One Obama Promise That DOESN'T Have An Expiration Date

Or you could look on it as an implicit acknowledgement of legislative reality:

While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama said his cap-and-trade tax plans would “bankrupt” anyone building a coal-fired power plant. Although those taxes haven’t materialized, the Environmental Protection Agency has put the brakes on seventy-nine surface mining permits in four states since he was elected.

The EPA says these permits could violate the Clean Water Act and warrant “enhanced” review. But the agency went even further last week, announcing plans to revoke a permit for the Spruce #1 Mine in West Virginia – a move that has caused anxiety among coal-state Democrats about the future of the industry under the Obama administration. …

Although his favored cap-and-trade bill hasn’t yet been passed, West Virginia’s Democratic Governor Joe Manchin III, who supported Mr. Obama’s candidacy, called the EPA moves part of a stealth campaign to stifle the industry.

“Right now, my belief is that they’re trying to kill off surface mining through regulation what they cannot get done through legislation,” Mr. Manchin told MetroNews Talkline, a West Virginia call-in radio program, earlier this month. In West Virginia, twenty-three permits are being held up, with other affected states being Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.

You know who's also pissed about it?  West Virginia's junior senator:

“I am angry with the EPA’s announcement that they will use veto power to revoke the authorized Spruce Mine permit in Logan,” he said. “It is wrong and unfair for the EPA to change the rules for a permit that is already active.”

<sigh>  There's such a "dance of the mayflies" absurd inevitability about this chickenshit.  It's not like you can't tell what kind of Obama promises are fake (anything that isn't ideologically hard-left) and what kind are the genuine article (everything else).  A promise to "cut taxes for 95% of Americans"?  Bogus.  Ditto "no stimulus bill above $175 billion," "most open, transparent, ethical administration in history," "I'll fight and win the REAL War on Terror in Afghanistan," and pretty much everything he's uttered about health care outside the gulag itself.  But closing Gitmo (they won't because they can't logistically, not from a lack of suicidal nerve), persecuting the CIA, laying waste to American power and prestige around the world, and bankrupting the domestic coal industry?  Fiat money in the bank, man.

The latter does seem an awfully....counterproductive step to take with NIMBYesque Donk senators whose cloture votes Red Barry is gonna need if he harbors even the flimsiest fantasy of crap & tax ever seeing the light of day.  Yes, it could just be bumbling greenstremist drones on autopilot taking a double-crossing regulatory wrecking ball to the American energy sector piecemeal.  Or it could be that he's already given up on C&T becoming law and is usurping more congressional power to himself to do by decree what he can't get rubber-stamped off Capitol Hill.

When we on the Right say that environmentalists are "anti-western, anti-human totalitarians," that isn't hyperbole.  If they fully got their way, we'd all be bulldozed backwards centuries towards ever rising primitivism, poverty, pestilence, and filth, living in caves like Moon-Watcher, dreading not the man-eating leopard, but the capo from the green police state making his daily exhilation check to make sure you aren't emitting too much CO2, and prepared to smother you to death if you have.

Happily, they won't get their way - entirely.  But they've done so much damage already that it's a question of whether there'll be enough of an American energy economy left to revive.

King Hussein's political fortunes, though, will be in much worse condition.