Last Call For Removing The Keystone

The Keystone XL pipeline project is officially dead and buried, sufficiently killed by a combination of COVID-19 crushing crude oil demand, green energy activism, and the Biden administration yanking the construction permits back in January.

 

The company behind the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline said Wednesday it's officially terminating the project. TC Energy already had suspended construction in January when President Biden revoked a key cross-border presidential permit. The announcement ends a more than decade-long battle that came to signify the debate over whether fossil fuels should be left in the ground to address climate change.

Environmentalists opposed the pipeline in part because of the oil it would carry— oil sands crude from Alberta. It requires more processing than most oil, so producing it emits more greenhouse gases.

TC Energy had begun construction on the pipeline last year and said about 300 miles of the $8 billion project had been built. It would have carried oil from landlocked Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Keystone XL supporters, including most of the oil industry, said the pipeline construction would have created much-needed construction jobs.

"It's unfortunate that political obstructionism led to the termination of the Keystone XL pipeline. This is a blow to U.S. energy security and a blow to the thousands of good-paying union jobs this project would have supported," said Robin Rorick, American Petroleum Institute vice president of midstream and industry operations.

The oil industry and its allies have claimed that Keystone XL would have created hundreds or even thousands of jobs. Most of those positions would have been temporary construction jobs. The State Department estimated full-time permanent jobs to be closer to 50.

Climate activists cheered the decision.

"For 13 years, an international movement of frontline communities in the U.S. and Canada, Indigenous leaders, and environmentalists fought back against this terrible proposed project at every turn," Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said in a statement. "Today, we can say yet again, that our efforts were a resounding success."

Keystone XL would have passed through Nebraska, and for years, a coalition of Indigenous tribes, ranchers and local environmentalists demonstrated, lobbied and sued to halt the pipeline's construction. Its proposed route in Nebraska cut through the Ogallala Aquifer, the groundwater source for millions of Plains states residents.

The pipeline's opponents in Nebraska feared that any leak from Keystone XL would damage the critical aquifer, and they welcomed the end of the project. "On behalf of our Ponca Nation we welcome this long overdue news and thank all who worked so tirelessly to educate and fight to prevent this from coming to fruition. It's a great day for Mother Earth," Larry Wright Jr., chairman of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska, said in a statement.

 

 

 

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Nearly a third of Republicans think Trump and his regime will be "reinstated" before the end of the year, and I remind you, that's tens of millions of Americans who are going to get very angry, if not violent, when that doesn't happen.

Those close to Donald Trump have sought to publicly downplay a report that the former president thinks he will be reinstated in the Oval Office later this year, but a sizable minority of Republican voters believe it will happen anyway.

According to a new Morning Consult/Politico survey, 29 percent of Republican voters said it is at least somewhat likely that Trump will be restored as president in 2021 – including 17 percent who said it is “very likely.”

The June 4-7 poll was conducted among 1,990 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2 percentage points. For the first time in a Morning Consult/Politico poll, the responses were weighted on 2020 presidential vote in addition to the typical weighting variables of age, gender, race and ethnicity, educational attainment and region.

The survey was conducted after New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman reported that the former president had told a number of people in his orbit that he expects to be reinstated by August. The paper’s chief Trump chronicler alluded to Trump’s regular statements on such developments as Arizona’s ongoing election review as evidence of the former president’s preoccupation with the notion that President Joe Biden’s certified victory in the 2020 presidential election could be overturned.

There is no existing constitutional mechanism to accomplish such a goal, as Corey Lewandowsi, a top Trump adviser, acknowledged on Fox News over the weekend, a fact that was not lost on the nearly 3 in 4 voters – including 84 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 61 percent of Republicans – who said it is unlikely that Trump will return to the White House this year.

While the idea of Trump’s reinstatement is far-fetched at best, the electoral and political impact of Trump’s repeated attacks on the 2020 outcome is very real, polling data suggests.

Recent Morning Consult polling has shown Democrats and Biden voters with an early enthusiasm advantage over Republicans and voters who backed Trump in 2020 ahead of the midterm elections. Republican leaders have also pressed Trump to drop his public denial of Biden’s victory and instead focus on attacking Biden and his agenda, but he instead doubled down on his false claims during remarks at the North Carolina Republican Party convention over the weekend.

Trump’s loss – and his behavior following it – did a number on Republican confidence in American elections, and it’s already been blamed by GOP strategists for a number of electoral problems, including the GOP’s loss in two Georgia special elections for Senate in January and the poor showing in a special election for House in New Mexico earlier this month, as both parties look toward a midterm cycle where there is no room for error.

From October to November, the share of Republican adults who said they had “a lot” or “some” confidence in the electoral system fell 22 percentage points, to 45 percent. In the latest May 28-May 30 survey, just 2 in 5 Republicans said they have confidence in American elections, compared with 62 percent of Democrats.

Amid Republicans’ Trump-fueled erosion of faith in the integrity of U.S. elections and Democrats’ fear and anger following the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol and a spate of state-level voting legislation, the vast majority of Americans said that they felt the world’s oldest continuous democracy is at risk.

With another 10% of Republicans saying they don't know whether or not Trump will be "reinstated" we're talking about the number of  Republicans who believe it can happen is about the same as the number of Republicans who no longer believe in the electoral system.

The next putsch/coup/junta attempt will be a lot bloodier, folks.

Closing Out The Mistakes Of The Past

When President Obama tried to close Guantanamo, Republicans (and several Democrats) rose up in Congress to make it impossible to do. President Biden says he won't make the same mistakes as we come up on the 20th anniversary of the Forever War.

President Joe Biden has quietly begun efforts to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, using an under-the-radar approach to minimize political blowback and to try to make at least some progress in resolving a long-standing legal and human rights morass before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

After initial plans for a more aggressive push to close the facility — including rebuffed attempts to recruit a special envoy to oversee the strategy — the White House changed course, sources said. The administration has opted to wait before it reaches out to Congress, which has thwarted previous efforts to close the camp, because of fears that political outcry might interfere with the rest of Biden's agenda.

"They don't want it to become a dominant issue that blows up," a former senior administration official involved in the discussions said of Biden officials. "They don't want it to become a lightning rod. They want it to be methodical, orderly."

The administration hopes to transfer a handful of the remaining terrorism suspects to foreign countries, the people familiar with the discussions said, and then persuade Congress to permit the transfer of the rest — including 9/11 suspects — to detention on the U.S. mainland. Biden hopes to close the facility by the end of his first term, the people familiar with the discussions said.

But even though just 40 people are left at Gitmo, the Biden administration faces many of the same obstacles that doomed President Barack Obama's much more public effort to close it a dozen years ago.

President George W. Bush opened the detention facility in 2002. At its peak, it held nearly 800 detainees, including 9/11 suspects and combatants from the battlefield in Afghanistan. By the time Obama took office in 2009, fewer than 300 detainees were in the camp.

During his campaign for president, Obama had pledged to shutter the prison within a year of taking office. Two days after he was inaugurated, he issued an executive order to close Gitmo by the end of the year, and he restated the goal in media interviews.

Congress, however, resisted the transfer of detainees to the U.S. The House and the Senate rejected funding for the move and also blocked the transfers, with many Democrats voting against the Obama administration's plans.

By the end of his second term, Obama had reduced Guantánamo's population from 245 to 41 detainees, transferring many to foreign countries, but the prison remained in use.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order keeping it open. One detainee was transferred to a foreign country during his tenure.

 

I personally think Trump will do everything he can to sabotage this and rally his cult against the closing, because if Trump couldn't get credit for it, nobody will. 

Give it a week, and the GOP will be rallied. Give it a month, and the plan will be dead.

 

StupidiNews!

• Former Virginia Dem Gov. Terry McAuliffe has won the state's gubernatorial primary, Virginia governors are allowed two terms but not consecutively.
• The US Senate has confirmed the first federal judge under President Biden, Julien Neals, on a 66 - 33 vote.
• Peruvian socialist Pedro Castillo is holding a narrow lead over Keiko Fujimori in the country's presidential elections, but Fujimori is challenging the margin in the nation's election court.
• President Biden's talks with Senate Republicans over a major infrastructure bill ha reportedly broken down, leaving Democrats turning to budget reconciliation to pass the legislation.
• Ohio GOP Attorney General Dave Yost is suing Google to force the company to be treated as a common carrier public utility and to have all of its goods and services regulated by the state.