Welcome to the New Pipeline Crossroads of the World

I was curious to see if the Republicans were really gaining any ground in the Senate on Keystone, and it seems they will be picking up three seats. Five of the Democrats who voted for Keystone are being replaced by Republicans, so no gains here. The Republican will pick up West Virginia, South Dakota and Colorado, where outgoing Democratic senators voted against the bill. Assuming the Republicans keep the remaining Democrats on board for another vote early in the new year, they will have enough votes to carry the bill, but not enough to override a veto, lest they convince five more senators that Keystone will make America more beautiful.

As Paul Waldman notes, you have to wonder why Democrats Mark Warner, Robert Casey, Michael Bennet and Tom Carper voted for Keystone, since it doesn't affect their states and they are relatively secure in their seats. Maybe they thought it was actually good for the country despite everything that has been said against Keystone, or that one way or another this pipeline is getting built whether Obama accepts it or not.

The southern leg of Keystone is already open for business, supplying tar sand oil from Cushing, Oklahoma, to Port Arthur, Texas, for refinement. TransCanada has already considered bypassing the contested areas, even if it brings additional costs. One way or another, this pipeline will be built, so why are the Republicans so determined to get this bill through Congress?

I suppose it is a way to prove to their political benefactors that they can override the President, setting up a big showdown next year. There are also tax subsidies attached to the bill, making it more lucrative to the refineries associated with the deal.

However, Obama no longer seems interested in a deal. There was a time the Senate Republicans could have gotten the President to sign onto Keystone had they been less determined to block his initiatives, administrative and judicial appointments. Price you pay for trying to make Obama a "one-term president."

Such deal-making used to be part and parcel of the Congressional process, but today's Republicans worry too much how these deals sit with their deeply conservative electorate, as it leaves the door open to being teabagged in the primaries. Can't have that. So, you can expect another threatened shutdown of government (blamed on Obama of course) in an effort to get the President to see the light so that they don't have to muster the additional votes for an override.

It's a rather sloppy game plan, but then it worked this last time around. The electorate seemed to forget the shutdown the Republicans engineered at the end of 2013 thanks to all the unrest in the Middle East. Almost makes you wonder who really is behind this Sunni uprising? It wouldn't be the first time Republicans stirred a hornet's nest in the region for their own political gain.

Whatever the case, Keystone now seems a part of our landscape whether we like it or not.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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