The National Right To Murder Association NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

The NRA's New President Jim Porter is a Confederate Sympathizer

Alabama lawyer Jim Porter will replace current NRA President David Keene, whose two-year term is expiring.

Here's what the media should know about Porter, a conspiracy theorist who calls the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression" and represents more of the same for the organization:

....2.     Porter Believes "Un-American" Eric Holder And Hillary Clinton Tried To "Kill The Second Amendment At The United Nations." Porter said during a June 2012 speech at the New York Rifle & Pistol Association's Annual Meeting that Attorney General Eric Holder, who he termed "rabidly un-American," was "trying to kill the Second Amendment at the United Nations" with the help of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He attributed this to the proposed United Nations Arms Trade Treaty, which he claimed would "make it illegal for individuals all over the world to own firearms." This is a blatant misrepresentation of the treaty, which deals with the international arms trade, not private ownership. ( Someone should ask Porter where he gets his drugs. They seem to be string enough to turn anyone who takes them into Glenn UnAmerican Beck).

3.       Porter Calls The Civil War The "War Of Northern Aggression." Explaining the NRA's roots during the same June 2012 speech, Porter said, "NRA was started 1871 right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn't like the way my Southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the 'War of Northern Aggression.' Now y'all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the 'War of Northern Aggression' down south." ( Corporate profits are higher than ever and wages for working class Americans are lower - just the kind of plantation economy conservatives dream of)

4.     Porter Thinks President Obama Wants European-Style Socialism. In a February 2011 interview with NRA News, Porter said: "I think everybody had a wake-up call after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and I think they had a huge shock when President Obama was elected in 2008. Most folks never would believe that there would be a run on our rights, our individual rights like there's been in this country. And people are so concerned that where this government wants to take us is to a European socialistic, bureaucratic type of government. And it's been a wake-up call." ( being a drug addict, a racist, a mentally deranged UnAmerican fruitbar, Porter is trying to deflect from the FACT that it is conservatives who are trying to do to the American economy, what European leaders are doing to Europe.

So the NRA has another anti-American proto fascist mentally deranged assclown as its president. Gee, what a surprise. Too bad his parents never warned him about sniffing the polish when he shines up his jack-boots.

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Time To Face the Reality, Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook Are Evil

Having solved the problem of people not wasting enough time on the internet, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now tackling his first real-world political cause: immigration reform. With a slick new non-profit group funded by tech millionaires, Zuckerberg is rallying Silicon Valley's elite into a political force they hope might one day rival Wall Street. Zuckerberg's political moves are of a piece with his career as a tech mogul: hugely ambitious, painfully awkward, entirely self-interested, and surprisingly successful. And he's just getting started.

Earlier this month, Zuckerberg unveiled the vehicle of his political will: FWD.us, a bipartisan, non-profit political advocacy group that sounds like an iPhone app. FWD.us has attracted big names from both politics and technology, including former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart, Romney adviser Dan Senor, LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman, and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The group hopes to raise $50 million to fund its lobbying for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform, which is currently making its way through Congress.

Why immigration? We need those smart foreign brains: In a Washington Post op-ed announcing FWD.us, Zuckerberg wrote that "in a knowledge economy, the most important resources are the talented people we educate and attract to our country." To that end, FWD.us says on its website it aims to "establish a streamlined process for admitting future workers" and increase the number of H-1B visas that let companies hire high-skilled foreign workers to "continue to promote innovation and meet our workforce needs."

The implicit argument behind FWD.us is that the U.S. doesn't have enough high-skilled domestic workers to meet tech companies' needs. This is a myth, and Zuckerberg and FWD.us are just the latest tech players to promote it. In fact there is no shortage of domestic IT workers, as shown in a new study from the Economic Policy Institute. While there is an unusually low unemployment rate among American tech workers (3%), they haven't enjoyed the large salary increases that would signal a shortage. There is also little evidence that the foreign workers tech companies hire are any better than Americans. The real reason tech companies want to hire more high-skilled immigrants is that they can pay them less than Americans, since immigrants are in a more economically precarious position. More than 80 percent of workers hired under the H-1B program are paid less than their American counterparts, according to the EPI. This kind of outsourcing benefits tech companies while hurting domestic tech workers.

The self-serving motives behind Zuckerberg's immigration reform push can be seen clearly in Facebook's corporate lobbying efforts. As FWD.us promotes high-minded ideals of openness and opportunity, Facebook's lobbying firms have been doing the dirty work of making sure immigration reform means they can freely hire high-skilled immigrants for less money than their American counterparts. Specifically, Facebook has been trying to insert language into the Senate immigration bill to eliminate a requirement that American companies make a "good faith" effort to hire Americans before looking abroad, according to the Washington Post. And Facebook wants to axe rules that would require companies to pay these foreign workers more. Facebook isn't just a fan of outsourcing its high-skilled jobs: Last year we reported that much of Facebook's dirty and unpleasant content moderation was done by outsourced third-world workers making as little as $1 an hour.

Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy told the Post, "The real goal is to put Zuckerberg and Facebook front and center with the Washington elite … to better extinguish a growing call to regulate how his company does business.”

So FWD.us is just another case of a savvy businessman wielding political clout for his financial benefit. But how FWD.us and Zuckerberg have done this is worth considering as a model of tech industry political activism to come. FWD.us demonstrates a bizarre wedding of Silicon Valley idealism with the tepid realities of interest politics. The two worlds collided last week when news stories went viral revealing that the group had funded ads trashing Obama and praising oil drilling in the Arctic. One ad supporting South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsay Graham slammed Obamacare and the president's "wasteful stimulus spending." The liberal blogosphere was shocked: The same Mark Zuckerberg who once feted Obama in Silicon Valley and counts Corey Booker as a bff now sounded like a long lost Koch Brother.

While the ad was funded by Zuckerberg's group, it didn't represent a right-wing turn for the politically ambiguous mogul. It was a tactical strike in his immigration reform campaign. The ad was made by a subsidiary group of FWD.us called Americans For a Conservative Direction. Lindsay Graham is one of the few Republican supporters of the Senate immigration reform bill, and the ad is meant to bolster Graham's conservative bona fides so he can push the largely Democrat-backed immigration bill without seeming like a softy. If that means bad-mouthing Obama, so be it.

After the ad went viral, FWD.us tried to placate angry liberals by pointing out that the group had also created a left-leaning organization, the Council for American Job Growth, to support liberal immigration reform backers. A FWD.us spokesperson told ThinkProgress that "maintaining two separate entities… to support elected officials across the political spectrum—separately—means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audience of their constituents." This is politics, Facebook-style: pandering as personalized as your Facebook Newsfeed! It's also about as craven as Washington gets. Even the Koch brothers lacked the devious ingenuity to back two competing teams, as BuzzFeed's Ben Smith pointed out on Twitter. They only disingenuously funded the Tea Party.

The ad fracas was not even the weirdest moment in FWD.us' brief history. Days before it launched, Politico obtained an enthusiastically creepy memo FWD.us president Joe Green sent to potential supporters that sounded like a dispatch from North Korea's propaganda ministry. While the bloviating of the tech elite sounds just a bit ridiculous in blog posts by venture capitalists pumping a new mobile payment service, it takes a more sinister tone when applied to politics.

Green's memo boasted that "technology executives would use their companies to 'control the avenues of distribution' for a political message in support of their efforts," according to Politico. In case the implications of that statement were unclear, the memo also listed three reasons why the tech industry can become "one of the most powerful voices" in politics:

    1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.

    2: Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.

    3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.

We control massive distribution channels is something that would issue from a Facebook lackey's mouth in the most conspiracy-addled daydream of an infowars.com power-user. And yet here is Green, Mark Zuckerberg's old Harvard roommate, essentially promoting technology-enabled subliminal messaging in a confidential memo to the tech elite.

Green said in a statement that his language was "poorly chosen" and gave "a misimpression of the views and aspirations of this organization and those associated with." But he made a very similar pitch Monday in a paid promotional presentation to the assembled geeks and entrepreneurs of the TechCrunch Distrupt conference in New York City:

"This is one of those urgent policy problems that demonstrates how broken Washington D.C. is," he said, "and where we can apply our patented tech community innovation skills."

This framing is important because as tech companies become bigger political players they're likely going to adopt a similar message. Last year, the tech industry spent $132.5 million on lobbying efforts, "placing them among the top lobbying sectors in the Capitol," according to the Washington Post. Many of these companies are taking the same route as Zuckerberg, creating non-profit "stealth PACS" that allow them to wield political influence in the name of some social good without disclosing their donors.

FaceBook has become no more than a captive audience of consumers to be studied by corporate marketeers - users are no more than guinea pigs.  If FaceBook is going to use and exploit their users the least they could do is start paying them.

George W Bush's $250 Million Can of Whitewash. In America, with enough time and money you can convince people you're not evil when you lose $17 trillion dollars of the nation's money and get 20,000 soldiers and marines maimed. Bush was just following the Conservative Road-map for America. He made the rich richer and the middle-class poorer.

Another proud day for the NRA ( National Right to Murder Children Association) 5-Year-Old Get .22 Caliber Birthday Rifle, Shoots and Kills 2-Year-Old Sister

Wacky Anti-America Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and Crazy Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) Fight for Corporate Welfare and Corruption of the Army

Wacky Anti-America Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and Crazy Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) Fight for Corporate Welfare and Corruption of the Army

Congress is forcing the Army to spend nearly half a billion dollars building tanks that Army officials insist they don’t want, with money they say could be better spent elsewhere, according to a new report from the AP.

Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) are the two members of congress at the helm of the effort to spend $436 million on upgrading the Abrams tank, “a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.” The reason? Both represent Ohio, home to the nation’s only tank manufacturing plant, which would profit from the money.

The move is contradictory for the two politicians; both are also vocal advocates for fiscal austerity, and have made careers insisting that the government cut what they see as wasteful spending. It would seem that pushing for tank production against the will of the Army — as Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno put it, “If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way” — is in direct contradiction to that aim.

Still, Rep. Jordan defended his request for the funding, saying, “The one area where we are supposed to spend taxpayer money is in defense of the country.” This is a common line among Republicans. The House GOP’s proposed budget also seeks to restore funding the military says it doesn’t need.

Indeed, Republicans have tried to maintain defense spending while pushing for cuts to mental health programs, cancer treatment, food safety inspectors, and preschool programs. They have repeatedly ignored or dismissed the assertion from military generals that President Obama’s budget, which would have made targeted cuts to military programs, was an acceptable path to spending reduction.

A cut to one specific program would by no means be a drastic setback for the military; between 2001 and 2011, military spending nearly doubled. American voters, much like the military’s generals, also support scaling back the military’s spending.

So plastic patriots Portman and Jordan want to waste tax dollars. They want to weaken our national defense. They want to go against the best judgment of military experts. yep, sounds like more conservatism in action. Isn't that what conservatism is all about, making America weaker and more corrupt, while wrapping it's dangerous agenda in the flag and fear.

Real Americans Do Not Disregard Medical Research Budget Cuts To Ridicule Patriotic Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)

Real Americans Do Not Disregard Medical Research Budget Cuts To Ridicule Patriotic Senator Harry Reid (D-NV)

Fox News selectively edited comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to accuse him of exaggerating the effects of automatic budget cuts that began March 1. Fox's excerpt of Reid's call to end the cuts left out his description of specific impacts and ignored widespread media reporting that supports his statements.

Due to the across-the-board spending cuts, the National Institute of Health (NIH) will be forced reduce its budget by $1.5 billion and expects to award 1,000 fewer grants in 2013. Because approximately three-fifths, or $40.8 billion, of all university research funding in 2011 came from the federal government, this loss will be disruptive. Some disruptions have already begun.

On April 25, Fox & Friends aired a short clip from Sen. Reid's April 24 remarks to the Senate that called for an end to the arbitrary budget cuts. Although Reid prefaced the aired comments with a broader description of the impact that the mandatory budget cuts may have on education and the economy, Fox Business host Stuart Varney and Fox News host Steve Doocy chose to focus on just three sentences, accusing Reid of "desperate" exaggeration. Doocy claimed that Reid "essentially is saying Republicans want to kill people."

Fox's short excerpt of Reid's testimony omitted context in which Reid detailed specific examples of how the budget cuts may curb medical research. Here is a larger excerpt of Reid's statement [what Fox aired is bolded]:

    Nationwide these across-the-board cuts will cost 750,000 jobs. They will cost us investments in education that keep America competitive. They will cost millions of seniors, children, veterans and needy families the safety net that keeps them from descending into poverty.

    Most of the headlines are focused on the hours the sequester has cost travelers in airports across the nation. The frustration and the economic effects of those delays should not be minimized. But the sequester could also cost this country - and humankind - a cure for AIDS or Parkinson's disease or cancer.

    These arbitrary cuts have decimated funding for medical researchers seeking cures for diabetes, epilepsy and hundreds of other dangerous and debilitating diseases. The National Institutes of Health has delayed or halted vital scientific projects and reduced the number of grants it awards to research scientists. Thousands of researchers will lose their jobs in the next few months. And projects that can't go on without adequate staffing will be cancelled altogether.

    At Ohio State University, grants for cancer research and infectious disease control have been axed. At the University of Cincinnati - which is at the forefront in research on strokes, a leading cause of death in the United States - scientists are bracing for similar cuts. Vanderbilt University and the University of Kentucky are accepting fewer science graduate students because of funding reductions. At Wright State University, scientists researching pregnancy-related disorders such as preeclampsia will lose their jobs. Boston University has laid off lab scientists, and research laboratories in San Francisco have instituted hiring freezes and delayed the launch of important studies. And grants to some of Harvard University's most successful research scientists were not renewed because of the sequester.

    This kind of research saves lives. These scientists are looking for the next successful treatment for Alzheimer's disease or the next drug to treat high cholesterol. But they might never get the chance to complete their groundbreaking work or make their life-saving discoveries because of these short-sighted cuts.

    We have seen the devastating impacts of these arbitrary budget cuts. Now it's time to stop them.

News reports confirm the cuts to medical research highlighted in Reid's statement.

The Toledo Blade reported that cuts to cancer and infectious disease research have already begun to take effect at Ohio State University. The school expects to lose $27 million by the end of 2014. The Blade also highlighted the $17 million cut expected to hit the University of Cincinnati's groundbreaking research on strokes and how the cuts have jeopardized Wright State University's potentially life-saving research on pregnancy complications:

    In his lab at Wright State University, Thomas Brown is moving closer to understanding why some babies are born premature -- cutting-edge research that has the potential to save the lives of babies and their mothers.

    But Brown, who has a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the underlying factors that cause pre-eclampsia and pregnancy-related disorders, faces uncertainty about the funding that makes his lab work possible.

According to U.S. News & World Report, Vanderbilt University already plans to reduce graduate student admissions for next year, and may have to cut research assistants on some of its 3,500 active research grants and contracts. The Stateline news service from the Pew Charitable Trusts reported that the University of Kentucky's College of Medicine reduced admissions to its Ph.D. program in physiology by a third due to federal budget cuts. Similarly, staffing reductions have begun to take effect among researchers at the University of California at San Francisco, which expects to lose more than $28 million. And Harvard Medical School shut down its primate research center, citing growing uncertainty of federal funding.

It is already well known that Fox Business host Stuart Varney and Fox News host Steve Doocy are rapid anti-American zealots. They have both pushed for America to adopt European style austerity measures. Austerity measures which have kept Europe from recovering from the world wide recession that started in 2007. Varney and Doocy make over a million dollars a year trashing America, advocating UnAmerican conservative economics, deceptively editing video as though they were working for the Spanish fascists of WW II. You would think they would show some appreciation for a country that has been so generous to them, especially considering they have the morals of a cockroach and the brains of a tree stump. 

Obamacare, Do Real Patriots Have Two Faces - Republicans To Back Bill Expanding Obamacare Program

Obamacare, Do Real Patriots Have Two Faces - Republicans To Back Bill Expanding Obamacare Program

House Republicans plan to vote on a bill on Wednesday that would shift money from the portion of Obamacare that invests in prevention and use it to expand a temporary initiative that has helped individuals and families with pre-existing medical conditions obtain coverage.

The Helping Sick Americans Now Act would move $4 billion from the Affordable Care Act’s $10 billion Prevention and Public Health Fund into the Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan (PCIP), a program of high-risk pools that has provided coverage to uninsured Americans who didn’t have an offer of insurance from an employer and couldn’t find a plan in the individual market. The PCIP was designed as a bridge to the exchanges, which will become operational in 2014, but the $5 billion program stopped accepting new enrollees in February.

“Like in so many other areas, the President’s health care legislation failed to adequately protect sick patients with pre-existing conditions, like those battling cancer,” Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), told Talking Points Memo. “House Republicans are determined to do so by taking funding from a slush fund and moving it where it is critically needed.”

But while insuring high-cost individuals in separate pools has long been a staple of Republican health policy, the Prevention Fund also supports GOP-backed priorities. The Fund has invested in community and clinical prevention, research, public health infrastructure, immunizations and screenings, tobacco prevention and public health workforce and training — measures that Republicans touted as critical to lowering health care costs:

    – Former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) argued that “one of the things we did in the health care legislation was to provide a lot of different incentives for preventive care.” [7/12/2010]

    – Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the law’s emphasis on preventive care is good “because it costs less to keep people well than to treat them when they’re sick.” [10/18/2010]

    – Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “Congress should be able to work together on our practical ideas that the American people support, such as reforming our medical liability laws to discourage junk lawsuits…encouraging wellness and prevention programs that have proved to be effective in cutting costs and improving care.” [8/26/2010]

    – Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): “I am an original cosponsor of S. 1099, the “Patients’ Choice Act,” …. The legislation would make health care coverage accessible and affordable for all Americans through private insurance coverage, while also promoting prevention and wellness which can improve lives and lower long-term medical costs. [7/19/2009]

Now, the party is seeking to undermine one priority to fund the other, even after repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare and eliminate the PCIP and the Prevention Fund.

Conservatives are just spiteful venal children who never grow up. Republicans do not stand for American values. This is an excellent example of what they do stand for, glaringly wanton behavior. Not good government. In their fantasies all conservatives really want to live in Somalia rather than big-government Sweden. I'd suggest taking up a collection to buy them all a boat ticket, but they have stolen so much from American workers they can pay their own way.

The Freaky Koch Brothers Have Another Bill on Their Anti-American Agenda

The Freaky Koch Brothers Have Another Bill on Their Anti-American Agenda

Will the "Koch Brothers Bill" Make Industrial Accidents More Likely?
Such accidents are all too common in chemical country. So why are congressmen fighting to keep the EPA from doing anything about it?

Last Wednesday’s explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant, which left at least 15 people dead and more than a hundred injured, was made possible by an ultra-lax [1] state- and federal oversight climate that make inspections of such facilities all but a rubber-stamp process—when they even happen. If the chemical lobby and its allies in Congress get their way, a regulatory process dismissed by environmental activists and labor unions as extremely weak would be watered down even more.

In February, 11 congressmen—10 Republicans and 1 Democrat—joined some two dozen [2] industry groups, including the Fertilizer Institute, the American Chemistry Council, and the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration, to back the General Duty Clarification Act [3]. The bill is designed to sap the Environmental Protection Agency of its powers to regulate safety and security at major chemical sites, as prescribed by the Clean Air Act.

"We call that the Koch brothers bill," Greenpeace legislative director Rick Hind says, because the bill's sponsor, GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, represents the conservative mega-donors' home city of Wichita. (The sponsor of the sister legislation in the senate, GOP Sen. Pat Roberts, represents the Kochs' home state of Kansas.) The brothers have huge investments in fertilizer production, and Hind thinks they'll ultimately get what they want, whether or not the bill becomes law. "It's not necessarily intended to achieve legislative passage—it's more about intimidation of a beleaguered agency."

The fight over fertilizer and the Clean Air Act has its origins in the passage of the law back in 1990. Although the original bill included language that would have permitted the EPA to regulate the emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide—both of which are important ingredients and fertilizer manufacturing—a fierce lobbying push from the fertilizer industry resulted in the compounds being stricken from the formal list.

The radical Kochs, their supporters and the Congressional representatives they buy off in Congress say they stand for freedom. Ever been sick or known someone who was seriously ill. How free were they. How much could they enjoy their family, their friends or just enjoy being alive. The Koch-heads want to make a lot of people sick, including children, so they ( already billionaires) can make even more money. The Koch-heads have only one god and that is money. They respect nothing else. Maybe they have figured out a way to take all the money they made off the labor of average workers, with them when they die.

The gun lobby often claims that firearms are used for self-defense an estimated 2.5 million times a year. But according to the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey, the actual number is just a fraction of that:

Freedom Loving Americans Understand What It Is Like to Have Fracking in Your Backyard

Freedom Loving Americans Understand What It Is Like to Have Fracking in Your Backyard

Ed Wade’s property straddles the Wetzel and Marsh county lines in rural West Virginia and it has a conventional gas well on it. “You could cover the whole [well] pad with three pickups,” said Wade. And West Virginia has lots of conventional wells — more than 50,000 at last count. West Virginians are so well acquainted with gas drilling that when companies began using high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing in 2006 to access areas of the Marcellus Shale that underlie the state, most residents and regulators were unprepared for the massive footprint of the operations and the impact on their communities.

When it comes to a conventional well and a Marcellus well, “There is no comparison, none whatsoever,” said Wade, who works with the Wetzel County Action Group [4]. “You live in the country for a reason and it just takes that and turns it upside down. You know how they preach all the time that natural gas burns cleaner than coal; well, it may burn cleaner than coal, but it’s a hell of a lot dirtier to extract.”

To understand what’s at stake, you have to understand the vocabulary. Take the word “fracking” for example. When people say it’s been around since the 1950s, they are referring to vertical fracturing, but what’s causing all the contention lately is a much more destructive process known as high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing. Or they’re using "fracking" in a very limited way. “The industry uses [fracking] to refer just to the moment when the shale is fractured using water as the sledgehammer to shatter the shale,” scientist Sandra Steingraber told AlterNet [5]. “With that as the definition they can say truthfully that there are no cases of water contamination associated with fracking. But you don’t get fracking without bringing with it all these other things — mining for the frack sand [6], depleting water, you have to add the chemicals, you have to drill, you have to dispose of the waste, you have drill cuttings. I refer to them all as fracking, as do most activists.”

The potential impacts that go well beyond the moment the well is fracked are mammoth. What has been most discussed is the concern that the chemicals used in the fracking process, as well as naturally occurring but dangerous substances underground like arsenic, heavy metals and methane, can migrate back to the surface with water through faults, fissures and abandoned mines. That’s deeply concerning, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The footprint of the well site, which now often includes freshwater or wastewater ponds and tankers full of chemicals, has grown expotentially from the size of conventional wells -- they certainly aren't the size of a few pickup trucks. Here's an aerial view of a new home, built in rural West Virginia that is now surrounded by a fracking operation after the owner's neighbor leased to a drilling company.


Fracking takes rural communities and turns them into industrial zones — and citizens have little recourse. Thanks to the so-called “Halliburton Loophole” in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, fracking is exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act and there are exemptions also in the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. In West Virginia, a state with a long history of energy extraction, industry has a controlling hand in local and state politics and thus far, seems to be calling the shots. To make matters worse, many properties had their mineral rights separated over a century ago. So, people may own their homes and properties, but not the minerals underneath. Their property can be destroyed by drilling and they will have no financial gain.

Or, they can lose virtually everything, simply by living next door to someone who does lease.

Maybe some old school vertical fracturing is safe enough. Maybe. Yet it is fairly obvious that that horizontal fracking combined with the massive numbers of wells is not safe, not clean, not sustainable and not good for American families.