By MJ Lee

Bill Clinton turned up the heat on the leading Republican presidential contenders Tuesday, saying their opposition to acknowledging climate change makes the country “look like a joke.”

“If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial” about climate change, the former president said on the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative’s seventh annual meeting in New York City.

“I mean, it makes us — we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right? That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there,” Clinton added.

Kicking off the three-day conference, Clinton called the lack of debate in America on climate change “really tragic.”

“We need the debate in America and every country between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what is the best , most economical way to do it, what will get more done quicker,” he said.

Read the rest at Politico.

By Paul Chesser

I’ve been tough (I think) in challenging former Minnesota Gov. (and now presidential candidate) Tim Pawlenty​ about his past support for cap-and-trade and policies to constrain carbon dioxide emissions. In December 2009, when he first started visiting New Hampshire, he was still talking like CO2 was pollution, and still failed to remove his state from the Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Accord.

Now he’s pretty much completed a 180-degree turnaround on the whole issue – even questioning the science of human-caused global warming, as revealed in a Miami Herald interview with him this week…

Read the rest and see the video at American Spectator.

Every presidential candidate is going to come into the 2012 race with baggage. But Newt Gingrich has what, for primary voters, could be a doozy in his closet — three years ago, he cut an ad with Nancy Pelosi for Al Gore’s climate change group.The ad, in which Gingrich and Pelosi don awkward smiles while talking about clean-energy solutions, is coming back to haunt him, along with other statements he’s made about climate change, as he officially launches his presidential bid. While Democrats have a long and winding list of grievances against the former House speaker, his past environmentalism could cause problems on the political right.

The early complaints are coming in large part from a former aide to Congress’ No.1 climate change skeptic, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. The ex-aide, Marc Morano, has virtually devoted his blog ClimateDepot to lambasting Gingrich’s stance on energy issues.

Morano specifically wants Gingrich to apologize for the Pelosi ad and for suggesting that lawmakers need to find a solution to global warming.

“It’s almost like he can’t admit he made a mistake,” Morano told FoxNews.com. “He needs to say it was a brain fart, at the very least.”

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Juliet Eilperin

The effort to enact comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year suffered a critical blow Saturday when Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), the key Republican proponent of the bill, withdrew his support because of what he said was a “cynical political” decision by Democrats to advance immigration legislation first.

The move forced the other two authors of the climate and energy bill, Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), to cancel a much-anticipated news conference planned for Monday at which they were to unveil the plan they negotiated with Graham.

Graham, who spent weeks working with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on an immigration measure that will appeal to both parties, wrote in an open letter Saturday to leaders of the climate effort, “Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy.”

Late last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) raised the idea of bringing up immigration legislation before an energy bill, and President Obama on Friday criticized Arizona’s tough new immigration law and said Congress must act on immigration or risk leaving the door open to “irresponsibility by others.”

In an interview, Graham said he has become convinced that Democrats have decided to push for an immigration overhaul in an effort to mobilize Hispanic voters, a key political bloc, and that only a focused effort on a climate and energy bill could ensure its passage.

Democrats denied that election-related considerations were driving the focus on immigration, and the White House, Reid, and Kerry and Lieberman said they would continue to press ahead with the climate and energy effort.

Even so, Graham’s departure greatly undermines Democrats’ prospects of picking up the handful of Republican votes needed for passage. “If Senator Graham leaves the effort, a long shot becomes a no-shot,” said Joe Stanko, who heads up government relations for the law firm Hunton & Williams and represents several industries that would face new federal regulation under a climate bill.

Read the rest of this story at Washington Post.

Scott Brown’s historic victory on Tuesday in Massachusetts has a lot of people asking the question whether there’s a new day dawning in American politics.  This video does a pretty good job of framing the issue.