But don't open the celebratory bottles of government-insurance-program funded medicine quite yet. There may be more cause for pessimism than optimism over the public option's fate, even though Durbin's office says he'll "whip aggressively" for the plan if it makes its way over from the House. Here are the top five reasons not to get too excited about the latest development:

1) Durbin didn't actually change his position Aides say Durbin -- who has been a vocal supporter of the public option all along -- never meant to indicate it was dead Thursday, and the pressure he got since then didn't bring him around. "There is no change in his position; it's exactly what he meant yesterday," spokesman Joe Shoemaker told Salon. "In the simplest terms, Durbin will whip against any attempt to alter or amend the reconciliation bill sent over by the House -- if it includes a public option, Leadership will whip for it and against all amendments to strip it out; if not, they will whip against any amendments to alter the House bill." Which means Friday's "news" doesn't actually change where things stand -- the House still needs to put a public option in the reconciliation bill.

Why is it all up to the House? For a combination of reasons. One, the House doesn't trust the Senate much farther than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could throw Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid right now. (Which is not that far, even if Reid isn't the biggest guy in Congress.) In order to finish the healthcare bill, the House will have to pass the Senate-passed version, which House members hate, and only then take up a reconciliation measure designed to "fix" the bill. The Senate has to promise the House that whatever comes over won't be changed; otherwise, the House might not have faith that the Senate will actually finish the job. Two, the reconciliation measure, because it would raise some taxes, must begin in the House anyway. And three, the Senate parliamentarian told Republicans there Thursday that the Senate can't take up the reconciliation measure until after the House has passed -- and Obama has signed -- the underlying healthcare bill. Otherwise, it's not reconciling an existing law.

All of that means Durbin had plenty of room Friday to pass the public option buck over to the House, and look justified in doing it. Conveniently, of course, that also means the Senate is slightly off the hook if the public option doesn't actually make it into the reconciliation plan.

2) The Senate still might not have the votes for the public option, anyway The Progressive Change Campaign Committee and its allies have done impressive work building up support in the Senate for a public option from 0 lawmakers on record to 41. But 41 is still short of a majority. The holdouts who haven't signed on so far include Evan Bayh, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor and Ben Nelson -- not exactly fertile ground for the public option. But liberals like Jay Rockefeller, of West Virginia, have also come out against adding it through reconciliation.

Pelosi herself doesn't think they can get it done. " I'm quite sad that a public option isn't in there," she told reporters Friday. "But it isn't a case of it's not in there because the Senate is whipping against it. It's not in there because they don't have the votes to have it in there."

Could 9 or 10 more votes for the public option be found, if the House includes it? Maybe, though it's hard to see exactly how. But will Democrats want to gamble on that if they aren't sure? Probably not. If a clear majority for adding the public option isn't there, chances are leadership won't put it in the reconciliation bill and risk seeing it defeated.

3) House progressives don't seem ready to go to the mat for the public option There was a time when liberals in the House said they wouldn't vote for a bill unless it had a public option in it. But that was months ago. Now that Nelson and Joe Lieberman have had their way with the legislative process, the White House has basically told progressives that the existing bill, with some additional changes via reconciliation, is about as good as it's going to get. "[President Obama] said the public option -- a well-known and long-standing progressive priority -- lacks enough Senate support to be included in the final package," Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., the co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said last week after a meeting at the White House. "However, he personally committed to pursue a public option after passage of the current bill."

That might wind up being enough to keep progressives from voting against the bill in the end; the argument that an imperfect bill is still better than the status quo is a pretty good one. (Remember, the bill would ban insurers from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions or revoking coverage once patients get sick, as well as setting up a new exchange for people on the individual insurance market and establishing new subsidies to help people afford coverage.) So far, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, has said he'll vote against the bill -- and that's been met by ridicule by some liberal bloggers.

4) Does the House even have the votes for the public option? That's not entirely clear yet. Though the House-passed version of the legislation in November did include a public plan, some Blue Dogs have defected since then -- and for a bill that only passed with 220 votes, there's not much margin for error.

Democrats may have to make a trade to get the Senate bill through the House as it is. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., and other anti-abortion lawmakers say they won't vote for the Senate version, because its restrictions on choice are less rigorous than the ones the House included. If the bill loses Stupak's block of about a dozen votes, there's no way House Democrats can afford to alienate any more conservative lawmakers by including the public option.

Why get excited about the public option, when the whole bill might still collapse? What is or isn't in the reconciliation measure is, for now, a theoretical question. The more pressing matter is figuring out whether Pelosi can wrangle the 216 votes she needs to get the House to pass the Senate's healthcare bill.

That's far from guaranteed right now. The White House has already announced that Obama will delay a trip to Indonesia next week, an admission that the deadline the administration had set for passing the healthcare bill -- March 18 -- won't be met. (But why should this deadline be any different from all the others that have been missed so far?) And no vote has been scheduled yet in the House, which is usually an indication that the votes aren't locked up yet.

In other words, there's still time for the whole thing to screech to a halt. Which means the public option wouldn't be the only policy that doesn't make it into law. No matter what Durbin says about it.

Caddell is in today's Washington Post with an op-ed he co-authored with Doug Schoen, Mark Penn's polling partner and another Fox News favorite. Their message to their fellow Democrats: Healthcare reform will destroy you this fall!

"If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate's reaction," they write. "If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes."

Mind you, they're only issuing this warning because they want to help the party they love: "At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise. "

And this isn't the only time Caddell has spoken out to defend the best interests of his party. Let's take  a moment to remember a few other instances from the last decade:

* Al Gore lacks character! (December 2000):  "We took [character] out of the equation in '92. The American people will never again take it out of the equation. Character matters. And in this kind of election, it matters a lot. And Bush has won that election"

* Going after Lieberman will destroy the party! (August 2006): "And this is my concern, is that if Joe Lieberman loses Tuesday -- and I hope... he doesn't, but I've felt badly about this ever since The New York Times went off the deep end and endorsed Lamont. But I'll tell you, I think if he loses you're going to empower what I call the real fringe of this party who are going to believe that they've been right all along and they are going to start setting litmus tests for everybody. A month ago, [there were] nine votes for pulling out (of Iraq) with a set timetable next year. You know the demand is going to be that position of the Democratic Party or else. That's what we're looking at here, this is kind of madness. The country's going to look at us and say, "What are you doing?"

* The Democrats can't win back Congress by criticizing the Iraq war! (September 2006): "Remember in '04, I kept saying to my party....'Get away from this National Guard thing. Stop doing this!' I'm telling you right now, the movement on the war on terror in Iraq have moved substantially, and I've just finished 40 hours of analysis on this. It's amazing. This is -- I don't think that's the issue the Democrats ought to be campaigning on, frankly. I don't care how many NIE reports come out."

* Leave George W. Bush alone! (October 2004): "Let me tell you something. I have said over and over...that this Michael Moorism, this hate stuff, this almost thuggery on the part of the sort of people that were brought into the [John Kerry] campaign, you know, sort of attacking Bush so personally was backfiring. I said this last week it was a mistake. It drives -- particularly when the president's personally popular as an individual but has problems. And they can't -- they've let themselves be dominated by that, because they think that's the next gimmick."

But, honestly, all Pat Caddell wants is what's best for the Democratic Party.....

The public option, of course, was public enemy No. 1 for Republicans last year. The GOP falsely blasted the healthcare reform bill as "a government takeover of the healthcare system," claiming any public insurance plan would inexorably lead to long waits, medicine shortages, crappy care -- in short, Canada, or at least Canada as portrayed in Republican propaganda. (As opposed to the real Canada, where a poll last fall found most Canadians are perfectly happy with their medical system and think it's "far superior" to what we're stuck with in the U.S.)

But it's worth remembering that the public option -- even the relatively limited one that was in the House-passed version of healthcare reform, which would have allowed providers to negotiate with the government-run insurance plan, rather than tying reimbursement rates to what Medicare pays -- was a compromise to begin with. What most progressives wanted all along, of course, was a government takeover of healthcare -- a single-payer system, with a public provider mostly taking the place of the private insurance companies that are now fighting tooth and nail against even this relatively mild reform bill. Given the angst the bill has caused, and the rabidity with which the GOP has proclaimed it to be a government power grab, might Democrats be wishing they'd gone for the real thing instead, and actually pushed some kind of single-payer plan all along?

There's a certain political logic to the idea. Medicare, after all, is incredibly popular; one way the GOP has fought the reform bill is by scaring seniors that if the government fixes healthcare for everyone else, their own socialized medicine gravy train will come to an end. For that matter, so is the public option, which polls show voters like more than the reform proposals Congress has actually passed. And if you're going to get attacked for letting government take over healthcare, why not actually get some of the policy benefits of universal socialized medicine in the process? Call it Medicare for All, as proponents urged the public option be renamed, and charge full steam ahead.

Like so much else about the healthcare debate, it comes down to math. "I would say that in the Senate, there are at most 10 votes for a single-payer plan," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a self-described democratic socialist, who isn't shy about his own preference for that kind of solution, told Salon this week. "In the House, I have no idea but it's a small minority ... It's absurd to say, 'Mr. President, go forward and make your bill single-payer,' when you've got 10 percent of the Congress supporting you."

There are any number of explanations for why there aren't any votes for a single-payer plan; the massive campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures by the insurance industry and other big healthcare players surely didn't help the cause. But as the public option looks like it may, once and for all, be ruled out of the bill, it's worth remembering that even the Democrats in Congress are a change-averse bunch when it comes to healthcare. (After all, it was Democrats, not Republicans, who insisted on knocking the public option out of the Senate bill.) The writing was on the wall for the public plan for a while, even though it did make it out of the House; President Obama told key progressive lawmakers last week that the votes just weren't there, but even before that, the White House was being so blasé about the idea that it was hard to see the administration fighting for it. Sanders will introduce an amendment for the public option in the Senate, but if Durbin is going to whip Democrats to vote against it in the name of smoothing the reconciliation bill's passage, it's likely to be defeated.

Still, rather than taking that as a sign that the healthcare reform bill is fatally flawed, it's possible to see the failure of single-payer or a public option as a reminder of how difficult passing any reforms was going to be. It may be obvious to progressives that a single-payer plan would be better than the bill Congress is contemplating, but the bill Congress is contemplating -- with its reforms of the insurance industry and its expansion of coverage -- is still better than the status quo. That might be about the best anyone can hope for at this point.

Roosevelt, Beck explained, hired Communists all over the place for the growing federal government during the Depression and World War II. Not only that, but he wasn't as popular as people think he was. "If FDR was so beloved, and no one was spooked by how much power he took, why is it that his body was barely cold when they passed the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution to make sure no one could ever serve as long as he did?" Beck asked. That's not, strictly speaking, really true; Roosevelt died in 1945, and Congress didn't pass the 22nd Amendment until 1947. It wasn't ratified by the states until 1951.

Next came a blast of what's become standard-issue conservative blather about how the New Deal actually made the economy worse during the 1930s, not better. "His policies didn't save us," Beck explained. "In fact, it was only in America that the period known as 'the Depression' is known as the 'Great Depression'. Why? Because his policies stripped the free-market system and actually prolonged the depression." That's not just slightly false, it's really false. A British economist, Lionel Robbins, helped popularize the term with a book, "The Great Depression," published in 1934 -- when he worked at the London School of Economics. Also, only the most dogmatic anti-New Deal conservatives -- like Beck -- think Roosevelt's policies made the Depression worse. Many historians, in fact, think things worsened in the middle of the decade when FDR backed away from New Deal policies.

But the best part of Beck's little history lesson came a few minutes later, when he segued on to the 1950s. "It was Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, who shined the spotlight on the Communist Party again," Beck said rhapsodically. "McCarthy later led a Senate committee investigation into inefficiencies in the government. Critics accused him of falsely identifying Communists, and smearing their names." Those pesky critics! Beck then brought up, for some reason, the Cold War "domino theory," that if one nation went Communist, so would its neighbors. "Kind of feels like that now, doesn't it?" he asked.

Bashing FDR is, like it or not, becoming second-nature to conservatives. But you don't often hear people willing to offer praise for McCarthy, who -- as even Beck had to admit -- was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his feverish pursuit of Reds, little of which he was able to substantiate. 

What any of this had to do with current affairs was -- as it often is while watching Beck's show -- a bit of a mystery. Until later in the program. On Monday's show, he promised, he'd reveal a new Communist -- working for the Obama White House. (Can't be bothered to expose the scandal Friday, though; after all, on Fridays, Beck usually airs pre-taped shows.)

Watch the whole weird rant here, courtesy of a source who captured it as it aired:

In 2000, Brown was sued by Jennifer Firth, who was then serving on the Wrentham, Mass. Board of Selectmen, a position Brown had held earlier. In the suit, Firth said that she'd volunteered on Brown's campaign for the state Senate, and that during her work for him, he'd harassed her. Afterwards, she said, he had defamed her, telling law enforcement and others that she'd sent him anonymous hate mail.

It's strange, Nolan writes, that these allegations never came up during this year's special election, when Brown beat Democrat Martha Coakley to take over Sen. Ted Kennedy's old seat.

"[W]hy did Democrats and members of the national press fail to even bring up the fact that Scott Brown had once been accused of sexual harassment and defamation in the myriad stories about him prior to Massachusetts' special election in January?" Nolan asks in his post.

There's a pretty good reason: As Nolan himself acknowledges, within days of her filing the suit, Firth moved to dismiss it. On top of that, her lawyer moved to withdraw his appearance on her behalf, saying he'd learned that the allegations in the suit weren't supported. That, by itself, should have disqualified the suit from being fodder in the campaign. But there's more, embedded in links Nolan himself provided.

An excerpt from one of those links, a contemporaneous news article about Firth's decision to drop the case:

Firth repeated her contention that she never sent harassing letters or e-mails to Brown, as he has claimed.

She did say that during his campaign for state representative that she sent him notes she intended to be humorous.

"My humor tends to be provocative, and I think Mr. Brown misinterpreted my humor,'" she said in a telephone interview.

Later, she issued a formal statement saying she deeply regrets the misunderstanding. Brown said today there is nothing funny about the harassment he and his family have been subjected to over a two-year period.

"I had a feeling she would try to spin this somehow. I do not find her actions humorous at all. It was a calculated pattern of harassment and inappropriate correspondence, e-mails and letters to me,'" he said.

He said if Firth does not stop bothering him and talking about him he will countersue her.

Firth said she plans to continue serving as a selectwoman unless people start harassing her or spread rumors about her again.

Given Democrats' criticism of the anemic campaign Coakley ran against Brown, there is still bound to be a question of whether the Coakley camp knew about the suit, and if so, why they didn't use it against him.

Let's assume for a moment that the morals of using accusations that seem to be tissue-paper thin at best never entered the equation. (Probably a good assumption; this is politics, after all.) If it did want to use the suit, the Coakley campaign faced two major obstacles. Early on in the race, she was the odds-on favorite, and going this negative against Brown would have looked bad. Later on, when it was clear the Democrat was in real trouble, it was already too late. By then, using something like this, which would be so easily swatted down, would have reeeked of desperation.

Update: The sub-headline of this post initially referred to the suit as being about sexual harassment; it was, as described in the post itself, actually a defamation suit. My apologies for the error.