Invasion of the radical left

Surely you didn't think people who try to shut down coal mines by chaining themselves to explosives trucks were good citizens.  If so, allow me to disabuse you of that notion.

 

 

And then there's this, from WV Metro News:

One of those arrested in a recent anti-mining protest in Lincoln County is now back in custody.

State Police arrested 34-year old Peter Bryan Garcia Tuesday in Madison. He's charged with failing to register as a sexual offender.  Garcia had already been arrested once ...  charged July 28th with trespassing and obstruction.

Garcia was among 20 members of the group Radical Action for Mountain People's Survival or RAMPS who went onto the property of Hobet Mining and chained themselves to heavy equipment in protest of surface mining activities.  Garcia this week pleaded guilty to trespassing in the case.  He was fined the maximum $500 and given one year probation with an order he not enter mine property in West Virginia.   The Lincoln County Magistrate Court says he has not paid his fine or the $160 in court fees.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement website indicates Garcia was convicted in 2002 on a charge of using the Internet to solicit or attempt to solicit a child for sex.   His conviction required he register for life as a convicted sex offender.  

 

I blame Obama's WAR ON COAL for emboldening these low-lifes to think they can come here from out-of-state to thwart the creation of wealth and prosperity.

 

.... Vice President Joe Biden made [it] clear during the 2008 campaign when he said the Obama policy was "No coal plants here in America." Similarly, candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that he would ensure that building a coal plant would "bankrupt" the operator because of the cost of complying with new carbon-dioxide emission regulations.

Deliberate government efforts to end an industry are not part of normal competitive market pressures and bad for the U.S. economy for three reasons.

*First, virtually all our coal production goes directly to generate electricity. Changing that is costly: our electric grid was designed based on generation patterns dominated by multiple coal plants. Eliminating coal requires both costly new generation facilities and expensive grid modifications.

Moreover, while the rapid development of domestic natural gas is cutting generation costs today, it is not guaranteed to continue indefinitely. If anti-fracking activists - who are also often anti-coal activists - succeed in their campaign to restrict natural gas production and pipeline construction, natural gas costs will rise.

* Second, diversity in sources enhances our energy security by minimizing the chance that politics or wars in unstable and unfriendly countries will disrupt our energy supplies.

America is called the "Saudi Arabia of coal" because it has more than a quarter of world coal reserves. Energy security is vital because energy is embedded in most goods and services. Almost half of our energy use is indirect and so invisible to consumers. Among the most energy intensive sectors of our economy are health care and food; we risk much more than higher utility bills if we remain vulnerable to unfriendly and unstable energy suppliers.

* Third, the coal industry is a significant source of jobs. The typical coal miner earns $73,000 a year, says the National Mining Association, which represents the mining industry in Washington.

An estimated 60,000 Americans work in coal-fired power plants. These are high-productivity jobs because the employees work with large amounts of capital. Electricity generated by coal takes just 0.18 employees per megawatt of plant capacity. Coal-fired power plant jobs pay high wages because their employees are skilled. Yet new EPA regulations are estimated to cut total coal employment by 1.4 million job-years between 2011 and 2020.

Besides destroying jobs, the new regulations imposed by the administration will lead to the closing of 40 gigawatts of electric generation capacity. A staggering 12 percent of America's current coal capacity will be shut down. There could be many long, hot summers if we lose these reliable sources of power.

Coal plays a key role in electricity generation. The power produced from coal-fired plants is embedded in everything from our prescription medications to the food we eat.

Tens of thousands of Americans earn good livings in coal-related industries. Domestically produced coal reduces our dependence on unstable and unfriendly suppliers....

etc. etc. etc. 

 

Let me leave you with this Quote of the Day, from Sultan Knish:

 

 To be a progressive is to be committed to perpetual reform in the name of perpetual grievance for perpetual power.

Grievance ... justifies their right to agitate and undermine, to seize power by any means necessary and to implement their programs legally or extra-legally."

 

 

Comments

[Iro]

Additionally, "green" protesters who claim they are defending the environment from the likes of the rest of us, don't look far enough to the future to predict the consequences of their efforts. Protesters who defended trees from being harvested by the logging industry didn't realize when they went on to other causes that rampant natural forest growth, without the selective methods used by the milling industry, encouraged the infestation of tree beetles. Wood from the infested trees became extra-dry sawdust which probably caused the explosion of two mills in Canada. Experts think the unharvestable trees will cause the loss of 14,000 jobs. http://missoulian.com/news/local/beetle-killed-trees-blamed-in-b-c-mill-explosions/article_d6858654-a7ac-11e1-bfb4-001a4bcf887a.html

[Mannie Sherberg]

One sure way to spot a radical Leftie (a redundancy -- all Lefties are radical) is by their language. They do not speak or write standard English; they speak and write Robotalk. No speaker of standard English ever uses words such as "landbase," and no speaker of standard English would ever say that our landbase is "our endowment." This is pure Leftie boilerplate, lifted out of the Saul Alinsky Lexicon for Robots. The phrase "our legal sytem is broken" has been favored by Lefties ever since Sacco and Vanzetti went on trial for their lives in 1921. The key feature of Robotalk -- and the thing that makes it so beloved on the Left -- is that it is utterly mindless, as gormless as sneezing or belching. Those who are practiced in it can compose whole dissertations while sleeping -- which is, I suspect, what Ricki Draper did with her little treatise. All true Lefties are skilled practitioners of Robotalk, but tree huggers, OWSers, and animal-rights advocates excel at it.