Magic Buggy Whip Dead-Enders

Someday not so far in the future, people will look back on pro-coal rallies the way we look back on Ku Klux Klan rallies during the civil rights era: dangerous fools screaming against the tide.

James R. Carroll at the Courier:

Thousands of miners from Kentucky and other coal-producing states, joined by some members of Congress, rallied at the Capitol on Tuesday to demand an end to what they described as an Obama administration “war on coal.”

“I hope somebody hears it, man,” said Will Stevens, 24, an Ohio County, Ky., miner for 1 1/2 years. He and fellow miner John Russell, 23, of Providence, Ky., wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with “Pick Coal” in white letters.

“I’d like to have a future in it,” said Russell, who has been mining for two years. “There isn’t a member of my family who isn’t a miner — except my sister.”

The two Kentuckians, like most of the other miners and their families at the rally, rode buses through the night to the nation’s capital — many making their first visits — to deliver their message, as one sign put it, to “Free America and the Coal Miner.”

There is no "war on coal," though we desperately need one  The war going on in this nation is the war by coal on coal miners, their families, their communities, their environment and the future of the planet.

The only way to save coalfield communities, the national economy and the planet is to reject coal and all its evil works and find salvation in manufacturing clean energy.

Unfortunately, the latest "summit" planned for eastern Kentucky is unlikely to produce any such proposal.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

With Eastern Kentucky stung by the loss of 6,000 coal jobs, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers and Gov. Steve Beshear on Monday kicked off an effort to come up with ideas to boost the region's crippled economy.

The two announced a summit in Pikeville on Dec. 9 where residents may offer ideas for the region's future. The summit will be called SOAR, for Shaping Our Appalachian Region.

They also announced the creation of a planning committee of more than 40 leaders from the region who will come up with ideas and help plan the summit at Eastern Kentucky Exposition Center.

Beshear acknowledged there have been a variety of efforts dating back decades to draft plans for developing Appalachia's economy. If this new effort is to make a significant difference, Beshear said, the ideas for reviving the region's economy will have to be homegrown.

"For us to be successful, the people here are going to have to develop that road map for success," Beshear said during a news conference at Hazard Community and Technical College.

As long as "the people here" are the same people desperately propping up the decaying corpse of coal, the December summit is going to fail as spectacularly as its many predecessors.

For some genuinely new and practical ideas for eastern Kentucky generated by genuine eastern Kentuckians not blinded by Big Coal's lies, check out the proposals from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell and his DINO opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes are competing to outdo each other in embracing coal's stinking, decomposing corpse.

Attention eastern Kentucky voters: candidates who love Big Coal hate and despise you.

ead more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/10/28/2899432/steve-beshear-and-hal-rogers-propose.html#storylink=cpy