Talking Points Memo reports:

The White House will announce soon whether President Obama will attend the climate change meetings in Copenhagen, a long anticipated decision that will signal how much effort and political capital the United States wants to spend on promising to curb carbon emissions.

As world leaders and climate experts have criticized a lack of action in Washington in the leadup to the talks, the White House is trumpeting more action in the 10 months since Obama took office than the world saw under President George W. Bush.

When questioned about the delay, White House officials pushed back.

“We go into Copenhagen with a very, very strong hand – if we have an outline that’s helpful, but we go in with 10 months of unprecedented leadership on these issues,” a senior administration official told reporters in a briefing today.

“We have done more than anyone could have ever expected us to do in a relatively short time frame,” the official said. “We have passed a house bill we have used our executive and our regulatory authorities to chart a very different course when it comes to energy use, efficiency, we’re making unprecedented investments. I am very very pleased with the hand that we have going into Copenhagen.”

The talks begin two weeks from today.

Talking Points Memo reports:

A good government group is calling on the State Department to investigate the role of former ambassador Peter Galbraith in drafting Iraq’s constitution in 2005 while he held a lucrative stake in a Kurdish oil field.

The letter from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to the State Dept. Inspector General asks whether State approved Galbraith’s activities, and cites a recent New York Times exposé that built off work of the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv.

The Times reported that Galbraith, advising the Kurds during the 2005 constitutional talks, helped secure “clauses that he maintains will give the Kurds virtually complete control over all new oil finds on their territory.”

Here is the letter: