By Friday evening, it wasn’t clear whether Saturday’s scheduled vote on the famous health care reform bill would happen on time in the House of Representatives, but Democrats were busy wooing any remaining potential supporters among their congressional ranks.  —KA

AP via Google News:

“We’re very close” to having enough votes to prevail, said Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, although he added a scheduled Saturday vote could slip by a day or two and sought to pin the blame on possible Republican delaying tactics.

“Nice try, Rep. Hoyer, but you can’t blame Republicans when the fact is you just don’t have the votes,” shot back Antonia Ferrier, spokeswoman for the GOP leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio.

Hours later, Democrats were still trying to get them.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi presided over meetings well after dark with Democratic abortion foes, whose votes were critical to the bill’s fate, then with supporters of abortion rights, who are among the health legislation’s biggest advocates in the House.

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On Friday, Jason Rodriguez, a 40-year-old engineer who had been fired from an Orlando, Fla., construction firm two years ago, went back to his former office and opened fire, killing at least one person and wounding at least five others before fleeing to his mother’s house, where he was tracked down and arrested.  —KA

The Orlando Sentinel:

After the arrest, the suspect was greeted by reporters just outside the police department’s doors.

“Why did you do it?” one television reporter asked.

“Because they left me to rot,” Rodriguez said.

He was asked if he was angry at his employer.

“No. I’m angry,” he said.

Mayor Buddy Dyer confirmed that the victims were all employees of Reynolds, Smith & Hill.

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“Illegal protest” can count a new baritoned bedfellow. In an interview ahead of the Copenhagen climate change conference, former Vice President Al Gore pronounced civil disobedience to be justified, believing that the global warming crisis requires more forceful methods of political activism. —JCL

The Guardian:

Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.

Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play,” he says. “And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”

In his only UK newspaper interview to mark the publication of his new book, entitled Our Choice, Gore says it is crucial for Obama to attend Copenhagen in person, adding: “I feel certain that he will.”

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Honduras’ government is on the ropes again. Roberto Micheletti, the interim president, moved to form a new government after a deal to form a “unity” cabinet collapsed. Manuel Zelaya, the elected president ousted in a coup in June, is now urging a boycott of the election scheduled later this month. —JCL

Reuters:

An agreement to end a four-month political crisis in Honduras collapsed early on Friday after two rival leaders failed to form a unity cabinet to heal the damage from a June coup.

Ousted President Manuel Zelaya declared the pact dead just a week after it was signed and called on Hondurans to boycott presidential elections this month because, in a surprise move, de facto leader Roberto Micheletti moved to form a new government without him.

The rival leaders had agreed to form a so-called unity and reconciliation cabinet by Thursday, but then they clashed over who would lead the cabinet until the Honduran Congress decided whether to reinstate Zelaya.

“It’s absurd what they are doing, trying to mock all of us, the people who elected me and the international community that supports me. We’ve decided not to continue this theater with Mr. Micheletti,” Zelaya said.

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In news that President Barack Obama described as “sobering,” the U.S. unemployment rate in October broke into the double-digit range, with 10.2 percent of Americans without jobs, the highest rate since April 1983.

The BBC:

The unemployment rate in the US rose to 10.2% in October, which was its highest rate since April 1983, according to figures from the US Labor Department.

It rose from September’s figure of 9.8%. The economy lost 190,000 jobs in the month.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the number of unemployed has risen by 8.2 million, while the jobless rate has risen from 4.9%.

President Barack Obama described the rise in unemployment as “sobering”.

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By the end of the day, some confusion about Thursday’s shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas had been cleared up. It turns out, according to later reports, that the military doctor shot at the scene, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was the only gunman involved in the attack and that he was still alive in its aftermath.  —KA

The New York Times:

The gunman, who was still alive after being shot four times, was identified by law enforcement authorities as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, who had been in the service since 1995. Major Hasan was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas.

Clad in a military uniform and firing an automatic pistol and another weapon, Major Hasan, a balding, chubby-faced man with heavy eyebrows, sprayed bullets inside a crowded medical processing center for soldiers returning from or about to be sent overseas, military officials said.

The victims, nearly all military personnel but including two civilians, were cut down in clusters, the officials said. Witnesses told military investigators that medics working at the center tore open the clothing of the dead and wounded to get at the wounds and administer first aid.

As the shooting unfolded, military police and civilian officers of the Department of the Army responded and returned the gunman’s fire, officials said, adding that Major Hasan was shot by a first-responder, who was herself wounded in the exchange.

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Don’t be fooled by stimulus critics who cite expenditures such as the “electric fish orchestra” (actually an educational demonstration of a larger project related to robotics and prosthetics) or trips to resorts (to train special-ed teachers). “Waste,” as ProPublica reports, “is in the eye of the beholder.”

The Obama administration has cut some projects that just sound bad—freezing fish sperm, cleaning up bird droppings and the like—but sounding bad shouldn’t be the standard (and perhaps it’s not). The question is, would the supplemental freezer at the Gavin’s Point National Fish Hatchery and other purchases have generated or saved jobs?  —PZS

ProPublica:

Among the 150,000 stimulus expenditures released last week are dozens of iPods, toilets and trips to resort hotels. But, according to the reports, those seemingly questionable purchases are being used to enhance technology in the classroom, make bathrooms accessible to the disabled and train special education teachers.

[...] The award for most unusual stimulus project could perhaps go to Malcolm MacIver, a neurobiology and engineering professor at Northwestern University.

MacIver received a $1.25 million grant to use electric fish from the Amazon to study how animals take in sensory information to move quickly in any direction. The research could help in the development of underwater robots to find the source of toxic leaks. Further in the future, it could lead to new, far more agile prosthetics.

For public outreach – a component of most National Science Foundation [6] grants – MacIver has proposed an interactive art exhibit. Sixteen species of electric fish will be arranged in sculpted fish tanks. The tanks will be connected to an amplifier that can convert the different frequencies that the fish emit into sound. Using a hacked controller from the Nintendo Wii video game system, visitors will be able to turn the amplifiers on and off, essentially conducting an orchestra.

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On Thursday afternoon, two gunmen in military uniforms opened fire in a processing center at the U.S. Army’s Fort Hood base in Texas, killing 12 people and wounding at least 31.  —KA

Update: The New York Times reported later Thursday that the gunman was identified as “Malik Nadal Hasan, an Army major who was about to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.” Hasan, a medical officer who specialized in psychiatry, was killed by authorities. CNN reported that two other soldiers who were detained had been released but that another person of interest was in custody.

The New York Times:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas told Fox 4 News that one shooter was in custody and “another is still at large.”

She said she was told by authorities that there were as many as 30 wounded.

“It was a processing center where soldiers are processed to go to Iraq or Afghanistan.

“Our hearts go out,” she said. “These are soldiers who are getting ready to go out to Iraq or Afghanistan and their families were under stress already. This was just a terrible tragedy and we don’t even know the extent of it yet.”

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Thursday would have been a good day for members of Congress to use those underground tunnels to get around the Capitol. Outside, throngs of conservative protesters, heeding Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s loony call, converged on the Hill to demonstrate against the proposed health care bill—also known, in GOP-speak, as the first official step in the socialist takeover of our government.

Reports that arrests were made in or around House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, as well as Sen. Joe Lieberman’s, surfaced later in the day. However, it’s more than likely that there were significant political differences between the groups storming those offices, or else some Tea Party-types got a little confused over at Lieberman’s cubicle.  —KA

The Washington Post:

Thousands of emboldened conservative activists converged on Capitol Hill for a midday rally Thursday, a last-ditch effort to kill the Democrats’ health-care reform legislation they called “Pelosi Care.”

Protesters from across the Eastern Seaboard waved flags, held signs and rang cowbells as their chants of “Kill This Bill” echoed across the Mall. Dozens of Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), stood on the Capitol steps and pledged to do everything they could to defeat the health-care reform bill by Saturday, when House members plan to vote.

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U.N. inspectors have found “nothing to be worried about” in their first report after visiting a previously secret uranium-enrichment site south of Tehran. The clean assessment, which described the site as a “hole in a mountain,” may cause critics to now look for more diplomatic solutions to Iran’s nuclear program.

Reuters:

U.N. inspectors found “nothing to be worried about” in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last month, the International Atomic Energy chief said in remarks published Thursday.

Mohamed ElBaradei also told the New York Times that he was examining possible compromises to unblock a draft nuclear cooperation deal between Iran and three major powers that has foundered over Iranian objections.

The nuclear site, which Iran revealed in September three years after diplomats said Western spies first detected it, added to Western fears of covert Iranian efforts to develop atom bombs. Iran says it is enriching uranium only for electricity.

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