Tax dollars shouldn’t pay to make liquid coal



Congressman Rahall and Gov. Manchin’s plan for energy independence from coal to liquid is nothing more than snake oil; it’s a big fat corporate welfare giveaway to already rich coal barons.

Don’t use our tax dollars for this insanity. If liquid coal is so great, then why don’t the coal industry, their minions that push this boondoggle, invest their own money?

Our lawmakers should invest their energy and our tax dollars in the development of renewable energy resources and efficiency. Investing in coal will be another Enron, with us taxpayers left holding the bag. Liquid coal doubles global warming-causing gases. The scheme is to get our tax dollars to build the plants, knowing that the pollution will cause these plants to soon shut down. A few corrupt people will become very rich while we lose.

Liquid coal wouldn’t even help us much at the pumps. Its main use is diesel and jet fuel. I want a solar car, a solar lawn mower or energy from renewables so I won’t ever have to buy gas from “the man” again. That is real energy independence.

We can have green jobs with a new federal energy bill that was just signed into law. It provides $150 million in training for green jobs in renewable energy. We must demand that our politicians bring these factories and jobs here to our great state.

Coal to liquid will increase the evil, destructive coal mining practice of blowing up mountains. Mountaintop removal is destroying our state and our communities. We residents pay the full price of this madness. Strip mining jobs are temporary, destructive jobs. In a few months, they destroy one mountain and community and poison our streams, then move on to another mountain, stream and community until there is nothing left for our children.

While Rahall is meeting movie stars and “saving the whales,” he is also aiding and abetting the coal industry in blasting and poisoning southern West Virginia and her citizens.



Julia Bonds

Rock Creek



Obama a Christian, sworn into office on Holy Bible



I am writing in direct response to Mr. Eddie Whittaker’s ‘Our Readers Speak’ in the Wednesday, Feb. 20, edition of the newspaper.

I love this country. I love it so much because idiots who possess not even the slightest hint of fact can get published in the newspaper. Mr. Whittaker’s attempts to link the front-running Democratic presidential candidate with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York are laughable, but then again, Americans have been fooled before by buffoons.

We will not be a subsidiary of al-Qaeda when — not if — Sen. Barack Obama wins the presidency of the United States. And we will no longer be beholding to the big money corporate interests like ExxonMobil, Halliburton and Enron who, no doubt, control Republicans and George Bush and Dick Cheney like puppetmasters (there are some puppet strings on the “pro-business” Democrats who believe BrickStreet was a good move for injured West Virginia workers, but I digress).

But check your facts, sir, and get them straight before you go getting yourself published in the newspaper. Barack Obama is a Christian and was sworn into office on a Holy Bible. And it was a congressman from Minnesota, not Barack Obama, who was sworn into Congress using a Koran — borrowed from the Library of Congress — one that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence and much of the Constitution.



Stephen New

Beckley