It's not news around here that the Republican House passed some Keystone XL Pipeline legislation again. Everyone knew they would and everyone knew they would do it the first week of the new session. It passed 226-153. And it isn't news that every single Republican voted for it. What about our centurions in the Democratic Party? Well, 153 voted against it. But 28 crossed the aisle and voted with the GOP.
Yesterday we looked at two perspectives of the issues around Climate Change, one regarding a planet hurtling towards uninhabitability and another, by Jack Hannold, about how current price fluctuations in the oil market will impact supply.
-by Jack HannoldThe price of gasoline has been falling lately because U. S. oil production has soared to its highest level in decades, producing a worldwide surplus. OPEC’s Thanksgiving Day announcement that its members won’t soon cut oil production means prices will remain low for now.One Russian oil executive thinks OPEC wants to crash the U.S. shale oil boom, which he compares to the dot-com boom of the 1990’s.
bye-bye Mary-- glad to see you go; too bad it wasn't a primaryHarry Reid has prevented a vote on the Keystone Pipeline boondoggle but the House just passed it again and this time-- at the urging of Mary Landrieu and a few other red state Democrats-- he's agreed to allow a vote.
A gas pipeline owned by Trans Canada, the Keystone XL villains, and running from Canada to Texas ruptured... but not in Canada nor in Texas. The victims were in Michigan, in Berrien County, ironically, the second most populous county in MI-06, the home district of House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman, "drill, baby, drill" zombie Fred Upton. The county leans Republican.
Since 1990 the Oil and Gas industry has pumped $221,453,356 into congressional campaigns, legalistic bribes that went almost four to one to Republicans, exceptions being a handful of Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party whom Big Oil finds it useful (and easy) to bribe. The Dirty Dozen House Members taking the most in bribes from Big Oil since 1990 are all Republicans:
The one above is the debut of James Cameron's must-see series on Climate Change, Years of Living Dangerously. It's an hour that, if you watch it, will have been well-spent. Cameron's video is-- God willing-- part of the solution to an existential threat to humanity. Below is a short, brutish political commercial. It's ugly and it will persuade many Democrats to hold their nose and just stay home rather than vote for Mary Landrieu.
In February when the U.S. was bringing violent outbursts to a head in Venezuela, we warned you that our government was aiming to destabilize the legitimately elected government there.
Greenpeace makes a show of rejecting government and corporate money. But it's close pals with the WWF - which gets enormous funding from exactly those sources.
ManchinAccording to Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman, author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, Cheney grabbed the Energy portfolio even before the Supreme Court halted the recount and handed the presidency to him and Bush. Since 1990, Big Energy has poured $445,583,154 directly into the campaign coffers of congressmen and congressional candidates-- $303,699,712 of it to Republicans.
