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After years of policy drift, the announcement by President Barack Obama of a 17,000-strong U.S. troop increase in Afghanistan and the recent inaugural tour of the region by newly appointed special envoy Ambassador Richard Holbrooke signal renewed attention to a challenge shared by the United States, Afghanistan, its regional neighbors, and the world. Reports of rising civilian casualties, sustained insurgent violence, and destabilizing drug cultivation all add urgency to ongoing strategic reviews by the White House and other government agencies. A concerted international effort by the Afghan government, the United States, NATO allies, and other regional partners will be crucial to addressing these issues.

Please join the Center for American Progress for remarks by His Excellency Dr. Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Minister of Foreign Affairs for Afghanistan, to be followed by a question and answer session.

Seeking the promise of America, a beautiful young Honduran woman, Sayra (Paulina Gaytan), joins her father and uncle on an odyssey to cross the gauntlet of the Latin American countryside en route to the United States. Along the way she crosses paths with a teenaged Mexican gang member, El Casper (Edgar M. Flores), who is maneuvering to outrun his violent past and elude his unforgiving former associates. Together they must rely on faith, trust, and street smarts if they are to survive their increasingly perilous journey toward the hope of new lives.

Please join us for a provocative discussion immediately following the film.

Please be advised that this film contains graphic violence and brief nudity.

This film is in Spanish with English subtitles.

The Center for American Progress and the Glaser Progress Foundation are pleased to announce the launch of the new Progressive Studies Program at CAP. The Progressive Studies Program is a unique interdisciplinary project exploring the history, intellectual foundations and public understanding of progressivism in America. The program seeks to increase public awareness of progressive ideas and values, as well as to educate public officials and policymakers through lectures, seminars, articles, public events, book discussions, new media tools, and training seminars with activists and young people. The Progressive Studies Program aims to develop thoughtful, honest debates about modern progressivism and its relationship to the earlier Progressive era and other political and social movements throughout American history. The public research component will complement these discussions by documenting and tracking American ideological attitudes and demographic trends in the country.

The launch will feature the release of two major reports:

State of American Political Ideology, 2009, the Progressive Studies Program's first national study of American beliefs about the role of government, cultural values, economic and domestic policy, and international affairs based on the results of a national survey of 1400 Americans and a companion survey of young people; and

New Progressive America, a detailed analysis of demographic, geographic and attitudinal trends following the 2008 election based on exit poll data, county-level voting returns, census and American Community Survey data and important post-election surveys.

For more information and the event video, visit the event page.

The bursting of the housing bubble and the resulting foreclosure epidemic have exposed major flaws in the U.S. housing finance system. All agree that significant reforms are necessary in all areas of mortgage finance—origination, primary lending, and secondary markets for mortgage-backed securities including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—but there is little consensus on what the system should look like when reforms are in place.

Please join the Center for American Progress for a provocative discussion about the aims and challenges of mortgage market reform.

Los Angeles, CA

The U.S. economy is experiencing its worst recession in decades. Our nation seeks to recover from a recession that has cost 3.6 million jobs since December 2007. Every single state has experienced the consequences of an economy ravaged by failed economic policies and regulatory institutions' failure to do their jobs. The road back to a robust economy is going to be a long one. We will almost certainly continue to see job losses for the rest of the year and possibly beyond even with Congress and the president taking action. But will the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the new budget put a brake on the downward spiral that is currently consuming the economy, and set the stage for a rebound?

Michael Ettlinger will outline the Obama administration's next steps on the budget, recovery, and stimulus, and how we can move the country forward. Michael will also highlight how the Employee Free Choice Act and the fight for green jobs will play a part on the road to recovery.

The Web is home to a rich array of original source data from government agencies, think tanks and nonprofits. There are powerful tools that cost absolutely nothing to use that allow even the least technically proficient journalist to quickly search, sift, mine and analyze it. We'll show you where to find all kinds of data--from government contracts to tariff suspensions, from the latest data on the multi-trillion dollar effort to shore up the banking system to the smallest earmark in the omnibus--that allow you to find out what's going on in Washington. We'll also teach you how to use some very simple tools that allow you to quickly navigate huge documents on deadline, to parse legislation down to the paragraph, to analyze columns of numbers and even to do simple mapping and visualizations. Bill Allison, a veteran investigative journalist and a senior fellow at the Sunlight Foundation, leads the two-hour session that points to data sources and provides hands on training on tools.

While there have been many studies on the best military approaches to take in the Afghanistan conflict, there have been comparatively few efforts to examine how the United States and its allies should best use their foreign assistance resources to achieve success.

The Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress commissioned an innovative scenario exercise to test how much “bang for the buck” the U.S. government could achieve in stabilization and reconstruction operations if it undertook many of the foreign assistance reforms advocated in previous CAP reports. Over the course of three days, we learned that robust foreign assistance reform should be seen as a key national security priority.

Please join us for the release of "Swords and Ploughshares" as Dr. Reuben Brigety and Dr. Patrick Cronin discuss this new approach to sustainable security in Afghanistan.

Click on this link to watch a short video highlighting CAP's recent Sustainable Security simulation, which featured participants from the White House, the Pentagon, USAID, and the State Department.

As the Obama administration takes its first steps to advance a sustainable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as a new Israeli government prepares to take office, Middle East Progress, Americans for Peace Now and the American Task Force on Palestine invite you to a discussion with Israeli Brigadier General (Ret.) Ilan Paz and Ghaith al-Omari, a former senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

The conversation will examine key issues, including how to best to rebuild Gaza, how to avoid strengthening Hamas while bolstering Palestinian moderates, and how or whether the United States should engage with a possible Palestinian national unity government.

On his first day in office, President Obama, in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, directed his administration to develop recommendations for an "Open Government Directive" that moves government towards being "transparent," "participatory," and "collaborative." OpenTheGovernment.org's webcast presents a great opportunity for the public to be involved in the crafting of this directive. During the webcast, individuals who are intimately involved in formulating the administration's policies and agendas will explain the initiative's goals, receive feedback from the audience, and let members of the public know how they can continue to participate in the discussion.

The event will feature a discussion between speakers and the audience on what the Obama administration hopes to achieve, the policy issues facing this administration, the Obama administration's vision for e-government, and financial and economic transparency. Also during the event, Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, and Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), will release a report based on the results of Show Us the Data, a web-based survey used to discover what restricted information the public wants to get access to and use.

While the Wyeth v. Levine case represents a victory for consumers injured by negligent drug warnings, those harmed by faulty medical devices face a different legal landscape. The Supreme Court ruled last year that clients cannot bring a state tort action against manufacturers, as a result of the Riegel v. Medtronic decision. Legislation would overturn this case before Congress, restoring the consumers’ ability to go to court when injured by faulty medical devices.

An upcoming event will include a screening of "Hit and Run," a short documentary produced by the Alliance for Justice, followed by a panel of experts who will discuss issues raised by the aforementioned cases and the prospects for congressional action.

With G20 member countries representing at least three quarters of global GDP, energy consumption and carbon emissions, they are in the position to offer a clear signal to the world that they are successfully tackling the double challenge of economic recovery and climate protection. They also have the human and financial resources necessary to push technological boundaries, creating positive spill-over effects and synergies needed to drive the much needed change.

Professor Ottmar Edenhofer from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Sir Nicholas Stern from the London School of Economics (LSE) were commissioned by the German Foreign Office to conduct this study, with the aim of broadening the momentum for immediate G20 action at the London Summit in April 2009.

The main finding of the study recommends the G20 nations to focus their recovery programs on strategic areas such as energy efficiency, infrastructure and clean technology markets.

Please join Ambassador Klaus Scharioth as he discusses the findings of this report at the Center for American Progress.

As President Obama heads to London early next month for the second meeting of the G-20 nations' leaders, the pressing issue on the agenda is rescuing the global economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression. It is therefore imperative that President Obama and the G-20 leaders agree on necessary measures to stem the global crisis. The Center for American Progress believes that these measures entail restoring normal functioning of financial markets, coordinating economic stimulus measures, providing much needed assistance to developing countries, avoiding protectionism, and taking new steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

But agreement alone is not enough. For this reason, the Center is calling for the G-20 leaders to establish an empowered, resourced and permanent but evolving "G-20 leadership forum" with the immediate mission to restore stability to the global economy, but with a longer term mandate to broker global deals, provide direction for multilateral organizations and cope with economic aspects of global challenges as they arise.

Please join the Center for American Progress for a discussion around these recommendations.

Please join John Podesta and American Progress for our 2009 Progressive Party, an evening of celebration in support of our work and our mission and a rededication to our goals and our work on behalf of all Americans.