Greg Sargent at The Plum Line:

In another surprising step forward for the public option, Senator Harry Reid’s office says that if a final decision is made to pass health reform via reconciliation, the Majority Leader would support holding a reconciliation vote on the public option.

With more and more Senators signing on to the letter urging Reid to hold an up or down vote on the public option under reconciliation rules, Reid spokesman Rodell Mollineau sends over a statement signaling Reid’s qualified support for the move:

Senator Reid has always and continues to support the public option as a way to drive down costs and create competition. That is why he included the measure in his original health care proposal.

If a decision is made to use reconciliation to advance health care, Senator Reid will work with the White House, the House, and members of his caucus in an effort to craft a public option that can overcome procedural obstacles and secure enough votes.

That’s a fairly big step forward: Up until now, Reid, while supporting the public option throughout the process, had been silent on whether he’d support a reconciliation vote on it.

Chart source

A Washington Post-ABC poll earlier this month found that 47 percent of Americans believe gay marriage should be legal, while 31 percent oppose. Support is down by 2 percentage points from the May 2009 poll cited below, but opposition has dropped 15 points.

From May 8, 2009:

Four polls released over the last week show that the American public is slowly but steadily coming to support the idea that marriage equality should be the law of the land.

The latest Washington Post/ABC poll shows the highest support, finding for the first time that more people (49 percent) are in favor of gay marriage than are against it (46 percent). That’s a whopping 17 point jump in support in the poll from five years ago.

In a CNN poll released yesterday, opposition to gay marriage was ahead, 54 percent to 44 percent, while 60 percent favored same-sex civil unions. (The most significant finding in the poll may have been the 58 percent support for gay marriage among young voters.)

The New York Times/CBS poll found that 42 percent supported gay marriage — the highest number ever recorded in that poll. And the Quinnipiac University poll reported that 55 percent opposed gay marriage while 38 percent favored it. On the other hand, by 57 percent to 38 percent, these same voters said they favored civil unions.

One factor behind the steady growth in support for marriage equality is that as fair-minded people delve into the arguments for and against gay marriage, the rationales promoted by anti-gay activists collapse under scrutiny.

In 1968, the year after the “activist” Supremes legalized interracial marriage in its decision on Loving vs. Virginia, a Gallup poll found that the vast majority of Americans still opposed the idea that blacks and whites could marry — 72 percent to 20 percent. Just 10 20 years earlier, in the wake of a California Supreme Court decision that overturned newly minted anti-interracial marriage laws in the state, Gallup found that 94 percent of Americans opposed mixed-race marriages.

As meager as support for gay marriage is now — 49 percent in WashPost, 44 percent in CNN, 42 percent in the Times/CBS and 38 percent in Qunnipiac — it is still about double the 20-percent approval for interracial marriage in the country a few months after mixed marriages became legal. (The average of support in the four new polls is 43.25 percent.)

In fact, it wasn’t until 1991, almost a quarter century after Loving, that opinion flipped on interracial marriage, 48 percent to 42 percent.

The most interesting number in the current round of polls comes from CNN, which found that 49 percent of Americans said they knew someone who is gay. It’s this factor that is likely prompting fair-minded people to apply more rigorous analysis to the flimsy excuses for opposing gay marriage.

The fact that half the people in the country say they have a gay friend or family member also proves that coming out works. Bigotry is a byproduct of ignorance. Nothing debunks stereotypes and popular misconceptions than actually knowing someone who is gay.

(The fact that 49 percent of Americans claim to know someone who is gay also appears to belie anti-gay activists’ assertion that only 1 or 2 percent of the population is gay. By comparison, about 1.5 percent of the country are Mormons, but it seems unlikely that half of Americans would say they personally know someone who is a Mormon. For example, I don’t.)

On “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” a few weeks ago, conservative columnist George Will warned Republicans that it was folly to continue to pin their party’s future on drumming up hatred for gay people to turn out votes. Young conservatives, he said, see being gay as no more controversial than being left-handed.

That statement from one of the Beltway’s leading expositors of conventional thinking was a sign of defeat for the dwindling army of homophobes and their anti-gay agenda.

The start of the “coming out” movement roughly coincides with the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 — just five years after the Loving decision. While there is a long way to go, this is a remarkable — and, yes, historic — turnaround in public attitudes in just 40 years.

Add another name to the list of members of the Teleprompter wing of the GOP Hypocrisy Caucus. Speaking at the annual right-wing meeting CPAC, Florida’s tea bagger candidate for the U.S. Senate said this about the blizzard that shut down Washington recently:

RUBIO: The Congress couldn’t meet to vote on bills. The regulatory agency couldn’t meet to set new regulations. The president couldn’t find anywhere to set up a teleprompter to announce new taxes.

Predictably, Rubio read these lines from either of the two teleprompters standing in front of him.

Rubio is in good company, of course. At the tea bagger ball in Nashville earlier this month, Sarah Palin joked about the president’s use of teleprompters — a joke she read either from a teleprompter or from a printout in front of her. A quick check produced photos of Palin using teleprompters on 20 separate occasions during her hapless candidacy for vice president.

Despite the video you may have seen of O’Keefe posing in pimp attire outside ACORN offices, when he went into the meetings he left the costume in the car and was dressed in his normal aging frat boy style, slacks and a button-down shirt.

With clever video editing, along with an invaluable assist from Fox News, O’Keefe — who is now facing federal charges on an unrelated caper in which he tried to tamper with Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phones in her office in New Orleans — and his boss, Drudge-“Bitch” Andrew Breitbart, have pulled off one of the biggest media scams in recent memory. And despite evidence to the contrary, the purportedly biggest “liberal media” outlet of them all, the New York Times, is refusing to retract stories it published asserting that O’Keefe wore the costume during his meetings with ACORN.

The BRAD BLOG had the story earlier this month:

“There is nothing for us to correct … We stand by our reporting.” That was the innocuous enough position from Greg Brock, New York Times “Senior Editor/Standards,” in reply to a [request for a correction] to recent reportage from the “paper of record” concerning rightwing activist James O’Keefe, on the heels of his federal felony arrest late last month. O’Keefe was arrested in New Orleans as an alleged ringleader in a conspiracy with three others, attempting to gain access, for reasons still unknown, to the phone system of Louisiana’s Democratic U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu.

Incredibly, Brock originally cited claims by Fox News and O’Keefe himself as sources for why the New York Times stood by their apparently unverified and apparently incorrect report. “We believe him,” Brock wrote, because he said as much on Fox News, apparently.

But the matter went from the absurd to the ridiculous in fairly short order, as Brock then seemed to contradict himself by claiming their source wasn’t actually Fox or O’Keefe, but that the Times stood by their reporting because of a mysterious, unpublished video said to back up the claim, along with testimony from ACORN employees.

Though both the video and statements from ACORN employees were cited as evidence their story was right, Brock would refuse to share evidence for either of the claims. That, even after an independent report from the former Attorney General of Massachusetts — released in early December, but never mentioned in the Times’ recent report (or any report at the paper to my knowledge) — directly contradicts their reportage….

In short, the Times suggested in an article a week ago Sunday — and at least seven others prior to it, all published after the release of the former MA Attorney General’s report — that O’Keefe was wearing his infamous pimp outfit inside the offices of ACORN while speaking to employees in his now-infamous hit videos. In actuality, according to the December 7th report by AG Scott Harshbarger, in direct contradiction to the Times reporting, he was not.

Read More:

• BRAD BLOG: Breitbart Lied About ACORN ‘Pimp’ Videos When Selling Story in His Own Washington Times Column (Feb. 17, 2010)
• Media Matters: James O’Keefe and the myth of the ACORN pimp (Feb. 17, 2010)
• Empty Wheel: NYT Thinks TeaBugger James O’Keefe Entitled to Own Set of Facts (Feb. 9, 2010)