We are definitely living in the age of Geek Power.

Walking the halls of the circus-themed Austin Convention Center at SXSW 2010, you would have seen swarms of twenty, thirty and forty somethings, with their neck craned and their heads bowed, staring down at mobile devices and computers, on the floors, waiting in line, or perched on mod chairs and tables. After seeing all that connectivity, I've decided to hook up this post. Once I put it online, it will automatically link to my Twitter account, which then feeds into my blog and Facebook pages, which then triggers an SMS to all my friends--including Jay-Z, holla--which then prompts a link to my version of "Empire State" on YouTube.

As everyone's heard by now, Umair Haque blew his interview with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. I totally cornbraided my hair (with beads) between each of Umair's ponderously...drawn...out...words. The LA Times called it as boring as watching two grandmothers play Canasta. Haque used the interview to show off his new vocabulary (which included groundbreaking words like "awesomeness" and "betterness") and bore us about how cool Twitter was for fixing his vacation when he tweet-raged about the rogue travel agency that booked him. That is awesomeness, Umair. Those stories have been told. Don't you write for the Harvard Business Review? Evan, thank you for not walking off the stage and humiliating the poor man.

I think I am in love. I mean professionally, that is. I am in love, professionally, with Jaron Lanier. His new book, You Are Not a Gadget, caressed my nervous soul and gave me hope for the future. The little avatars in my mind are taunting me, making me worry why I, as a human, am responsible for keeping up with the intricacies of technology in order to live my life. I'm not talking about signing up for a Twitter account. I'm talking about dancing 'til four in the morning and having the time of my life, then feeling like it didn't really happen because I didn't have a digital badge to prove it. And how many of us really understand our privacy settings in Facebook? Lanier, while criticizing the "ascendancy of geek power" also believes that those same geeks, his colleagues and friends, will act responsibly with a future of humanity and democracy, not techno-feudalism, in mind.

Meanwhile, CJP Media's Cleveland Wilson is onto something. In the panel on branded entertainment, he discussed the "Easy to Assemble" project that he produced for IKEA. The project enlisted Illeana Douglas and Justine Bateman in a series where they battle (as themselves) for IKEA's Co-Worker of the Year award. You watch the webisodes, you vote, and Erik, the Store Manager, decides. The webisodes took the best of broadcast tradition--with seasons, bonus materials, and a star cast--to bring great content to the web, not for the web. The webisodes were beautifully shot (Cleveland and CJP understand that "social" does not mean "informal," it means "open") and hilarious to watch. The distribution was brilliant. With a zero media budget, CJP enlisted influencers like Perez Hilton to post each webisode on their site; the sites which got the most hits were written into the final episode of the season. When I hear about projects like this, I get giddy, because it's obviously about making good for the client, but it's also about making great art that is great business.

Great art is great business. Did you hear that, Upstack? What? You don't believe me? If you are still in business in December 2011, I will try your service for a very tentative side project. I love entrepreneurs and the courage they have to take risks, but I've been creating brands for fifteen years and I know that my relationships with clients and the inspiration from my colleagues is the only thing left after the paper and the pixels disappear. It is my relationship with them that inspire me to create. In Upstack, the humanity of design is just...lost. I must stop crying now, but it makes me very sad and surely if this thing takes off, I will search for Calatrava, McGuiness, and John Galt who surely left for a secret design utopia.

In closing, I'd like to congratulate Wolfram Alpha for their "Best of Show" award*. Their answer engine has so much, to use some of Umair Haque's new vocabulary, awesomeness. Yet weary of all the tech talk at the end of this interactive conference, I found myself "rekindled by a spark from another person," as Albert Schweitzer put it. This person was filmmaker Lena Dunham. I was invited to attend the SXSW Film Awards, where her film, Tiny Furniture, won the Jury Prize. As I am not a film critic, I won't even pretend to critique the film, but I will say that her art will set you a little bit free, and I urge you to view the trailer, find out when the screening is in your area, and have a look at some of her shorts on YouTube.

There is so much hope for our future.

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Under the heading "A symbol of the slave trade joins US and Cuba," the news is out this morning: the schooner Amistad is on its way. The organizers have said that it will first dock in the province of Matanzas, a city known as the Athens of Cuba because of its Doric and Ionic columns and the site of the new UNESCO-affiliated slavery museum. On the morning of March 22, when the Amistad is set to arrive in the bay of Matanzas, it will be fulfilling a two century old return home; indeed, it was there, on those docks, that the original schooner was built and from where it first set sail.

The Amistad left Cuban shores in 1839 full of captive African slaves, all of whom revolted, taking over the ship until the vessel was finally seized off the shores of Long Island. All of this is beautifully and, as always, artistically and tastefully recounted in the 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad .

Maritime law obliges vessels to carry at least two flags: one from the country from where it leaves port and the other from the country from where it is headed. This vessel will thus be sailing the Caribbean waving both the Cuban flag and the flag of the United States of America. What a lovely sight that will be.

For anyone who doubts the ties between Cuba and the US, this is yet another page in the many chapters of the long relationship that unites these two nations. The replica of a XIX century slave vessel baptized "Amistad" -- back again honoring the end of one of the most horrendous and, ironically, enriching chapters of the history of this hemisphere -- will be flying the flags of the hemispheres oldest foes whose history and mutual ties reach back in time only to, paradoxically, spell out friendship.

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A group of French psychologists recently recruited 80 volunteers for what they claimed was a pilot for a new TV Show. The game involved posing questions to another "player" -- in reality, an actor --and punishing him with as much as 460 volts of electricity when he answered wrong as the roaring crowd screamed "Punishment!" Of the 80 volunteers, only 16 refused to obey and walked out. The other 80% went all the way until the actor appeared to have died. One of the contestants who went forward with the torture admitted that she was the granddaughter of a Jewish couple who were tortured and persecuted by the Nazis in World War II.

The experiment was paralleling that the Yale Psychologist Stanley Milgram, in which individuals were told to inflict pain on subjects. Similar to the French show, most of the recruits in that experiment went forward and followed the authority of doctors in white coats, even as they heard screams and pleas from the person next room that they thought they were torturing.

Psychologists have used the results of Milgram's experiment and others done since then to support the concept that in contrast to the belief of many, it doesn't take a mentally deranged individual to commit horrific acts. But rather, under certain social circumstances, any average individual is capable of committing violence against another individual. These circumstances often involve someone with an apparent claim of authority who is issuing the orders, and a group of other individuals surrounding a individual who are following those orders. The more people who follow the orders, the less likely it becomes for every single person to question those orders.

Many historians have used the results of Stanley Milgram's experiment and now the French torture game to explain the atrocities committed by rank-and-file Nazi soldiers. But a more recent real world example is the situation in Iran. Following the eruption of the Green Movement, the world was shocked to find out the extent to which members of Basij and Sepah-e Pasdaran (also known as the Revolutionary Guard) were willing to use violence against the protesters.

When one attempts to encourage Iranians to use proven nonviolent civil resistance strategies that have been successful in defeating the most ghastly dictators -- such as Slobodan Milosevic, Argentine Juntas and Augusto Pinochet -- many claim that the Iranian regime is different and cannot be affected by such methods. Similarly, many Iranians who are rightly mad at the regime believe that there is no point trying to communicate, reason and persuade those who are committing the violence because they can never be convinced to side with the people. Some don't even consider these basijis humans, often referring to them as "heyvoona" (animals).

But Iranians have a lot to take from the result of the French "Game of Death." The fact is while individuals at the highest levels of Iranian leadership may be fanatics who can never be persuaded that they are committing atrocities, many of the lower-ranking "foot soldiers" who actually commit those acts on the ground are not intrinsically iniquitous. They are rather average people from various segments of the Iranian society who do what they do because of factors that often fall into two main categories: economic and psychological.

The economic element that explains their behavior is quite simple. These violent individuals often desperately need the paychecks and other forms of payment -- such as bags of rice and roghan-e jaamed (solid cooking oil) -- that they get from government.

But as often as Iran analysts mention the first factor, they do not emphasize the many psychological factors that can lead someone to commit horrific acts. First, there are many elements in the Iranian culture and traditions that implicitly approve the use of violence to settle disputes. When students underperform in school, teacher uses a ruler to inflict pain on them, and many men use violence against women in their own homes. These practices don't just happen in the basiji families, but in homes throughout the most affluent and progressive parts of Iran. Chances are every Iranian reading his piece can think of someone in his or her own extended family who has engaged in this kind of behavior.

Secondly, fear plays a huge factor. When a basiji is faced with an angry crowd that is screaming "Mikosham! Mikosham! Anke Baradaram Kosht!" (I will kill, I will kill, that who killed my brother), even if that basiji has not personally killed anyone, he begins to see his commission of violence in a fundamentally different way: an act of self-defense. After all, he wonders, is there any chance that such a crowd would afford him clemency should they succeed in bringing change?

And the third factor has to do with the concept of conformity and respect for authority that the French psychologists revealed in the torture game. When a member of the Guard or Basij receives an order to crush the protesters with full force, and he is surrounded by other members who are moving forward with the execution of those orders, the circumstances are ripe for any individual with the mentioned personal concerns to follow suit in that specific context. This does not mean he is mentally flawed or cannot be persuaded, and it does not mean that the only way to achieve victory is to engage in reciprocal violence.

As the French torture game highlights the capability of normal human beings to engage in seemingly inexplicable behavior, it also goes a long way to explain how members of the security forces in Iran are capable of committing such acts of violence. Acknowledgement of this reality should strengthen Iranians' belief in the effectiveness of persuasion in making allies of even the most seemingly unpersuadable members of society by focusing not on threats and intimidation, but reason and incentives.

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LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — In the capital of Afghanistan's Helmand province, Taliban roam the streets freely. Barely a mile (a kilometer) outside Lashkar Gah, they wield more control than the government, according to residents.

Last month 10,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan forces wrested control of Marjah, a Helmand farming community about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from Lashkar Gah, after years of Taliban rule. The Marjah offensive was the first test of NATO's new counterinsurgency strategy to turn ordinary Afghans away from the Taliban with good governance and development.

But the battle for Helmand is far from over. Even in Marjah, Taliban fighters still plant bombs under cover of darkness. NATO efforts to win over the population with public services and aid have barely begun.

On Wednesday, would-be suicide attackers targeted the offices of a charity in Lashkar Gah but were killed by security guards before they could detonate their explosives-laden vests. One foreign employee was wounded in the attack on the office of International Relief and Development.

According to residents, the Taliban presence in Helmand province remains formidable, even with the loss of their base in Marjah.

"Look over there at that TV tower," said Abdul Latif, an English teacher in Lashkar Gah who wore a scarf over his face because he didn't want to be identified in the company of foreigners. "After that tower, the rest is all Taliban. The Taliban are all over the city. They leave their guns at home and come into the city."

Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal acknowledges that the Taliban have outright control of three of the province's 13 districts. In most other districts, the only areas where the government has control are the district capitals, according to residents and some government officials.

Mangal's appointee as chief of Baghran district, Abdul Razik, hasn't been able to take up the job because the Taliban won't let him enter the area. Instead, he works out of an office in Lashkar Gah, telephoning elders in Baghran to try to persuade them to switch sides.

"How can I go there by myself if they are in control?" Razik asked. "We don't have enough soldiers or police to go with me. I can't go alone."

In Musa Qala district, the government controls the main town but the Taliban hold weekly court sessions in the rest of the district to settle property and other disputes.

The new counterinsurgency strategy pushed by U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal requires NATO to not just take an area but to hold it. Yet the Taliban's strength in Helmand underscores how fragile NATO's hold is not only on Marjah – an 80-square mile (200-square kilometer) district composed of farming villages – but also on other communities.

Michael Scheuer, the former CIA point man in the hunt for al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, cautioned against overstating Marjah's success, which he called "transitory."

"As long as we have 10,000 folks on the ground and open the spigot of greenbacks the success will continue," he said. "The U.S.-NATO-Karzai team will also get a boost from the large part of the media ... who will take a transitory local success and extrapolate it into a nationwide, permanent turning of the tide. How many times did we see that in Vietnam and in Iraq? How many times did the Soviets trumpet the same kind of victory in Afghanistan?"

In an interview on the banks of the Helmand River, Mangal, the governor, likened Marjah to a pilot project in good governance. If it succeeds, the expectation is that it will turn ordinary Afghans against the Taliban, and win over Taliban fighters with a promise of development and good governance.

But people are skeptical, some pointing to the appointment of Abdul Zahir as Marjah's new district leader. Zahir was convicted and jailed in Germany on attempted manslaughter charges, according to German court documents. Zahir has denied ever spending time in a German jail. Afghan officials have not rushed to oust him, but are reviewing the case.

Former Helmand Gov. Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, who supported the assault on Marjah, warned that widespread corruption will turn the Marjah victory into defeat.

"The Taliban are not gone. They have only gone to the other districts of Grishk and Sangin," said Akhundzada, whose family has ruled the province for much of the past two decades.

"The administration of Helmand is generally corrupt and nothing is changing in Marjah, no signs of reform with the latest appointment," Akhundzada said. "It doesn't matter if you have thousands and thousands of NATO troops, you will still have Taliban in Helmand."

Scheuer said it was dangerous to suggest that Marjah was a big setback for the Taliban or a major win for the Afghan government and international forces.

"Is it crippling or even hurtful (to the Taliban) over the long term? No," Scheuer said, citing multiple attacks in Kabul on Feb. 28, a day after the provincial government hoisted its flag in Marjah's town center, that underscored the Taliban's ability to strike throughout the country.

"I think the U.S. and NATO can make inroads and win tactical victories with conventional forces in Kandahar or most any other place they want to go in Afghanistan with big forces, but so what?" Scheuer said. "We do not have a tenth of the forces necessary to be everywhere at once and apply a nationwide strategy – even if we had one."

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There's a swirl of reports coming out now that leadership is negotiating with a handful of the Stupak crowd to get their votes. Pelosi says "This bill is about health care and not about abortion. There will be no further changes in the bill." But what's happening outside of this bill? A reminder--the Nelson Senate language will be what passes, because the reconciliation package cannot include a change in abortion language.

So the focus isn't on changes "in this bill"--it's what they promise Stupak, et al. outside of this bill. The Hill reports some sort of deal is in the works.

At least six anti-abortion-rights Democrats are open to supporting the healthcare bill if they can get a guarantee from the Senate that it will move separate legislation containing the House abortion language, one of those Democratic holdouts said Friday.

Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), one of Rep. Bart Stupak’s (D-Mich.) gang of staunch opponents of the Senate abortion language, said they are in discussions with senators and House leaders to secure such a commitment.

“There could be some kind of commitment from the other body to act on this later ... to ensure that the Senate language does not remain law,” he said....

The chairman would not say whether discussions between Stupak and Senate Democrats have risen to the leadership level, but he did say that he and Stupak are talking to House leaders, including Pelosi.

Asked how those discussions were going, Rahall said, “That’s undeterminable at this point.”

The anti-abortion-rights Democrats view the Saturday Rules Committee markup of the bill as an opportunity to set an up-or-down vote on the Stupak abortion language in a way that would not make it part of the bill itself. Abortion-rights supporters have been cool to the idea, despite the likelihood that such language would not find enough support in the Senate to become law.

Stupak himself has been pushing another procedural route, an "enrollment corrections bill." Here's what he said this morning on GMA, as reported by the Wonk Room.

STUPAK: George, that’s called an enrollment corrections bill. I presented that to leadership about ten days ago. There’s renewed interest in that piece of legislation that I and a number of us are ready to introduce. It’s prepared. Everybody’s looking at it right now. That’s one way, maybe. But we set the deal with the Senate. You give us a vote in the House. We had a vote in the House. It was overwhelmingly 240-194, to keep public law, no public funding for abortion.

Indeed, Stupak has been promoting this strategy for weeks, telling MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that he would support a separate “tie bar” bill earlier this month. The tie bar approach requires just 51 votes in the Senate and would “tie” the health care bill to Stupak abortion provisions. “It almost goes the same time,” Stupak told Fox News’ Greta van Susteren. “And what the bill really says is, it does not become law unless this other piece of legislation becomes law.”

And that would make the Stupak Coathanger Amendment law without "further changes in this bill." In the Wonk Room post, Volsky takes Stupak at his word that he only wants to reinforce Hyde, and suggests that the "tie bar" legislation leadership offer in return be a codification of the Hyde amendment--an evil, yes, but not as evil as the more extreme Stupak language. But it seems damned unlikely that Stupak will take that deal, and nothing in his actions over the past months suggest that he'll settle for anything less than getting abortion restrictions into private insurance coverage.

The problem for Pelosi, getting six or seven of those Stupak supporters by agreeing to letting his Coathanger Amendment go forward outside of this bill could mean losing six or seven of the 41 pro-choice members who are on record as opposed to Stupak. A handful of those folks are probably pissed off enough at the other liberal losses in this bill--Stupak could be the tipping point.

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Glenn Greenwald wrote a very good post on whether the Rahm healthcare strategy, "to ignore the demands of progressives on the ground that they would fall into line at the end no matter what," has been vindicated by the outcome of the health reform debate.

For almost a full year, scores of progressive House members vowed -- publicly and unequivocally -- that they would never support a health care bill without a robust public option. They collectively accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars based on this pledge. Up until a few weeks ago, many progressive opinion leaders -- such as Moulitsas, Howard Dean, Keith Olbermann and many others -- were insisting that the Senate bill was worse than the status quo and should be defeated. But now? All of those progressives House members are doing exactly what they swore they would never do -- vote for a health care bill with no public option -- and virtually every progressive opinion leader is not only now supportive of the bill, but vehemently so. In other words, exactly what Rahm said would happen -- ignore the progressives, we don't need to give them anything because they'll get into line -- is exactly what happened. How is that not vindication?
....

I want to be clear here: I'm not criticizing progressives who support this bill, nor am I criticizing those who insisted they would oppose it but changed their minds at the end. Unlike many progressives, I was never among those who advocated for this bill's defeat because, as loathsome and even dangerous as I find the bill's corporatist framework to be (mandating that citizens buy the products of the private health insurance industry), I've found it very difficult (as I said all along) to oppose a bill that results in greater health care coverage for millions of currently uninsured people. Whether progressives are doing the right thing in supporting this bill is debatable (there's a strong progressive case for the bill -- any bill that restricts industry abuses and vastly expands coverage is inherently progressive -- and a strong progressive case that it does more harm than good), but that's a completely separate question from the one raised by Smith.

What's not debatable is that this process highlighted -- and worsened -- the virtually complete powerlessness of the Left and progressives generally in Washington. If you were in Washington negotiating a bill, would you take seriously the threats of progressive House members in the future that they will withhold support for a Party-endorsed bill if their demands for improvements are not met? Of course not. No rational person would.

That's the dilemma plenty of progressives, myself included, face--seeing the serious problems with this bill--the mandate in absence of a public option, the very real rollback of reproductive rights for women, the lack of effective cost controls on pharmaceuticals and device makers and hospitals, the fact that it doesn't provide universal care--it provides access to insurance to citizens, leaving out millions of undocumented workers who won't even be able to spend their own money on insurance, should they care to.

In short, there are a tremendous number of trade-offs for a bill that doesn't reach system healthcare reform, that settles for insurance reform that is lacking the most effective element--significant competition. Way back last summer, Obama shifted his rhetoric on this bill to call it insurance reform, a key shift that signaled that the kind of comprehensive system reform many were looking for wasn't in the offing. Nonetheless, like Glenn, I can't bring myself to advocate for its defeat because the very effort at trying to curb health insurance industry abuses and expand coverage is progressive, and there's little hope that we can argue effectively for more and better reform if this one doesn't pass.

At the same time, though, trying to argue that the provisions in this bill signify a progressive victory is from my perspective, a negotiating mistake. There are some improvements to this bill over the Senate bill achieved by the House--and by labor--that should be recognized and appreciated, but I think it's worth noting that little that was added came from either the progressive caucus in the House or certainly from progressive activists, and that we really don't have laurels to rest upon if we want to keep fighting for real reform.

Some of these improvements: the expansion of Medicaid, a very necessary development given the rough economic time states are still having, happened because Nelson and Reid blundered so fantastically with the Nebraska deal, and had to find a way out. Bernie Sanders increased funding for community health centers is another significant addition, but he did that pretty much on his own with some smart negotiating that didn't include the activist community. His state waiver provision which could theoretically allow states to set up single payer is actually a bit of a double-edged sword--the ERISA waiver that would be necessary to allow states to do this wasn't included in Sander's provision, and it's not yet clear whether it's in the reconciliation package. What's more, that same provision was written loosely enough to allow states to also opt-out of Medicaid and Medicare, waivers that Republican governors might be able to get out of an HHS in the next Republican administration (counting on Dems to hold the WH for the next few decades isn't a safe bet).

For those who were looking for systemic, comprehensive health care reform, we didn't get it. Ending insurance company abuses is absolutely vital, and those provisions very important, but have to be enforced. The exchanges might provide a start for that enforcement, but that's a limited "might." The exchanges are going to be state-based, not national. Right now we're gambling on them to create real competition and some sort of structure for real regulation and oversight of the insurers. But that's going to be relying in large part on elected state insurance commissioners, and federal regulation writers. The Senate bill is written loosely enough to allow for regs to pick up some of the slack and for a significant HHS role, but again, that's something that the next Republican administration can undo.

I'd argue that it's bad politically and for future policy efforts for progressives to lose sight of the fact that we had some pretty big losses in this one. Who lost? Labor, though the excise tax is better, it's still there. Single payer or public option advocates, obviously. Women. Hyde will be law now, and the fight taken beyond public funding to private insurance. Latinos. Undocumented workers can't spend their own money on insurance. And in the offing we went from 48 million uninsured to 31 million uninsured because we won't count the brown people. Despite the fact that from a systemic public health perspective, getting them care will still cost money because hospitals and emergency rooms will still be legally obligated to provide that care--as they should be.

In other words, the job isn't done with this bill. Is this a step forward? Yes, to the extent that now Congress sees it can do something about health reform. Should it be passed? Yes. Absolutely. Millions of people will now have access to coverage, and to care, that they do not have under the status quo. That's a societal good.

But if the deficiencies--and they are significant--are going to ever be fixed, we can't make the case for doing so by saying this is a progressive victory along the lines of Medicare or Social Security. It's just not. If, as progressives have been told and are now repeating, this bill is just the start to reform, we can't lose sight of exactly where it is we're starting, and what still needs to be fixed. Congressional progressives are already in a bad negotiating position for future fixes--when as Glenn argues they've already shown how easily they can be rolled--by not setting down markers now for what still needs to be fixed.

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The unions are pissed with Democrats who are balking on health insurance reform:

It appears SEIU is dead serious about this business about yanking support for House Dems who vote No on the health bill.

The SEIU bluntly informed Dem Rep Michael Arcuri of New York yesterday that it’s pulling support for him in the wake of the news that he’s an all-but-certain No, I’m told. And the search for a primary or third-party challenger is underway.

Well, fine. That's their prerogative.

But there ought to be more at stake here than his House seat (though that would admittedly take care of most of what ought to be at stake by incorporation).

Who else has leverage here? Well, the leadership. Arcuri has a plum seat on the powerful House Rules Committee. Let's take a quick look at the Committee's history, courtesy of their official site:

In Congresses of the late twentieth century, the Rules Committee has consisted of thirteen members, nine from the majority party and four from the minority party. This heavy majority party ratio of 2 to 1, plus 1 reflects the Committee’s status since the mid-1970’s as an “arm of the leadership” and “legislative gatekeeper.” The Committee principally serves to assist the majority leadership in scheduling bills for floor action.

Yes, the Rules Committee really is an arm of the leadership, and seats on the Committee don't go to (or long stay with) Members who don't take their positions in leadership seriously.

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Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 3/15-17. Likely voters. MoE 4%, 5% for primary samples. (8/31-9/2/2009 results)

On the Democratic side, Lt. Gov. Daniel Mongiardo has significantly expanded his lead over Kentucky's Attorney General.

For the GOP, Paul, son of Ron, has reversed the primary numbers in the last six months, running an outsider campaign that is pure teabagger with a dash of anti-war fervor. He is certainly giving the GOP establishment fits, especially the Mitch McConnell machine which is backing the secretary of state. Even Dick Cheney appears involved, panicking at the thought of an anti-war libertarian undermining neocons from within.

On the other hand, Paul appears to be the GOP's strongest general election option:

Certainly not as hopeful as last week's SurveyUSA poll of the race. Both Democrats suffer from high undecideds from Democratic respondents -- in the other of 20-26 percent. Less than 10 percent of Republicans are undecided. But there aren't enough Democrats to make up these gaps, so to be competitive, they will have to close their sizable deficits among independent voters.

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It's going to get hairy here the next few days, but with the reconciliation language decided upon, the votes are starting to shake out. As of this morning, John Boccieri from Ohio is a yes.

He joins Betsy Markey of Colorado and Bart Gordon from Tennessee in saying they will vote aye, as will Eliot Engel, as pretty much expected.

Travis Childers and Stephen Lynch are still in the "no" camp, though Lynch's opposition comes from the conviction that the bill isn't strong enough and could potentially be swayed, along with Michael Arcuri, who is now targeted by SEIU if he votes no.

Stupak is still bleating about finding a compromise that will get his vote. One suspects that Stupak is continuing to enjoy the tv cameras.

Where does that leave us? David Dayen continues to have the most exhaustive and careful count with the Boccieri, he pegs it at 194 yes, 208 no.

Definite YES:
193 Democrats, including 3 who voted No last time, in November (Dennis Kucinich, Bart Gordon, Betsy Markey).

Definite NO:
177 Republicans

Definite NO:
31 Democrats.

24 Democrats who voted No in November:
Bobby Bright, Mike McIntyre, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, Walt Minnick, Artur Davis, Chet Edwards, Frank Kratovil, Mike Ross, Dan Boren, Gene Taylor, Larry Kissell, Collin Peterson, Ike Skelton, Jim Marshall, Mike McMahon, Charlie Melancon, Tim Holden, Ben Chandler, Health Shuler, Rick Boucher, John Adler, Lincoln Davis, John Barrow, Travis Childers.

7 Democrats who voted Yes in November ("S" for confirmed Stupak bloc):
Stephen Lynch, Mike Arcuri, Bart Stupak (S), Dan Lipinski (S), Jerry Costello (S), Joe Donnelly (S), Steve Driehaus (S).

11 potential Democratic No-Yes flip votes:
5 lean Yes:
John Tanner, Brian Baird, John Boccieri (Clyburn Three), Suzanne Kosmas, Scott Murphy.

5 undecided:
Jim Matheson, Harry Teague, Travis Childers, Jason Altmire, Allen Boyd.

1 lean No:
Glenn Nye.

20 potential Yes-No flip votes:

5 additional Stupak bloc (Stupak-curious):
Brad Ellsworth, Kathy Dahlkemper, Henry Cuellar, Marion Berry, Marcy Kaptur, Joseph Cao.

5 lean Yes:
Paul Kanjorski, Dina Titus, Allan Mollohan, Bill Owens, Tom Perriello.

9 other undecided Democrats:
Zack Space, Chris Carney, Nick Rahall, Solomon Ortiz, Earl Pomeroy, Bill Foster, Harry Mitchell, Melissa Bean, Mike Michaud.

3 lean No:
Marion Berry, Joseph Cao.

Democrats need 23 of a combination of the 11 potential No-Yes flip votes and the 20 potential Yes-No flip votes. So they need 23 out of the remaining uncommitted 31. If you’re counting leaners, Democrats need 13 of the last 17 uncommitted.

Stay tuned. There will probably be a lot of firming up among these undecideds today.

Update: And just like that, TPM is reporting Kaptur now leaning yes, and Chris Murphy a definite yes.

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