Mike Allen is obviously carrying water for Baucus/Snowe and some Blue Dogs in the House who don't have the numbers to stop a Medicare+5 public option and are determined to make noise and bring some heat to stop the momentum of reformers.

Valerie Jarrett looked pissed on Morning Joe about the Politico story and hopefully there will continue to be push back; I've been seeing some across the blogosphere.

The President favors a trigger has been Allen's default story for a long time now, and it likely will be until the opposite happens. Pisses me off, but what can you do?

Here's what I don't get. Let's assume that Nancy does not yet have the votes for a Medicare plus 5 public option. That could be true. Or it could be that we don't know yet...that they are close to 218 but not there yet and still whipping votes to try to get to that number. Let's further assume she can't whip 218 votes. With the trigger option looking less likely in the Senate and with an opt-out option looking more likely in that body, why, in the House, if Nancy can't get 218 for Medicare plus 5 would the fallback be a trigger? Why wouldn't the fallback be a public option with negotiated rates - similar to Schumer's plan but minus the opt-out? Why do they fallback all the way to the trigger, something even the Senate is no longer actively considering? Do any of the House options even include a trigger?

I agree with Gator....Allen has a direct line to Baucus' office and he's basing his report purely on what he gets from Max. And Max is angry not so much because he opposes something like an opt-out public option but because he wants to be seen as the grand dealmaker here, the guy who brought Republican votes - well, 1 Republican vote - on board by pushing for Olympia's trigger. Now that it's looking like that's not going to happen, Baucus is looking more and more irrelevant. Yeah, it was nice to get Snowe's vote on the Finance Committee mark but it wasn't needed...without her it still would have been voted out of that committee 12-11.

These folks know history is being made here and they want their names prominently attached to it. Max is losing that contest and he's not happy about it. Of course, he could have won that contest easy had he pushed the plan that he drated in 2008 and not spent months trying to get a single Republican Senator on a committee mark that she probably won't vote for on the floor. You bring 10-20 Senators from the other side on board and you go down as a master of bipartisanship. You bring one person from the other side on board who might vote for a crappy bill and you look like a dupe. Max wrote his own obit here. (Remains to be seen if his actions were taken based on direction from the WH)

As for the WH, I don't think Obama has or will specifiy a preference re: the flavor of public option that is included in the final version of the bill. Rahm is likely pushing for whatever will get passed...it's all about winning for him, always was. In the discussion last night, Obama probably, as he always does, asked about the various options on the table. When Harry laid out what he was thinking but left out the trigger, Obama probably said, "And what about the trigger option?" This automatically gets translated by Allen into - "Obama wants the trigger and that's what Congress is going to give him." But it likely wasn't Obama expressing a preference...it was Obama being Obama.

Please....consider the source of this article...it was written by Mike Allen the biggest gossip queen in DC. He probably picked up this nugget of information from his fellow Log Cabin friends in DuPont Circle.

Everyone knows this queen is nothing more than a highly paid gossip who wouldn't know investigative reporting if it bit him in the ass. He was loathed while he was at Time, Inc.....just ask Matt Cooper about Allen and his history.