The purpose of our September 23 piece was to emphasize the importance of climate change in advance of the G20 meetings and encourage the world’s top emitters to seize an important opportunity to take concrete steps to move forward in advance of December’s summit. It is not news that the divide between the unwieldy groups of developed and developing countries have stalled climate talks in the past and that they are drifting again. It is, however, noteworthy that major emitters have recently utilized new channels — the Administration’s Major Economies Forum, for example, as well as the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue — to lay the groundwork for a new climate agreement in Copenhagen. We think this is an important development and should be pursued whenever opportunities, like this week’s summit, arise. Our piece urged leaders at the G20 to pursue concrete actions prior to Copenhagen on issues such as financing arrangements, technology cooperation, and deforestation prevention to increase the chances of success in December.

Even in the midst of global economic crisis, climate change has remained at the top of the agenda both in the United States and in key countries around the world. There is broad consensus that the effects of climate change are not only real, but will be devastating to developed and developing countries alike if the international community fails to agree on a global emissions reduction strategy soon. The road ahead is not without obstacles, which our piece pointed out. But the fate of Copenhagen is far from sealed — and it is my strong belief that the Obama Administration is committed to doing all it can to lead the world into a low-carbon, clean energy future.

Once again, Mick Jagger is right: “You can’t always get what you want/ But if you try, sometimes you just might find/ You get what you need.” The House of Representatives is poised for its first ever floor debate on legislation to reduce global warming pollution. This landmark bill is revolutionary in its intent and, while imperfect in its means, deserves the support of progressives.

For about the cost of a postage stamp per day, the bill would lay the foundation for a thriving clean energy economy, by establishing greenhouse gas pollution limits, setting the first national renewable electricity and efficiency standards for utilities, and improving efficiency standards for buildings and appliances.

The original draft included a more aggressive 2020 greenhouse gas reduction target and a higher renewable electricity standard, which if restored would create more clean energy jobs than the current compromise.

Unfortunately, Senate passage of similar legislation will be more difficult, and the Senate Energy Committee is off to an inauspicious beginning by passing an energy bill that would do little to boost investments in renewable electricity. The Senate bill is weak, toothless, and unacceptable.

The Congressional will to act lags far behind the scientific evidence that there is little time left to avert the worst impacts of global warming. But passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act this week by the House will give us a chance to start the critical transition to a low-carbon economy.

Elizabeth is truly a remarkable, dynamic and courageous woman. From her life story, we know that, above all, she is a survivor and a person of deep moral conviction.

Her grace and strength through this battle will continue to serve as an inspiration to us all.

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Edwards family.

To this day, Rove has maintained his security clearance in spite of evidence that he mishandled classified information regarding Valerie Wilson’s position at the CIA. Rove was named as in the indictment of Scooter Libby as “Official A.”

An Executive Order 12958, signed by President Clinton in 1995, states disclosure of an undercover agent is grounds for, at a minimum, losing access to classified information:

Section 5.1: Violation means: any knowing, willful, or negligent action that could reasonably be expected to result in an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Section 5.7.d: The agency head, senior agency official, or other supervisory official shall, at a minimum, promptly remove the classification authority of any individual who demonstrates reckless disregard or a pattern of error in applying the classification standards of this order.

In November, Newsweek wrote, “Having his security clearance yanked would not require Rove to resign as deputy chief of staff to President Bush. But it would prevent him from taking part in policymaking that relates to national-security issues, which would mean a much-reduced role in the Bush White House.”

Rove has now resigned his policy-making post and is focusing primarily on politics. Given Rove’s public intentions to make national security the focus of the 2006 elections, the White House should reveal whether Rove will be doing his political job while holding a security clearance.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert has decided to mark the season by loudly insisting that the Capitol’s decorated spruce be called a “Christmas tree,” as opposed to a “Holiday tree.” He is right on this point. It is a Christmas tree. And while the Speaker may consider his action a “work,” the message of Jesus means more.

If Speaker Hastert really wants to put Christ back into Christmas, he should start by joining a long list of religious leaders in supporting a budget that isn’t balanced on the back of the poorest and most vulnerable.

Before the House went on Thanksgiving break, it passed $50 billion in spending cuts that target millions of poor and working-class Americans. The budget’s Medicaid provisions “would allow state governments to impose co-payments even on the poorest beneficiaries for emergency room visits for non-emergency health problems and for drug prescriptions not on a list of preferred treatments.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated the House bill “would cut food stamp benefits by about $45 a month for 225,000 people” and that 40,000 children would lose their eligibility for free meals at school. At the same time, conservatives are seeking to “extend several of Mr. Bush’s biggest tax cuts, including those on stock dividends and capital gains” — over half of the benefits from those cuts go to people earning over $1 million per year.

Hastert should heed the true spirit of Christ by caring for the vulnerable. As Jesus reminds us in Luke 4:18-20, by following his example we can “bring good news to the poor.”

In his confirmation hearing, John Roberts affirmed the right to privacy, agreed with the conclusion of Griswold, and told the Judiciary Committee that he considered Roe v. Wade “settled as a precedent.”

There is much in Harriet Miers’ record to suggest she fell to the right of Roberts’ on the question of abortion rights. She does not consider Griswold settled law and had a record of supporting anti-choice causes.

John Roberts was enthusiastically embraced by right-wing conservatives eager to overturn Roe v. Wade. Harriet Miers was vilified by the exact same people.

Harriet Miers’ nomination has always been controversial, but it was not until comments from a 1993 speech surfaced where she said she believed in “self-determination” that Miers was presumably forced to withdraw.

It is clear that, absent an unambiguous pledge to overturn Roe, the right holds women nominees to a different standard. They do it because they fear a woman justice will feel empathy towards other women making the agonizing choice of whether to have an abortion. They fear that a woman justice would not be willing to use criminal sanctions to regulate other women’s decisions.

No nominee should be subject to a litmus test, especially one that discriminates based on gender.

The truth hurts. More than 60 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since President Bush went on vacation. Iraq’s interim government has twice missed the deadline for presenting a constitution. The current draft of the constitution not only threatens to create an illiberal Shia theocracy that doesn’t respect the rights of women and religious minorities, but also risks intensifying the current undeclared sectarian civil war. And the president’s approval rating has dropped to an all-time low of 36 percent – lower than Richard Nixon’s approval rating at the height of Watergate. Cindy Sheehan is not the only American who thinks that things aren’t going so well in Iraq.

The White House’s solution to its problems? Sending the president to the friendly environs of Utah and Idaho and putting its spinmeister Dan Bartlett on television to simply insist that “we have the right strategy to prevail.”

As a former White House chief of staff, I can say that the most important duty of a senior advisor is not to say “yes, sir,” but to honestly present the facts and the options available to the country. If the president’s advisors can’t confront the truth or don’t have the courage to tell the president the truth, they shouldn’t have taken the job in the first place.

Instead of spending time plotting motorcade routes to avoid Cindy Sheehan protests, the president’s advisors should be spending their time laying out the situation on the ground and the impact the war is having on terrorist networks, regional stability, sectarian conflict within Iraq, our overstretched ground forces, and U.S. security.

The Center for American Progress has drafted a memo that outlines the facts and challenges in Iraq. This is the memo that the White House Iraq Group should – but probably won’t – send the president.

Read it here.

We can all get off ours and sign up for the virtual march. Please join the effort.

Donald Duck and friends are being drawn into an unusual showdown between Western sensitivities and Chinese tradition, setting off a debate that has this city buzzing.

It all began when Hong Kong Disneyland, a new theme park scheduled to open on Sept. 12, announced that it would serve shark’s fin soup – a chewy, sinewy, stringy dish that has been a Chinese favorite for two centuries.

But plans for the culinary delicacy, to be served at wedding banquets, have drawn an outraged response from environmentalists. They say that so many sharks wind up floating in soup these days that there are not enough left swimming in the world’s oceans.

If this concerns you, T-shirts are available:

In this simmering shark-eat-shark dispute, one group, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has printed T-shirts showing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck brandishing knives and leering sadistically over three bleeding sharks that have lost their fins.

In the past, some in Congress have viewed “bankruptcy reform” as an easy “pro-business” vote that won’t really hurt working families and won’t matter to Americans anyway.

That’s wrong on all accounts. Proponents say the bill will stop bankruptcy abuse, but the bill lets the biggest and wealthiest abusers off the hook. Even more important–and this is the point proponents are hoping to obscure–the bill does nothing to address why millions of middle-class Americans are going broke in record numbers. In fact, the bill makes life tougher on families who have done everything right but suffered because of structural problems in our economy.

If progressives press these points, Americans will see the fight over bankruptcy reform for what it is: a struggle between progressives defending families who play by the rules and conservatives standing with wealthy individuals and corporations that break those rules.

The Policy

The bankruptcy bill symbolizes much of what’s wrong with Washington today.

1. Manufacturing a crisis. Why are we even talking about this? We’ve seen the Bush Administration inflate the fiscal challenge facing Social Security into a crisis in order to justify a pre-existing agenda. The same has happened with bankruptcy. Advocates of bankruptcy “reform” point to “a crisis of both real and perceived abuse in the bankruptcy system.” (Testimony of Todd Zywicki, Senate Judiciary Committee). But they offer zero hard evidence of the abuse crisis. In fact, the vast majority of families go into bankruptcy because they’ve run out of money for reasons that aren’t their fault. According to a study supported by the American Bankruptcy Institute, 96.3% of people filing for chapter 7 relief just don’t have the money to pay their debts, even under an onerous means test. Half of families filing for bankruptcy have faced illness or high medical costs; nearly 9 out of 10 have faced health care problems, job loss, or divorce and separation. Most of these families have done everything they can to avoid bankruptcy–they’ve skipped doctor’s visits or prescriptions, for example, and a third have had their utilities shut off. As to the “perceived abuse” crisis, we are aware of no data suggesting that the American people are clamoring for this “reform.” Americans see a very real health care crisis that Congress shows little interest in addressing. When people worry about bankruptcy abuse, they worry most about abuses by fat cats that this bill doesn’t even tackle.

2. Ignoring the real crisis. As we all understand, the Bush solution to the Social Security “crisis”–privatization–doesn’t address real challenges like the Social Security shortfall and America’s low savings rate. The same is true here. The real bankruptcy challenge isn’t the 4 percent of debtors who abuse the system. The real crisis is the 96 percent who are broke when they file for bankruptcy. Two million Americans go bankrupt every year–1 every 15 seconds. If current trends continue, 1 in 7 families with children will go bankrupt by the end of the decade. These rising bankruptcy levels directly correlate with rising levels of consumer debt. And those rising debt levels in turn reflect a tectonic shift in our economy–away from a time when families could afford to save, and into a time when their wages are stagnant (+12% since 1978) but the costs of their health premiums (+163% since 1988), their tuitions (+170% since 1978), their mortgages, and their child care have risen dramatically. Because of all these trends, families stand on a precipice, and one sickness or pink slip sends them off the cliff, with no safety net below. Shutting down access to bankruptcy courts of course does absolutely nothing to address these challenges. As Elizabeth Warren has noted, it is like responding to a disease epidemic by shutting down the hospitals.

While conservatives press ugly and inaccurate stereotypes about the “deadbeats” who typically go broke, progressives should tell the truth about an economy that no longer works for the middle class. And while conservatives may want to shut down the hospitals, progressives seek to cure the disease by supporting health reform, help paying for college, and measures to create good middle-class jobs again.

3. Visiting the sins of a few abusers on millions of decent Americans. The central feature of the bill is a “means test” that would require borrowers seeking to discharge their unsecured debts in a chapter 7 bankruptcy to demonstrate their inability to pay. This sounds well and good–why shouldn’t abusers have to pay? But two federal commissions to study bankruptcy reform have rejected this approach for sound reasons. Under this bill, even the 96% of debtors who cannot pay would be required to pass a complicated test with multiple new forms. A credit card company seeking to recover a few extra dollars would be able to trigger a special new hearing. (Apparently, extending litigation is acceptable to the Bush Administration, as long as the parties extending it are mostly corporate creditors.) The result would be high new legal costs and heavy burdens for people with pennies to their names. Because of problems in the test–for example, a rigid method of calculating income based only on the prior six months of work–some people who deserve relief won’t be able to get it at all. In the end, the means-test will raise only modest sums from abusers, but will impose heavy new burdens on families already facing severe hardships.

Make no mistake: Abuse of the bankruptcy system is wrong, and we should support sensible reforms to stop it, from shutting down the homestead exemption to ending repeat filings designed to game the system. But as 92 law professors recently wrote, “this bill seeks to shoot a mosquito with a shotgun.” Hard-working families are standing behind that mosquito.

4. Want to talk about real abuses by the wealthy? No. The worst abuses of the bankruptcy system go unaddressed by this bill. In five states, multimillionaires can go into bankruptcy and keep their mansions because of unlimited homestead exemptions. This bill imposes some new limits on the homestead exemption, but rich people with good lawyers who plan ahead will be able to avoid those limits. The simple solution–capping the exemption–isn’t included in the bill. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported on how five states allow wealthy individuals to set up “asset protection trusts” that can’t be touched in bankruptcy. This bill does nothing to close this millionaire’s loophole either. And then there are the corporations that have used bankruptcy protection to slash the pensions and benefits of long-time employees, even as executives have walked away with sweetheart severance packages. Senator Richard Durbin offered an amendment in the Judiciary Committee to give bankruptcy courts more power to deal with these abuses, but it was also voted down.

Progressives should highlight the message of this bill: If you are a wealthy homeowner or a corporate insider and you can afford a good lawyer, it’s business as usual. But if you are a single mother who just lost her health care, watch out.

5. Rewarding Wrongdoing. We know the biggest winner from bankruptcy reform: the credit card industry. According to a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analysis in 2001, credit card companies would gain up to 5% in profits from this legislation. (Profits are now $30 billion per year. You do the math.) Yet these same companies have played an integral role in triggering the rise of bankruptcy filings. As several studies have shown, consumer borrowing and consumer bankruptcy increased following a 1978 Supreme Court decision that effectively eliminated states’ ability to regulate credit card interest rates. The pricing structure now used by the credit industry–few up-front charges and enormous fees, penalties, and interest payments when balances are carried or payments missed–is designed to yield as much money as possible from families who are already at the financial edge. The credit card industry mails out an astonishing 5 billion solicitations per year, many targeted at minors with no jobs or income. Some practices of the credit card industry violate basic norms of fairness: for example, companies will now triple interest rates on existing debt based on missed payments to other creditors. (You put the $1000 fridge on the credit card at 12%, but now they are charging 35% on that $1000.) The bill does nothing to rein in any of these practices, nor even to impose the most elemental disclosure requirements. The Senate just rejected Daniel Akaka’s sensible proposal to tell customers how much they will need to spend if they make only minimum payments on their credit card bill.

Instead of taking on the abuses of credit card companies, this bill will encourage further abuse by allowing those companies to squeeze a few more dimes out of struggling families. Progressives should be pointing out the injustice of rewarding the credit industry for bad behavior. This really is Washington at its worst.

Bankruptcy Reform in Larger Context

The debate over bankruptcy reform also offers an opportunity for progressives to stand up for working-class Americans, particularly women. Forty percent of families filing for bankruptcy are in the second income quintile that is above the poverty level but still struggling. Women with children are especially hard hit by bankruptcy. More than one out of every six mothers will go bankrupt by the end of the decade, and families with children are about three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than households without children. Proponents of the bill are doing a great job representing the interests of credit card companies. Progressives need to speak up for the interests of these working class women and families.

Bankruptcy reform can speak to these Americans. Progressives can stand up for the burdened middle class who continue to feel squeezed by this economy, and expose the real agenda of conservatives that support this bill — to aid highly profitable credit card companies, not squeezed middle class Americans.

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privilege for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world.

I was there in the Clinton White House. Let me tell you what actually happened. President Clinton enacted fiscally responsible policies that strengthened Social Security and kept it solvent for more years than anyone thought possible. He made it very clear to the Congress and conservatives there who wanted to send surpluses on tax cuts that we had a moral obligation to “save Social Security first.” That’s what we did.

President Bush has pursued the opposite policy: raid Social Security first. In the first term, he squandered two trillion dollars of the surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy. Now he wants to take us two trillion more dollars into debt to pay for the dismantling of Social Security.

As President Clinton himself was fond of saying — “Mr. President, that dog won’t hunt.”

Listening to the speech, it occurs to me that President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security offers an entirely different a three-legged stool – an additional two trillion dollars in debt, big cuts in benefits and risky privitization carve-out accounts.

Important safety tip: don’t try sitting on President Bush’s stool.

Since 2001, President Bush added 10,000 pages to the code and other tax regulations, shifted the burden to the middle class and created new corporate tax loopholes.

So when the President promises “tax reform” hold on to your hat.

For tax system that’s fair, that’s simple, that shrinks the deficit and will be a job creator not a job killer see the American Progress Plan.

Fortunately, the Pope’s health seems to be improving — but as a former White House official, I can empathize with the Bush staff.

I remember during President Clinton’s 1997 State of the Union, the verdict of the second OJ Simpson trial came in mid-speech. It was the first time in television history that they “split the screen” during a Presidential State of the Union.

It’s hard for even a great communicator to compete with the White Bronco

Here’s why. This President has the worst fiscal record of any President in the history of our country. Period. He has presided over a ten trillion dollar swing from record surpluses to record deficits. The President may try and gloss over his reckless record of deficit spending tonight. But when you are talking fiscal policy, fundamentals matter and there are some facts even this Administration can’t dismiss. The US dollar is on shaky ground. To paraphrase Tennessee Ernie Ford (I’m showing my age): another day older another billion in debt. Over 90 percent of the increase in the debt under Bush has been bought up by foreigners.

He may lay out what sounds like a bold agenda, but he is going to have a hard time marshalling any of the resources to get it accomplished.