Obama and Keystone Kops?

It is astounding that President Obama cavalierly rejected a permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline when his administration continuously tosses out bold rhetoric about the necessity of creating jobs and economic recovery.

In this case, it is obvious that he is playing to his green constituency at the expense of jobs that would have been supported by the private sector, and Montanans should be angry because the pipeline is intended to pass through Eastern Montana, where there definitely would have been economic benefits.

Credit Montana’s two Democratic senators for putting some distance between themselves and Obama’s election-year politicking. Both Max Baucus and Jon Tester, along with Rep. Denny Rehberg, say they will work to bring the pipeline — and its jobs — back to life.

But the recent line of rebuttal from pipeline opponents has been to downplay the number of jobs that would be created and to emphasize that they would be temporary. A widely cited estimate is that there would be 22,000 jobs, but opponents now say the number would be considerably less — as if, say, 10,000 jobs just don’t matter.

Intuitively, it seems obvious that a 1,700-mile pipeline from Alberta to Texas would create a high number of jobs and economic activity. From 1974 through 1977, for instance, tens of thousands worked on the 800-mile Trans Alaska Pipeline at a cost of about $8 billion.

And if you want to question job claims, you need to look at more than just Keystone. Far more suspect than the Keystone numbers are the Obama re-election campaign’s claims that his clean energy “investments” have created 2.7 million jobs. Oddly enough, that claim is made in an ad defending the administration’s loans of more than $500 million in taxpayer money to the solar panel company, Solyndra, which laid off more than 1,000 people when it went out of business last year.

We’ll take the real jobs that the Keystone project would create over phantom jobs at public expense any day. Let’s hope there are enough in Congress who feel the same way.

THE WHITEFISH Winter Carnival put Whitefish on the map in a big way when National Geographic Traveler magazine included the time-honored carnival in its online list of Top 10 winter carnivals in the world.

Whitefish is in some pretty good company, with spectacular winter celebrations such as the Fur Rendezvous in Anchorage, Alaska, and Saranac Lake Winter Carnival in New York topping the list.

The Flathead Valley should be proud of the Whitefish event, which is celebrating its 53rd year as it culiminates the weekend of Feb. 3-5. Let’s all head to Whitefish for carnival fun this year.

WHITEFISH ALSO can be proud of one of its own who pulled down a perfect score on a national college admissions test.

Molly Schmidt, a Whitefish High School senior, notched a flawless composite score of 36 on the ACT exam.

That puts her in very elite company: Only 704 students out of 1.6 million who took the test across the county received perfect scores.

Acing the ACT (along with achieving a 4.0 grade-point average) helped Schmidt earn acceptance to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Well done, Molly.