Points Of Interest
CNN reports that the Senate vote on the Keystone XL pipeline failed to get the required 60 votes to proceed. The Republicans will bring it up in the new Congress in January, knowing that Zero will veto it and they don’t have the two-thirds majority to override the veto.
The ABC reports that the Philae probe detected organic molecules. Given that it is generally believed that comets are the detritus of the founding of the planets of the solar system. The discovery of organic molecules on a comet would tend to indicate that the building blocks of life were present when the planets were created.
That grand jury in Missouri still hasn’t announced a finding.
The current temperature at 11:30PM is 31°F, which is a lot of fun.
2 comments
I keep hearing that Obama will “of course” veto this or that but people who rely on him to oppose creeping corporatism tend to get disappointed. Let’s not forget who approved expanded offshore drilling just before the BP disaster. He’s got his retirement to think about, after all.
Signing the bill would give up Presidential power and he has never done that. It would also derail the standard approval process through the State Department which would send the whole mess into the courts. All of this may be moot anyway, because a regulatory board in Nebraska still hasn’t given its permission, and without it the project can’t go forward.
To go through it has to get permission from the State Department and that board in Nebraska. Even if both give their approval, there are a series of law suits that have either already been or will be filed in state courts and those will probably end up in Federal courts. Giving the costs involved in getting the tar sands into a pipe line and the falling oil prices, this project becomes less valuable every day, and may not be profitable if it is built.