David Corn on the last day of the Copenhagen talks:
No deal. Not even a fig leaf. That seemed to be the implication of President Barack Obama’s much-anticipated speech at the Copenhagen climate summit.
….His eight-minutes of remarks signaled a global train wreck. Not hiding his anger and frustration, he said, “I think our ability to take collective action is in doubt.”….Obama played it simple and hard. He maintained the United States was calling for three basic principles: mitigation, transparency, and financing….Obama essentially accused other leaders of preferring “posturing to action.” He explained, “I’m sure many consider this an imperfect framework…No country will get everything it wants.”….Obama was clearly venting: “We know the fault lines because we’ve been imprisoned by them for years.”….This was not a speech of persuasion; it was one of positioning. After the morning meeting, Obama and his aides had obviously calculated that a deal was far off—perhaps not even possible—and that there was not much Obama could say in this speech to grease the way to a meaningful agreement.
Bloomberg on the state of the healthcare bill:
Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson threw a Christmas deadline for passage of health-care legislation into further doubt, rejecting a compromise on abortion and saying he doesn’t see how fellow Democrats can resolve all his objections.
“I can’t tell you that they couldn’t come up with something that would be satisfactory on abortion between now and then and solve all the other issues that I’ve raised to them, but I don’t see how,” Nelson said in an interview with KLIN radio in Lincoln, Nebraska.
….Nelson told reporters that he has a “laundry list of concerns” besides abortion. And while he doesn’t want to start over on the legislation, an incremental approach might be better to first focus on health-care costs, he told KLIN.
Top ‘o the morning to you too! I think I’ll just go back to bed now.
