6:10 p.m.: When it comes to undecided House Democrats announcing their votes, there's been a run of good news for supporters of the reform bill. Saturday evening, the trend was broken by Rep. Zack Space, D-Ohio. A yes vote last year, he's voting no on Sunday.

5:10 p.m.: A lot of reports coming in of some real nastiness from Tea Party protesters on the Hill today. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., has said that one protester called Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., the n-word. (That report, if true, is particularly ironic and disturbing considering Lewis' history as a major civil rights leader.) Another protester reportedly called Lewis a "baby killer."

Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., the House majority whip, told reporters, "I heard people saying things that I have not heard since March 15, 1960 when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus." A staffer from his office also reported that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., was spat upon.

Another protester yelled at Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who is openly gay, "Barney, you faggot." Talking Points Memo reports that other protesters laughed at this, though Politico says that other protests admonished the man who'd yelled the slur at Frank.

4:24 p.m.: Wrapping up his address to House Democrats, Obama leads them in a chant of, "Fired up! Ready to go!"

The president arrived on Capitol Hill only after leadership was fairly sure the votes would be there Sunday. And he told lawmakers that the vote would be "a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself and about this country."

"We have been debating healthcare for decades," Obama said, looking back on the long history of attempts to get universal coverage, and on the time this particular legislation has been worked on. "It has now been debated for a year. It is in your hands. It is time to  pass healthcare reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow."

4:16 p.m.: Obama acknowledges that the healthcare bill isn't exactly what most of the House Democrats who are poised to vote on it Sunday would prefer. "Now, is this bill perfect?" he asked. "Of course not. Will this solve every single problem in our healthcare system right away? No."

 4:09 p.m.: As Obama speaks to Democrats in the Capitol Visitor's Center, tea partiers outside the Capitol are chanting just as loudly as ever. Sitting in the press gallery, just outside the House chamber, I can hear frequent cheers and refrains of, "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!" But it's probably too late -- Obama, and Democratic leaders, are talking about the bill as if they're sure the votes are there.

4:02 p.m.: President Obama is telling Democrats not to listen to Republicans offering political "advice" about the healthcare reform bill. "They're all warning you of the horrendous impact if you support the legislation," he said. "Now, it could be that they are suddenly having a change of heart, and they are deeply concerned about their Democratic friends... That's a possibility."

But it's just as likely, he said, that the GOP is worried about what happens to Republicans if the bill passes. "They know that after this legislation passes and I sign the bill... lo and behold, nobody's pulling the plug on Granny."

3:54 p.m.: President Obama just took the podium at the House Democratic conference rally.

3:46 p.m.: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., just promised House Democrats he'd get the budget reconciliation fixes through. "We need a simple majority to make a good law even better," he told the conference, before President Obama speaks. "So I'm happy to announce I have the commitment of a majority of the United States Senate to make that good law even better."

3:40 p.m.: Watch President Obama live here:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

3:35 P.M.: New yes votes have started rolling in. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., voted yes in the fall but had said recently that he was leaning towards no -- he's going to be a yes. So are Reps. Chris Carney, D-Pa., who was part of the Stupak anti-abortion group, and Henry Cuellar, D-Texas.

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President Obama is expected to arrive at the Capitol any moment to talk to House Democrats. He's bringing along an entourage, too -- Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, budget director Peter Orszag and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will also be at the meeting.

Democratic leaders are more and more confident of passage. "Clearly, we believe we have the votes," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters just before Obama showed up. So Obama's talk to the conference may be more of a rally than a last-ditch attempt at swinging votes. "This is rah, rah, sis boom bah," Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., said on his way to the meeting.

Meanwhile, leadership decided to abandon the "deem and pass" tactic they were considering; pro-choice lawmakers seem to have won a battle with anti-abortion Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich.; and hordes of tea partiers are gathering on Capitol Hill to protest the whole thing. For earlier coverage from Saturday, click here.

The policy, though, took some work. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who chairs the House Democratic campaign committee, told reporters Saturday that leaders had realized they could adopt the changes to the bill through the reconciliation process before passing the Senate bill. "We want to make it absolutely clear that we're modifying the Senate bill," Van Hollen said. The "deem and pass" tactic would have been one way to do that; passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the underlying bill is another.

In the Senate, the parliamentarian had said the reconciliation bill couldn't be considered until the House passed the Senate proposal. But now it seems what may be important is when President Obama signs which bill into law, not when each one is voted on.

2:35 P.M.: Remember all that angst over "deem and pass" and "self-executing rules"? Never mind.

Democratic leaders told lawmakers just now that the House will hold three separate votes on the healthcare bill: one on the rule governing debate, one on the Senate's healthcare bill, and one on a package of fixes using the budget reconciliation process. "There will be three votes," Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz told reporters on her way out of the meeting.

That means the House will avoid any GOP-driven controversy over whether they've actually voted on the bill. But it also means the political heat lawmakers took over parliamentary procedure this week was all for nothing.

2:28 P.M.: On the second level of the Capitol, there's a balcony just off the House floor, where lawmakers can step outside during votes to make a phone call, smoke a cigarette or get some fresh air.

Or, on some days, get screamed at by a horde of tea party activists.

"Cowards!" some women were just yelling at the Capitol. "Why can't you listen to the rally?"

Several thousand protesters turned out Saturday to spend a gorgeous spring afternoon venting their anger at the thought of expanding access to healthcare for millions of people. "Kill the bill!" the crowd shouted, constantly, as a parade of Republican lawmakers streamed out to rile them up.

The rally was a scaled-down version of the 9/12 march on Washington and other big tea party events: yellow "don't tread on me" flags, tricorner Revolutionary War hats, lots of grumbling about the evils of government. "It's the start of socialism in this country," Neil Payne, a stay-at-home dad who drove down from Gettysburg, Pa., told me. "They've made no secret of the fact they want to eliminate insurance companies completely." Considering that the bill would, actually, give billions of dollars in subsidies to people so they could buy private insurance, I asked him what he meant. Turns out that President Obama once said he favors single-payer healthcare (which "nobody seems to cover, except Fox News"), and this bill would "absolutely" move toward that.

Except for the air of panic that the impending passage of the healthcare bill had brought, there wasn't much difference between this tea party rally and any other. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., took the podium to declare the GOP "the party of K-N-O-W," but also to proudly proclaim all the "no" votes the party had cast. A few protesters strayed into the House office buildings, open for the rare Saturday session. "There's a lot of angry people out there," a guy in a suit told me and some other reporters as we waited outside a closed Democratic caucus meeting. "I'm one of them."

1:45 p.m.: Pro-choice Democrats say House leaders have told them they're no longer negotiating with Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., over restrictions on abortion in the healthcare reform bill. Which means Democrats must feel pretty good about being able to pass the bill without Stupak's bloc of anti-abortion lawmakers -- and that they were more concerned about losing support from a larger bloc of pro-choice votes.

"Well, there are more of us than there are of them, right?" Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairman Lynne Woolsey, D-Calif., told reporters Saturday afternoon. "We have to have the votes. The people who are counting said we would have the votes."

As Democrats hunt for a few additional votes to pass the healthcare bill, they've been able to pick off some of Stupak's posse one at a time. Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., peeled away from Stupak on Wednesday, for instance. Where Stupak once claimed he had about a dozen lawmakers who would oppose the bill if his abortion language wasn't included, that's probably down to six or so now, aides and lawmakers said Saturday. Stupak aides didn't immediately respond to a question about the negotiations.

The difference between what Stupak wanted and the language that Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., had inserted into the Senate bill that the House is considering passing isn't that great. And it seems that in the end, it wasn't significant enough for many lawmakers to justify killing the healthcare bill over it. Both would make clear that existing federal law that bars tax money from paying for most abortions means women who get coverage through the new insurance exchanges would have to buy a separate policy if they want their insurer to cover abortions.

Now lawmakers say the White House may issue an executive order on the topic as a way of picking up one or two more votes from Democrats nervous about being accused of trying to fund abortions with tax money.

"If an executive order or some other statement from the White House basically reflected our compromise, then that would be fine with us," Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a leader of the pro-choice bloc, said Saturday. "We've already compromised to say federal funding will not be used in this bill to pay for abortions. We don't like it."

The pro-choice Democrats seem to have persuaded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leaders that they had about 40 or 50 votes that might be at risk with any new restrictions on abortion rights.

So now, the question is, will that offset the loss of any votes Stupak still controls?

"I believe we will have the votes," DeGette said.

11 a.m.: After more than a year of tumultuous debate on the healthcare reform bill, there was really no reason to think the last few days would go any smoother than the rest of the process, was there?

As the House marched toward a vote Sunday, the bill's fate was still in flux Saturday morning. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., the leader of an anti-abortion posse threatening to defeat the bill if their demands for abortion rights restrictions aren't met, abruptly canceled a press conference to announce how he would vote. ("Discussions are continuing," a Stupak aid says.) Clusters of lawmakers trooped in and out of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office, hashing out the final details of what was and wasn't in the bill, and what could and couldn't be added later. Democrats scheduled a whip team meeting for noon Eastern, closed to the press, to count up their votes. The House Rules Committee met for a tense debate on the rule governing how the bill will be debated on the floor; the "deem and pass" tactic Democrats are using means once lawmakers vote to approve the rule, they'll also pass the Senate's version of the healthcare bill, sending it to President Obama, and a separate package of amendments that will use the budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, tea party activists gathered outside the Capitol, hoping to kill the legislation (or at least enjoy a gorgeous spring day in Washington and get a nice tan).

Aides think they're only a handful of votes away from having the 216 they need to pass the bill Sunday -- but if the vote were held Saturday morning, they might fall short. Obama will address House Democrats later in the day, hoping one more sales pitch will convince them to hold together.

Check back here throughout the day for updates.

Then I'd start laughing, and I'd say, "But no one would ever be crass enough, or irresponsible enough, to run that Op-Ed."

And I'd be wrong. Because on Friday, Politico ran an Op-Ed by Bachmann and King about healthcare reform, and it is just as bad as you could expect it to be -- worse, maybe. So there's one very simple question to be asked here: Why the hell would Politico run this? Sure, I understand the traffic argument, but it's nice to think that even in this day and age media outlets have higher standards than traffic alone -- and the piece doesn't meet any of them. It contains not a single original argument, it does nothing to inform Politico's readers, it's often misleading or just plain wrong. It's totally predictable.

Take, for example, a small portion of the Op-Ed in which Bachmann and King argue that the Democrats' healthcare reform bill is unconstitutional because it contains an individual mandate. Their sole evidence for this claim is this quote from a 1994 Congressional Budget Office memorandum:

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.

That's it. Not mentioned? The CBO memo was about how to score an individual mandate -- not whether it would pass constitutional muster. (The CBO doesn't deal with those questions in the first place.)

Then there's this paragraph from the Op-Ed, my personal favorite:

In addition to these legal issues, one group will be hit especially hard – our senior citizens. Always the wisest folks, seniors have been against this bill from the beginning. And for good reason. Obamacare cuts a half-trillion dollars in health care for seniors to lay the foundation for socialized medicine.

Of course, what Bachmann and King didn't mention is that those cuts would come from, yes, a government healthcare program, Medicare, which just happens to be the kind of thing the pair would normally decry as socialistic. And Politico let them get away with that.

That, ultimately, is the real problem here. It's not about the position that Bachmann and King are taking here; obviously, their side deserves as much of a voice in the press as the Democrats do. But that doesn't mean that Op-Eds this shoddy should run, or that media outlets should so completely abdicate their responsibility to ensure that what they publish is factual and informative. Actually adding something to the debate would be nice, too.

Update, 5:14 p.m. EDT Friday: Rep. Brad Ellsworth, D-Indiana, is a yes. Ellsworth voted yes last year, too, but he was a supporter of the Stupak Amendment's restrictive language on abortion funding, which isn't in this bill. Add that to the fact that he's currently running to replace Sen. Evan Bayh, who's retiring, and his vote was a real toss-up. Good news for Democrats.

Update, 4:33 p.m. EDT Friday: Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Ohio, who voted for the House bill but has been publicly undecided this time around, has just announced that she'll be voting yes again.

Earlier this week, demonstrations outside Kilroy's office by people looking to influence her vote were the scene of what became an infamous video of anti-reform protesters berating a man who suffers from Parkinson's Disease.

Update, 4:22 p.m. EDT Friday: Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., a no vote last fall who Democrats were hoping to sway, will vote no again, Pittsburgh's KDKA reports.

Update, 4:04 p.m. EDT Friday: Democrats just scored big. Rep. Allen Boyd, D-Fla., has reportedly said he will vote for the bill. This is a pick-up: Boyd was a no last year, and he'd been expected to stay a no.

Update, 2:50 p.m. EDT Friday: Rep. Tom Perriello, D-Va., a yes vote from the fall who'd been wavering, has reportedly decided to support the bill -- though he apparently wants assurances from at least 50 senators that they'll vote for the planned fixes to the Senate bill. Perriello is a freshman in a conservative district, so this vote does make him more vulnerable than he already is -- he's a top Republican target this year -- and he'd been shying away from his party earlier this week, voting for a GOP resolution that would have forbidden the use of a House procedure that might be used to get the full final package approved.

Update, 12:17 p.m. EDT Friday: Rep. Dina Titus, D-Nev., will vote yes. She was a yes on the House's bill last year as well.

Update, 11:05 a.m. EDT Friday: Rep. John Boccieri, D-Ohio, has announced he'll be voting yes. That's a gain for the Democrats, since he voted against the House's bill.

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As we get closer to a vote in the House on healthcare reform -- it could come as early as Sunday -- we're starting to get a clearer picture of how that vote will shake out. Several members who've been on the fence announced their decisions on Thursday, and there are likely to be a few more on Friday.

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi got a couple yes votes in her pocket, thanks to Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., and Rep. Betsy Markey, D-Colo. But Reps. Michael Arcuri, D-N.Y., and Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. -- both of whom voted yes on the House's bill last year -- wiped out those gains by deciding to vote no this time around. (Even a lobbying effort by President Obama couldn't sway Lynch.)

Meanwhile, on Thursday we learned that a few Democrats who voted in favor of the House bill last year but who had been undecided about this version of the legislation will support it. Those members are Reps. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., Dale Kildee, D-Mich., and Dan Maffei, D-N.Y.

There's already been one announcement on Friday: Rep. Charlie Wilson, D-Ohio, who voted yes last fall, will do the same now. Later in the day, Rep. John Boccieri, D-Ohio, who voted no last year, is slated to announce his position.

To pass the bill, Pelosi needs to cobble together 216 votes, which constitutes a majority in a body that's currently a few members short. At this point, the consensus is basically that she's already gotten more than 200 votes, but after that, there are varying whip counts out there -- some as low as just 200, some as high as 211.

Excuse me, but it is embarrassing -- really, embarrassing to our country -- that the president of the United States has again put off a state visit to Australia and Indonesia because he's having trouble passing a piece of domestic legislation he's been promising for a year will be passed next week.

And to do this to our old friend Australia -- how particularly outrageous. Nor is the White House's excuse any good. Noonan thinks it was especially gauche to flake out and then offer the explanation that healthcare is "of paramount importance." "Indonesia," she writes, "must be glad to know it's not."

As far as Noonan can tell, the whole thing shows the White House just has no class at all. "How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid's stuff."

Of course, Indonesia and Australia will still be there in June, when the trip is rescheduled. Healthcare reform won't. This is something that the Indonesians, Australians, and everyone else but Noonan seems to understand: moving a presidential social call back three months won't hurt anyone. As Australia's ABC News puts it, "Analysts say the postponement of the trip comes as no surprise, because his presidency is hanging in the balance." In Indonesia, the presidential spokesman says, "The delay of President Obama's visit to Indonesia is related to urgent internal matters, so we understand. Health reform has become a hot issue in the U.S."

It's as though Noonan thinks that the simple, happy folk of the Pacific Rim are so desperate for a glimpse of an American president that they'll be devastated to have to wait until June. Here's a tip: they have their own politics, with hot issues and legislative debates and everything. That should tide them over.

But yesterday, Noonan got to the end of her rope with Obama. In addition to canceling on an international social call, Obama also delivered, in his interview with Fox News, what Noonan calls his "most revealing and important broadcast interview."

Noonan, apparently writing from another planet, describes an evasive, obfuscating president trying to escape the substantive questions of public-service journalist Bret Baier. "In the end the interview seemed to me a public service because everyone in America right now wants to see the president forced off his grooves and into candor," she writes. Baier "seemed to be attempting to better inform the public."

This is the same Baier who cut the president off almost every time he tried to discuss the content of the bill, in favor of asking about House procedure. The guy was palpably, almost explicitly interested in "winning" rather than having an actual discussion. Yet where Obama tried to change the subject back from punditry to substance, Noonan sees deception. "He has his message, and he presses it forward smoothly, adroitly. He buries you in words. Are you worried what failure of the bill will do to you? I'm worried about what the status quo will do to the families that are uninsured . . ." (Emphasis is hers -- apparently her version of quotation marks.) From this exchange, and others like it, Noonan has determined that Obama is the one who doesn’t know the contents of the healthcare bill.

Sometimes, a writer interprets the world in a manner so completely opposite of what seems like reality that there’s little to say. What can you even tell someone who spends a whole column bemoaning how Obama has been rude to Indonesia, Australia and Bret Baier because he’s trying to nail down the details of healthcare reform, and then ends on this note:

I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn't worth it -- worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory.

That’s right. What’s been lost -- apparently, presidential social grace in interacting with South Pacific allies, plus a willingness to talk shop with Fox News reporters -- is concrete and "vivid." Healthcare reform, with its coverage for 30 million currently uninsured Americans, is what's "amorphous, blurry and likely illusory."