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"  In the last of the 67,823 Republican debates scheduled to precede the Iowa caucuses, Newt Gingrich, then the frontrunner, now d/b/a a pile of smoking meat by the side of the road, summed up the people he thought were behind the Obama Administration&amp;#039;s decision not to rubber-stamp blindly the XL pipeline, the massive project that aims to bring the tar sands of Alberta to the refineries of Texas via most of the central United States, and which the people building it have pinky-sworn will not result in drinking water you can use to light your Coleman stove. Newt knows why the president is objecting to linking this controversial project to his attempt to extend the payroll tax cut, and it&amp;#039;s not because the president realizes that the two issues have as much to do with each other as bananas do with carpet tacks. No, said Newt, the president was merely protecting &amp;quot;left-wing environmental extremists in San Francisco.&amp;quot;  (The &amp;quot;San Francisco&amp;quot; is a nice little dog-whistle. It&amp;#039;s Newt&amp;#039;s way of saying &amp;quot;gay,&amp;quot; just as &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t look at all well, dear&amp;quot; is Newt&amp;#039;s way of saying, &amp;quot;I want a divorce.&amp;quot;) Anyway, let me introduce you to Ken Haar. Ken is an independent state senator from Nebraska, that noted hotbed of left-wing San Francisco environmental extremism. In fact, Ken is a San Francisco environmental extremist who hales from Malcolm, Nebraska, which would seem to be something of a geographical conundrum for old Newt. Ken was instrumental in forcing Trans-Canada, the aforementioned pinky-swearing pipeline mongers, to move their project out of the environmentally fragile Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and in asserting the state&amp;#039;s right to conduct its own environmental impact study.  Anyway, Ken paused in the middle of a hair-raising drive back to Nebraska from a visit with his son in Texas to talk about watching an issue that strikes so close to home for him being used as a bargaining chip in an ongoing Washington dumbshow. &amp;quot;People see what&amp;#039;s going on in D.C., and they wonder what&amp;#039;s coming next,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But, as long as we got it moved away from the Sand Hills, that&amp;#039;s what we were aiming at and hopefully, we&amp;#039;ve done that. &amp;quot;Trans-Canada has said they&amp;#039;ll move the route and they&amp;#039;d have to be crazy not to follow through on that.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s also still concerned about the impact of the pipeline on the endangered Ogalallla aquifer, the massive natural water system that feeds most of the arable farmland in the country. In some place in the Sand Hills, the water table is so close to the surface that water leaches out of the ground entirely. And he wants the president to hold off on a decision about the pipeline until Nebraska&amp;#039;s own environmental study is complete. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what else we can do,&amp;quot; he says. As a matter of precise historical fact, Newt, the president was not protecting the imaginary Talking Point People who roam freely in your head. He was protecting people like Ken Haar, local politicians trying to make absoutely certain sure that their constituents won&amp;#039;t get poisoned, which would seem to me to be about the most basic constituent service you could provide. Now we know what historians do in a lobbying shop. Windows. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12140/xl-pipeline-interview-6619956/>