After months of legislative deliberation aimed at forging a bipartisan health care bill that began by ejecting single-payer advocates from his hearing room, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) unveiled his committee’s health care bill today with zero Republican support. Baucus’s bill — which former Cigna executive Wendell Potter has referred to as “an absolute gift” to the health insurance industry — includes no public option, an individual insurance mandate, and the creation of health care co-ops.

While a number of Democrats immediately rose in opposition to Baucus’s bill — Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) said it has “no legitimacy,” outspoken single-payer advocate Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) declared it “dead on arrival,” and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) flatly refused to support it — one Democrat, Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), praised the bill today:

“It’s a good product,” Conrad said on CNBC. “It is an attempt by the chairman to lay out what he thinks reflects best the discussions over this extended period of time. And I think the chairman has done a good job of capturing where the talks are at this point.” [...]

“Many of the concerns that our Republican colleagues raised have been included in the chairman’s proposal,” he said, citing provisions in the bill on abortion funding, coverage for illegal immigrants, and taxes on high-value insurance plans.

Conrad’s support for Baucus’s health care bill is unsurprising, given the fact that it includes his co-op proposal that he introduced shortly after a meeting with the nation’s largest insurer and health reform opponent UnitedHealth Group. BusinessWeek reported on the meeting last month:

UnitedHealth is generally well received in legislative circles in Washington. In late May its in-house point man on reform, Simon Stevens, hand-delivered a report to key senators detailing ways to save an estimated $540 billion in federal spending over 10 years. A week later, on June 4, Stevens accompanied UnitedHealth’s chief executive, Stephen J. Hemsley, to a meeting with Senator Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), an influential moderate member of the Senate Finance Committee. Conrad has since led an effort to create nonprofit medical cooperatives that would operate much like utility co-ops as a substitute for a federally run plan. With less heft than a proposed national plan, the state medical cooperatives would pose a far weaker competitive threat to private insurers.

Conrad’s links to the health care industry don’t stop there. For the 2010 election cycle, the health care industry has donated over half a million dollars to the senator, and his former chief of staff Robert Van Heuvelen is now a lobbyist for the American Health Care Association.

As the Huffington Post’s Roy Sekoff told Ed Schultz last night, if the Baucus bill is anything, it is health insurers getting “what they paid for with the three million dollars they’ve donated to Baucus since 2003.”

Yesterday, President Jimmy Carter caused controversy when he suggested that Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) recent outburst during President Obama’s health care address and other attacks against Obama may be motivated by racism. Today, Glenn Beck suggested on his Fox News show that Carter’s claims are equivalent to the terrorist tactic of strapping bombs to children and portrayed Carter as an ideological ally of Osama bin Laden:

BECK: Nobody is saying we’re blowing children up or anything like the Taliban. But this is the same kind of tactic being used now in America. You can’t get your agenda, so you unleash the hounds and point the fingers, and everybody is a racist.

Watch it:

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) is the self-proclaimed “most outspoken critic of ACORN.” Following the release of incriminating videos showing ACORN workers giving advice to undercover conservative activists inquiring about how to start a brothel and not get caught, Vitter and other Republicans called for investigations and audits of the organization. On Monday, he put out a press release bragging about all his anti-ACORN work over the years and commending the administration for condemning the group:

After months of beating the drum and continued news reports of criminal investigations, the president and his administration are finally starting to distance themselves from ACORN. The Census dropping ACORN as a partner is a good, common sense move. Now we must go one step further and support my simple and direct amendment, which declares that no federal funds should go ACORN.

Yet despite all his anti-ACORN activism, Vitter missed the vote that cut off federal funding for the group. A spokesman said that there was “a scheduling error” that caused the senator to miss his flight back to Washington in time for the roll call, but he still “called colleagues and urged them to support the amendment.”

Vitter’s outrage over the latest ACORN scandal seems extraordinarily hypocritical, in light of what he went through in 2007:

A woman accused of running a Washington prostitution ring placed five phone calls to David Vitter while he was a House member, including two while roll call votes were under way, according to telephone and congressional records.

Vitter, a Louisiana Republican now in the Senate, acknowledged Monday that his number was on the woman’s call list and apologized for a “very serious sin.”

Vitter, of course, kept his federal funding, and remains in the Senate.