Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Barack Obama angered many environmentalists this week when he promised to promote the coal industry fraud of clean coal. Why would he do such a thing, when there’s never been a single viable commercial use of supposedly clean coal technology, when the technology doesn’t even really eliminate most of the pollution and waste from the process of gaining energy from coal anyway?

Well, there’s a lot of money in that coal. One of the coal giants, Alliance Resource Partners, just announced record profits for 2009. What did they do with all that money? $12,500 of it went to the Central Executive Committee of the Kentucky Democratic Party.

And what did Kentucky’s representatives in Congress do this week? They joined together to reconstitute the Congressional Coal Caucus, which includes Nick Rahall, the Democratic Chair of the House Natural Resources Committee.

Coal dust is settling all over the Democratic Party these days.