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There are strong rumors that President Obama will soon announce his decision, possibly within days or by the end of August, on the Keystone XL pipeline. He will either throw his support to the private Canadian oil company that wants to build the pipeline into our country to send the dirtiest, high-carbon oil from the tar sands region of western Canada all the way to our Gulf for processing. Or the President will stand for what is in the best interest of America’s future.

President Barack Obama reacted with grief and anger to the mass shootings of people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” said Obama. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” he said. “Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times.”

This evening the Beaufort/Port Royal Sea Level Rise Task Force will make a presentation to Beaufort City Council’s work session. The task force, which the South Carolina Small Business Chamber helped to convene and was not formerly established by either government, has been meeting since late last year preparing to assess the threat of rising seas to these municipalities and to make recommendations as to how the communities can be more resilient. Tonight’s presentation will be an update for the Council. The presentation to the Port Royal Council will be tomorrow evening.

Oceana released a new report today that finds offshore wind would produce over three times more jobs and nearly nine times as much energy as offshore drilling off South Carolina’s Atlantic coast.

Congratulations to five of our 7 U.S. House members for opposing the government-funding bill that barely passed the House late yesterday.  They were Jeff Duncan, Trey Gowdy, Mick Mulvaney, Tom Rice and Mark Sanford.

Buried in the 1600+ page bill is a provision to once again put the American taxpayer on the hook for bailing out big banks that gamble with their depositors’ money.

It is exactly this kind of big-bank bad behavior that led to the Great Recession and then the 2010 passage of the Dodd-Frank Act that made the greedy big banks move their risky betting out of

The American Sustainable Business Council and Business for a Fair Minimum Wage conducted a national phone poll of 555 small business employers and found support for raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour in every region of the country. Two thirds of surveyed businesses in the Northeast were in favor, and even in the South, 58 percent of small businesses approve of President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage in steps and then index it to inflation.

South Carolina state trooper Sean Groubert asked Levar Jones, an unarmed black man, for his license. When Jones reached for the very thing the officer asked for, Groubert opened fire on him.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham says we need to bomb ISIS before they come to America and kill us all. He appeared on one of the talking-head news programs to practically beg the President to up the war efforts.

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In her dissent in the Hobby Lobby case today, Justice Ginsburg mentioned a 1968 precedent in which the owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants in South Carolina “refused to serve black patrons based on his religious beliefs opposing racial integration.”

South Carolina is one of the last states most think about when it comes to renewable energy. However, a decision Wednesday could go a long toward changing that.

Remember the big campaign to get young people to opt-out of Obamacare? Burn your Obamacare card they said, even though there is no such thing as an Obamacare card. Apparently it's not working. According to the Washington Post, only about 77,000 families and individual have asked for an exemption based on one of the many officials reasons someone can avoid the individual mandate to have health insurance. That is less than one percent of the 8 million who signed up for Obamacare during the open enrollment period.

A South Carolina bill that passed a senate committee on Thursday would expand the state’s “stand your ground” self-defense law to include fetuses.