The crude oil intended for the Keystone XL pipeline contains great amounts of sand, tar, other impurities, plus additives needed to  get it to even flow through heated pipes. Why has no lawmaker or pundit, that I have noticed, suggested telling Canada to refine at least most of the crud out of the crude, deal with the mountains of waste there, and then send a finished or close to finished product down to the Gulf Coast by well established means? 

Rachel Maddow drives me nuts repeating over and over, and then over again, and then a few more times, her setting of the scene when describing a person or event and then supporting her point by doing it all over again. She could cover three times the news items or give much more detail if she didn’t structure her presentation as if trying to get through to a fence post.

Russia Insider is a news compiler site worth checking out for anyone interested in the intensifying cold war [cold for now except for the Ukrainians] between the U.S. and Russia and who does not want all their reading of propaganda to come from the same direction. The articles are often from U.S. sources but also from European and Russian publications.

http://russia-insider.com/en

From a posting by Corey Robin Who quotes Samuel Fleischacker

“It breaks my heart to say this, but today I don’t feel I can call myself a Zionist any longer.”
    Samuel Fleischacker is a Professor. He studied at Yale University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1989. He works in moral and political philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. Among the issues that have particularly interested him are the moral status of culture, the nature and history of liberalism, and the relationship between moral and other values (aesthetic values, religious values, political values).

 Fleischacker's full statement follows.

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/03/19/it-breaks-my-heart-to-say-this-but-toda...

    Mankind's dialogue has just come to an end. And naturally a man with whom one cannot reason is a man to be feared. The result is that - besides those who have not spoken out because they thought it useless - a vast conspiracy of silence has spread all about us, a conspiracy accepted by those who are frightened and who rationalise their fears in order to hide them from themselves, a conspiracy fostered by those whose interest it is to do so. 'You shouldn't talk about the Russian culture purge - it helps reaction.' 'Don't mention the Anglo-American support of Franco - it encourages communism.' Fear is certainly a technique.

What with the general fear of a war now being prepared by all nations and the specific fear of murderous ideologies, who can deny that we live in a state of terror? We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has been wholly submerged in History; because he can no longer tap that part of his nature, as real as the historical part, which he recaptures in contemplating the beauty of nature and of human faces; because we live in a world of abstractions, of bureaus and machines, of absolute ideas and of crude messianism. We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or in their ideas. And for all who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue and sociability, this silence is the end of the world.

To emerge from this terror, we must be able to reflect and to act accordingly. But an atmosphere of terror hardly encourages reflection. I believe, however, that instead of simply blaming everything on this fear, we should consider it as one of the basic factors in the situation, and try to do something about

This was not written yesterday. For the rest go here:

http://www.ppu.org.uk/e_publications/camus1.html

Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine. It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2015/03/20/clinton-foundations-deep-financial-ties-to-ukrainian-oligarch-who-pushed-for-closer-ties-to-eu-revealed/

FRom Wikipedia:

During the Bill Clinton administration, Nuland was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott before moving on to serve as deputy director for former Soviet Union affairs.

She served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and then as U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Nuland became special envoy for Conventional Armed Forces in Europe and then became State Department spokesperson in summer 2011.[3]

She was nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in May 2013 and sworn in to fill that role in September 2013.[4] During her confirmation hearings, she faced "sharp questions" about a memo she had sent outlining the talking points that would be used by the Obama administration in the days shortly after the 2012 Benghazi attack.[5]

Victoria Nuland has been rumored to be Hillary Clinton's choice for Secretary of State should she become President. There are some, myself included, who think that that would be one more piece of evidence that Hillary is a de facto neocon and that that appointment of an obvious neocon to a position having even more aggressively insane influence on our foreign policy would be a bad choice by Hillary made possible by a bad choice by the American people. 

http://lettersfromglobistan.com/2015/03/10/perverted-humanitarianism-the-neocon-case-for-arming-ukraine/

Neocons: the Echo of German William Fascism

The common thread linking Republicans and Netanyahu’s “national camp” is a belief of each in their own country’s “exceptionalism,” with a consequent right of military intervention wherever and whenever their “Commander in Chief” orders it, as well as the need for oppressive laws to suppress dissent. Kristol, neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard, would agree. Celebrating Netanyahu’s victory, Kristol told the New York Times, “It will strengthen the hawkish types in the Republican Party.” Kristol added that Netanyahu would win the GOP’s nomination, if he could run, because “Republican primary voters are at least as hawkish as the Israeli public.”   https://consortiumnews.com/2015/03/27/neocons-the-echo-of-german-fascism/

McCain hopes Israel is not bluffing about bombing Iran and he suggests that Israel may have to 'go rogue' and act om their own. Cool!

Here is something from Corey Robin which offers food for thought.

http://coreyrobin.com/2015/04/05/alumni-diplomacy/

The links within that posting are a significant part of the intended message. . I have only skimmed a couple of the comments so far but a couple of them impressed me too.