Eighteen years ago, President George H. W. Bush made his famous campaign pledge, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” (Bush Sr. broke this pledge when he signed the 1990 budget agreement.) Now, President George W. Bush is following in his father’s footsteps.

In 1999, he said he would “oppose and veto any increase in individual or corporate marginal income tax rates or individual or corporate income tax hikes.”

But by signing the recently passed tax cut bill, he raised marginal income tax rates for Americans living abroad. (The bill also cut taxes for the wealthy and worsened long-term deficits.) The New York Times reports today:

In an effort to raise revenues, tax writers in Congress added a last-minute provision that retroactively increased taxes for Americans living abroad. “¦ The change, which is retroactive to the beginning of 2006, is expected to raise taxes on Americans abroad by $2.1 billion over the next 10 years. “¦

Americans working overseas get a dollar-for-dollar credit for income taxes paid to foreign countries to offset their American income taxes. They also get to exclude $80,000 from the income they report to the I.R.S. The new law increased the exclusion to $82,400 this year.

But analyses by the accounting firms Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers show that by adding provisions to how the exclusion is calculated, it raises the overall tax bill and marginal tax rates as well for some overseas Americans.

The Times reported last week that the bill also “tripled tax rates for teenagers with college savings funds.”

Perhaps these tax hikes are good policy. But President Bush has been insisting for years that any tax increase is bad policy. If he has reconsidered his position, he should be upfront about it.

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Average gross per screen for An Inconvenient Truth over the holiday weekend, the highest average in the nation.

Watch it:

On May 25th, President Bush said that Treasury Secretary John Snow had not given him any indication that he was leaving soon:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Secretary of Treasury Snow?

Q Has he given you any indication he intends to leave his job any time soon?…

PRESIDENT BUSH: No, he has not talked to me about resignation. I think he’s doing a fine job.

In fact, not only had Snow indicated he was leaving, President Bush had already settled on his replacement. Today, Tony Snow said that Hank Paulson was offered the job on May 20 and accepted a day later:

QUESTION: Do you have any tick tock on the Paulson…

SNOW: Yes. The tick tock is the two of them met on the 20th of May and there was a conversation. And Hank Paulson accepted the job a day later. That was subject to clearance. It does take time, especially for a Senate confirmable position, to complete those. So it did take time to get some of those clearances wrapped up.

Later in the briefing, Tony Snow essentially admitted that Bush misled the public, claiming it was necessary to protect the market: Read more

Neil Volz, Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) former top aide testified today in the trial of David Safavian, saying that when he worked for Abramoff, he received help from not only from Ney, but also Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Rep. Don Young (R-AK), and Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH).

Jason Lee Steorts of the National Review has published a column taking issue with our response to his cover story on global warming, “Scare of the Century.” The response is useful because it more explicitly exposes the tactics of Steorts and others trying to muddy the debate:

1. Discount the consensus of thousands of scientific experts in favor of a handful of skeptics backed by the fossil fuel industry. Steorts objects to two of our points because they are “based on the International Panel on Climate Change’s models” which he claims “make unrealistic assumptions.” The IPCC process involves thousands of scientists from over 120 countries who, over a period of years, develop detailed reports on climate change. The peer-review process is far more extensive than even the most prestigious scientific journals – the most recent report was reviewed by more than 1,000 top experts. The process includes “climate skeptics” and representatives from industry. In response, Steorts cites one individual, Patrick Michaels who disputes the IPCC’s science. Michaels, whose work is backed by the fossil fuel industry, once famously “proved” global warming wasn’t happening at all by mixing up degrees with radians.

2. Distort scientific research, much of which confirms the severity of global warming, to confuse the issue. First, Steorts quotes Patrick Michaels asserting that “Antarctica has been gaining ice.” Michaels doesn’t have any research to back up that claim, so Steorts is forced to rely on the scientific research of others, including Curt Davis. Steorts is unconcerned that Davis has said that the use of his research by climate skeptics is a “deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public.” Pieter Tans, who runs a lab at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that this is a typical tactic “They argue not as scientists but as lawyers. When they argue, they pick one piece of the fabric of evidence and blow it up all out of proportion…Their purpose is to confuse.”

In the last line of his column, Steorts claims we don’t have the “slightest idea what [we] are talking about.”

But the issue here is not that we know what we are talking about and Steorts doesn’t. The point is that thousands of scientific experts do know what they are talking about. The few people paid by the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on the consensus, and writers like Steorts who act as their megaphone, are not a credible or reliable rebuttal.

“The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for government employees to file lawsuits claiming they were retaliated against for going public with allegations of official misconduct,” the AP reports. By a 5-4 vote, justices ruled “that the First Amendment does not provide protection for comments that a public employee makes in the course of performing regular duties, even if the comments alleged public corruption or government wrongdoing.” Justice Samuel Alito cast the tie-breaking vote.

UPDATE: More on the ruling from SCOTUSBlog: “This apparently means that employees may be disciplined for their official capacity speech, without any First Amendment scrutiny, and without regard to whether it touches on matters of “public concern” — a very significant doctrinal development.”

President Bush’s new nominee for Treasury Secretary, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr., not only endorses the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse emissions, but argues that the United States’ failure to enact Kyoto undermines the competitiveness of U.S. companies. Here’s a statement from the Nature Conservancy, where Paulson serves as chairman of the board:

The Kyoto Protocol is a key first step to help slow the onslaught of global warming and benefit conservation efforts…Until the United States passes its own limits on global warming emissions, innovative companies based here will lose out on opportunities to sell reduced emission credits to companies complying with the Kyoto Protocol overseas. Additionally, without enacting our own emission limits, U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries participating in the Protocol who are developing clean technologies.

Goldman Sachs, under Paulson’s leadership, argued that the danger from global warming is imminent and requires “urgent” action by government to reduce emissions:

[C]limate change is one of the most significant environmental challenges of the 21st century and is linked to other important issues such as economic growth and development… Goldman Sachs is very concerned by the threat to our natural environment, to humans and to the economy presented by climate change and believes that it requires the urgent attention of and action by governments, business, consumers and civil society to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

As a result, Paulson’s nomination is strongly opposed by a coalition right-wing groups seeking to cast doubt on climate science, such as the National Center for Public Policy Research, describing Paulson as “diametrically opposed to the positions of [the Bush] Administration.”

and will be replaced by Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr., CBS News reports.