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Energy

Senate approves Keystone pipeline as 9 Democrats buck party leaders
WASHINGTON TIMES
Stephen Dinan
Senators approved the Keystone XL pipeline in a momentous vote Thursday as nine Democrats bucked their party leaders and joined Republicans in backing the long-stalled project, setting up an eventual showdown with President Obama, who has vowed a veto.

 

LNG exports gain momentum on Capitol Hill
FUEL FIX
Jennifer Dlouhy
A plan to accelerate government approvals for liquefied natural gas exports is gaining momentum on Capitol Hill, even as low oil prices weaken the economic case for U.S. LNG. The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing to examine the issue Thursday, one day after the House overwhelmingly passed legislation to set a deadline for the Department of Energy to finish reviewing LNG export applications.

 

Obama’s Climate Plan Could Threaten U.S. Forests
POLITICO
Michael Grunwald
This highly technical but consequential fight over the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to “bioenergy”—energy derived from trees, crops, or other plants—has gotten lost in the larger hubbub over the Obama plan’s impact on coal, and the potential upheaval in an electricity sector that will be forced to rein in its greenhouse-gas emissions for the first time. But while the overall plan was hailed by environmentalists and attacked by industry when it was unveiled in draft form last June, the EPA seems to be taking industry’s side on bioenergy.

 

Falling Prices Spread Pain Far Across The Oil Patch
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Erin Ailworth and Dan Molinski
Many big energy companies have said they plan to slash billions of dollars in spending along with thousands of jobs; energy giant ConocoPhillips told employees Thursday to expect a salary freeze and layoffs. Indicators like drilling permits in Texas have fallen sharply.

 

NRC: Yucca Mountain site is safe
POLITICOPRO (Subscribe)
Alex Guillén
The long-awaited Nuclear Regulatory Commission safety evaluation of Yucca Mountain said that the site would be safe as a nuclear waste repository, but it recommended against approving it — for now.

 

Obama policies may end energy boom
USA TODAY
Steve Forbes
American jobs, affordable energy and continued economic recovery will depend on a strong energy sector. The men and women working in oil and gas don’t need a medal or any special favors, but they do need the government to let them do their jobs. If a bipartisan coalition in Congress can hang tough against the administration’s onslaught, America’s energy revolution will continue to be the envy of the world.

 

 

Technology

Metadata Can Expose Person’s Identity Even Without Name
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Robert Lee Hotz
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed anonymous credit-card transactions by 1.1 million people. Using a new analytic formula, they needed only four bits of secondary information—metadata such as location or timing—to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved, even when the data were scrubbed of any names, account numbers or other obvious identifiers.

 

FCC chairman warns: The GOP’s net neutrality bill could jeopardize broadband’s ‘vast future’
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
The head of the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t like that Republicans want to take away his agency’s powers to police Internet providers. And on Thursday, he said as much in a lengthy speech to reporters. “You know I’m a huge Lincoln buff, and he had a great expression: ‘The struggle of today is not altogether for today; it’s for the vast future also,’ ” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, implying that if the GOP restricts the commission’s legal powers, the future of the Internet could be harmed.

 

Feds increase standard for Web speed
THE HILL
Julian Hattem
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday raised the bar for what it considers to be high-speed broadband Internet service. While the move is largely symbolic, the 3-2 vote to change the definition of broadband Internet could presage heightened expectations for companies on the part of regulators, and contribute to agency leaders’ concerns about the lack of competition in the U.S. market for Internet service.

 

FCC Raises $44.9 Billion in U.S. Wireless Spectrum Sale
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Thomas Gryta and Gautham Nagesh
The Federal Communications Commission’s biggest ever auction of wireless spectrum closed Thursday and drew a record $44.9 billion in bids, a boon for taxpayers and a sign of the growing cost of supporting Americans’ smartphone habit. The haul is more than twice as much as the government notched in its last major sale of spectrum in 2008, back when Apple Inc.’s iPhone was only about a year old. Winners will be disclosed Friday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said.

 

911 dispatchers are literally listening to people die. These new FCC rules will help stop that.
WASHINGTON POST
Brian Fung
Under new rules from the Federal Communications Commission, wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T will have to provide 911 dispatchers with more accurate location data so that first-responders know how to find people in need. Within a few years, the carriers will be expected to deliver specific latitude-longitude coordinates for a wireless 911 caller that’s accurate to within 50 meters, or 164 feet. Another option will be to provide dispatchers with a caller’s specific address, down to the suite or room number. Existing technologies like WiFi hotspots can help narrow down a caller’s location substantially, and part of the solution will rely on those.

 

China Further Tightens Grip on the Internet
NEW YORK TIMES
Andrew Jacobs
China has long had some of the world’s most onerous Internet restrictions. But until now, the authorities had effectively tolerated the proliferation of V.P.N.s as a lifeline for millions of people, from archaeologists to foreign investors, who rely heavily on less-fettered access to the Internet. But earlier this week, after a number of V.P.N. companies, including StrongVPN and Golden Frog, complained that the Chinese government had disrupted their services with unprecedented sophistication, a senior official for the first time acknowledged its hand in the attacks and implicitly promised more of the same.

 

 

Finance

Weiss Fight Is Over, but Wall Street Animosity Lingers
NEW YORK TIMES
William D. Cohan
[Warren’s] drive to derail [Weiss’] nomination highlights a lingering animosity toward bankers that risks becoming counterproductive. It also tended to paint everyone on Wall Street with the same broad brush of nefarious behavior. The truth, of course, is much more nuanced, as Ms. Warren well knows. Some Wall Street types serving in government want to protect their friends and the status quo; others, like Mr. Weiss, want to actually try to reform the bad behavior they have been seeing for years.

 

CFPB offers changes to mortgage rules for smaller lenders
THE HILL
Vicki Needham
A top government regulator on Thursday proposed several changes to its mortgage rules aimed at providing more leeway for smaller financial institutions to make loans. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) suggested expanding the definition of rural area and increasing the number of loans an institution can make before falling out of the designated small-lender category under year-old ability-to-repay rules.

 

A breakthrough on trade in Asia
WASHINGTON POST
David Ignatius
Strange bedfellows of 2015: As the Obama administration pushes toward a major new trade agreement in Asia this spring, it is developing two unlikely allies: Chinese officials abroad, who are signaling that they want in, and Republicans in Congress, who appear willing to support what would be one of President Obama’s biggest successes.

 

 

Politics

Iowa’s David Kochel goes all in for Jeb Bush
DES MOINES REGISTER
Jennifer Jacobs
Jeb Bush has recruited a key political strategist into his inner circle: Iowa’s David Kochel, who has been a close adviser to Mitt Romney since Romney’s earliest days on the presidential campaign trail. After three months of soul searching and election forecasting, Kochel decided this week to join Team Bush, he told The Des Moines Register in an exclusive telephone interview Thursday. Kochel, 50, of Des Moines, will be a senior adviser to Bush’s new political action committee, Right to Rise. If Bush pulls the trigger and runs for president of the United States, Kochel would be tapped to lead his national campaign, Bush’s advisers told the Register.

 

Obama veers left
POLITICO
Ben White
As he prepares to deliver his budget on Monday, President Barack Obama is lurching to the left. The president has already proposed — and had to drop — a plan to tax college savings accounts. He’s writing for The Huffington Post. He declared war on “mindless austerity” while pledging fresh tax hikes on banks and the rich to pay for free community college and other goodies. Remember those budget caps put in place in 2011? Obama wants to blast right through them. It’s a progressive’s dream version of Obama, untethered from earlier centrist leanings and flirtations with “grand bargains” with Republicans on entitlement reform.

 

Obama Budget Proposes 7% More in Spending Above Sequestration Caps
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Carol E. Lee and Kristina Peterson
President Barack Obama will propose government spending that is 7%—or $74 billion—over caps he and congressional Republicans agreed to in a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal over three years ago, a White House official said Thursday. Mr. Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget, due to be released Monday, will propose some $561 billion in defense spending and $530 billion in nondefense spending, the official said.

 

‘Middle-Class Economics’
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Editorial
President Obama is disguising his latest tax increase as “middle-class economics,” no doubt because it sounds better than calling it income redistribution. So it’s instructive that this false political front has already been exposed by no less than the President’s political allies at the Tax Policy Center.

 

A Plan for Central America
NEW YORK TIMES
Vice President Joe Biden
For the first time, we can envision and work toward having the Americas be overwhelmingly middle class, democratic and secure. That is why we are asking Congress to work with us. Together, we can help Central America become an embodiment of the Western Hemisphere’s remarkable rise — not an exception to it.

 

Bipartisan efforts to repeal the medical device tax are galling
WASHINGTON POST
Editorial
Once again, Congress seems set to prove it can be bipartisan — when the challenge involves caving in to special interests. Republicans and Democrats look set to repeal the Affordable Care Act’s medical device tax, a 2.3 percent excise on manufacturers of everything from sutures to pacemakers to MRI machines. The winners would be an influential lobby and rank hypocrisy. The loser would be the country.