Even before tonight’s jobs speech, conservation groups in Colorado and across the Rocky Mountain West say it’s clear President Barack Obama has chosen polluting industry jobs over other employment sectors, demoralizing the environmental base ahead of the 2012 campaign.
On the heals of Rep. Diana DeGette hosting a women’s business forum with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Colorado U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and Mark Udall and Governor John Hickenlooper, Wednesday sent President Obama a report on innovation and job creation prepared earlier this year by Coloradans for an Innovation Economy, a group representing business and academia.
Critics of the 2011 Republican battle against abortion on Capitol Hill and in capitals around the country have said it’s about more than abortion. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette, chair of the House Pro-Choice Caucus, told the Colorado Independent this spring that the GOP push had exposed a large percentage of Republican lawmakers as anti-contraception and opposed to family planning. That assertion is supported by the vote and related discussion in New Hampshire last week that rejected a $1.8 million state contract for Planned Parenthood’s family planning and disease prevention and treatment services. The contract had been in place for decades.
Indiana Republican lawmakers stripped funding from Planned Parenthood last month and in doing so made contraception unaffordable for thousands of Medicaid patients. The battle over the law in Indiana is another high-profile example of the way Republicans, in seeking to pass sweeping anti-abortion bills, have unveiled a longstanding antipathy among a growing bloc of Republican lawmakers to the kind of basic family planning that the vast majority Americans have come to embrace instinctively as a modern-world human right, according to Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the Mormon former governor of Massachusetts who led the nation in government-based health reform, is already no favorite with the Tea Party-wing of the Republican electorate. He has now cemented that unpopularity by saying in public what he said in his book last year: that he stands behind the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists who believe that the planet is warming and that that’s a bad thing and that humans are no small part of the problem– not that he’s going to do anything about it, policy-wise.
Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson today admitted the natural gas drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, comes with certain risks, telling reporters at the company’s annual meeting that the debate still needs to stay fact-based. “We know there are risks,” Tillerson said, according to Reuters. “We’re not trying to characterize this as an activity that does not have risks.”
Colorado’s top oil and gas regulator and the head of one of the state’s leading industry lobbying groups both say federal legislation compelling disclosure of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing would not have prevented the state’s worst cases of groundwater contamination.
Echoing sentiments expressed to the Colorado Independent by U.S. House Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., more than 49 percent of the shareholders of an oil and gas company in the Permian Basin of West Texas recently asked for more transparency in hydraulic fracturing operations.
In a sit-down interview with the Colorado Independent in Denver this week, U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette said the natural gas industry should support full public disclosure of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing as a “protection” from potential litigation.
Speaker of the House John Boehner has contracted high-profile conservative attorney Paul Clement to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on behalf of House of Representatives. Boehner has agreed to pay Clement initially up to $500,000 to defend the law, although analysts say that figure is sure to rise. Colorado Springs Christian right organization Focus on the Family celebrated the arrangement, touting Clement’s resume as one of the nation’s top attorneys.
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