ThinkFast: November 16, 2009

In Singapore this weekend, President Obama “was forced to acknowledge that a comprehensive climate deal was beyond reach this year,” dashing his desire for the United States to “lead the way toward a global agreement in Copenhagen next month to address the warming planet.” Instead, Obama expressed support on Sunday for a plan “to pursue a two-step process at the Copenhagen conference.”

During his first public appearance in China, President Obama pressed for greater “universal rights” — “freedoms of expression and worship, of access to information and political participation.” Speaking to 500 “carefully screened” students in Shanghai, Obama’s “most provocative” statement was a call for greater Internet freedom.

In his first interview since the Fort Hood rampage, Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi “said that he neither ordered nor pressured Maj. Nidal M. Hasan to harm Americans, but that he considered himself a confidant of the Army psychiatrist.” Aulaqi said he may have played a role in transforming Hasan into a devout Muslim and “the two developed an e-mail correspondence over the past year.”

“Despite a solid Democratic majority in the Senate, Obama is on pace to set a record for the fewest judges confirmed during a president’s first year in the White House.” So far, only six of Obama’s nominees to the lower federal courts have won approval, while President George W. Bush had 28 judges confirmed and President Clinton had 27 confirmed in their respective first years in office.

Iraqi doctors in war-ravaged Fallujah are reporting a huge rise in birth defects among infants. “Before 2003 [the start of the war] I was seeing sporadic numbers of deformities in babies. Now the frequency of deformities has increased dramatically,” said Fallujah general hospital’s director Dr. Ayman Qais.

Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) discussed the Republican strategy to delay and derail health reform, demanding “that the Senate take, at the very least, six weeks to deliberate legislation once it is sent to the floor for amendments.” Republicans want to “delay the process so we fully understand what’s in the bill,” he said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups are trying to collect $50,000 to fund a study by a “respected economist” that could be used to attack health care reform. Part of the plan is to then have the economist “circulate a sign-on letter to hundreds of other economists saying that the bill will kill jobs and hurt the economy.”

President Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev presented a united front on Iran’s nuclear program, warning “that they were losing patience with Tehran and wouldn’t wait much longer for it to accept a proposal to resolve the dispute.” “We’re still not satisfied with the pace of advancement of the process,” Medvedev said.

A new wing of the prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan opening later this month will contain review boards that allow detainees to challenge their internment. “What is important to us is not the facility itself; our main focus is on the detainees themselves, how they are treated, and their rights,” said Ahmad Nader Naderi, the deputy head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

And finally: President Obama doesn’t use Twitter. The President told a group of Chinese students that his “thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone.” However, he stressed that he is “a big believer in technology.”

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