U.S. Rep. Paul Broun is live-blogging the health care summit on Thursday.

Team Broun announced the congressman “will hold a real-time interactive discussion” on his Facebook page from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Hear me now and understand me later. Tea partiers are a bunch of girly men!

Broun also took a swipe today at California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for saying the tea party movement will disappear because it can’t offer any solutions.

Says Broun, “I will crush my enemy, and see him driven before me, and hear the lamentations of the women.”

Not really. But he did say Schwarzenegger is out of touch.

On the eve of Senate Democrats finally passing health care reform, Georgia Republicans are calling for an investigation into the deal that made it happen.

States are required to match federal funding for Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor and disabled. The health care bill would make people who earn up to 133 percent of the (very low) federal poverty line, costing states millions of dollars (federal officials have pledged to make up the difference, although that’s not part of the current legislation).

Sen. Ben Nelson ripped open his Christmas card Saturday and found millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements for his home state of Nebraska. In Majority Leader Harry Reid's envelope was a 60th vote for health care reform.

But when Democratic leaders played Santa for Nelson, they also handed Republicans a gift-wrapped issue to use in the health care debate.

Sen. Johnny Isakson: “Isakson also criticized the lack of transparency as the legislation was drafted and the backroom deals that Democratic Leader Reid, D-Nev., made with certain Senate Democrats in order to secure their votes on his health care proposal.

Sens. Johnny Isakson and Saxby Chambliss voted against supporting the troops before they voted for it.

Georgia’s two Republican senators issued a news release over the weekend about a $636 billion defense spending bill the Senate passed Friday night.

“(W)e have the best trained, most professional, most effective, and best led military in the world and they deserve our unfailing support,” Chambliss said. “That is why I voted in favor of this bill.”

“While I do not agree with everything in this bill, this funding is critical to ensuring that our men and women in uniform have the resources they need to protect our homeland and continue the fight for freedom around the world,” Isakson said.

A group called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is running ads in Georgia’s 12th District targeting Rep. John Barrow, D-Savannah, for his vote against health care reform.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which claims 250,000 members, said in a news release it raised $20,000 online to run ads criticizing 10 of the 39 Blue Dog Democrats, including Barrow, who voted against the bill.

U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, a Republican candidate for governor, let it slip during a live chat this morning that he is a birther.

In response to a question from journalist Tom Crawford, Deal said, “I am joining several of my colleagues in the House in writing a letter to the President asking that he release a copy of his birth certificate so we can have an answer to this question.”

Deal also said during the chat states should be able to opt out of a proposed Medicaid expansion because he doesn’t believe the federal government will really foot the bill. Which reminded me of something Gov. Sonny Perdue and GOP gubernatorial candidate John Oxendine told me last week. (notebook dump alert!)

Chatting today with Maria Sheffield, one of the roughly 6,000 Republicans running for state insurance commissioner, she mentioned that the crowds at GOP events seem a bit smaller and more subdued these days after the frenzy of the TEA parties and the anti-Obamacare town halls.

“I think in a way people are just worn out,” she said.

Perhaps that’s why, when this Paul Broun press release hit my inbox later this afternoon, it seemed so lukewarm by Broun’s standards.

The congressman had this to say about the House health care bill Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today:

I spoke to Rep. Paul Broun this morning about the OPTION Act, which stands for Offering Patients True and Individualized Options Now. But we’ll just call it BrounCare.

He readily conceded that the idea of replacing Medicare with cash vouchers is not going to happen, so let’s shift the focus to some of his other ideas. Namely, letting people buy insurance across state lines, allowing groups of people to form pools to get lower rates, expanding tax deductions for health care expenses and transparent pricing (doctors and insurance companies posting costs and reimbursements for services up front).

Rep. Paul Broun just dropped his health care bill.

The text isn’t available yet, but here is a summary. The highlight is that Broun – who has long maintained that Medicare is unconstitutional – wants to end the popular government insurance program for seniors, replacing it with vouchers that could be used to buy private insurance or stashed in health savings accounts.

He also proposes letting people buy insurance across state lines, allowing organizations to pool their members to buy coverage and offering tax credits to doctors who perform charity care. Under the bill, emergency rooms could deny care to people who are deemed not to be having an emergency.

I’m supposed to talk to Team Broun later on, and a few questions immediately come to mind, like:

• What happens if a senior citizen can’t obtain private insurance?

Rep. Paul Broun says Sen. Olympia Snowe, the Maine Republican all the Democrats want to take to the dance, will insert a public option trigger into the Baucus bill, and that 18 Republican senators might vote for it on the floor.

During an Oct. 2 speech in Nashville to a group of conservative doctors, Broun also said that he and Ron Paul are the only two congressmen who believe in the Constitution as originally written. The whole speech is on YouTube, for anyone who wants to hear Broun give his spiel on health care but wasn’t able to make it to a town hall meeting.