Tag: Obama administration

A Salt Lake City doctor on Friday expressed “deep distress” at the Obama administration’s decision to pull back new national smog standards proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Colorado’s Democratic leadership today was cautiously optimistic and somewhat supportive of weekend efforts to hammer out a debt-ceiling compromise – a deal that’s gaining momentum and could be voted on as soon as today in the U.S. Senate.

Want to see (and hear) how truly far apart Democrats and Republicans are on the ongoing debt-ceiling, default-crisis debate? Look no further than Colorado’s own congressional delegation. Republican Doug Lamborn shared his views on KRDO radio Wednesday night, and Democrat Jared Polis will appear tonight on Fox Business Network’s Stossel Show with John Stossel.

More than 17,000 low-income Colorado households will lose state benefits to help pay their home heating bill this winter if the federal government delivers on expected funding cuts to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP).

Colorado’s senior senator, Democrat Mark Udall, is pushing the same panic button the White House has been pounding the last couple of days, imploring both parties to come up with a debt-limit compromise before the looming Aug. 2 deadline.

While critics on the right have accused the Obama administration of moving too slowly on the still-unproven potential of oil shale on Colorado’s Western Slope, observers on the left say the White House has been pushing too fast on an agenda promoting Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal and tar sands oil production in Canada.

A victim of the ongoing federal budget battle, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is backing off of last December’s Wild Lands Order, which would have compelled the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to make millions of acres of federal land eligible for wilderness protection.

Wildfire season in Colorado’s super-saturated high country seems so far off, but the debate over thinning beetle-killed forests to reduce fire risk around mountain towns remains at the forefront of an ongoing campaign to further revise the Colorado Roadless Rule.

Colorado Division of Wildlife (CDOW) officials on Monday reported that 214,000 hunters harvested 48,018 elk in Colorado last fall – a 22 percent success rate. However, some conservation groups are worried the Obama administration’s National Forest Planning Rule unveiled last month could adversely impact fish and wildlife habitat on 13 national forests and grasslands encompassing 14.5 million acres of public lands in Colorado.

This morning, President Barack Obama plans to officially announce that Elizabeth Warren — Harvard Law professor and the current head of the Congressional Oversight Panel over the Troubled Asset Relief Program — will head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.... sort of.