Osama bin Laden's Death

With the recent news of the attack on a compound in Pakistan and the subsequent death of terror-lord Osama bin Laden, there is much to think back on over the last ten years.  I know everyone over the age of probably 13 or 14 remembers where they were and what they were doing when bin Laden's master plan came to fruition.  Oh how that day changed us as a country forever and mostly for the worse.

At the outset, as President Obama mentioned in his speech last night, we came together like never before.  Republican, Democrat, Yankee, Southerner, whatever race, it didn't matter.  We all cried.  We were all emotionally destroyed.  We were all New Yorkers.  We were all American.

The whole world was American.

We soon realized that bin Laden and Al-Qaida were behind the attack and the whole world came together to attempt to bring these extremists to justice.  And that's where the warm-fuzzy feelings start to go away.  Instead of asking for sacrifice from Americans, then-president Bush told us to spend.  He could

Extraction Industry Regulation

Yesterday I read a story in The Inter Mountain (Elkins, WV) covering the Republican gubernatorial debate in Wheeling Tuesday.  From the story it seemed the debate consisted of, not surprisingly, a lot of Obama bashing and fear-mongering.  One candidate even claimed that Obama was waging war on West Virginia industries because he didn't win the state in 2008.  I don't want to get into the ridiculousness of those arguments, but I do want to address a few things that were said by candidates during the discussion.

The first sentence in the article says this:

"Republicans seeking to be West Virginia's next governor want environmental regulator to keep their hands off the state's coal and gas industries."

I don't understand anyone, especially someone from West Virginia, especially so soon after Upper Big Branch disaster, who claims that regulation hurts West Virginia and her people, unless they are being paid to say that by the coal and gas industries.  Regulation and regulators are painted as vengeful beaurocrats out of touch with the world outside the beltway, which couldn't be farther from the truth.  These are people at the top of their scientific fields who do important research and make conclusions and regulation based on the most current science.

It seems to me that the purpose of the regulations are 1) to protect the health and safety of both the people who work in these industries and the people who live near the extraction points and 2) to protect the health of the environment.

When some "Free-Market" Republican says that regulators are hurting West Virginia workers, I say think about how things were before regulations.  The working environment was so bad before regulation that workers had to band together and literally fight a war with the coal barons to get the rights to a clean(er) and safe(r) work place and better pay.  Many hard working