Is Keystone finally dead?

It depends on how you look at. As far as getting the necessary EPA approvals to go through key stretches of environmentally sensitive land, the deal is dead, at least for the time being. However, about 40 per cent of the pipeline has already been built and is pumping "dirty oil" through the US. One way or another, this project will probably be finished, even if it has to bypass key sections that would have reduced the length of its flow.

Obama seems to have waited until he got a sympathetic government in Ottawa. Stephen Harper, the former conservative MP, was the one who pushed this project the past 10 years. It was all about getting Canadian oil to the Gulf of Mexico, where it would have greater access to international markets. It was never about jobs or providing oil to the US. That flow never stopped. In fact, it greatly helped Harper fund this project. However, with oil prices currently very low, Canada is finding it now has a glut, so there is little need for this additional crude oil.

The President has other worries though, as the new Canadian government isn't excited at all about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Stephen Harper had also endorsed. Canada is a key player in this agreement.

Keystone XL has not been a hot issue on the Republican campaign trail, but will probably now be mentioned as one more awful reminder of how bad the Obama administration is. The pipeline never was going to offer the jobs the Republicans claimed, nor benefit the US economy in any appreciable way. It was nothing more than a convenient route for Canada to get its tar sands oil to US refineries and to international markets.

However, reason very rarely wins out on the campaign trail. Keystone served Republican interests by showing how friendly they are to oil and other big businesses, and that this is the only way to get out of an economic crisis like the one they generated. I guess their adage is to fight fire with fire, until everything burns down. It really has been hard to figure out how they can get away with this pretzel logic, as Steely Dan once sang, but they do. There is a very gullible audience out there that thinks that the only good business is big business and the only way this nation survives is with plenty of oil pumping through it.

We've all heard how the Koch Brothers stood to benefit the most from this pipeline, given their vast land holdings along the proposed route, as well as their vested interest in TransCanada oil. They may not make $100 billion off Keystone XL but they will do quite well with or without White House approval. Not surprisingly, they had been fueling quite a number of campaigns to promote Keystone, which I imagine they will continue to do.

For President Obama it is a political victory of sorts, in that it finally gets this monkey off his back. It also allows him to be seen as a friend of the environment, drawing support from Bill McKibben and others for standing up to Big Oil and citing the effect on climate as his reason for this long deferred decision. One only wishes he would have shown the same backbone to Shell Oil.

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, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

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

Dispatches from Vilnius

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