"A Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Motion to Proceed" seems like a pretty obscure way to start the Thanksgiving holiday festivities, but we'll take our victories where we can get them.

We all know the obstacles remaining -- from a (abortion) to z ( we couldn't think of a really great Z on Monday morning -- Xanax only sounds like a Z. For now we'll settle for Zocor as a placeholder for more fights on pharmaceutical pricing). But a supermajority of the United States Senate has agreed to begin the historic debate on health care reform after the holidays. And that's an achievement which gets us closer to another achievement.

We're not going to rehash everything in the weekend papers, because we expect that a ridiculous proportion of our readers were either watching the vote on C-Span or at least tracking it on their Blackberries.  But a few good links to point you to:

At the Treatment, Harold Pollack writes on the absurdity of listening to Republicans complain that the Democratic health care bill is too skimpy in its help for the poor.

One says that the program is too stingy. He recounts a heartrending tale of seriously-ill Texas children going without needed care because pediatric specialists would not take low Medicaid reimbursement rates. Another notes disparities in neonatal mortality between Medicaid and private insurance patients. "Care delayed is care denied," he intoned to great effect. A third laments that poor people will be consigned to the "medical Gulag" of Medicaid. A fourth suggests that the only reason poor people are made eligible for Medicaid rather than for private coverage is to make the CBO numbers look better.  

Maybe not quite Dada-esque, and unfortunately the bottom line is too serious for Monty Python.

At the Boston Globe, Lisa Wangsness has a reasonably upbeat assessment of the changes of compromise on the public option. It's obviously still a big hurdle, but as Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown noted, there is a lot of support in the Democratic party -- and in the country as a whole -- for inclusion of some form of a public option.

At the Health Affairs blog, law professor Tim Jost has several posts giving a good strong summary of what the Senate bill does and doesn't do. 

A lot of ink over the weekend on Blanche Lincoln. This piece from the LA Times offers a good look at what Lincoln is facing back home a year before she faces the voters for re-election. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank also weighed in, noting that the Senate debate had a bit of Southern Gothic/Tennessee Williams  flavor to it... down to a leading role played by a Southern woman named Blanche...