With odds for climate change legislation this year now hovering around zero, the Obama administration is looking for fallback positions that can ensure the United States has a strong negotiating hand at December's U.N. Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen -- where 192 nations are supposed to develop a follow-on pact to the Kyoto Protocol.

The administration had hoped enactment of a domestic cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions would send a strong signal to its negotiating partners, and enable it to strike a global-warming deal that's acceptable to both houses of Congress.

Officials are eager to avoid repeating the experiences of the Clinton administration -- which backed the Kyoto pact but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate after the chamber in 1997 passed a resolution stating it would only sign a deal that included commitments to cut emissions levels from developing countries like China and India.

The White House is in a real bind. On one hand, it can't really come up with a coherent negotiating position without concrete emissions targets. And if negotiators in Copenhagen fail to reach any substantive agreement, Congress will probably be more reluctant to move cap-and-trade legislation next year, right before the mid-term elections. The House in June narrowly passed a bill (HR 2454) that would limit emissions at 17 percent below current levels in 2020, 42 percent in 2030 and 83 percent in 2050.

Less than a day after President Obama scrapped the missle-defense system championed by George W. Bush, Russia's leaders called on the administration and Congress to lift Cold War-era trade restrictions, including curbs on sensitive technology transfers.

At a business forum in the Black Sea city of Sochi, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin praised Obama's decision to cancel plans to deploy interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic "correct and brave," then pressed for U.S. trade concessions -- particularly the repeal of the so-called Jackson-Vanik amendment to a 1974 trade bill (PL 93-618) that links exports to human rights. The measure -- a long-running source of friction in Washington-Moscow relations that's named for its sponsors, former Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash. and Rep. Charles Vanik, D-Ohio, -- was enacted to pressure the Soviet Union to liberalize Jewish emigration.

The Bush missile plan had been viewed as a threat by the Russians. Officials there hope Obama's turnabout is part of a larger thaw in relations between the countries that they can turn to their economic advantage.

The White House on Thursday made good on President Obama's pledge to evaluate the medical malpractice system and take steps to discourage "defensive medicine" and frivolous lawsuits.

All without committing much money.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced her department would award $25 million in grants to states and health care systems to test new patient safety and medical liability measures and review existing state laws that discourage malpractice suits, by channeling claims through screening panels or out-of-court mediation.

At a White House briefing, Sebelius echoed the administration's line, by saying she didn't think malpractice suits were really driving health costs off the rails -- as some conservatives in Congress claim. But she allowed that the threat of litigation was chilling professionals in specialties like obstetrics and neurosurgery, by forcing them to order more diagnostic tests and take other potentially costly precautions.

Two days, two big environmental announcements from the Obama administration.

The EPA on Wednesday said it would reverse a Bush administration policy and propose new national smog standards by December to ensure that the benchmarks are scientifically sound and protect public health.

The action comes on the heels of Tuesday's unveiling of new mileage and tailpipe emission standards for cars and trucks and amounts to a rejection of 2008 EPA decision to tighten air pollution standards for smog -- also known as ground-level ozone -- to 75 parts per billion from the old standard of 84 ppb.

The fuel economy and tailpipe emissions standards that the Obama administration unveiled on Tuesday essentially formalized a deal the White House cut in May that got the federal government, states, the auto industry and environmentalists more or less on the same track with respect to climate change.

But there were several important political statements embedded in the several hundred-page proposal.

The first is that even more sweeping regulations addressing global warming are on the way. Within weeks, the EPA is expected to issue an "endangerment finding" that would trigger a requirement for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act (PL 101-549) -- even without new legislation. This wouldn't just cover emissions from "mobile sources" like cars and trucks, but from power plants, factories and other large facilities. That puts pressure on the Senate to begin moving a climate change bill and protect its favored industries, or watch from the sidelines while the EPA writes new rules.

President Obama sounded a note of optimism about the economy in his speech on financial regulation today, declaring that “the storms of the past two years are beginning to break.” It appears, however, that that may not be true for the poorest Americans. For them, in fact, the worst of the storms may be yet to come.

A report issued late last week by the Brookings Institution projects that the national poverty rate will continue to climb because of the recession, peaking at 14.4 percent in 2011 or 2012 — up from 12.5 percent in 2007 — as more people are thrown out of work. That means another 8 million people could be thrown into poverty, in addition to the 37 million people who were poor in 2007.

Don’t look to Brookings for any “light at the end of the tunnel” rhetoric. “This recession will cast a long shadow on those at the bottom of the ladder — a group that was not doing well before the recession arrived and which will be disproportionately affected long after it has ended,” the report stated.

If you thought President Obama's health care address to Congress reset the terms of the debate and increased prospects for bipartisan cooperation with Republicans in Congress, think again.

The president has a health care rally in Minneapolis Saturday, and our colleague Emily Cadei reports state Republicans are ready.

Rep. John Kline plans to offer a "prebuttal" to the president at a 10:30 a.m. press conference. And the Republican Party of Minnesota is spending $25,000 buy local TV ads urging the president to take time developing a common-sense health care reform plan, instead of rushing a partisan plan through the Congress.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama plans to use the rally to reiterate key points from Wednesday night's speech to a joint session of Congress. And there's more to come. The president will hold another health care rally on Sept. 17 at the University of Maryland in suburban College Park, Md. and is likely to discuss the issue at the AFL-CIO convention on Sept. 15 in Pittsburgh, and at a fundraiser for Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., that night in Philadelphia

Local TV stations who've lost money during the recession must be quietly hoping this debate will drag on.

Seldom does the collapse of a major financial institution qualify as a subject for presidential commemmoration. But President Obama, ever in search of a teachable moment, plans to use Monday's first anniversary of the demise of Lehman Bros. to issue a rallying cry to overhaul financial regulations -- and to prod the Senate to take action on one of his top-tier priorities.

Obama will appear at Federal Hall, on Wall Street, to discuss the need for new rules governing the trading of financial derivatives and new structures that protect consumers by approving mortgage products and imposing new disclosure rules. He'll also likely repeat his pitch to give the Federal Reserve the power to regulate systemic risk, a proposal that's aroused substantial ire from Fed critics in Congress.

Press secretary Robert Gibbs on Friday said Obama was using the occasion to remind Americans how close the economy came to the abyss, and to sell a series of steps "to ensure what happened a year ago won't happen again." He declined to say who'll be in the audience at the site, where George Washington took the oath of office as the first president and where the first Congress, Supreme Court and executive branch offices were located.

Clearly, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio wasn’t looking forward to his weekly press conference today. Why would he, since he knew all of the questions were going to be about one of his caucus members heckling the president’s speech like one of those Little League parents who abuses the coach?

So Boehner did what any congressional leader does in that position: He faced the music, clung to his talking points, and never admitted he was embarrassed. Even though he certainly looked embarrassed.

After a lengthy delay caused by some drawn-out House votes, Boehner walked into the press conference and cited his litany of policy objections to President Obama’s health care speech last night. If it had been any other week, the reporters might have asked him some policy questions. But not the day after Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., disrupted Obama’s speech, shouting “You lie!” when Obama claimed the health care bill wouldn’t extend coverage to illegal immigrants.

The health care debate appears to be so intoxicating that even ninth-graders want to discuss the hows and whys of expanding coverage.

During a 20-minute question and answer period with 32 students on Tuesday before his national back to school address at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., President Obama took a query from a student who identified himself as Sean.

Why, Sean asked from what appeared to be a prepared question, does the United States lack universal health care when 36 other countries have such a system?