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ratic and nine Republican senators sent Obama a letter urging him to stop stalling.
• North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, a Republican who helped organize the letter, said there's been no response from the White House, which declined to comment.
• The ratings agency Moody's says it expects Obama will eventually approve the pipeline, but it won't be quick. Take too long to approve the permitting, Moody's warned in a November report, and Obama risks missing the boom in oil prices that instigated the pipeline in the first place.
• Estimates for how many jobs the pipeline would create range from a few thousand up to 20,000 or more. At 36 inches in diameter, the pipeline will have an initial capacity of 700,000 barrels a day. That's significant because demand for oil and gas pipelines is expected to surge over the next four years, according to a November report by The Freedonia Group, a market research firm.
• A TransCanada spokesman said the company expects a decision by the State Department, which is determining whether the pipeline is in the national interest, in the first quarter of 2013, and hopes to start construction on the upper portion shortly thereafter. The longer the decision drags on, the less realistic that timeline appears to be.
• Officials in Nebraska are close to completing their own study of the revised route, with a public hearing planned for Tuesday ahead of a final decision by Gov. Dave Heineman.
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AP News in Brief
States wary of trade-offs in accepting Medicaid expansion for millions of low-income uninsured
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's health care brinksmanship, with hundreds of billions of dollars and the well-being of millions of people at stake.
• President Barack Obama's health care law expands Medicaid, the federal-state health program for low-income people, but cost-wary states must decide whether to take the deal.
• Turn it down, and governors risk looking callous toward the needy. Not to mention the likely second-guessing for walking away from a pot of federal dollars estimated at nearly $1 trillion nationally over a decade.
• If the Obama administration were to compromise, say by sweetening the offer to woo a reluctant state, it would face immediate demands from 49 others for similar deals that could run up the tab by tens of billions of dollars.
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