The news released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday appeared to be all good: The unemployment rate was down by 0.2 percent to 8.3 percent, the lowest since the month after President Obama was inaugurated. November and December estimates were revised upward. Most private industries showed growth, including 70,000 new business services jobs, 50,000 new manufacturing jobs, and a remarkable 21,000 new jobs in the construction industry. The labor force expanded by 500,000 which appeared to indicate that more people are coming back into the market looking for work.

But the skeptics were legion: the Wall Street Journal, while accepting the numbers at face value, said, “Even with the recent gains, this is by far the worst jobs recovery since the Great Depression, and the U.S. still has about 5.5 million fewer jobs that it did before the recession began in December 2007.” Across town, the Washington Times said the numbers looked better than they should because of the number of young people dropping out and the paper even found an economist at the Federal Reserve to agree with it. Brian Holter, who works at the Minneapolis Fed, said: “However these factors stack up, the improvement in unemployment is largely the work of declining participation rates and, unfortunately, not job growth.”

, writing at Townhall.com, was blunt in his assessment of the BLS report:

Continue reading Friday’s Unemployment Numbers: Correcting the Corrections

King had earlier released a statement regarding his endorsement, saying:

“Governor Romney has the leadership qualities, experience, and credentials to make him best suited for carrying the conservative Republican banner into the November Presidential election, defeat Barack Obama, and put this great nation back on the path to prosperity and strength. We have a country to save, and Mitt Romney is the candidate best able to lead us in doing that.”

About 350 people were on hand to hear Gov. Romney at the standing room only rally at the Country Inn in Grand Junction. Another 200 or so stood listening outside on speakers set up for those people who were turned away at the door by Grand Junction fire marshals.

Most in the crowd were Romney supporters; some, however, were undecided and had stopped by simply to hear from one of the candidates in hopes of gathering enough information to make an informed decision come caucus time tomorrow night. Some of these seemed to come away from the rally impressed by what they saw and heard.

Harry Benjamin, of Grand Junction, said he was not a Romney supporter before attending the event. But after hearing the former Massachusetts Governor speak, said he liked what he had heard.

“He is a successful manager, and that is what we need” Benjamin said.

Some attendees had been to Rick Santorum’s event in nearby Montrose two days earlier, and drew comparisons between the two candidates. Matt Soper, a recent law school graduate attended both events and said that to him, “the difference between Santorum and Romney was the difference between someone running for governor, and one running for President”, saying that Romney’s speech, attitude and demeanor seemed to be more professional an d ”presidential”. In terms of substance, Soper said that he was gratified to hear Romney honor the U.S. military in his speech, and speak on foreign policy. “Santorum only spoke of the military when prompted by a question, and I found that rather disappointing”.

Followers of Romney’s rivals were present as well. Judy O’Dwyer, also of Grand Junction, said that she was a Rick Santorum supporter, but had come to hear what Romney had to say, and to see if she could trust him. “I have my doubts about him; I don’t know if he is conservative enough for me” she said prior to the event. However, she went on to state that she would support Romney fully if he became the candidate.

Other opponents were not so accommodating. About a dozen Ron Paul supporters were on hand to protest the candidate and the event. Local Palisade peach farmer David Cox, a prominent supporter of the Texas Congressman, said that they were there to raise awareness of Romney’s support for TARP and the recently signed National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular the controversial provision that allows for indefinite detention of U.S. Citizens, eliminating, as Cox put it, “the right of due process and habeas corpus”. Cox told PPC that he was thrown out of the event; “I began raising my voice and informing people and that’s when the staff had me ejected”. No other incidents were reported.

Overall, however, the reception from the west slope to Mitt Romney was approving, and crossed demographic lines. Kristina Kelly, a young Grand Junction Resident in her early 20’s, and Sheryl Wilson, a retiree, both touted Romney’s values and business experience as essential for leading America out of her current troubles. Fruita Iraq Veteran Sean Otto said Romney was the “only one who has a record for turning things around”, citing his history in Massachusetts, the Olympics, and in the business world.

For West Slope voters, Romneys biggest applause line came when he spoke of energy, an issue critical to the economy of the region rich in natural gas, coal, and oil shale. In a speech that mostly stuck to the script of his last several appearances, Romney criticized Obama’s record on energy policy, noting that the current President has kept hundreds of acres off limits for production, while subsidizing so-called “green energy” boondoggles – contrary to his call in the State of the Union speech for an “all of the above” policy.

Romney’s promises to reign in the EPA and to help facilitate domestic production of “energy secure and independent from foreign cartels” met with approval from West Slope residents. Harry Benjamin, when asked if Romney’s message appealed to the average west slope voter replied, “Yes. Especially based on what he said about energy.”

Norm Franke, President of Alpine Bank in Grand Junction agreed. “Romney does appeal to local people when he talks of energy development” he said. “Romney told the audience the right things. It will be nice if he will do them.”

This column appeared originally on Townhall Finance.

Obama is China’s best friend

By Amy Oliver Cooke and Michael Sandoval

When it comes China, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Speech last month was nothing more than a rhetorical exercise from the political pied piper, who, along with his supporters, believes his own words magically alter reality. He is oblivious to his own hypocrisy and frighteningly disconnected from the consequences of his policies. The Chinese probably love him for it.

Obama spoke of “American energy,” but his policies encourage reliance on unpredictable regimes like China and turn away from friendly trading partners.

Obama spoke of fairness, criticizing China for subsidized manufacturing while his policy is to heavily subsidize industry with money borrowed from China.

His references to China appeared weak in the wake of China’s strategy to influence U.S. economic and military policy and to control the world’s energy resources.

The first found the president employing one of his favorite themes of late – fairness.

And I will not stand by when our competitors don’t play by the rules. We’ve brought trade cases against China at nearly twice the rate as the last administration _- and it’s made a difference. (Applause.) Over a thousand Americans are working today because we stopped a surge in Chinese tires. But we need to do more. It’s not right when another country lets our movies, music, and software be pirated. It’s not fair when foreign manufacturers have a leg up on ours only because they’re heavily subsidized.

Tonight, I’m announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trading practices in countries like China.

Fortunately, Obama, the economic superhero, saved us from those unfairly imported Chinese tires, but he fails to recognize the hypocrisy of his criticism, which brings us to the next reference to the one Bryan Ritterby and America’s “heavily subsidized” green industry.

Paying lip service to the justifiable outcry over the $535 million taxpayer-funded Solyndra bankruptcy, Obama promised to continue spending money we don’t have by pouring tax dollars down the renewable money hole.

Some technologies don’t pan out; some companies fail. I will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.  I will not walk away from workers like Bryan.  I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.

Wasteful and heavily subsidized at home is acceptable but considered unfair if the Chinese do it.

Beijing probably doesn’t care. China couldn’t ask for a better friend in the White House. Obama’s strategy on spending and energy have weakened the U.S. and strengthened the Chinese.

Debt and Spending

Obama may believe the threat of his “Trade Enforcement Unit” has the Chinese, the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, shaking in their Mao suits, but remember that late last summer, following the U.S. credit downgrade, it was the Chinese warning the U.S. that the “good old days” of unmitigated spending were over, as Reuters reported:

‘The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone,’ China’s official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.

The Los Angeles Times reported on the same commentary, “China called on the United States to ‘cure its addiction to debts’ and ‘learn to live within its means.’” More frightening because we owe so much to the Chinese, they are emboldened to reprimand the U.S. on defense spending:

‘China, the largest creditor of the world’s sole superpower, has every right now to demand the United States to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets,’ the commentary said.

If no substantial cuts were made to the U.S. gigantic military expenditure and bloated social welfare costs, the downgrade would prove to be only a prelude to more devastating credit rating cuts, which will further roil the global financial markets all along the way…

We’ve used China as our payday lender to point where it has the right to demand we get our fiscal house in order by slashing spending in areas where it would be most beneficial to China.  Obama responds with a threat to put China in the trade time-out chair.

Unfortunately, the Chinese are correct; the U.S. must address its deficit and debt crisis including cuts to defense spending, entitlements, and energy investments. At the same time, the Chinese are increasing their military spending, growing their sphere of influence in North America, Africa, and the Middle East, and expanding their control over global energy resources.

Fossil Fuel Energy Policy

Quick, which country exports the most barrels of oil to the U.S.? If you answered Canada you are correct. When Obama and others demagogue “foreign oil,” they besmirch our friendly neighbors to the north.

While Obama and his eco-irrational supporters fret over “foreign oil” and carbon footprints, China is eagerly expanding its energy footprint in North America as the Wall Street Journal recently reported:

After tiptoeing into North America in recent years, Chinese companies have ratcheted up their energy deal-making as unconventional extraction methods—from oil sands to shale gas—have transformed the continent’s energy market.

Obama’s disastrous veto of the Keystone Pipeline served as a warning (and an insult) to Canadians who called it “a slap in the face to Canada…making Canadians rethink the relationship that they should break their dependence” on the U.S. and look to China as a willing trade partner, as Bloomberg reports:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is gaining support among Canadians for his plan to ship oil sands crude to China after President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada Corp. (TRP)’s $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

The Chinese will buy what Obama doesn’t want, which is why Harper is headed to China where he will meet with President Hu Jintao and likely “tout Enbridge Inc.’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline that would let crude flow to Asia from Alberta’s oil sands via a Canadian port.”

The Chinese aren’t just looking to secure imports of Canadian oil; they want ownership so they can have more influence over global supply and demand. “Two of the largest acquisitions of Canadian oil and gas companies last year were driven by Chinese companies,” totaling more than $2 billion each.

Remember, Chinese companies are state-controlled, and they’re after more than just Canadian resources including U.S. reserves and technology according to the WSJ:

Recent government estimates indicate that China might have more gas locked up in shale than the U.S…Chinese companies have bought front-row seats in the U.S. development boom by paying billions of dollars recently for stakes in oil and natural-gas projects across America, from Michigan to Texas.

Those “front-row seats” are the perfect place to learn our technology, which they intend to take back home. When Obama and environmental left regulate hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling out of existence under the guise of “safety”, the Chinese will be well-positioned to expand drilling in China and other countries that wish to take advantage of their natural resources.

Renewable Energy Policy Leans Heavily on China

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) December 2011 “Critical Materials Strategy” update continues to acknowledge the stranglehold on rare earth elements (REE) production by China—the country provides 95 percent of the REEs currently mined, processed, and fed into the global supply chain for a variety of technological purposes. The DOE report targets the use of REEs in many forms of renewable energy applications, especially the permanent magnets used to generate energy in wind turbines, or propel electric drive vehicles.

The DOE’s market assessment contains cautionary language due to the lack of “opacity” or transparency from the Chinese near-monopolies on many of the REEs critical to global (and U.S.) technological demands:

As producer of more than 95% of the world’s REOs [rare earth oxides], China has the ability to significantly influence market dynamics. Its imposition of quotas and export duties has decreased supply and caused increases in the prices of a number of rare earth elements. At present there is little clarity or predictability about China’s rare earth production and export policies, which sends uncertain supply signals to the market and can disrupt future investment decisions by downstream consumers. Additionally, there are significant data gaps or uncertainties with respect to Chinese reserves and resources, production and consumption. Some of this information is collected by China’s government ministries, but it is not disseminated.

Centralization brings the ability to manipulate the market, as China has done, by reducing rare earth exports at its discretion, in an effort to control prices.

But centralization by a handful of producers within China, combined with the growing vertical integration of multiple steps of the production process, further concentrates the production of REEs. The DOE’s own estimates of barriers to entry for new REE sources put the development of so-called “greenfield” projects at more than $1 billion each, with at least ten years or more required to bring products to the supply chain at the “upstream”—later stages—of production.

Capital investments and permitting waits notwithstanding, rare earth-related human resources have disappeared within a generation. In just the past 30 years, the DOE acknowledges the technical expertise related to REEs once possessed by the U.S. has eroded by an astounding 94 percent:

As the United States was once the world’s leading producer of rare earth materials, the United States was also once a leader in rare earth technical knowledge.

It is estimated that prior to 1980 rare earth mining and related industries employed approximately 25,000 people in the United States, with 3,000-6,000 holding college degrees in science or engineering. Current estimates are that 1,500 people are employed throughout the U.S. rare earth industry including 200-400 persons holding college degrees in science or engineering (Gschneidner 2011).

Green Not So “Clean”

Proponents of renewable technologies tout the “clean” nature of the energy sources—wind turbines and thin-film solar cells—that require a great deal of REEs in the critical components that generate the energy output, including known carcinogens like cadmium. Chinese standards of environmental concern are, to say the least, not exactly Greenpeace-friendly, and a recent spill in southern China affected enough residents that the mitigation efforts to contain the contamination garnered international news at the end of January—via the New York Times:

Officials in southern China appear to have averted environmental calamity by halting the spread of a toxic metal that had threatened to foul drinking water for tens of millions of people, the state media reported Monday.

Officials said they had successfully diluted the concentration of cadmium, a poisonous component of batteries, that [sic] has been coursing down the Longjiang River in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

Used in a variety of applications, including solar cells and batteries, cadmium is a toxic metal, and “poisoning can cause kidney and liver damage and weaken bones.”

China’s less-than-sterling ecological record has produced this result:

Despite what appears to have been a disaster avoided, the episode highlighted China’s continuing struggle against contamination of its waterways. The Ministry of Environmental Protection has acknowledged that half the nation’s rivers and lakes are unfit for human contact, and news reports of chemical and oil spills are commonplace here.

According to the research of Nanjing Agricultural University, ten percent of the nation’s rice supplies “contained excessive cadmium levels,” with some southern provinces observing 60 percent of their rice samples exceeding national standards for potential cadmium poisoning.

In other words, President Obama’s call for lowering foreign dependence on oil in turn increases foreign dependence on REEs controlled by China. This requires the cooperation of Chinese-based companies with little in the way of demonstrated business transparency and Chinese government regulatory agencies more concerned with covering up ecological disasters than the health of their people. Unless forced by the sheer magnitude of potential harm, as the above spill would have affected millions downstream in places like Guangzhou and Hong Kong, Western media rarely reports such ecological contamination.

China’s state media heavily censors outgoing information, and regularly downplays events that would rival the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico—as it has done here.

Obama would merely seek to exchange one dependency—petroleum—for another—rare earths. Only this time, the supply chain is concentrated in one country, rather than distributed among several.

Conclusion

Chinese investors continue to snap up struggling U.S. renewable energy companies like Colorado-based Ascent Solar, which narrowly averted a Solyndra-like collapse by pulling its $275 million DOE loan guarantee application in 2011.

Obama’s administration has not only subsidized many of his top bundlers’ investment vehicles, as they did with Solyndra, but provided incentives in the form of tax credits, loan guarantees, grants, and other subsidies to renewable energy companies that are charged to the nation’s credit card through debt issued, you guessed it, to China.

The Chinese can afford to subsidize their own renewable companies and undercut U.S. competitors, something that Obama decries, when the U.S. provides them a steady flow of green, renewable cash.

They are probably hoping for four more years.

Amy Oliver Cooke is the founder of Mothers Against Debt. She is also the director of the Colorado Transparency Project and the Energy Policy Center for the Independence Institute. She can be reached at amy@i2i.org. Michael Sandoval is the Managing Editor of People’s Press Collective and a former political reporter for National Review Online.

For a moment, let’s set aside the other attendant issues; privacy, better ways to spend money, and the contestable reality of a threat that justifies such excesses.  Let’s look at the health question.  These machines stand in open, crowded, and filthy areas.  They get infrequent and, almost certainly, inadequate maintenance.  The people running them don’t even need a high school diploma or basic literacy to get the job.  The scanners lack radiation alarms and, until recently, their operators did not wear dosimeters.

…it now takes an Act of Congress to force the U.S. Government to conduct actual investigation into wantonly showering the populace with radiation.

Right here, we’ve got problems.  Any doctor who so callously exposed her patients to radiation would be stripped of her license.  Any radiation technician who took such shoddy care of the equipment he uses would be fired.  Any hospital that tolerated such carelessness would lose accreditation.  The government justifies such laws on the medical use of radiation based on the inherent danger.  This is the stuff that mutates your cells, turns yours bone into crumbly mush, and inflicts giant ill-tempered lizards on the Orient.

Why then, are we operating under the asinine fallacy that radiation isn’t harmful if we say it’s for security rather than therapy?  Radiation is radiation.  It doesn’t read policy memos and it doesn’t care that Homeland Security sees to be willing away the unstable isotopes.  Whatever alternate universe the politicians are on, here in reality, radiation is a threat and we’re all at higher risk.  Higher risk not just because of the roll-out of scanners at airports, but because of the government’s fetish for adding the things in every public place from sea to shining sea.

Washington tells us it’s all perfectly safe.  They, of course, can’t actually share any of the evidence they swear to possess with us peons, national security and all.  Even were all that tip-top evidence to exist, the outrageous laxity of radioactive machines popping up all around us is a problem.  Simply put, intelligent people aren’t so frivolous to a known carcinogen.

Finally, there may be some movement on the impending irradiation of the Land of the Free.  Principally authored by Susan Collins (R-ME), and with bipartisan sponsorship, the study sign bill would require that DHS contract with an independent lab to test radiation levels.

Last fall, John Pistole, the TSA Administrator who would not rule out cavity searches at airports, finally promised Congress that he would preform just such a study.  Within days, he reneged, saying that DHS’ own private studies concluded there was radiation risk.  That study, naturally, is not available for citizens to review.  TSA officials brazenly insist that no one will get cancer from the ionizing radiation of scanners, an alarming level of certainty with no basis for belief.

Europe has already banned the use of such scanners over radiation concerns.  ProPublica concluded that no peer-reviewed work on the safety of backscatter x-rays has been done and that the TSA may have glossed over safety problems with the machines.  Scientists who have been publicly named by the TSA as supporters of the use of radiation in passenger screening have reacted angrily, accusing the agency of misrepresenting their work for its own agenda.  The National Academy of Science has espoused a linear model of radiation risk, meaning that cancer risk grows over time with increased exposure, finally concluding that no amount of radiation, small as it may be, is entirely safe.

The FDA declined to invoke its power to regulate non-medical use of radiation, opting to rely on the TSA voluntarily seeing to the safety of the machines.  In turn, the TSA ignored the requirement to consider public comment and paid no heed to research that suggested the machines posed a risk.  In short, there exists little data, none of it up to academic snuff.

What this means, boys and girls, is that it now takes an Act of Congress to force the U.S. Government to conduct actual investigation into wantonly showering the populace with radiation.  The level of disregard for citizens this evinces ought to concern us all.

Sen. Collins will introduce her bill soon.  Until then, we may at least hope that, when the radiation turns us all into mutants, our superpowers will be enough to extract a bloody vengeance from Washington.

At the time, some justified leaking Bork’s rental history to the press, and the media’s willingness to publish, on the grounds that Bork had himself not been a terribly strong advocate of privacy.  A move intended to embarrass Bork instead scared Congress, many of whose members no doubt patronized niche video rental stores and had built up truly scandalous rental histories.

In response, we got the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, a piece of direct legislation forbidding video renters from disclosing a customer’s checkout history without explicit consent.  At one point, it would have fair to say this was something of a misstep down the road of favoring painfully specific laws over common sense.  Libertarians, such as I, would have said that service providers who sell or give away their customers purchase history would be punished efficiently through market mechanisms.

Things, to put it lightly, are changing.  Our personal information is worth more and more and to ever greater numbers of people – often strangers and discrete data-mining companies.  Technology allows integration of that data to a level inconceivable in the late 80s.  Back then, the fear was that the reading and movie-watching habits of public figures would be publicized to humiliate those people.  Today, the reality is that each and every one of us is a monetized prize; sold, resold, and bundled to the highest bidder.

Enter Netflix.  Streaming movie providers have run up against VPPA before.  In 2008, Blockbuster got into hot water over violating customer privacy via a partnership with FaceBook Beacon.  The next year, Netflix was answering questions over its practice of divulging user data as part of a contest to improve the algorithm by which the company recommends films.  And now, the inevitable is here.  Netflix and FaceBook would like to fully integrate their services, with every film you watch shared with your ‘friends’ for the purpose of fine-tuning movie picks.

Uh-huh.

The problem with the collision of technology and privacy concerns is very much about ostensibly ‘free’ services actually being an exchange of online services for personal information.  Make no mistake, we pay for everything we get one way or another.  That’s fine if it’s an agreement with informed consent.  As well you know if you pay any attention at all to privacy issues, this is a vanishingly rare thing when it comes to social media.

Under VPPA as it stands, Netflix may not be able to legally share that data on an ongoing basis.  More accurately, Netflix is afraid that VPPA doesn’t give it as much protection from angry users as it would like to enjoy.  Obviously, both Netflix and FaceBook would like to share as much data as possible and to do it all as an obscure opt-out, if they can.  To that end, the former company has gone before Congress, asking for a ‘clarification’ of VPPA, along with asking users to urge their Representatives to support that position.  The proposed legislation here is H.R. 2471, which would explicitly make it legal for a company, such as Netflix, to get a one-time consent from a user to share data indefinitely, until that consent is revoked.

Here, again, I make my objection that more and more laws will make some people feel safer, but won’t actually improve the grace with which private data are handled by third parties.  VPPA originally had language banning magazine publishers from disclosing subscriber data, something that fell prey to lobbyists.  Between 1988 and today, the PATRIOT Act has gutted much of heft behind laws we may think protect our privacy.  Why is the answer to the quagmire of legally protected user data yet another law, and an absurdly precise one at that?

On that note, the mere fact that companies with perfectly dreadful privacy records are backing H.R. 2471 ought to raise eyebrows ad questions.  Too, why does a company that has enacted two painful price hikes in the last sixteen months, all while the quality and selection of its offerings decline, now need Washington’s blessing to make more money off the data of people who are already paying customers?

What Netflix is really doing here is pushing for a highly specific law that will render it immune to the complaints of users down the road.  If the extent of Netflix’s planned expansion is to get an informed and explicit consent and then share data only for the purpose of delivering better movie recommendations to users, it’s hard to imagine why they would require federal legislation with such narrow focus.

Patrick Leahy, author of VPPA, described, “an era of interactive television cables, the growth of computer checking and check-out counters, of security systems and telephones, all lodged together in computers….”  That was 1988.  Last week, he neatly summed the problems with HR. 2471; “A one-time check off that has the effect of an all-time surrender of privacy does not seem to me the best course for consumers.”  He’s right.  However, let’s take it a little further.  A law like this comes too close to making peoples’ privacy decisions for them, and flirts with giving Congressional benediction to unethical data-mining.

I go back to my position that people should be their own first privacy guardians.  That means common sense, skepticism, and scrutiny of any bid to share their information ‘for their own good’.  I dislike laws that infantilize consumers, that make dangerous behavior seem harmless with the veneer of legal acceptability, that distort the market.

Netflix wants customers to waive privacy now and forever and just trust that things will turn out hunky-dory.  Yet they want a law essentially guaranteeing they won’t have to answer for their behavior in the future.  To me, that says they anticipate angry customers over the proposed data sharing.  And it says they don’t want to play by the same rules they are suggesting for the rest of us.

“‘I think there is a legitimate argument that it’s in the national interest to build the pipeline,’ said Udall, adding that it’s important that the administration work with Nebraska to find the right route before approving the Keystone project.”

Udall pointed to partisanship surrounding the Keystone XL project as the reason for its failure to receive a permit.

“It speaks to the fact that the Keystone XL debate has been infused with presidential politics, partisan politics, and has not had enough to do with the discussion of how do we truly become energy self-reliant,” said Udall.

But this stands in contrast to an earlier 2009 project the administration did back–and touted:

More than two years ago, on Aug. 20, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton approved a 1,000-mile pipeline that has the capacity to send 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada’s oil sands to Wisconsin. That pipeline is owned by the Canadian company Enbridge and began operating in October 2010.

What the U.S. Department of State had to say when the 2009 pipeline received approval:

“The Department found that the addition of crude oil pipeline capacity between Canada and the United States will advance a number of strategic interests of the United States. These included increasing the diversity of available supplies among the United States’ worldwide crude oil sources in a time of considerable political tension in other major oil producing countries and regions; shortening the transportation pathway for crude oil supplies; and increasing crude oil supplies from a major non-Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries producer. Canada is a stable and reliable ally and trading partner of the United States, with which we have free trade agreements which augment the security of this energy supply.

Approval of the permit sends a positive economic signal, in a difficult economic period, about the future reliability and availability of a portion of United States’ energy imports, and in the immediate term, this shovel-ready project will provide construction jobs for workers in the United States.”

Sen. Udall’s conclusions about legitimate arguments to be made that building a pipeline like Keystone XL represents a “national interest” simply corroborates the State Department’s own conclusions from 2009.

It would appear, however, that the administration is doing quite well playing presidential and partisan politics in the Keystone XL debate, placing political expediency–satisfying economic and strategic concerns in 2009 while favoring environmental arguments in 2011-12–above legitimate national interests when it comes to energy independence and economic growth.

Oh hey there! I’m glad you asked. Our Energy Policy Center director Amy Oliver has been hitting the energy and environment issues hard lately. You should take a look at our Energy Policy Center’s webpage to stay on top of Amy and Michael Sandoval’s work. For example, when President Obama came to town to talk about his “comprehensive” view of energy, Amy and Michael put together a nice article translating his rhetoric into real life language – that real people speak! Additionally, Amy sat down with my main minion Justin Longo to discuss Obama’s energy policies and figure out how his “green” energy favoritism gets twisted into an “all of the above” approach he claims to have. You can hear Amy translate and discuss Obama’s energy policies here on iVoices.org.

Let’s bring energy policy even closer to home shall we? Amy and Michael also tackled the upcoming energy legislation before our Colorado representatives in this year’s legislative session. What’s some of the good? What’s some of the bad? And you know there’s going to be some downright ugly when it comes to energy policy in Colorado… so what’s that all about this year? Amy gives a run down of some of the more important legislation in this iVoices.org podcast with Justin. You might be surprised at how great some of the good stuff is. (Hint: Rep. Spencer Swalm is on an energy tear this year!) Likewise, the bad will bad and the ugly… expensive.

Colorado

• Sen. Tom "Big Government" Massey's school trans-fat ban is "unnecessary" say school lunch officials. No, not because schools are capable of making the choice themselves. (They are, by the way.) It's because the Feds already beat them to it.
• If you've ever thought that lawmakers had to be drinking to come up with some of these bills, you may be right.
• Hey, let's let the government hide information because it's more secure. Here's a basic lesson learned in computer security and applicable everywhere. Security through obscurity doesn't work.

Everywhere else

• Government funded "green jobs" training is about as successful as every other government funded program.
• Feds to airlines: Don't show customers how much they're paying in taxes.
• RNC delegate rules favor Romney?

"I believe that every human has a finite number of heart-beats. I don't intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises." -- Buzz Aldrin