George Shultz Presses Congress to Act on Climate Change

George P. Shultz, a former Republican cabinet secretary, seems an unlikely figure to fight for climate change, which is largely the political turf of Democrats.

But climate change was exactly why Mr. Shultz, who is best remembered as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, came to Washington on Friday, breaking a 20-year absence from Capitol Hill to push lawmakers to support the development of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, and alternative energy.

“If we can capitalize on these opportunities, we’ll have a much better energy future from the standpoint of our national defense, from the standpoint of our economy and from the standpoint of our environment, including climate change,” he said at a conference.

For the past few years, Mr. Shultz, an economist, has been studying energy policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He recently traded his hybrid car for an all-electric one, and he advocates a carbon tax to pay for the research and development of alternatie energy sources.

At the conference, he said that a regulatory framework for the safe development of fracking might be best left to the states. But he said that Congress should pass a fee-and-dividend carbon tax that would remit revenues to consumers. The tax would be revenue-neutral, covering the cost of research and development for alternative energy sources without generating extra income for the government.

But in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats are deeply divided over the size and scope of government, talk of new taxes and regulations is toxic. A carbon tax like the one Mr. Shultz supports has been proposed by Senators Barbara Boxer of California and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, although Mr. Shultz did not endorse their measure.

Mr. Shultz, 82, spoke at an event sponsored by the Partnership for a Secure America, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington that wrote a letter warning Congress of the “staggering” cost of inaction! . The letter included 38 signatures from a broad spectrum of former lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries, military and intelligence officials, and national security experts, including Mr. Shultz; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Richard G. Lugar, the former Republican senator for Indiana. Mr. Shultz was also a labor secretary, a budget director, a Treasury secretary and an adviser to President George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign.

He is one of a trickle of Republicans who are challenging the party’s stance on climate change. He said that Republican presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to George Bush signed off on major environmental policies, like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act.

“Good work on conservation and the environment is in the Republican gene,” Mr. Shultz said. “We’ve been the guys who did it. So we’ve just got to get back to that.”

Energy and Climate on the White House Agenda

President Obama hosted a casual off-the-record meeting with a diverse group of energy and climate change experts at the White House on Thursday evening, officials and participants said Friday.

The session appeared to mark an early stage of the “national conversation” on how to deal with climate change that Mr. Obama promised to lead shortly after he was re-elected in November.

Among the participants were top oil and gas and utility executives, academic exerts on energy, former government officials and a half-dozen White House staff members. Bill Ritter Jr., the former governor of Colorado and an outspoken advocate for clean energy, was there, as was Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a former chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Cass R. Sunstein, the Harvard Law School professor who served as ! overseer of federal regulation in Mr. Obama’s first term, was also at the table.

Here is the White House description of the gathering: “During the meeting, the president reiterated his commitment to a cleaner and more secure energy future. The discussion covered a variety of topics including the important role of natural gas in our domestic energy portfolio, new opportunities for renewables like wind, solar and advanced biofuels, the importance of clean energy research and development, as well as the promise and potential of increased energy efficiency in our homes and businesses.”

The White House added that Mr. Obama said he would use his executive branch authority during his second term to advance his goals for clean energy and climate change, repeating a vow from his recent State of the Union address.

The attendees were asked not to discuss the specifics of the conversation.

Officials said that Mr. Obama would visit the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago next Friday to discuss energy.

Here is a full list of the participants in Thursday’s meeting, as provided by the White House:

James T. Hackett, executive chairman, Anadarko
Lew Hay, executive chairman, NextEra; chairman, Edison Electric Institute
Walter Isaacson, president and chief executive, Aspen Institute
Shirley Ann Jackson, president, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
! Eric Land! er, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, PCAST
Alex Laskey, president and founder, Opower
Bill Ritter Jr., director, Center for New Energy Economy, Colorado State University
Debra Reed, chief executive, Sempra
Terry Royer, president and chief executive, Winergy
Jeffrey W. Shaw, chief executive, Southwest Gas
Frederick W. Smith, chairman, president, and chief executive, FedEx
Cass R. Sunstein, professor, Harvard Law School
Susan F. Tierney, managing principal, Analysis Group
Cynthia Warner, president, Sapphire Energy

The Obamas Hosted the Clintons at the White House

President Obama has been quite the social butterfly lately, dining with Senate Republicans and hosting bipartisan lunches. Now comes word that the president and the first lady had their first double date with Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton, over dinner at the White House last Friday.

Clinton associates confirm that the couples spent about three hours in the private residence of the White House; the dinner was first reported by Politico on its Web site. The occasion was a celebration of Mrs. Clinton’s first-term service as secretary of state, but it followed some recent media commentary about the fact that the Obamas had never “doubled” with the prior Democratic residents of the White House.

The Obamas’ invitation also came as the president was starting a strategy of outreach to Republicans in Congress - through calls and meals - to reach around their resistant party leaders and seek common ground on the budget and other issues. Mr. Clinton has made it clear that he favors such engagement.

Aides to the current and former presidents declined to provide any details.

Q&A: Dumping the Windows Jump List

Q.

Is there a way to stop Windows 7 from listing my recently used files in those pop-up lists in the taskbar

A.

Those “Jump Lists,” as Microsoft calls them in Windows 7 and Windows 8, are intended to be a convenience since they let you “jump” right back into whatever you were recently working on without having to hunt around the computer for the files. Jump Lists appear when you right-click a program icon in the Windows desktop taskbar. In Windows 7, you can also go to the Jump Lists from the programs listed in the Start menu.

If you would rather not leave a list of your recently used files hanging around the taskbar, you can change the settings. In Windows 7, right-click the tskbar and choose Properties from the menu. When the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties box appears, click the Start Menu tab, turn off the checkbox next to “Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar” and click OK.

For those using Windows 8’s desktop mode, right-click the taskbar and in the Properties box, click the Jump Lists tab. Under the Privacy section, turn off the checkbox next to “Store and display recently opened items in Jump Lists” and click the OK button.

Democrats Cry Foul Over Wednesday’s Other Filibuster

Senator Rand Paul may have staged a Senate-shaking filibuster Wednesday, but his was actually only the second most significant Republican filibuster of the day.

In a vote just before Mr. Paul,  the junior senator from Kentucky, tried to blockade the nomination of John Brennan as director of central intelligence over drone policy, the Senate failed to end debate on the nomination of Caitlin J. Halligan of New York to a seat on the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia.

The filibuster of Ms. Halligan didn’t blow up on Twitter the way Mr. Paul’s impressive 12-hour stand did. But of the two, it was the one that could renew a feud over rules governing filibusters and how the Senate handles high-level judicial nominations â€" an issue that has torn the chamber for years.

Democrats are already in discussions on how to respond to the Halligan filibuster. They believe Republicans are dead set against confirming qualified Obama administration nominees to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. They accuse Republicans of exaggerating their objections to Ms. Halligan to justify a filibuster under a 2005 agreement that short-circuited the last partisan showdown over filling judicial vacancies.

That deal, crafted by the famous Gang of 14, put its signatories on record as saying they would not block confirmation votes on appeals court judges without “extraordinary circumstances” as determined by each individual. While only members of the gang signed it, it became informal Senate policy and defused a crisis that had Republicans threatening to execute the “nuclear option” and bar filibusters against judicial nominees by a simple majority vote instead of with the 67 votes h! istorically needed to change Senate rules.

It also led to President George W. Bush winning three appointments to the appeals court often considered a feeder to the Supreme Court, giving conservatives an advantage on the influential panel, which hears many federal-powers cases. It its current makeup, the court consists of four judges appointed by Republican presidents and three appointed by President Bill Clinton, with four vacancies â€" the most ever on that court.

In filibustering Ms. Halligan, several Republicans cited extraordinary circumstances arising from her earlier work as the solicitor general for the State of New York, particularly on a case against gun manufacturers.

“Ms. Halligan advanced the novel legal theory that gun manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers contributed to a ‘public nuisance’ of illegal handguns in the state,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, accusing her of judicial activism. “Therefore, she rgued, gun manufacturers should be liable for the criminal conduct of third parties.”

Democrats cried foul. The real reason she was blocked, they say, is that Republicans do not want to see the balance of power on the D.C. appeals court shifted. They say that Ms. Halligan was acting in her official capacity representing the State of New York, not as a jurist, and that Republicans have abandoned the extraordinary circumstances test engineered by the Gang of 14.

“If you go back to that history of what occurred back then, there is a real question of whether they have broken the deal now,” said Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico. “This is a key circuit for the country. What they are doing is not allowing these consensus candidate judges to get votes.”

Mr. Udall has been among a group of relatively newer members of the Senate clamoring for significant changes in the rules governing filibusters. One demand is that senators act more like Mr. Paul, and take the floor to mak! e their c! ase when they are trying to block a vote.  In January, working to avoid a divisive fight, Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, struck a deal making some modest changes in filibuster rules.

But those changes have done little so far this session to curb filibusters, as evidenced by the vote on Ms. Halligan and the politically charged obstacles raised to confirmation votes on Mr. Brennan and Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator who found himself on the receiving end of a Republican filibuster before winning confirmation as secretary of defense. The filibuster is alive and well in the Senate and, as Mr. Paul showed, may even be enjoying resurgence as grand theater.

Democrats say that despite what they see as clear provocation, they are in no hurry to change the new rules after just two months n place. They say they are more inclined to explore new ways to confront Republicans over the vacancies.

Mr. Udall says one option might be for the president to make multiple nominations, in effect daring Republicans to find ways to cite extraordinary circumstances in multiple instances.

“Rather than putting just one up, we should put before the Senate all four and expose what is happening here,” said Mr. Udall, who acknowledged that Senate Democrats would need White House cooperation.

“We need to design a strategy to counter the Republicans, and we are going to need the president,” he said.

The fight will take time to unfold. Democrats say they will wait to see how Republicans respond to future appeals court nominees. But a series of filibusters against what they view as acceptable nominees could quickly bring to a head the push for a change in Senate rules.

Follow Carl Hulse on Twitter at @hillhul! se.

The Early Word: Exposition

In Today’s Times:

The 13-hour filibuster led by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has exposed a deep divide among Republicans over the president’s drone policy. Richard W. Stevenson and Ashley Parker write that “by the time the Senate adjourned for the weekend, a Republican Party that had long assailed Mr. Obama as a leader who would turn a war on terrorism into a police action with Miranda rights for suspects had shown itself to be sharply divided over whether the president had instead grabbed too much power and was risking violating the Constitution in his efforts to keep the nation safe.”

Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law is set to go on trial in New York after he was charged with conspiracy to kill Americans. Discussing the case, MarkMazzetti and William K. Rashbaum write that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former spokesman for Al Qaeda who is married to one of Bin Laden’s daughters, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg profiles an emerging guard of Latino leaders who are using their wealth, education and fame to tap the Latino electorate for campaign cash and political clout.

President Obama is waging a campaign to woo Republicans into a productive partnership, but Jeremy W. Peters writes that wining and dining with lawmakers might not help to overcome stark ideological differences about what the size and scope of government should be.

After a series of protracted fiscal fights, President Obama is late submitting his 2014 budget proposal to Congress just as President Ronald Reagan was under similar circumstances in 1988. But Jackie Calmes writes that whereas Democrats were sympathetic to Mr. Reagan, Republicans are decidedly impatient with Mr. Obama.

A Senate race in Michigan will be an open contest after Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2014 for a seventh term. Jennifer Steinhauer writes that while Mr. Levin’s decision leaves Republicans more areas of attack in their effort to take back the Senate, they do not do so well in Michigan’s statewide races.

Around the Web:
In an opinion article for The Washington Post, former President Bill Clinton saysit is time for the Supreme Court to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act that he signed into law.

The State Department is rethinking whether to give the International Women of Courage Award to an Egyptian activist amid a row over messages sent from her Twitter account that were deemed anti-Semitic and supportive of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to The Associated Press.

Happening in Washington:
Economic reports expected Friday include employment data for February at 8:30 a.m., followed by wholesale trade inventories for January at 10:00 a.m.

Also at 10, a Federal District Court in Washington will hear oral arguments in Al Shimari v. CACI. The lawsuit was brought by four Iraqi torture victims against a private government contractor whom the v! ictims ac! cuse of participating in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

The remains of sailors who died when the warship Monitor sank in 1862 will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery in a ceremony that begins at 11 a.m.

At 11:15 a.m., Mr. Obama will meet with religious leaders to discuss immigration reform.

Michelle Obama will deliver keynote remarks at a conference focused on childhood obesity at 1:30 p.m. At 3 p.m., she will join Secretary of State John F. Kerry to honor the nine recipients of the International Women of Courage Award.

The Early Word: Exposition

In Today’s Times:

The 13-hour filibuster led by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has exposed a deep divide among Republicans over the president’s drone policy. Richard W. Stevenson and Ashley Parker write that “by the time the Senate adjourned for the weekend, a Republican Party that had long assailed Mr. Obama as a leader who would turn a war on terrorism into a police action with Miranda rights for suspects had shown itself to be sharply divided over whether the president had instead grabbed too much power and was risking violating the Constitution in his efforts to keep the nation safe.”

Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law is set to go on trial in New York after he was charged with conspiracy to kill Americans. Discussing the case, MarkMazzetti and William K. Rashbaum write that Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a former spokesman for Al Qaeda who is married to one of Bin Laden’s daughters, could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg profiles an emerging guard of Latino leaders who are using their wealth, education and fame to tap the Latino electorate for campaign cash and political clout.

President Obama is waging a campaign to woo Republicans into a productive partnership, but Jeremy W. Peters writes that wining and dining with lawmakers might not help to overcome stark ideological differences about what the size and scope of government should be.

After a series of protracted fiscal fights, President Obama is late submitting his 2014 budget proposal to Congress just as President Ronald Reagan was under similar circumstances in 1988. But Jackie Calmes writes that whereas Democrats were sympathetic to Mr. Reagan, Republicans are decidedly impatient with Mr. Obama.

A Senate race in Michigan will be an open contest after Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat, announced that he would not seek re-election in 2014 for a seventh term. Jennifer Steinhauer writes that while Mr. Levin’s decision leaves Republicans more areas of attack in their effort to take back the Senate, they do not do so well in Michigan’s statewide races.

Around the Web:
In an opinion article for The Washington Post, former President Bill Clinton saysit is time for the Supreme Court to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act that he signed into law.

The State Department is rethinking whether to give the International Women of Courage Award to an Egyptian activist amid a row over messages sent from her Twitter account that were deemed anti-Semitic and supportive of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to The Associated Press.

Happening in Washington:
Economic reports expected Friday include employment data for February at 8:30 a.m., followed by wholesale trade inventories for January at 10:00 a.m.

Also at 10, a Federal District Court in Washington will hear oral arguments in Al Shimari v. CACI. The lawsuit was brought by four Iraqi torture victims against a private government contractor whom the v! ictims ac! cuse of participating in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

The remains of sailors who died when the warship Monitor sank in 1862 will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery in a ceremony that begins at 11 a.m.

At 11:15 a.m., Mr. Obama will meet with religious leaders to discuss immigration reform.

Michelle Obama will deliver keynote remarks at a conference focused on childhood obesity at 1:30 p.m. At 3 p.m., she will join Secretary of State John F. Kerry to honor the nine recipients of the International Women of Courage Award.