For the past year, most blog posts, action alerts and appeals to “Stop Keystone XL,” “Reject Keystone XL,” “Fight Keystone XL” and “Resist Keystone XL” have focused on blocking the pipeline’s northern leg, while ignoring President Obama’s support for the 485-mile southern segment. During this time, TransCanada has been busy building that southern leg, which is now 75 percent constructed.

This should alarm every climate activist.

While the Pacific coast is getting battered by storms, and while the Northeast coast continues to recover from Sandy, the only falling water that farmers in Nebraska, Kansas, and the great plains can see are the tears on their own faces. Drought may not make for gripping television, and it didn’t end once October’s lower temperatures arrived. Things are still dry — exceptionally so — and in many places, it’s getting worse.

Yet to the national media, “no rain today” in the Midwest and Plains remains “not news”.

The news roundup from April 29, 2012, including links to stories about personhood bills, Oklahoma, EPA fracking rules, Navajo, solar energy farm, Minnesota GOP, Apple’s taxes, Iran war, Spanish unemployment, Jon Corzine and more.

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 backlash to the war on women has been moving forward. This week, an Idaho bill that would have mandated ultrasounds for abortion seekers died in the legislature, a victory for women’s rights in one of the most conservative states in the nation.

But the backlash is also getting an assist from a district court in Oklahoma.

It is Super Tuesday with 10 states voting: Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. You can find my primer for tonight here and find part one of the live blog here. Real time results can be found at Politico or Google. To recap: So far Newt Gingrich won Georgia. [...]

It is Super Tuesday in the Republican presidential primary. This is the single biggest day in the primary with roughly 20 percent of the delegates at stake. People are voting in ten states today: Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. You can find my primer for tonight here.

Today is the all important Super Tuesday. Ten states with nearly 20 percent of the total delegates are voting in the Republican presidential primary: Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia. Here’s a summary of what to expect in each of these states and what the polls are saying.

That all-male hearing on birth control access over at the House Oversight Committee provoked Democratic women on the committee to walk out of the hearing room.

This settlement arises from multiple abuses found in the servicing of loans and the foreclosure process over the past several years. At the height of the housing bubble, banks sliced and diced mortgages and traded them with little regard for the rules following land recording or securitization to such a sloppy extent that they lost track of the true owner on potentially millions of homes.

To cover up for this massive failure, banks and their servicing units have been found to have routinely forged, back-dated and fabricated documents at county recorder offices and state courts across the country. Furthermore, they employed “robo-signers,” who signed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of documents and affidavits without any knowledge of the underlying mortgages. In addition, investigations uncovered massive servicing abuses, including illegal fees charged to borrowers, putting borrowers into foreclosure at the same time as they were working out loan modifications, failing to honor previous settlements where promises were made on modifications, and countless other errors that maximized servicer profits and gouged homeowners.

There are also cases of wrongful foreclosures where homeowners have been turned out of their homes without just cause, and servicer-driven foreclosures, where servicers illegally added late fees and applied payments inaccurately, pushing the homeowner into foreclosure. This is but a smattering of the examples of foreclosure fraud and servicer abuse found in a series of interlocking investigations, court depositions, reviews of documents in registers of deeds offices, and homeowner testimonials.