunday or early next week.

Hoyer acknowledged to reporters Friday that Democratic leaders don't yet have the 218 votes needed to pass President Barack Obama's historic health overhaul initiative.

He said he still expects passage Saturday night. But he added that some Democrats are still "looking to get a comfort level" with the bill.

The largest pieces of the defense pie are manpower and logistics, in that they require the most sustainment resources. In 2010, there will be more men and machinery in motion than at any time since the positioning phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom -- that is, more manpower and vastly more logistical demands than we've seen in years.

The funding numbers simply don't add up. There's no adjustment for inflation. The administration has not asked for additional funding to support, sustain, or equip the influx of 22,000 new troops. No one seems to know where the money to move troops out of Iraq is coming from, and with Secretary Gates confirming that military expenditures will essentially be "flat" for the next five years, the US military cutting procurement and delaying the reset of equipment already in service. The effects will be felt in both theaters of war.

In order to turn White House directives into reality, the Joint Chiefs have put in for a $50 billion war supplemental for FY2010, which is precisely the way the president said he wasn't going to fund the war. Unfortunately for Obama, he may have to choose between extending his egress timetable in Iraq or severely under-equipping CENTCOM forces. This is exactly why you don't make bold foreign policy decisions/campaign promises until you've got all the facts in front of you.

Army officials say the suspect, "the lone shooter" for this tragic incident, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, is currently on a ventilator at a nearby civilian hospital and the police officer who gunned him down, Kimberly Munley, a civilian Fort Hood police officer, is in stable condition.

She's a civilian officer:

Munley, who had been trained in active-response tactics, rushed into the building and confronted the shooter as he was turning a corner, Cone said.

"It was an amazing and an aggressive performance by this police officer," Cone said.

Munley was only a few feet from crazed Army psychiatrist Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan when she opened fire.

Wounded in the exchange of gunfire, Munley was reported in stable condition at a local hospital...

Cone said Munley's aggressive response training taught her that "if you act aggressively to take out a shooter you will have less fatalities."

"She walked up and engaged him," he said. He praised her as "one of our most impressive young police officers."

She's apparently conscious, and spent the night calling fellow officers to let them know her condition, and checking up on the other wounded.

All of the other wounded are in stable condition, which is far better news than I expected, with so many wounded.