House Republicans' campaign arm today aimed a fresh jab at environmentalists opposed to the Keystone XL oil pipeline, releasing a Web advertisement that parodies a commercial in which MSNBC host Rachel Maddow praises the Hoover Dam.

The National Republican Congressional Committee's (NRCC) online ad puts a satirical spin on the GOP's central argument in favor of a presidential permit for the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline with an actress portraying the liberal Maddow promoting the XL line's 1,700-mile size and industry estimates of 120,000 or more jobs created by the $7 billion project.

"We've got to figure out why the president thinks we're not a country that can think this big," the Maddow impersonator states.

The playful tone of the new NRCC ad drew immediate push-back from green advocates fighting to block the pipeline, which would nearly double U.S. import capacity for emissions-intensive Canadian oil-sands crude if granted a permit by the Obama administration.

"GOP attempting humor on a risky export pipeline that would threaten clean water and family farms," said Jane Kleeb, founder of the liberal group Bold Nebraska and a leading Cornhusker State organizer against Keystone XL.

But Republicans have no plans to dial back their full-throated cheers for the XL line, which the administration must weigh in on by Feb. 21 as part of a 60-day deadline attached to last month's payroll tax-cut extension deal. Environmentalists are confident that the White House plans to reject or at least keep slowing down the pipeline when it rules in the coming weeks, but the GOP is already planning a counterpunch that could raise new questions of executive-branch authority by overriding a presidential rejection of the pipeline (Greenwire, Jan. 12).

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) also sounded off on the pipeline today, publishing an op-ed in a newspaper in his district -- one of several GOP-held areas that President Obama won in 2008 -- to remind voters that several member labor unions of the pro-Democratic AFL-CIO endorse Keystone XL as a job creator.

"The ball remains in the Obama administration's court to approve the Keystone project, and unfortunately the shot clock is running down," Upton wrote in the Kalamazoo Gazette. "Canada is eager to do business with the United States, but if we continue to needlessly string them along, they eventually will look elsewhere and those jobs will go away."

Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday sounded an increasingly muscular note in criticizing Obama for his administration's previous delay in ruling on Keystone XL. In an interview with the CBC TV network, Harper said that resistance to Keystone XL and a second politically volatile oil-sands pipeline, the Northern Gateway, is driven in part by U.S. special interests seeking to sway the course of Canadian energy development.

"I don't object to foreigners expressing their opinion," Harper told CBC. "But I don't want them to be able to hijack the process so that we don't make a decision that's timely or in the interests of Canadians."

Hearings on the Northern Gateway line, also strongly opposed by coalitions of American and Canadian conservation groups, began in the province of British Columbia last week. The second oil-sands crude line is particularly relevant to the congressional pipeline debate because it would allow the daily transport of more than 500,000 barrels of oil-sands fuel off Canada's west coast to Asian markets, giving rhetorical firepower to the GOP's warning that a rejection of the XL line to the Gulf Coast would benefit Chinese consumers.

Click here to watch the NRCC parody ad.