Swamp Tours
If you’ll hop right on this flat boat here, Dewayne and Clive will take you on a tour of the DeeCee Swamp.
Hey, look right over there at the latest nominee to the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, who is not only a coal lobbyist, but also has given major fundraisers for some real special people.
Wheeler, who was first rumored to be tapped for the EPA last March, raised funds for Republican senators on the committee that makes the preliminary decision on confirming appointments to the agency.
One of them was Jim Inhofe, a worthless Republican from Oklahoma, where Wheeler spent 14 years as a staffer. Wheeler became a coal lobbyist in 2009 and since then has spent day and night snorting and stomping over the Obama coal regulations. ‘Cuz what we need is way more coal accompanied by black lung disease.
This is just the latest, but it’s fresh and it sends a signal that the swamp is only getting stinkier. Hold you nose – mixing coal and a swamp will knock you out.
Thanks to Henry for the heads up.
And, frnkly, the Swamp includes that White House aide who was just “resigned” cuz the info on his wife beating past got public!
1“Drain the swamp” was a bad image in the first place because healthy swamps are productive and help clean up a limited amount of pollution. Trump claimed he was going to get rid of the entrenched Washington politicians, and voters who didn’t know squat about him except they’d seen him on the TV (or did know and were bankrolling him because they knew) backed him. And now the former group is wondering when Glinda the Good Witch is going to make everything wonderful like Donnie said, and the latter group is real happy because Washington is now twice as corrupt as ever before, right out in the open.
2You don’t drain a swamp by throwing in more alligators.
3Drain the swamp? Not so much with Donnie. But he sure has released a large number of particularly large swamp rats in the area. Some have compared his appointees to termites out to destroy whatever agency to which they are appointed. We especially need to keep track of his judicial appointments and eradicate them after Donnie’s demise. Starting with Neil Gorsuch the courts will need an exterminator.
Maggie, wth is wrong with Hope Hicks? She works for a serial groper, dated Cory the Low, and reportedly was dating this latest loser, Porter. Maybe a two for one intervention for she and Messy?
4Coal is dying and will be DEAD in a decade, and it will stay that way no matter what these asshole buggywhippers say or do.
Coal production and usage will continue it’s downward spiral for the next decade or two, by which time almost none of it will be used at all. Every coal mine in the country will be just a cleanup site, every coal miner* doing something else (or unemployed). Nothing will prevent or change this from happening, it is inexorable.
Trump’s regime and his minions are doing the bidding of a few coal industry owners who have bribed him in order to extract a few billion more dollars from coal, at a far greater cost to us all.
At the same time they are doing everything they can to cripple our own US renewable energy industries, while the rest of the world surges past us.
Electricity generation is almost the sole use of coal today. As coal-fired electrical generating plants age out, they are not, and will not, be replaced by another coal plant. A couple of generations ago some homes were still heated by coal furnaces, a few RR locomotives used coal (even most steam engines were burning oil by the late 1930’s), none of that exists today. Coal is DEAD.
(* I even belonged to the UMW coal miners union for a year or two, although in a completely different industry)
“• New U.S. electricity capacity from renewables beat natural gas installations for the fourth year in a row.
5The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission reported that biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar, and wind made up 49.85 percent of all new capacity installed during 2017. That’s a total of 12.3 gigawatts worth of new renewable energy capacity.
New natural gas capacity accounted for 48.67 percent, with rest being provided by waste heat (0.89 percent), nuclear (0.41 percent), and oil ( 0.16 percent).
No new coal capacity was added in 2017.”
Repeat:
***No new coal capacity was added in 2017.*** (and as in 2016, maybe 2015, IIRC, and as likely every year in the future)
Eastern coal is dead. Big coal discovered forty years ago that it’s a lot cheaper to strip mine it in the West than to mine it traditionally in the East.
They don’t want to reopen WV/Pennsylvania mines, but it makes good copy, and maybe they can scam some money out of claiming they do.
6Yeah, the promises to the coal miners were right up there with the ones to the Carrier folks who were going to keep their jobs because the orange dotard was elected. They’re all out of work now, and I hear they’re more than a little unhappy. But the coal miners are still willing to believe the rubbish. Maybe a year or so from now they’ll catch on, too.
7When we are finally rid of Trump, in lieu of a Presidential “library” – frankly what would be the point? – I propose a
8“Beautiful” open-pit coal mine to be named for him and designed in such a way as to allow citizens of all races, genders, and abilities to stand and piss into it. This will be a lasting testament to “trickle down” theory. One for the ages. Be a hella’ tourist draw.
Jane and PKM, I am so damn thrilled the I did not go into running therapy sessions with my graduate psych degree. I am known to frown on the willfully stupid etc. All I can see re: Hope Hicks is that she is playing the field she landed in. In future time she may even write a tell all! Also, if she were dating independently of her work colleagues, those same colleagues may immediately distrust her and see that she is dumped out of her well paying job. Otherwise, I can’t see any real intelligent reason for Hope Hicks even being in the White House, especially after she had to steam the Golden Gibbon’s pants while he was inside them with him snarling and screaming for more steam, more steam, more steam!
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