Midwives & Mothers in Action

One way that a health care reform bill could become law even though it lacks the votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate: the House of Representatives could vote for the Senate version of the bill and send it to the President to sign.

But according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, there are not enough votes in the House to do that.

The Senate, for its part, appears quite through with doing any work on the thing for now.

After an apparently earth-shattering loss of one Senate seat in a Massachusetts special election, Democratic Senators are signalling that they're done with health care reform as an issue and want to move on to job creation.

So, if there is going to be a health care reform bill, the House of Representatives may have to pass the Senate version of the bill.  Is the House willing to do that?  Apparently, no.

...and in fact, Scott Brown has won the Massachusetts Senate race.  To put it mildly, this complicates the process of producing a health care reform bill.  Will the House of Representatives now pass the Senate version of the bill and send it to the President?  Will both houses work overtime to complete the process with the compromise bill before Brown can be seated?  Will the whole thing fall apart?  It's anybody's guess at this point.

Next Tuesday, Massachusetts elects a new Senator, and the polls indicate that it will be close.  If Scott Brown wins, he won't be voting for the Senate version of the health care bill that the Senator currently in the seat, , voted for.  The other candidate, Martha Coakley, supports the current version of the bill. This is very much a Democrats versus Republicans situation, complicated as always by the ins and outs of Massachusetts politics.  But the uncertainty has got the legislators responsible for the current version of the health care reform bill quite .

And other compromises put together to get that bill in the first place remain shaky, or are already unraveling.  It's likely to be a difficult weekend for legislators on Capitol Hill.

Erykah Badu singing "On and On."

And here's Erykah Badu and her partner twittering her home birth with a midwife.  Pretty cool, no?