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The under-30 crowd is moving to the Democratic party.

That’s the conclusion of a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll.

It found that 44 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds consider themselves Democrats compared to 23 percent who called themselves Republicans.

Bloomberg news quoted Scott Keeter, the director of survey research at the Washington-based Pew Research Center.

Younger voters don’t agree with many of the Bush administration’s conservative social positions, he told Bloomberg.

Republicans are finding it difficult “to attract younger people who are not hung up on gay marriage and gay rights and immigration.”

Turnout by younger voters often falls short of older voters but they are getting to the polls in larger numbers. And there will be some 50 million next year.

More on candidates being nice in Iowa.

Sen. Barack Obama came to Sen. Joe Biden’s defense during today’s debate. Biden was asked about calling Obama “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Said Obama: “I have absolutely no doubt about what is in his heart and the commitment he’s made to racial equality in this country.”

And Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton apologized to Obama for a supporter’s comments on Obama’s past drug use. That’s according to CNN.

Here’s what Billy Shaheen, the husband of former New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen and the co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire, said: “The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use.”

He has just announced that he regrets his remarks and is stepping down from his position.

Obama meanwhile is using the attack to raise money.

From an email from the Obama campaign: “If 5,000 people donate in the next 24 hours, we can show their campaign that we reject this kind of divisive politics. Make your donation of $25 now.”

Yesterday, the Republicans held their last debate before the caucuses and they were also on their best behavior.

PHOTO: Democratic presidential hopeful former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Des Moines Register debate in Johnston, Iowa, today.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is at the climate change conference in Bali and today he advocated for carbon taxes.

Bloomberg has been aggressive in implementing what measures he can as mayor to try to curb global warming. Tomorrow he addresses the conference as a representative of the world’s local governments.

Here’s a report from the Associated Press

By CHARLES J. HANLEY

BALI, Indonesia (AP) — New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at a U.N. climate conference drawing hundreds of emissions traders, said Thursday the growing carbon cap-and-trade industry is vulnerable to “special interests, corruption, inefficiencies,� and should be replaced by straight carbon taxes.
Speaking of global warming, Bloomberg said, “Most experts would agree that the way to solve the problem is with a carbon tax.�
The Kyoto Protocol, requiring 37 industrial nations to reduce carbon dioxide and other industrial, transportation and agricultural emissions, has given rise in Europe and elsewhere to carbon cap-and-trade systems, under which businesses that don’t use up quotas of emission allowances sell them to others who need them to overshoot their ceilings.
That in turn has given rise to a multibillion-dollar global industry of brokers, analysts and project managers dealing in such carbon credits and “green� projects that produce them.
The two-week U.N. conference, ending Friday, has attracted more than 300 participants from one emissions-trading association alone. The meeting is to establish a negotiating track for a new agreement to succeed Kyoto when it expires in 2012.

Bloomberg, who addresses the conference Friday as a representative of the world’s local governments, told a meeting with environmentalists Thursday that carbon trading “is attractive to many politicians because it doesn’t have that three-letter word ’tax’.�
“But it’s a very inefficient way to accomplish the same thing that a carbon tax accomplishes,� he said. “It leaves itself open to special interests, corruption, inefficiencies.�
At the conference Friday, Bloomberg is expected to tout his new plan to reduce global-warming emissions in New York City by 30 percent by 2030 by, among other measures, improving energy efficiency in buildings, requiring taxi fleets to convert to hybrid vehicles, and levying a fee on drivers entering Manhattan business districts.

PHOTO: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg gestures inside a solar taxi today in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia. The U.N. climate chief is warning that a deadlock between the United States and the European Union over pollution cuts is threatening to derail talks aimed at launching negotiations for a new global warming pact. (AP Photo/Firdia Lisnawati)

Last week, I wrote about Jerome Kohlberg’s effort to start a new GI Bill that would fully support a college education for today’s troops.

He went to school on the GI Bill himself after World War II and went on to become a successful financier.

Then in April, he was talking to one of his employees who had been  in Iraq and was studying for a doctorate at Columbia University Teachers College.

That was Matthew Boulay.

“We started talking about my benefits as a veteran and the GI Bill as it stands today, and I think he was taken aback as many people are to realize how today’s benefits compare so unfavorably to the deal that the veterans got after World War II,” Boulay, 37, said.

And there was the impetus for Kohlberg’s latest  project, the Fund of Veterans’ Education, which Boulay now administers.

Boulay served in the U.S. Marines Reserve and so was entitled only to about $200 month as a part-time student.”The Reserve benefits are much less than active duty benefits,” Boulay said. “That’s even after being called up and serving in Iraq. One of the things we say is ‘Same battlefield, same service, same benefits.’”

The Associated Press reports that New York City has closed a facility where debris was sifted for the remains of Sept. 11 victims.

But the search for body parts from the 2001 attack will not end until the World Trade Center site is rebuilt, according to a memo from Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“At no point in the near future would it be prudent to declare this search ‘over,’” Skyler wrote.

The search was expanded in October 2006 after more than 80 bones were found in a manhole at Ground Zero. The city opened the facility in Brooklyn a year ago to hand-sift debris recovered from in and around Ground Zero.

More than 1,100 of the attack’s victims remained unidentified from the bones recovered.

I’ll post again then.

Mitt Romney gives his speech on religion today and he has said he would focus as much on the country’s religious heritage as on his Mormon faith.

That faith has been an issue in Romney’s bid to become president, the country’s first Mormon president.

Many Christians reject the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as part of Christianity. A Pew Research Center poll found that a quarter of all Republicans said they would be less likely to vote for a Mormon. For white evangelical Protestants, the number stood at 36 percent.

Romney’s speech is of course prompting comparisons to the one President Kennedy gave to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960.

Romeny’s challenge is different from the one that faced Kennedy. Romney is trying to appeal to voters who believe religion should play a larger role in public life.

But still I thought it would be interesting to look at Kennedy’s speech.

Kennedy began by saying he was stating not what kind of church he believed in—“for that should be important only to me”—but what kind of America he believed in.

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute,” he said. Where no prelate or minister would tell parishioners for whom to vote, where no church or church school would receive public funds.

“I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish,” he said. Where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace, where an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

“For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew, or a Quaker, or a Unitarian, or a Baptist,” he said.

Or a Mormon.

And finally, he said, “I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end…”

You can read the entire speech “here.”:http://www.beliefnet.com/story/40/story_4080.html

UPDATE: Romney delivered his speech and said: “Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.�

More “here.”:http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/R/ROMNEY_RELIGION?SITE=NYWHI&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

PHOTOS:

Former Massachusetts Mitt Romney talks with members of the audience after his address, “Faith in America” at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Then Sen. John F. Kennedy takes part in a question-and-answer session at the Ministers’ Association of Greater Houston. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle)

Today Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s pollster and campaign consultant, said the press release on Barack Obama’s kindergarten essay—“I Want to Become President—was just a joke.

“Why bring up his kindergarten teacher?” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked him on Morning Joe.

“Oh that is so silly,” Penn said.

“It was a joke. And then the spin machines here are so hyped up here about Sen. Clinton and her campaign that someone would pick up on a joke like that and actually treat it as though it were serious.”

Clinton’s campaign was mocked throughout the day yesterday for its attack on Obama.

PHOTO: Obama in Iowa. (AP Photo/Kevin Sanders)

The closer Iowa the harsher the attacks.

Over weekend Hillary Clinton’s campaign went after Barack Obama, calling him a man of words, not substance, charging he was trying to manipulate the Iowa caucus with out-of-state college students, and wondering why Karl Rove had written a “memo” in the Financial Times on the subject of how Obama could beat Clinton.

“Could it be that he thinks it will be easier for Republicans to run against the unknown gentleman from Illinois?” it asks.

And here’s her campaign on a surprisingly petty issue: how long Obama has wanted to be president. “Sen. Obama Rewrites History, Claims He Hasn’t Been Planning White House Run” is the headline on “HillaryHub.com”:http://www.hillaryhub.com/ and it digs up comments from friends, relatives, classmates to show Obama has long wanted to be president.

“In kindergarten, Sen. Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President’” it says. And it happens to link to an “AP”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16813267/ article about whether the primary school Obama attended in Indonesia was a radical Muslim religious school, a madrassa espousing a strict Wahhabi version of Islam. Right-wing groups have claimed without evidence that it was, a charge Obama called scurrilous and here’s one more reminder of that malicious back and forth.

It is usually Clinton who comes fire for being too ambitious. And Obama has been criticizing Clinton obliquely with lines like this: “I am not in this race to fulfill some long-held ambitions or because I believe that it’s somehow owed me. I never expected to be here, I always knew this journey was improbable.”

I’m not sure how you do get to the White House without being driven, either one of them. And I wonder how many kindergartners write essays on wanting to be president.

Meanwhile Obama has begun a Web site called “Hillary Attacks.”:http://hillaryattacks.barackobama.com/

The polls show a toss up among Democrats: Obama leads in Iowa according to one out over the weekend from the Des Moines Register; Clinton and Obama are in a statistical tie according to an AP/Pew Research Center one released today. Clinton has 31 percent; Obama 26 percent.

PHOTOS: Clinton waits to be introduced in St. Louis yesterday. Obama speaks at a fundraiser in Boston yesterday (AP Photos/Clinton by Tom Gannam; Obama by Bizuayehu Tesfaye)