Rachel Maddow took viewers through the litany of statements made by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid about the need to reform the filibuster rules to prevent the Republican minority from forcing 60 votes on every single bill, but as she noted, what ended up passing this Thursday was nothing that anyone could consider any type of meaningful reform.

About the only issue I'd take with Rachel's reporting on the subject is that I'm not sure if it's fair to lay all of the blame at Reid's feet, or if it's what I believe is a more likely scenario, which is that he'd have gladly signed onto the reforms himself if he thought he had the votes within his own caucus, which he did not. If that is the case, I'd like to know which Senators he was dealing with that refused to go along with stopping the unprecedented obstruction we've seen from the Republicans since Barack Obama was elected president.

And in regard to the failure to pass any new reforms now, as long as Democrats do not control the House, it's not like there is going to be any actual progressive legislation making it through our Congress that Senate Republicans would be blocking. It would make a big difference with nominees and treaties being held up (which I don't want to minimize) to get the rules changed now, but if Democrats were going to reform the filibuster rules, it would have made a real difference when they had control of the House as well and they refused to do it then. I'm disgusted but not shocked that they didn't do anything about it now as well, given their track record.

I've read jokes about the day Al Franken finally got sworn in being the worst day of Harry Reid's life because they couldn't use the Republicans as an excuse any more for not getting anything done in the Senate. I think we're seeing right now that we're not going to have any reforms as long as we've got a bunch of Democrats mucking up the works who are not much better than their counterparts on the right.

Here's more from Ezra Klein on the latest: Harry Reid: “I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold”:

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Media Matters caught this one -- National Review's Lowry falsely equates reconciliation and nuclear option in order to accuse Dionne of hypocrisy in yet another example of why E.J. Dionne on the panel of Meet the Press this weekend was the only thing that made it watchable.

MR. DIONNE: Rich's point about process, I went back and looked at all the columns I wrote criticizing the Bush tax cuts. I never made a process argument about reconciliation. I argued about the merits of the tax cut, and I think instead of talking about process we ought to talk about the merits of the health plan.

MR. LOWRY: But you really, you did, E.J., you did write a very stirring column about the nuclear option in defense of the Senate...

MR. DIONNE: That was...(unintelligible).

MR. LOWRY: ...as an anti, as an anti-majoritarian institution.

MR. DIONNE: That has nothing to do with--I believe...

MR. LOWRY: And look, just one last thing...

SEN. HATCH: I've got it right here.

MR. LOWRY: ...E.J., the point you're saying if Republicans are united, the Democrats can't govern, is what they're saying. It would have been relatively easy--and Senator Hatch would be an expert on this because he worked so closely with Ted Kennedy on health issues--to get 65 or 70 votes for a major healthcare bill in the Senate. Not this, but $100 billion, $200 billion more for Medicaid, for SCHIP, maybe some version of this Plan B we've seen reporting about that the White House--after Massachusetts came up with a plan where they'd cover just 15 million people at a quarter of the cost. You do something like that and you would have picked off five or 10 Republicans in the Senate, but they didn't want to do it.

MR. DIONNE: Senator Baucus spent months holding hand--Senator Baucus spent months holding hands with Senator Bauc--with Senator Grassley and Senator Enzi and got nowhere.

SEN. HATCH: I, I, I...

MR. GREGORY: OK, quick final point then I'm going to take a break. Senator:

SEN. HATCH: I was a member of the gang of seven. He was so restricted by the Democratic process that he couldn't really do anything for Republicans. So I had to leave just out of honor because I couldn't--I'd walk out of there and, and trash everything they were doing, so I left out of honor. The other Republicans gradually left, too. There has been no real effort to try and get together on all the things we can get together on. It's just been "take it or leave it," and that's been their attitude.

MR. GREGORY: All right, we're going to, we're going to leave, we're going to leave it there.

From The Daily Show March 4, 2010.

The Rapture is the ultimate Republican emergency backup plan that's guaranteed to derail Obama's health care reform.

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Rachel Maddow whacks the Republicans and the good folks over at ClusterFox who are aiding and abetting them for trying to conflate reconciliation with the nuclear option.

After playing a clip of Lamar Alexander saying that using reconciliation would be a “political Kamikaze mission” and “the end of the United States Senate” if the Democrats used it to pass the health care bill, Rachel notes Alexander’s hypocrisy on the subject. He was more than happy to use it for the Jobs & Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003, the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the Tax Increase Prevention & Reconciliation Act of 2005 and the College Cost Reduction & Access Act of 2007.

Rachel then calls out all too often guest on the Sunday shows Grandpa McCain for his hypocrisy as well. As Rachel notes, McCain wants to change the Senate rules so reconciliation can’t be used for anything involving entitlements and the John McCain of the past felt a bit differently. McCain voted for the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 with Dick Cheney as the tie breaking vote which slashed Medicaid. McCain voted for the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989 which overhauled the doctor payment system for Medicare.

She goes on to explain that the Republicans are now so desperate to win the debate on health care reform since they have already lost the votes in both houses of the Congress that their last resort is to try to conflate reconciling the two bills with the nuclear option, which would have eliminated the filibuster all together.

It’s good to see Rachel calling these guys out for their lies, but sadly too much of the public does not watch her show and is being propagandized by the likes of ClusterFox.

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No sooner did I finish watching Rachel Maddow call these guys out for conflating the budget reconciliation with the nuclear option in the Senate and I turn on Greta Van Susteren's show and guess what? She and Rick Santorum are conflating the use of budget reconciliation with the nuclear option. Shameless. She even uses deceptive video footage of the Democrats talking about the Republicans threatening to use the nuclear option and blow up the Senate's filibuster rule to get their judges through and then brings on Santorum who actually didn't even look comfortable lying through his teeth here. As Rachel noted, these guys know perfectly well what they're doing.

There's not a chance in hell that they don't when all we heard out of them when Bill Frist was threatening the Dems to get those judges through was "nuclear option" over and over and over again. That and "up or down vote" when they wanted to drive home the point that the Democrats filibustering would be obstructing the will of their majority, even though they didn't have sixty votes to get all of their agenda passed.

Harry Reid has called the Republicans out for this, but it's not going to stop ClusterFox and the rest of the conservative media from helping them spread their lies. More on that from Media Matters here -- Media continue to push GOP rhetoric on reconciliation.

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Rachel Maddow calls out the Republicans for saying that Democrats passing the health reform bill through reconciliation is the same as the nuclear option. And as she notes, they are more than well aware that they are lying since they constantly threatened to use the nuclear option and change the rules of the Senate when they wanted to get Bush's judicial appointments confirmed.

Maddow: What's going on here is a deliberate attempt on the part of Republicans to define nuclear down -- to conflate these two totally separate things to demonize the way that Democrats have to pass health reform right now. By calling it the nuclear option even though the nuclear option is a real thing in the Senate, and this isn't that -- it has nothing to do with that. Perhaps the reason that Republicans are so unwilling to call this what it is, reconciliation is because they have a really long record of using reconciliation.

As Rachel notes budget reconciliation is how the health care system has been formed in the United States already and Republicans used reconciliation to pass the Bush tax cuts, twice. And it's been used to pass things like COBRA and SCHIP. No sooner did I turn her show off tonight and guess who was helping conflate the term reconciliation with the nuclear option? You've got it... ClusterFox.

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Funny, I don't remember any Republicans saying this when they wanted to get Bush's judicial nominations through the Senate.

HANNITY: And that was Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus earlier today making a plea on behalf of his health care reform plan. Now we had hoped and, in fact, promised it would be a bill that would garner bipartisan support. Instead, Senator Baucus, he found himself standing all alone this afternoon.

There were no Democrats. There were no Republicans by his side. So, is his bill DOA, dead on arrival? We're joined now by former White House communications director Nicolle Wallace and Sandra Smith from the FOX Business Network.

You know, the interesting part of this is nobody came out with him. It's still going to be $800 billion. Still hasn't been scored. But you got Rockefeller saying no, Wyden saying no. That's on the Senate side. And then Olympia Snowe saying get rid of the government option.

You have Weiner in the House. Pelosi in the House and the CBC in the House saying no way without a government option. It's the Democrats' problem.

NICOLLE WALLACE, FORMER WH COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR: Yes. Look, I think what we'll never know is how this would have played out if this is where the Democrats started. You know the one thing I thought today was this would have been a great opening position if the Democrats had spent the last four months trying to rally support around this as their position to come to the table and invite Republicans to sit down with them.

This is the best we can do. We think this represents the desires of most -- many Americans.

HANNITY: Right.

WALLACE: What do you have? But, you know, instead, this is near the end of the process and he walked out alone.

SANDRA SMITH, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK: And the whole point here is that the proposal -- we understand that this is a proposal. This is not the actual plan. It's a mark up. It can be changed. It will be changed. But the whole point, Sean, is that he was coming out with this in hopes of garnering Republican support. He steps out today. He is alone. No one is joining in with him.

HANNITY: Not one person.

SMITH: Not one person.

HANNITY: Well, Harry Reid, for the first time this week, said he will use the nuclear option. If he goes down that road, what will the reaction be not only from Republicans but from people in this country that are out there protesting at town halls, the march on Washington this week. What's the reaction?

WALLACE: I think the nuclear option is the only thing less appealing to the American people than the public option. I mean you saw the outcry. We all saw over the summer. This is not a Republican revolt. This is a revolt of the American people. And I think if he turns to that tactic, I think the Democrats will pay hefty price.

And of course she's wrong about support for the public option.