Remember, set your alarms for tomorrow, when the Senate debates health care reform all day, leading to a Saturday night vote on a motion to proceed, at 8:00 pm ET. Till then…

UPDATE: I’ll be on Air America’s Nicole Sandler Show tonight talking about health care and that odd meeting between FDL’s Eve Gittleson and President Bill Clinton.

• Department of bad ideas: two polls show the public thinking that cutting taxes and stopping spending will create jobs, and that the government should balance the budget in the middle of the recession. These things are insane. The public: not very good at economics!

• Roland Burris got a slap on the wrist from the Senate Ethics Committee today, just like virtually everyone else they investigate. This probe related to his appointment to the seat.

• The “free rider” provision in the Senate health care bill has been improved. Even the CBPP, the ringleader in whipping up opposition to it, thinks so. But a better improvement would just be ditching it and moving to a real employer mandate, like the House bill.

• Good article from Suzy Khimm on women’s health and the Senate bill. Still a lot of confusion around this.

• Lots of reform advocacy groups are pushing hard around tomorrow’s Senate health care vote, among them HCAN, MoveOn.org (which had a nice ad regarding triggers), and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee, which robocalled voters in Nevada supporting Harry Reid’s efforts to put a public option in the bill.

• John Kerry writes a very, very stern letter about Blackwater offering bribes in Iraq. I don’t know what it will take to get that company fully off the government payroll.

• Mortgage delinquencies are at a record high, and they’re increasingly affecting prime loans. Until housing recovers, we’re not going to see much improvement in the economy.

• With the OPR Report on the torture memo authors due any day, Jay Bybee, one of those authors, has set up a legal defense fund. I hope he needs it.

• Neat site from the Economic Policy Institute tracking unemployment and the economy: Economy Track.

• Defeatocrat Fred Thompson says the war in Afghanistan is lost, spurs hundreds of blog posts decrying the unintended irony.

• The Attorney General of Ohio sued the credit rating agencies today, for their poor ratings of high-risk securities that may have led to the financial meltdown.

• This 32% rate hike on student fees in the University of California system is staggering. How the state of California expects to maintain an educated workforce is unclear. What a tragedy, although it may be waking some people up.

• Nancy Pelosi gave a qualified endorsement to a financial transaction tax, saying that all countries had to offer the same kind of rules to prevent outsourcing.

• And cosmetic surgeons are united against the “Botax”, that 5% tax on elective surgery. I prefer the term “nip/tuck tax.”