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Energy
Behind Drop in Oil Prices, Washington’s Hand
NEW YORK TIMES
Eduardo Porter
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this story is that one of the main participants in this revolution is the American government. Facing fears of a broad energy shortage, in the shadow of an embargo by Arab oil producers, the Nixon administration and Congress laid the foundation of an industrial policy that over the span of four decades developed the technologies needed to unleash American shale oil and natural gas onto world markets. Environmentalists against any government involvement in the fossil fuels business will hate this, of course. But the collaboration between government and business in pursuit of energy independence offers a valuable lesson for policy makers forging a strategy to fit the current energy imperative: reducing carbon emissions to combat climate change.
Low gas prices are great for Obama. Too bad he can’t really take credit.
VOX
Brad Plumer
In his State of the Union address tonight, Obama trumpeted low gasoline prices around the country. “Today, America is number one in oil and gas … And thanks to lower gas prices and higher fuel standards, the typical family this year should save $750 at the pump.” It’s not a surprise he’d mention this. The US oil boom — and subsequent recent plunge in gasoline prices — are giving the US a big economic boost. But Obama also can’t really take much credit: gas prices have mostly fallen for reasons outside of the president’s control.
Obama knocks Keystone focus, vows to defend enviro rules
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Andrew Restuccia
President Barack Obama bashed Washington’s obsession with the Keystone XL oil pipeline and vowed to block efforts by the Republican-led Congress to roll back environmental protections in his State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Rare Moment of Consensus for Senate on Keystone Pipeline
NEW YORK TIMES
Coral Davenport
The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the Keystone XL pipeline bill that is aimed at improving energy efficiency in buildings — a rare moment of bipartisan agreement in a tense debate that is nowhere near being settled. Lawmakers voted, 91 to 5, to add the popular energy-efficiency provision to a contentious bill that would approve construction of the Keystone pipeline.
Dems add climate to Keystone mix
POLITICO
Elana Schor
The Senate will vote as early as Wednesday on whether it believes in the science behind climate change. The vote, which will come as an amendment to the bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, has turned into a top priority for Democrats who are eager to put Republicans on the hot seat over whether they believe human activity is warming the planet.
Obama puts GOP on climate hot seat
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Darren Goode
Obama used his annual State of the Union address to Congress to directly confront Republican leaders who’ve sought to sidestep the debate over whether climate change is occurring and if human activity was to blame. “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act,” Obama said. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what … the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.”
Climate Reporting’s Hot Mess
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Holman Jenkins
News reporting of the latest climate alarm was not uniformly bad. Among hundreds of publications in the Factiva database, exactly one—the Mail on Sunday, one of those derided London tabloids—injected the phrase “statistically significant” into consideration of whether 2014 was in any meaningful sense the “hottest year on record.”
Technology
Eight reasons to support Congress’s net neutrality bill
WASHINGTON POST
Larry Downes
The proposed law is short and sweet. It grants the FCC authority to enforce tough new limits on how ISPs manage network traffic, directly addressing the kinds of practices both the agency and the White House have argued could, if implemented by ISPs in the future, threaten the continued success of the U.S. Internet. At the same time, it would cleanly resolve the long-running conflict between the agency and the federal courts, who have rejected two earlier net neutrality efforts from the FCC on the ground that Congress never delegated oversight of broadband ISPs to the agency.
Congress girds for ‘net neutrality’ battle
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
At the same time, though, the [GOP] draft bill would specifically clarify that broadband Internet access is an “information service” under the law, to prevent the FCC from enacting tougher, utility-style rules. It would also strip the FCC of other legal tools that it could use to go after companies. Those provisions could be a deal-killer for Democrats. “I strongly believe that we need the strongest protections, and right now I don’t think that bill does it,” Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said on Tuesday. On Friday, he called the bill a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
Obama just lumped the Internet in with trains, bridges and Keystone XL. Here’s why that’s a big deal.
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Lumping the country’s Internet onramps in with roads and bridges is a significant rhetorical move, laying a kind of governmental claim over these types of commercial conduits. It helps justify Obama’s recent calls for new rules on Internet providers and his proposal that federal regulators have a role to play in helping cities build and sell their own Internet service.
Obama Calls for Tough Legislation to Combat Cyber-Attacks
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Damian Paletta
There are limits to what the White House is seeking. Mr. Obama has called for steeper penalties for people convicted of computer hacking, but the White House hasn’t specified how it might punish foreign countries for stealing information, a growing concern following the Sony breach. A key stumbling block in the effort to toughen cyber-laws is a concern among some U.S. companies that sharing information with the government could expose them to shareholder lawsuits or a customer exodus. Companies have also complained that certain government agencies are using surveillance to steal corporate and customer information.
Obama leaves out patent reform
THE HILL
Mario Trujillo
A call for patent reform legislation in Congress was left out of President Obama’s Sof the Union address Tuesday night. … It is seen a potential area of compromise this Congress, and observers believe it to be increasingly likely to advance now that Republicans control both chambers.
Finance
Obama Defends Financial Reform But Avoids Bank Bashing
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ryan Tracy
Mr. Obama, who has toned down his reproaches of Wall Street since winning re-election in 2012, had been expected to discuss risk-taking by big financial firms ahead of a new tax his administration plans to propose on those firms in the coming weeks, according to senior administration officials. Instead, Mr. Obama promised to veto bills “unraveling the new rules on Wall Street” adopted during his six years in office, but he didn’t discuss the new tax.
Obama’s proposal to raise the capital gains tax drives sharp wedge between parties
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Steven Mufson
President Obama reopened a fiscal can of worms with his proposal to increase the capital gains tax to 28 percent, a plan Republicans said they would not adopt.
Liberals: Great speech, Obama … except on trade
POLITICO
Lauren French
But he irked even the most die-hard Obama Democrats by pushing yet again for fast-track authority to reach trade deals. Oregon Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio said trade is “No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 in terms of things” that House Democrats “will find objectionable to the speech, along with a long list of things we would like.”
The Allure of Easy Money
NEW YORK TIMES
Room for Debate
One thing on the minds of many working-class Americans is greater federal regulation of payday loans, the small, short-term high-interest loans that are currently under state jurisdiction. Critics of payday loans say they lead to a cycle of ballooning debt for consumers, who can rarely afford to pay them back and must take out more loans to stay afloat. But payday lenders say that strict rules would eliminate the industry and with it, the only viable lending option for people with bad credit. Should payday loans be federally regulated?
Politics
Fact check: Obama’s State of the Union
USA TODAY
FactCheck.org
President Obama largely stuck to the facts in his State of the Union address, although he did cherry-pick data and exaggerate at times to put the best spin on his accomplishments.
Does Obama Believe What He Says Anymore?
NATIONAL JOURNAL
Ron Fournier
He acknowledged there is good reason for cynicism. “But I still think the cynics are wrong.” Does he really? After six years of blaming the GOP and accusing pundits of overstating his ability to change Washington, Obama still has the audacity to hope?
The Gaslight Presidency
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
If Mr. Obama won’t make any concession to political reality, then Republicans are under no obligation to take his agenda seriously. For their own peace of mind, they should ignore his gaslighting and prioritize something that really would help the economy.
Mr. Obama’s policy goals may be too ambitious with a Republican Congress
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
President Obama declared Tuesday night that “we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth.” Economic indicators — jobs, growth, gas prices — are indeed more favorable. And yet his State of the Union address was Mr. Obama’s first to a joint session of Congress controlled by Republicans. The progress on Mr. Obama’s watch did not translate into success for his party in November. From that turn of events, Mr. Obama appears to have learned that Democrats need to rebrand themselves as the party of “middle-class economics” to recapture an electorate dangerously susceptible to Republican messages — and that the newly buoyant economy provides the opportunity for measures aimed at easing inequality and shoring up the rewards to work.
At the State of the Union, a President Outgunned in Congress Is Still Combative
NEW YORK TIMES
Editorial
The circumstances facing President Obama as he delivered his State of the Union address Tuesday night could not have seemed less promising: a presidency with only two years left to get anything done in a Congress that is now totally in the control of a party that has routinely ignored his pleas for cooperation. So he chose wisely to send a simple, dramatic message about economic fairness, about the fact that the well-off — the top earners, the big banks, Silicon Valley — have done just great, while the middle and working classes remain dead in the water. His remedy: skim from the rich and redistribute to those below, while deploying other weapons to raise wages and increase jobs.
Obama’s populist plan skirts root causes
USA TODAY
Editorial
The main problem Obama faces is that while manipulating the tax code can put a little more money in some people’s pockets at the expense of others, it can’t give most people what they want, which is a greater chance to improve their lives. Weak wage growth is primarily the result of globalization and technological advances, not a tax code that is overly lenient on the wealthy.
Sen. Joni Ernst delivers personal, populist Republican response to State of the Union
WASHINGTON POST
Robert Costa
Freshman Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) offered a smoothly delivered, personal and populist message that sought to draw a contrast with President Obama in the official GOP response to Obama’s State of the Union address. Minutes after Obama touted the economy’s upturn, Ernst cast his presidency as a period of national unrest and economic hardship and said Republicans understand “how difficult these past six years have been.”
Cradle to Ivory Tower
NEW YORK TIMES
Frank Bruni
Leaving aside all of the other good arguments both for and against it, I have one big problem with the proposal for free community college that President Obama recently outlined and described anew in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. It’s awfully late in the game. I don’t mean that he should have moved on it earlier in his presidency. I mean that our focus on getting kids to and through higher education cannot be separated from, or supplant, our focus on making sure that they’re prepared for it. And we have a painfully long way to go in that regard.
Hill fight on No Child Left Behind looms
POLITICO
Maggie Severns
Senate education committee leader Sen. Lamar Alexander says he wants to work out a bipartisan deal this spring to rewrite the landmark education law No Child Left Behind. But last week, he released a discussion draft of the bill that was anything but. He and other congressional Republicans are angling to revamp rules about how often students are tested, how much power the education secretary should have, the amount of control states have over education policy as they collect billions in federal dollars, when to intervene in schools deemed failing and more. The debate kicks off at a hearing Wednesday on testing.
Postal Service proposes rate hikes to keep up with inflation
WASHINGTON POST
Josh Hicks
The U.S. Postal Service has proposed raising postage rates this spring to adjust for inflation, according to a recent filing from the organization. Under the USPS plan, which was submitted to the Postal Regulatory Commission last Thursday, prices across all classes of mail would increase by an average of 1.966 percent on April 26. The cost of a single-piece stamp would remain at 49 cents, but the rate for letters weighing more than 1 ounce would increase from 21 cents to 22 cents per additional ounce.
Rebels Tighten Grip on Yemen’s Capital After Seizing Army Base
BLOOMBERG
Mohammed Hatem
Shiite Houthi fighters tightened their grip on Yemen’s capital after seizing control of the presidential palace, threatening to plunge Saudi Arabia’s southern neighbor deeper into sectarian conflict.
