Walking back from picking up my daily salad I was thinking, what are the most improbable professions or job titles? I’m going to start the bidding with “celebrity pathologist“. Whaddya got? Any others?

Also, I noted before that the derivatives bill just passed the Ag Committee. How do derivatives work in a chicken-denominated economy?

Late Update: All the other suggested improbable job titles so far have been, I’m afraid to say, kind of weak. But TPM Reader BL suggests “Former Half-Term Governor” which ain’t bad at all.

Our Brian Beutler caught up with Sen. Shelby (R-AL) a few moments ago on the Hill and Shelby suggested a deal is almost done that “there will be a substantial number of Republicans that go along with it.”

More evidence McConnell’s solid phalanx strategy is crumbling.

Our Eric Kleefeld just got in touch with the Sue Lowden campaign to ask about the chicken barter approach to rein in spiraling health care costs in the 21st century. And here’s what they said.

You may have seen ads, opinion columns, or TV appearances by a group that dubs itself “Stop Too Big To Fail.” At first glance, maybe even at second glance, they seem to be coming at financial reform from the left, arguing that the proposed reform doesn’t go far enough in breaking up the big banks. But unlike most advocates for tougher reforms, this group is actually urging that the current bill be voted down, which seemed a bit odd. So we started looking into the group.

It turns out it’s a project of a notorious astroturf outfit based in Indiana that has a long track record of taking industry money to set up phony “grassroots movements.” But their effort this time with Stop Too Big To Fail was so convincing that it actually roped in uber-reformer Simon Johnson, the former IMF economist who’s been on a one-man crusade to topple the banking oligarchy. Now he’s trying to get his name and photo removed from the group’s website. Some news outlets have been duped, too. It’s a great story, and Justin Elliott got it for us.

Brian Beutler and Christina Bellantoni report on the Senate Republican caucus’ sudden change of heart on financial reform.

Perhaps inevitably, as you can see in the picture at the left, a progressive group has now created a special ChickenCare dance remix of senate candidate Sue Lowden’s proposal to bring down health care costs by adopting a barter economy in medical care.

A bit more seriously though, this does put the Nevada senate race into a certain clarifying perspective. The Health Care Reform bill wasn’t Harry Reid’s bill — ideas and strategy from lots of people went into it. And many people had endless criticisms of how he managed the process over the course of 2009 and 2010. At the end of the day, though, it passed. The Senate is where it happened. And Reid was central to the entire thing. That is an historic accomplishment. If his career in politics ends in January, his place in history will be secure.

So on the one side you have Harry Reid, a key architect of comprehensive Health Care Reform, the product of decades of activism, in all its messiness and policy complexity.

And on the other you have Sue Lowden, who thinks bartering livestock and other commodities for health care services from doctors is a way to rein in spiraling health care costs. (If you think that’s an exaggeration, take a minute and watch this video.) There’s no end of comedic possibilities thinking through the logistical and logical difficulties of managing co-pays and long-term care and drug costs in chickens and other barter payment. But step back and give it a serious look and … well, this is this woman’s take on confronting medical inflation. It’s funny and also sad. But as a contrast it’s stark and painful.

Seriously, think about it for a minute.

Obama makes his case for financial reform in Manhattan this morning. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Jon Stewart schools the Brits on how democratic elections should really work. Watch.

Former New York Gov. George Pataki (R) spent 2009 mainly keeping it real. And since he seems to harbor presidential ambitions we figured that his angle would be to hang back, maintain his generally moderate image and bank on being on hand as a moderate option if the Tea Party right overplays its hand and the economy is humming along by 2011.

But I guess that’s not his plan after all. Our Rachel Slajda noticed that out of the blue he’s roared back in full Tea Party mode heading up a new Repeal HCR group looking to collect a million email addresses to repeal “ObamaCare”.

Thor Hearne, the GOP election lawyer in St. Louis who became a TPM fave in the mid-oughts with his euphemistically named American Center for Voting Rights — which was actually a nationwide Republican voter-suppression effort — went to ground after the U.S. attorneys scandal blew up and the spotlight focused on Republicans’ bogus voter fraud charges.

But now he’s popped up back up again, practicing law in Washington, D.C., though his heart is still in Missouri. Back home, the state attorney general is a Democrat and has refused to join in the bailout of GOP lawyers going on in many states, otherwise known as suing to get health care reform overturned on constitutional grounds. So Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, a Republican with gubernatorial ambitions, has taken it upon himself, since like most lieutenant governors he doesn’t have much else going on, to start raising private money to hire a lawyer to represent the state so Missouri Republican lawyers won’t be left out of the legal fee bonanza.

And who does Kinder turn to to handle the case? Thor Hearne, of course.