Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a very powerful tool at his disposal, but (true to form) he's not even admitting it exists, much less threatening to use it. The tool is called "reconciliation" and means (as I have written about previously) that budget bills which go through a certain committee process cannot be filibustered when they reach the Senate. Democrats would only need 50 votes (and Joe Biden's tiebreaker, if they couldn't get 51) to pass budget bills. Senate Republicans would be denied using their favorite obstructionist tactic, the cloture vote (the modern equivalent of the filibuster). Which may be the only way to pass President Obama's budget without significant parts of it being removed by balky Republicans.

So why isn't Reid brandishing this weapon in his rhetoric? Why isn't he using the phrases "give us an up-or-down vote" and painting every single cloture vote as "massive Republican obstructionism," every chance he gets?

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If you're just browsing by for the Rush Limbaugh contest, you can just scroll down to the end, to talking point number seven. Because we're going to talk health care for a while first.

As lefty as this column can be at times (ahem, sorry about that), sometimes this column must adapt tactics which usually originate from the righties. Which means it is time for a pre-emptive attack on what appears to be the emerging Republican position on revamping our nation's health care system. Call it the number one contender for the anti-Obamacare position -- before "the Obamacare position" is even close to actually being defined. In other words, it's a pre-emptive strike by the other side. And it needs to be countered swiftly, logically, and decisively -- in order to cut it off at its figurative knees before it even has a chance to stand on its own -- by a pre-emptive strike of our own.

OK, even I admit that I'm now lost in the metaphors tactically deployed in the previous paragraph. I'll do my best to simplify the argument here, while refraining from such literary excess.

One of the most intriguing proposals for improving health care in America -- without dictating sweeping changes in the health-care insurance industry, mind you -- seems to be to let government compete with private industry.

That's it in a nutshell. And the mere concept is driving Republicans berserk.

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For all the terminology of the political world, all the divisions and divisions-within-divisions, there is no term which defies definition quite the way populism does. When we speak of conservatives or liberals or progressives or even libertarians, we pretty much all agree what the label means, and who it covers. Hyphenation and neologisms abound to adequately describe individual factions of the major groups; such as social conservatives versus fiscal conservatives, or neo-conservatives versus paleo-conservatives. But there's no disagreement with the general scope of what "conservative" means. The concept of populism doesn't have this generally-agreed-upon consensus among the public, however. Even historians define the term differently amongst themselves. And this is just within America's politics -- populism can mean even more diverse movements when talking about the rest of the world.

Newsweek magazine announced a few weeks ago that: "We Are All Socialists Now." While I leave it to others to debate this dubious assumption, I would counter with the question: "Are We All Populists Now?" Because the wide use of the term seems to be encompassing just about everyone now, with the possible exception of a few CEOs in the financial industry.

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A funny thing happened in Washington yesterday, and not many people noticed -- bipartisanship broke out in the Senate. While the chattering classes (and most Republicans) were fixated on whether Rush Limbaugh was the Republican Party's leader, the conservative movement's leader, or just leading them into the wilderness for 40 years (one can but hope); the Senate was taking care of some legislative business. In a bipartisan fashion. Almost one-fourth of Senate Republicans voted to move last year's budget along -- voting with President Obama and with the Democrats, and voting against the man who not so long ago was actually the leader of the Republican Party: John McCain.

Will anyone in the media notice? It's doubtful. Mere weeks ago they were all fulminating over the "failure" of President Obama's bipartisan outreach on his stimulus package, and pointing out over and over again how he "only got three votes out of over 200 congressional Republicans" in an effort to... um... well, I'm not really sure why they spent two weeks on this particular storyline, to tell you the truth. But obsess over it the media did, which would make you think they would follow up on the story if a large chunk of Republicans actually did vote with the Democrats and Obama on a large spending bill.

But then, I remind myself, this is the mainstream media we're talking about, so I shouldn't expect too much of them.

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President Barack Obama is taking another page from F.D.R. (which should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone) by attempting to "brand" his recovery program for America. Addressing the Department of Transportation today, Obama unveiled two logos which will be prominently displayed to show Americans that their stimulus package money is being well spent. The first of these is a generic logo for all projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA):

The second is specifically for transportation projects, and is a striped acronym which stands for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER):

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Today is apparently Dr. Seuss Day. Who knew? In the spirit of this not-so-solemn occasion, I considered writing today's entire column in Seuss-ian language.

It would have been fun, for instance, to rewrite the story "The Cat In The Hat." In the original, as we all should remember, the crazy cat invades a household with two bored children, wreaking havoc and destroying just about everything he and his henchthings ("Thing 1" and "Thing 2") touch. A fish serves as the conscience of the children, warning that Mom will be returning at some point, and there are consequences to wild actions, no matter how much fun they may be at the time. Magically, the house is cleaned up and repaired by the cat, who disappears just in time for said parental return.

Of course, you'd have to update it a bit to be relevant.

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We open today's column with a mental image -- a gigantic metal turtle-bot, inching its way along. Clomp, clomp, clomp... it moves forward so slowly you can barely see it move. Voiceover: "This is Washington." But wait! Barack Obama jumps aboard, and the robot transforms into a giant steamroller. It starts moving so fast, flattening issues left and right, until you can barely even see it and it becomes a blur. "This is Obama's Washington. Any questions?"

Barack Obama is moving Congress so fast, we're approaching warp speed. Consider the fact that neither presidents Reagan nor Clinton got their (much smaller) stimulus packages passed for over six months -- and Obama got his passed in mere weeks. And with Clinton and Reagan, that was a major party of their presidential legacy, whereas with Obama it is just the first item on a very long list of enormous changes to be made. Soon.

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The District of Columbia is about to take a big step along the road to political relevance. They appear poised to receive a full vote for their "shadow" member of the United States House of Representatives. In a bargain which harkens back to the Missouri Compromise, Utah will also add a House member at the same time. Much has been said about this story in the past week, but everyone seems to be overlooking one good result which will come from the new arrangement: a tie will never again be possible in the Electoral College, at least not without a third-party candidate picking up at least one elector.

I had fun with this concept, during the 2008 presidential race, where I explored exactly what might happen if we wound up with a perfect 269-269 tie (short answer: it would be messy, but Obama still likely would have won). This will no longer be a worry for the wonktastically-inclined. Because the Electoral College will always be an odd number, barring one small and very temporary loophole.

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The "Great Communicator," for our younger readers who were not exposed to him, was what the media eventually decided to call President Ronald Reagan. The title of this article, for our unhipper readers (excuse me, for "the suave-ically-challenged"), is an homage to Frank Zappa's boxed set of albums entitled Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar. You see, while Frank Zappa was a consummate musician as a guitarist and bandleader, his eclectic (to say the least) lyrical style, not to mention his singing ability, turned a lot of people off. So he released a three-album all-instrumental boxed set just for such semi-fans, with disks titled: "Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar," "Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar Some More," and "Return of the Son Of Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar." If Zappa couldn't have fun with the lyrics, he certainly wasn't going to forego having some fun with the album and song names (best track name: "Variations on the Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progression").

But I digress.

President Barack Obama may be distantly related to Dick Cheney, but I am not aware that he is related at all to Ronald Reagan. Nor is he returning zombie-like from the dead, for that matter. But he is indeed the embodiment of The Great Communicator, and the more time goes by, the more people are going to notice and comment on this. The label "Great Communicator II" has already been tossed around (by The Wall Street Journal no less), and will continue to pop up in political debates with more and more frequency, if my guess is correct.

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The Republican Party is at a real fork in the road. It is rare, in politics, to be able to see with absolute clarity such dividing points while they are happening, I should point out. Usually these things are analyzed after the fact, when conclusions can be drawn with certainty. But the GOP is now at such a point, and it faces two choices: absolute purity, or some shade or another of pragmatism ("the road less traveled," as it were, for Republicans these days).

In other words, does the party want the purest of the pure when it comes to ideology, or would it (perhaps) like to win some elections at some point in the future? Because make no mistake about it, that is the choice they now face. There is the Bobby Jindal / Sarah Palin path to the future, and there is the Charlie Crist / Arnold Schwarzenegger path to the future. The choice is theirs.

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