At Huffington Post, Arianna and her crew have been following this angle of the Utah mine story. And it really deserves a lot more attention. We’ve seen a series of these mine tragedies in recent years. And pretty much every time it ends up being a mine — not surprisingly — with a terrible record of safety violations.
Again, that’s not exactly a shocking correlation. But it does throw into sharper relief the essential fact that these are not random lightning bolts of tragedy visited on small towns in middle America. These are guys who got killed because they worked for companies that routinely broke the rules put in place to keep their employees alive.
And there’s more. It turns out that the guy in charge of mine safety for the federal government, Assistant Secretary of Labor Richard Stickler, couldn’t even get approved by the Senate back when it was under Republican control because his own record on safety issues was so questionable. President Bush had to put him in with a recess appointment.
Perhaps it’s not time to assign fault while active rescue operations are underway. But once that’s over, maybe it would be worth the networks taking a tenth of the time they use milking ratings from these mine sagas and cast a little light on how a lot of this is preventable if the mine owners would stop breaking the rules and the federal government stopped looking the other way.
Deal?
Looks like the voting in the 2008 Presidential election just might start in 2007 after all. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
Roll Call (sub.req.): Rep. Chip Pickering (R-MS) expected to retire.
For about two centuries it was widely understood that being black at all was a disqualifying qualification for being elected president. So why don’t more people see it at as more than vaguely nauseating that the first black candidate for president with a realistic chance of getting the job is continually asked if he’s black enough?
Fred Kaplan offers a comprehensive analysis of Rudy’s ridiculous Foreign Affairs article.
You know that Mitt Romney is a huge phony. What’s more concrete and troubling is that he seems remarkably ignorant of anything beyond America’s shores. His new kick is demanding an apology from Barack Obama for saying something that the President of Afghanistan, the Ambassador from Afghanistan, US Commanders on the ground in Afghanistan and even President Bush thinks is true. Learn about Mitt’s unparalleled ignorance in today’s episode of TPMtv …
Dem Presidential candidates go on the attack — against China. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.
A panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals all but laughs at the Justice Department’s pleas to throw warrantless-surveillance lawsuits out of court.
This weekend we learned that Gen. Petraeus’ Report will actually be written by the White House. Now it turns out that the White House is pushing to have the general’s increasingly nominal report delivered by Condi Rice and Bob Gates, with Petraeus relegated to a “private congressional briefing.”
The Democrats on the Hill appear to be saying, No, this isn’t going to be like a has-been 60s band touring under its founders name twenty years after the guy dropped out and went to live in an Ashram. We actually want to hear from Gen. Petraeus.
And the oddest part of the article in the Post reporting this is that the authors claim, “The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush’s war strategy.” (emphasis added)
Perhaps I’m missing something. But doesn’t this sound like the anxiety is a little more pronounced on the White House side since they’re the ones trying to bag on the report that has been the building focus of our Iraq policy for months now?
New “Gays for Giuliani” pseudo-ad to actually hit the airwaves in South Carolina. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.