While Republicans continue to try to make Keystone XL a campaign issue, President Obama has officially put the fate of the pipeline on the backburner until after the November 2012 U.S. elections.

But this has not stopped other key pipelines and pipeline extensions from being built “in the meantime, in between time,” as the song lyrics made famous by the classic novel, The Great Gatsby, go.

The EPA will announce the first federal rules against fracking. Curiously, the rules have nothing to do with the Clean Water Act, but seek to reduce the air pollution around fracking sites, also a serious concern, though much of the attention around the corrosive side effects of fracking has revolved around water contamination.

Rubbing elbows at exclusive, industry-sponsored “forums” might make sense for corporate bottom lines, and it might make life a little easier–or at least a little more fun–for stressed-out scribes, but it does nothing, really, for the consumer. And that would be for the consumer of the energy product or the news product.

Republicans think they have a winning issue with the Keystone XL pipeline, even though President Obama has already approved the lower half of it. They think it plays into their depiction of Obama as unwilling to promote domestic energy to lower gas prices, even though domestic oil and gas production has exploded under Obama, and the pipeline would do nothing to aid that with the tar sands oil coming from Canada and just moving to Texas refineries on its way out to sea and the global market.

I mentioned earlier today that the President issued an executive order to create an interagency working group to oversee hydraulic fracturing, the process used in extracting natural gas. This order creates no regulations on fracking on federal lands, or on the development of environmental and public health standards associated with fracking generally. It just coordinates the “Interagency Working Group to Support Safe and Responsible Development of Unconventional Domestic Natural Gas Resources,” between 13 different federal agencies and headed up by the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council.

If you live in an area where fracking is taking place, and you start having symptoms which you think might have something to do with your being exposed to chemicals which might have been used in fracking, your doctor or any other doctors involved in your treatment can ask for information on chemicals that companies drilling in your area use in fracking. But they don’t have to tell anyone and in order to get that information, your doctor will have to sign a legally binding NDA which will prevent him from passing on that info.

“The Isla Waters” – “The song was composed by Martin and Andy around a fragment sung by Andy’s grandfather, who was born in Glen Isla in 1900. It tells of a crofter whose life was made difficult by the fact that his local ‘ale hoose’ was across the river from his croft, but miles from the nearest bridge. Crossing to the inn on stepping-stones was easy enough in daylight when sober, but returning after a night of song and powerful whisky was an entirely different matter.”

Probably the most convenient thing about turning one’s political party into a something closer to a religion, as the Republicans have increasingly done, is that your adherents can be relied upon to believe anything you say, no matter how implausible, provably false, or downright cuckoo it happens to be. When you’re talking about a religion, after all, the more improbable the belief is, the more fervently it is held, and for Republicans this tendency is always a bonus, for good reason.

A “level playing field” sounds inherently fair, so why should domestic solar manufacturing have to suffer for the sins of legacy energy production?

Meet your government, ladies and gentlemen. Josh Fox, the Academy Award-nominated director of the fracking documentary Gasland, was arrested today on Capitol Hill for attempting to film a public hearing. The GOP Committee did not want Fox filming their latest witch hunt.