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

When I turned on the TV last night, I wanted to stand up and cheer. While watching President Obama’s State of the Union address, I felt much like I did when I watched his 2008 acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium in Denver. OK, that’s not true–not hardly. Reality has not been kind to Obama’s rhetoric, after all. But when Obama got to the energy section of the speech, I found much to applaud, not unlike in 2008. . . with some obvious caveats for his praise of dirty, dangerous, failed or flat-out fictional forms of energy production.

I was struck by the way in which President Obama’s State of the Union speech was structured, with each issue laid out inthe same pattern: start with the conservative talking point, then move to the progressive positionas though the progressive-leaning positions were being given the rhetorical back seat. Only when the speech spoke of unity of worthwhile purposes did it capture what makes a nation great.

During the BP oil disaster, the government would generally back up BP’s estimates of flow data, and only changed when they changed. Now we learn from Kate Sheppard that the White House actually leaned on their own scientists to lowball the amount of oil being released from the busted well.

Palast takes us on a fast paced, kick ass narrative that globe trots from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, to the coast of Alaska, to New Orleans, to Liberia, to Azerbaijan, to Fukushima, Japan. It’s the real-deal investigative reporting of corporate irresponsibility. As Greg Palast said himself in an interview,” This book is a story of the 1%. It’s why we occupy.”

The Obama Administration officially denied the Keystone Pipeline permit pending before the State Department. The White House statement supporting the decision blamed it on the unreasonable time restriction imposed by Congress and the GOP, while leaving the door open for a renewed application.

Before Congress even passed its two-month stopgap payroll tax/UI legislation, the State Department had a warning. The bill included a mandate that the Administration give an up-or-down approval or rejection on a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline within 60 days. The State Department said flatly that this would force them to reject the permit, because it would not give them enough time to complete their environmental review. Today they announced they’ll do what they promised.

Nigeria is a giant on the African continent, a maturing democracy and a major hub for culture and trade. It also contains about one sixth of Africa’s population, many of whom live in abject poverty. So when the government decided to “save” funds by removing a critical fuel subsidy, it lit a tinderbox of populist outrage.

Uprisings have been rocking the country all week. Tens of thousands of protesters amassed to express anger at a jump in oil prices. Labor activists launched a general strike. Oil workers have also threatened to shut down production, jolting global oil markets.

Dylan Ratigan is well positioned to author a book, designed to be an enjoyable and informative read by normal humans, on the ongoing financial crisis. He is the wunderkind who became Global Managing Editor for Corporate Finance of Bloomberg, the premier news service that specializes in finance, at an exceptionally young age. He was at CNBC while that network was hyping the housing bubble as a non-bubble offering fantastic investment opportunities.

The biggest reason I can find for economic optimism in 2012 is a belief that people will eventually have to buy new cars and form households, so why not this year? That appears to be the animating thought behind Matt Yglesias’ cheery forecast in the new year. But the economic story is a lot more mixed.