Crumbling Before Our Eyes

Good Lord, two more dead miners in West Virginia today. And now the governor is shutting it down.

"We're going to check for unsafe conditions, and we're going to correct any unsafe conditions before we mine another lump of coal,'' Manchin said.

In the absence of literally any federal oversight or response to this rash of disasters, the state government had to step in and I applaud them.

In yesterday's SOTU speech, one of the ways that Bush suggested weaning us off our "addiction to oil" (and how's that for projection? OUR addiction, sir?) is through expanding the production of "clean-burning coal." Which means more mining. Which means we might actually have to have a Mining Safety and Health Administration that does something useful for a change.