New Poll -- Per Reader's Request; The Keystone And Tea Leaves

I suspended the poll because a) it was not adding much to the blog; b) it took a lot of time; and, c) I couldn't come up with timely questions that enough folks might be interested in.

One reader, out of the hundreds of thousands that read the blog (LOL), asked for a poll on whether the president would "approve" the Keystone XL.

I don't like that poll because it is not "timely" in the sense that it could take quite some time before we know the answer.

However, it might be interesting. And it gave me a chance to see if I could remember how to post a poll. So there it is.

The tea leaves suggest that a rational individual has seen enough, read enough, heard enough, spoke enough, that it was "okay" to approve the Keystone XL pipeline.

The last argument "on the table" has been addressed and that argument was answered in favor of the pipeline.

Now that all arguments have been addressed, the answer will be made simply on political grounds.

In politics everything and everyone is unpredictable; President Obama is particularly unpredictable (I would use a different word, but "unpredictable" seems adequate). [That's what I wrote for the original post; The Daily Kos agrees.]

So, the poll.

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Predicting political outcomes is very much like astrology. In astrology, one has the stars; in politics, one has tea leaves. 

Will he or won't he ("approve the Keystone")?

Tea leaves:

• state of the union speech suggests he understands the importance of fracking and non-fossil fuels like natural gas (according to the Democratic Party, natural gas is not a fossil fuel)
• the US State Department publishes its study suggesting the Keystone is not an environmental threat
• former Interior Secretary, a Democrat and Obama cabinet member Ken Salazar says the Keystone should be approved