Think Progress

By Zaid Jilani at 3:05 pm June 13, 2010

One of the themes of U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul’s (R-KY) campaign has been that businesses are burdened with overregulation, with Paul even decrying the anti-discrimination provisions imposed on private businesses in the Civil Rights Act.

Now, Crooks and Liars has unearthed an interview Rand Paul gave in 2009 where the candidate aired these strident views with respect to mountaintop removal. When asked about the environmentally disastrous process, Paul told the interviewer that he thinks “whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine.” To justify his hands-off approach to environmental regulation, Paul then went on to explain that mountaintop removal isn’t that bad, anyway, saying, “I don’t think anybody’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there”:

INTERVIEWER: What about mountaintop removal?

PAUL: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it’s been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you’ve got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.

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While seeking evidence that BP had been lying about oil flow from the start, I stumbled across a bipartisan agreement on America’s energy policy.

Enjoy!

Coal Tattoo

May 26, 2010 by Ken Ward Jr.

Federal inspectors have yet to get underground at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, but they’ve already hit the operation with another nearly two dozen citations — all in the last two weeks.

U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration inspectors cited Massey’s Performance Coal Co. subsidiary for 23 different violations in a “spot inspection” that began May 14 and remains ongoing, according to the latest entries in MSHA’s online computer database.

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British Petroleum failed to take safety seriously, used the wrong diagram to fight the disaster, lied about the scope of their fiasco, keeps minimizing the disaster, and can’t say where all the oil has gone. Large balls of tar are washing up on shore as the uncontrolled vent puts 70,000 barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day — the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez every four days.

All that was bad enough. Then last night, Sen. Lisa (“Lease-A”) Murkowski (R-BP) blocked an effort to raise the liability cap on oil companies from $75 million to $10 billion. BP has already spent $350 million; costs will probably reach the billions before the cleanup is done. There is nothing to stop BP from declaring its liabilities finished and walking away while oil still clogs the beaches of Mobile Bay.

Murkowski’s motivations have everything to do with the prominence of BP in her state’s oil and gas industry (.PDF). Her campaign coffer contains $426,000 of oil and gas industry cash. This action amounts to a billion-dollar taxpayer BAILOUT of a foreign corporation, and a very wealthy one at that, in exchange for a relative pittance.

But all is not lost. In fact, this is a crisis we cannot afford to waste.

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