People who are against the pipeline project have spread the evils of pipelines during the undecided period of the administration. They managed to portray pipelines as dangerous when in fact the industry is the most effective and safest in the nation.

The Keystone pipeline network is nearly 70 percent finished and it is already carrying over half a million barrels of Canadian crude oil to the US. Since the project was proposed in 2005, it has generated thousands of jobs and will continue to create more as soon as the final phase, known as Keystone XL, is approved by President Obama.

Keystone XL will create thousands of construction jobs in the Midwest. It would also increase the nation’s independence and energy security by steering away imports of oil from less friendly nations. Canada will continue to develop the oil sands. Transporting the oil to refineries through the Keystone pipeline network is preferable than by other ways such as rail, truck or ship. Pipelines are safer, produce less emissions, less expensive, and more efficient.

The anti-pipeline activists say they care for the environment and if that is the case, they should be in favor of the Keystone pipeline instead of going against it. Even the AFL-CIO supports the pipeline. The group is composed of Republicans, Democrats, the Chamber of Commerce, Organized Labor and a former top hazmat safety regulator.

President Obama’s speech will be his attempt to fulfill one of his State of the Union pledges of making his administration more transparent with the public with regards to the drone program. Drones have become the centerpiece of his administration’s efforts to battle against terrorism. People were criticizing the use of drones.

The White House official said President Obama would use the speech to be given at the National Defense University to discuss efforts to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The president pledged to renew the efforts even if his attempts to close the detention center were thwarted in his first term.

President Obama prepared the speech earlier this month but it was postponed due to distracting events, such as the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from Associated Press reporters and the hunger strikes at Guantanamo. The planned speech was first reported by The Washington Post that claimed President Obama may change it to narrow it down to the two issues.

Civil liberties groups as well as a coalition of Democratic and Republican lawmakers have criticized Obama’s administration for keeping the drone program a secret. Critics were concerned about the use of drones to kill American citizens in foreign lands.

The White House is expected to increase the use of drones and other counterterrorism methods as the war in Afghanistan comes to a close at the end of 2014. Most of the US troops in the region have already returned to the United States.

The White House official was authorized to talk about President Obama’s speech but remained anonymous because the president hasn’t delivered the speech yet.

The president’s aides ordered the White House staff not to be sidetracked by the hearings on Capitol Hill. White House chief of staff Denis R. McDonough expects them to spend less than 10 percent of their time on the controversies.

McDonough laid out a plan to focus on overhauling the immigration laws, implementing the health care law, and reaching a budget agreement. The White House also wants to keep student loan rates low when the present ones expire in summer. The administration’s plan to get through the controversies is to highlight the policy proposals and contrast them with the political gamesmanship by the Republicans.

White House officials know they can get bipartisan support required to pass the proposals in Congress. They also want to focus on narrowing President Obama’s policies that can be carried out on his own. Last Friday, the president flew to Baltimore to announce the faster process for federal approval of infrastructure projects.

Republicans criticized President Obama’s executive actions as big government overreach. They are likely to use the recent controversies to further their case as the White House goes into thorny issues, such as greenhouse gas emissions.

While President Obama was in Baltimore, his opponents in the House questioned acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service and its inspector general as they tried to determine whether other officials in the administration knew that conservative groups were scrutinized more than other groups.

The White House made several nominations in the previous week after several positions were unfilled at the State Department. The administration also continued to lobby to get the approval of a nominee at the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

The attorney general has been on the hot seat after the discovery that they Justice Department secretly recorded the conversations of some reporters from the Associated Press. The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as much whistle blower as every other president in nation’s history combined.

President Obama declined to make comments about the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records, which was part of an investigation into media leaks of a Yemen-based plan to bomb an American airliner. CIA agents were put at risk after the news agency ran a story about it last year.

The president said that the leaks were connected to national security and could place people at risk. He continued by saying he would make no apologies and he doesn’t think the American people expect him not to be concerned about the data that might compromise missions or get them killed.

President Obama said he support the revival of a media shield law that would balance the need to protect press freedoms with national security concerns. The president said that the case renewed interest on how the government can achieve that balance. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York announced that he would reintroduce a measure to provide legal protections to journalists who gather news.

The Associated Press and several other media organizations filed protests after the Department of Justice revealed it got phone records of three AP bureaus with regards to a probe of an administration leak after the failed bomb plot in Yemen in 2012. They want President Obama to fire Attorney General Holder.

President Obama spoke at the yearly National Peace Officers Memorial Service that the White House described as an annual ceremony that honors law enforcement who died in the line of duty in the past year. The president also held meetings with advisers and people expected to hear more about how the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative groups.

The president said he has ordered Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to hold people responsible for the wrongdoings to be accountable and to implement reforms recommended in the report made by the Inspector General. President Obama said that what they did was wrong no matter how they were allowed to take place.

The Obama administration continued to face questions regarding the September 11 attack on a United States facility in Benghazi, Libya. Republicans and other groups criticized the White House for the seizure of journalists’ phone records from the Justice Department, which was said to be part of an investigation into national security news leaks. These issues could make it hard for Obama to achieve presidential normalcy.

President Obama said that he had the opportunity to review the Treasury Department watchdog’s report on its probe of IRS employees who targeted conservative groups applying for tax exempt status. He said that the investigation’s findings were inexcusable and intolerable. He added that the federal government must conduct itself in a way that was worthy of the public’s trust.

The president said that the IRS must be impartial and fair in applying the law and the agency’s employees must act with integrity. He said that the report showed some of the employees failed the test.

Steven Miller, who at the time the wrongdoing took place was not the commissioner of the IRS, agreed to step aside due to the misconduct on the part of the government agency. Obama was visibly angry and said that the additional screening that “Tea Party” groups went through prior to last year’s presidential election was a complete outrage.

Obama added that he was in fact angry over what happened and said the American people have a right to be upset.

The remarks Obama made were in response to the reverberation that has occurred due to the controversy throughout Washington this week.

Previously Obama has said the accusations against the IRS had been outrageous but did not report publicly on the incident until he received a report prepared by the Department of the Treasury.

Jacob Lew, the Secretary of Treasury requested that Miller resign. Miller agreed to do so but his resignation was effective immediately, it will take place in June.

The Inspector General’s report, which was released on Tuesday, did not put the blame on the leadership of the IRS in Washington for initiating the scandal, but found fault with them for not adequately supervising employees located at its office in Cincinnati where the targeting had first started.

The peer-reviewed Wildlife Society Bulletin estimated that more than 573,000 birds were killed by the wind farms across the nation. These included 83,000 hunting birds, such as eagles, hawks and falcons. Each death is a federal crime according to the Obama administration when it prosecuted oil companies when birds drown in waste pits and to power companies when birds were fried by the power lines. But in the case of wind farms, they have not been prosecuted even for repeat incidents.

Wind power has been touted as the pollution free energy alternative to ease global warming. It is a vital part of President Obama’s energy plan. The White House has given a $1 billion a year tax break to the industry that has resulted to doubling the total generated wind power in his first term.

The large number of dead birds at wind farms indicated how the rush of generating renewable energy came with its huge consequences. These were trade-offs that the administration was willing to make for cleaner energy.

The Associated Press collected documents and emails that showed glimpses into the problem. It showed 14 deaths at seven locations in California, five in New Mexico, five in Oregon, one in Washington State, and one in Nevada.

The deadliest place in the United States for golden eagles is Wyoming, where federal officials said more than four dozen golden eagles were killed by wind farms since 2009. Getting precise figures was hard because companies were not required to disclose the number of birds they kill.

President Obama said he learned about the claims last Friday after he read about them in news reports. If some IRS personnel engaged in such practices that have been written in reports, the president said they are culpable and the agency is not place for them.

The president didn’t comment on the details of the probe until it was complete. He said that any wrongdoing would be punished to the extent of the law. He added that the IRS is an independent agency that needs to have absolute integrity and people must be confident that they apply the law in a non-partisan way.

The Obama administration and the IRS have been scrutinized since Friday. The agency apologized for singling out specific groups, especially those who were connected to the tea party, when they applied for tax exempt status.

The IRS insisted that high level employees were not involved in the practice. The draft of an inspector general’s report that was set to be released this week indicated that Lois Lerner, an IRS official who heads the oversight of tax-exempt groups, knew about practice as early as June of 2011.

The report also showed that the IRS started targeting tea party groups in the spring of 2010, which was two years before the agency head told Congress that the targeting was not true. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration report said the agency determined it would have to destroy some collected information. This was indicated in a letter dated June 2012 that informed organizations the information would be destroyed.

According to the new data from the Census Bureau, President Obama’s electoral foundation has two pillars. These are young people and African Americans. Black voters were responsible for the win in the 2012 election. The African American turnout of 66 percent of eligible voters was higher than that of white, which was 64 percent. 1.7 million more African Americans voted in 2012 compared in 2008. On the other hand, 2 million less whites went out to vote in 2012 than four years ago.

The participation of African Americans in elections was impressive. It increased 13 percentage points since 1996. During the same time period, white voting rates increased by three percentage points. Hispanic rates have increased four percentage points.

President Obama has dominated the African American votes. In 2008, he got 95 percent of the African American vote. Last November, the president got 93 percent. The percentages are impressive but they are not unique. Then-Senator John F. Kerry got 88 percent of African American votes in 2004. Al Gore got 90 percent of black votes in 2000. During the midterm elections, 89 percent of black voters picked Democratic candidates but didn’t stop Republicans from getting majority of the positions in the House of Representatives.

It would be hard to imagine any other candidate in the future that would create the same enthusiasm in the black community as that of the first African American presidential nominee. But the Democratic Party can try to come close to it.

Republicans are calling for a committee to look into the September 11 attack that took place at the U.S. diplomatic post in Libya. However, Obama and his administration also must deal with the reports saying conservative groups were being targeted by the Internal Revenue Service.

Cameron is meeting with Obama and both are scheduled to hold a joint press conference in the Rose Garden at the White House on Monday morning.

Obama has yet to make any public comment about the IRS admission that it placed extra scrutiny on groups that were filing for tax-exempt status that had the world Patriot of Tea Party in their name. Even though the President has not made any comment about the practice, aides at the White House criticized the IRS practice.

Jay Carney, the spokesman at the White House, said the IRS is an entity that is non-partisan with just two political appointees. The IRS is conducting an internal investigation of its own.

Carney said the action that the IRS took was very inappropriate.

Republican Susan Collins, a Representative in the House from Maine, said it was almost as upsetting that the President and Jack Lew his treasury secretary have not apologized personally to the people of America and promised a complete investigation.

Other congressional Republicans have called for a committee to address the administration’s actions that surrounded the attacks on September 11 in Benghazi. Senator John McCain a Republican from Arizona and other Republican lawmakers said that aides of Obama attempted to cover up that the attack had been terrorism carried out by a group of terrorists.

The aides, who attributed the attack to protesters upset due to a film that was anti-Islam, said that since the evidence had changed, their story did as well.

Carney, on the other hand, accused congressional Republicans of making an attempt to politicize the attack that killed four U.S. citizens including Christopher Stevens the ambassador to Libya.