ZINGS!

From today's issue of the Tallahassee Democrat:

• How many people keep gloves in the glove compartment of their cars?

• The reason we don't let school kids read the Bible is so they won't be obsessed with blood and animal sacrifices, and get ideas about beating people to death with large rocks.

• India DID offer help following Hurricane Katrina, but it was turned down by the Bush administration.

• When will you tree-hugging fools realize that coal is cheap and plentiful and natural gas is expensive and in limited quantities? Maybe when you're sitting in the dark and you can't bash Bush via the Internet because there's no power? :grr:

http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opinion/12905415.htm

we live in the north and it gets cold up here.

warm weather patriots that coal's not nearly as cheap as they think. http://ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/003/index.html

Here in WV, as well as in VA, KY and TN, communities are destroyed wholesale by a process known as Mountain Top Removal. The advent of MTR has resulted in the loss of thousands of traditional mining jobs in Appalachia.

Like the sword of Damocles, homes, schools and what few businesses remain sit under the shadow of multi-billion-gallon lakes of toxic goo, restrained by nothing more than a dirt wall. http://ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/007/index.html

Those mud walls fail. http://www.geocities.com/kyriverpal/martincoky.html
http://ohvec.org/galleries/mountaintop_removal/006/index.html

When that happens, people die. http://www.wvculture.org/history/buffcreek/buff1.html

The myth of cheap coal is something propagated both here in coal country and more loudly in non-coal country. And it is precisely that: a myth, just like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

There's no doubt that our reliance on foreign oil poses a risk to national security. It perverts our political processes by making our leaders cozy up to ugly, hateful foreign princes and makes the U.S. little more than a tarted-up whore for Saudi political fornication.

Still, we must understand, preferably sooner than later, that coal is a domestic energy threat to our national security. The clean-up cost we saw with Katrina can and will be repeated time after time as these Appalachian Sludge Dams fail and kill. Our health care costs rise in direct relation to the amount of arsenic, mercury, manganese and other poisons pumped into our air and water.

Most progressives would mount a hue and cry to pierce the stratosphere if American companies were doing in a foreign country what they're doing to the ancient communities of Appalachia. But this national disgrace is going on under peoples' noses, and hardly a word is said.

Like a Saudi prince in our own backyard, Don Blankenship, head honcho of Massey Energy, dictates policy in WV, KY and VA and makes sleazy tramps of our political leaders, Democrat and Republican alike.

So do us Appalachians a favor, please, especially those of you in the southeast and midwest. TURN THE DAMNED LIGHTS OFF if you don't have to have them on. Don't leave a light burning in an empty room. When you go to bed at night, turn off the computer.

Because when you don't, you're killing us here in the mountains.

We used to do moving gallery mining where one big assed machine was assembled underground on the seam face and dug its way through the whole seam and sent the coal out a conveyor. Very few guys underground. Very safe. Minimal disruption of the landscape.

But not as cheap.

We need to go back to that.

Have you been getting a better audience in GD than in the Lounge? I remember your musings that no one paid attention to the Zings in the Lounge...

You might remember me as the DUer who stayed up till 7 am...well I did it again, and I need bed now;)