Rally Crowd Comes for Music, Tunes Out Pro-Polluter Politics

So Massey coal company CEO Don Blankenship blew more than a million of his own dollars on a rally in West Virginia. How'd it turn out? From the Charleston Daily Mail:

As conservative pundit Sean Hannity continued to attack the Obama administration on one stage, hundreds if not thousands of people at a Labor Day rally here shifted their attention to the main stage, where country rocker Hank Williams Jr.'s band was getting ready to play.

For all the talk that Monday's Friends of America Rally marked a new day for the conservative movement, a lot of people seemed to have come to this small Mingo County community just to hear some good music. [...]

But the commercial vendors who had come prepared to sell to 100,000 people saw lower than anticipated sales by mid-afternoon.

This was all completely unsurprising to The Green Miles, who went to Live Earth. Most of the attendees were there for the music, as well.

The low attendance has to be a disappointment to Verizon Wireless, which took a huge public relations hit in standing by its local affiliate's sponsorship of the event. Now it doesn't even get full value for its sponsorship.

This photo from the Charleston Daily Mail tells you all you need to know about the site on which the event was held. The paper refers to it in coal industry jargon as a "reclaimed mountaintop removal site." It's actually what we real Americans would call "a barren lunar landscape":

If You Disagree with Massey CEO, You're Osama bin Laden

Via the Natural Resources Defense Council, here's the CEO of Richmond-based Massey Energy going off on a rant about how he thinks all the world's scientists are conspiring with the communists and the atheists to fool us about global warming.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. Don Blankenship goes on to compare people who disagree with him to Osama bin Laden, which may call for a revision of Godwin's Law. NRDC breaks the video down and concludes:

Blankenship goes on with his bizarre theories about how mass transit will destroy American capitalism. Or, how dealing with global warming will cause the Chinese to take over and tell you where you have to go to church.

But you get the idea.

Next time you hear someone from the coal industry asking to be taken seriously about "clean coal" or the nonexistent "debate" about climate change, just remember the wit and wisdom of Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship.

Did I mention Massey has given 97% of its contributions to Republicans?

Cross-posted from RK