President Obama will meet with Al Gore today on climate change in advance of their separate trips to Copenhagen.

So now Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) is saying that Sen. Ben Nelson’s anti-abortion amendment to the health care bill doesn’t have the votes to pass their chamber, which sets up an interesting quandary. Nelson says he can’t and won’t vote for the bill if his amendment or something equivalent isn’t in it and would actually filibuster it. Without his vote, the Democrats don’t have 60. So it presents another possible scenario under which a GOP vote is crucial.

To be clear, that’s taking Stabenow and Nelson at face value, which isn’t always prudent given that negotiations are ongoing and everyone’s words are usually chosen to achieve a particular end. On top of that, there’s no rule against saying you’ll vote one way, and voting another after deals are struck, compromises reached, etc. So perhaps the safest conclusion to reach is that the abortion language is either a huge sticking point or a very big bargaining chip.

President Obama will talk about his decision to send 30,000 more troops to fight the war in Afghanistan when he accepts the Nobel Peace Prize later this week.

An odd exchange on Fox News a short time ago. I know. That never happens, right? But this one has me really confused. Genuinely. Read More

Rep. Michele Bachmann is set to meet tonight for the first time with Sarah Palin.

Late Update: I originally thought this was the first meeting. Apparently they’ve met at least twice before. And, reassuringly, the universe didn’t vaporize. So I’ll be able to sleep more soundly.

As I mentioned over the weekend, a few weeks ago a guy named Tedd Petruna, a NASA employee, sent friends and family an email describing a November 17th incident at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport in which he singlehandedly thwarted an attempted hijacking by a dozen Muslim men. Then the email went viral and Petruna became a cult hero in the right-wing blogosphere and on sites like Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. Only the incident, as he describes it, seems never to have happened. And according to the airline, Petruna wasn’t even on the plane in question.

Now TPMMuckraker’s Justin Elliott has reported out the story and even spoken to Petruna, who’s sticking to his story.

But gets even better.

The people who gotten taken in in the first place are doubling down. Now not only did Petruna actually pull off the cartoonish smackdown of the porn-watching (just read the story) Muslim terrorists. Now AirTran, the airline that seems to have proven pretty conclusively that Petruna wasn’t even on the plane, is supposedly in on the grand conspiracy to cover up for the Muslim terrorist doing dry-run hijackings on our commercial aircraft.

There are so many moving parts to the health care reform negotiations that it can be hard to keep track (although we’re doing exactly that here and here), but this one seems like a potentially very big deal: expanding the scope of Medicare to win over progressive senators in return for dropping public option from the bill.

FAA investigated the alleged ‘dry-run’ Muslim terrorist hijacking in Atlanta last month. And they don’t seem to think anything happened either.

Guttmacher Institute says the Nelson amendment in the senate is virtually identical to the Stupak amendment in the House.

Way back when, the plan progressives were really behind was just allowing people to buy into Medicare — an approach that had a lot of political logic to it. It now seems like a very limited version of that may be back on the table as something that progressives would get in exchange for jettisoning the Public Option.