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A Gasoline Conspiracy to Set Fire to the Obama Administration?

According to the Automobile Club of America, gasoline prices have risen, on average, 13.1 cents in the past month—despite the fact that gas prices traditionally fall in the month of February as people drive fewer miles during the wintery month.

What’s more, virtually every projection out there suggests that gas prices are about to make a dramatic rise to, potentially, record levels with some suggesting that $5.00 a gallon gas or more —double the prices of just a few months ago—could very well be in our future.

This becomes a particularly odd statistic when one considers that Americans are using less gasoline than they have at any time in the last fifteen years. Currently, we burn up 8 percent less gas than we did during the peak year of 2006 while most experts expect the trend to continue to where we will be using 20 percent less gasoline by 2030.

Millions of Christians Want to Start WWIII to Speed the “Second Coming”

Neocon Warmongers Using Religion to Rile Them Up to Justify War Against Iran:

Millions of Americans believe that Christ will not come again until Israel wipes out its competitors and there is widespread war in the Middle East. Some of these folks want to start a huge fire of war and death and destruction, so that Jesus will come quickly.

Actually, it’s the other way around. Israel doesn’t need to destroy its competitors for their precious lord and master to come floating down out of the heavens on a flying white horse with a thousand flying sidekicks to carry the faithful away to paradise, according to their worldview two-thirds of Israel must be destroyed for the “Second Coming” to occur. These people don’t want to save “Israel”, they want to destroy it. Small point in an otherwise incredibly good post.

Bill Moyers reports that the organization Christians United for Israel – led by highly-influential Pastor John C. Hagee – is a universal call to all Christians to help factions in Israel fund the Jewish settlements, throw out all the Palestinians and lobby for a pre-emptive invasion of Iran. All to bring Russia into a war against us causing World War III followed by Armageddon, the Second Coming and The Rapture.

As to this notion that some bastard is going to come back and rescue them… that as the blood of our adolescent squabbles over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick rises to the horses’ bridle will come floating down out of the sky on a white horse with a thousand angels to carry away the chosen few, the faithful…

Who are these “Chosen People”, these “faithful”? The genetically purest cattle (or pigs, as it is)? More accurately: just who do they think they are? Get this straight, these “Chosen People”, these “faithful”, can destroy the world – burn the forests, chop down the mountains, turn the air we breath into toxic gas and waters we drink into vast garbage reservoirs… can

drop their fucking bombs and burn the screaming babies

and at the last moment, the moment the world is utterly destroyed, after the bloodbath, some spectral being with whom they’ve entered into some kind of “special” contractual obligation is going to float down out of the sky and carry them away.

Uh-huh. To what?

Far the more likely thousands upon thousands of cavernous spacecraft, vast slaughter-houses piloted by ravenous vaguely reptilian creatures, replete with horns and folked tail, intent not as benevolent overseers of the demise of this world and our current iteration in human evolution and our children’s evolution onto the next iteration of humanity but as ravenous reptilian creatures… you know, hungry lizards.

We did, afterall, invite them to “Come Eat!”

Beginning at noon today, a coalition of over a dozen environmental groups, progressive organizations, and socially minded businesses — including 350.org, NRDC, Sierra Club, MoveOn.org and companies like Patagonia and Northface — are launching a 24 hour “signature bomb” with the goal of sending the Senate over 500,000 messages opposing Keystone XL and urging Senators to block any amendments that reverse the President’s pipeline rejection.

The action has been planned to combat an expected amendment that could be added to the Senate transportation bill which will be under consideration over the next several days.  If successfully tacked onto the Senate bill, the provision would force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline even after President Obama rejected it last month.

Suzanne Goldenberg, at The Guardianreports this morning:

Some inflated estimates have put the number of pipeline jobs as high as 50,000; an analysis by the State Department, which oversaw the project, put the number at 5,000.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress are due on Monday to introduce a new measure that would force work to begin on the pipeline, essentially overturning the White House decision.

Republican Senators plan to file a measure on Monday that would link the pipeline project to a bill that would authorise more than $100bn in long-term transportation spending.

Gasoline, by the gallon, by May.

House Republicans made a conscious choice to undercut the Keystone XL oil pipeline project, even though members of their own party strongly support it. The politics were too ripe. But just how badly have they undercut it? It’s not a stretch to say that politicking the issue will cost TransCanada — the firm that was to build the pipeline — huge sums of money, and may just be the project’s death knell.

No pipeline. How’s that for an expedited decision? No. Just Say No.

From The Hill:

House Republicans are putting more pressure on President Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, unveiling a clock that counts the number of days since the president signed legislation requiring a speedy verdict on the project.

The countdown clock marks the latest push by Republicans to pressure Obama to approve the project, which would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

Simply stated: “The State Department’s own environmental review states that pumping dirty tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico through Keystone XL will pollute our water. It will also commit us to an unsustainable future based on dirty fossil fuels at the precise moment when the national interest demands that we rapidly transition to clean energy to avoid climate catastrophe. There is simply no way that President Obama can honor his commitments to the American people if he caves to Big Oil.”

It’s why your car runs like shit. Idles rough, no power, stalls out at the light, water running out of your exhaust pipe, ten percent less miles per gallon. And until last week, subsidized by the government:

When the U.S. Congress adjourned for the holidays on Friday, December 23, its departure sealed the fate of subsidized ethanol production.

During its session, the Congress did not renew a tax break for U.S. production of corn-based ethanol that had become increasingly unpopular across a wide area of the political spectrum.

The tax credit amounted to 45 cents per gallon of ethanol that was blended into gasoline. It had been in place since 1980.

As The Detroit News reported the next day, by some estimates, total subsidies to the ethanol industry may have reached $45 billion over that period. That is several times the total loans, grants, and tax credits provided thus far to the U.S. electric-car industry.

In June, the Senate voted 73-27 to end the tax break. That vote, attached to an economic development bill that was stalled, was viewed as symbolic—letting Congressmembers go on record against continuing the subsidies without effectively ending them.

It proved to be a test case that demonstrated the waning support in Congress for the corn-based ethanol industry. Three weeks later, an agreement was reached to end the subsidies for real—and it held for the rest of the year.

Ending the ethanol tax breaks is projected  to save about $2 billion over several years. Of that total, two-thirds is to be applied to cutting the national debt, although it represents just one-tenth of 1 percent of the total national debt of $14.3 trillion.

If that damned pipeline the Republicans instructed President Obama to make an “expedited decision within sixty days” about is amongst those “14 provisions that he said infringed upon his power to conduct foreign affairs…”

The omnibus gets a signing statement

When President Obama signed a budget bill on Friday, he issued a signing statement claiming a right to bypass dozens of provisions that placed requirements or restrictions on the executive branch, saying he had “well-founded constitutional objections” to the new statutes.

Yo! ‘Bama – just say No. No pipeline. How’s that for an “expedited decision” for ya’?

It doesn’t provide “thousands of jobs”, it barely provides hundreds. It doesn’t deliver “much needed energy to consumers eager to break the dependence upon foreign oil”, it delivers tar sand sludge to port refineries to be refined and exported to consumers elsewhere around the world. Environmentally, as Alaska has proven, there is nothing benign about a pipe “just laying there”, deteriorating, for decades, leaking and eventually collapsing and dumping those tar sands sludge on the land.

It’s a boondoggle: of little or no value, a project funded by the federal government out of political favoritism that is of no real value to the community or the nation.

A big waste of time, money and effort. Just say No. No pipeline.

Another possible government shutdown: Despite loud warnings from Senate Democrats and a veto threat from President Obama because of poison pills within the text, House Republicans Tuesday passed legislation to renew a 2 percent payroll tax holiday and extended unemployment benefits of one more year.

The bill passed 234-193, with 10 Democrats joining with the Republicans and 14 Republicans pitching in with Dems.

In a private conversation Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid again warned House Speaker John Boehner that his bill remains dead on arrival in the Senate. In particular, Democrats and the White House oppose a number of GOP-backed provisions: a measure forcing the Obama administration to expedite its decision about whether to green light construction the Keystone XL pipeline; out-year spending caps that could further reduce funding to key federal programs; and other restrictions including one that would allow states to drug test unemployment applicants.

Sure, expedite a decision about whether to green light construction [of] the Keystone XL pipeline – just say no. “No. No pipeline. Expedited enough for ya’?”. Waste no time, give ‘em what they want, an expedited decision: no pipeline.

It’s why your car runs like shit. Runs rough, stalls out at the stoplight, water running out of the tailpipe. It’s why the town smells like a wet diaper.

And subsidies to the ethanol industry cost the taxpayer thirty (30) bullion dollars.

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