Internet muse.
Daring, bold, never sold.
My daily weblog of politics, humor, philosophy...and a constant and nagging reminder of the existence of universal love....
Excerpt:
With regard to [V.P. Dick Cheney, Edwards continued to level sharp criticism.
"It is not an accident that he's unbelievably poorly thought of," Edwards said. "He is one of - if not the - principal architects of this disaster in Iraq. He put us on an energy path that the American people are paying an enormous price for right now. He paid little to no attention to making sure the government was prepared to respond to the kind of disaster that hit our Gulf Coast. We've got a health care crisis going on, he's had no proposal of any kind that I know of. And people don't trust him anymore, which is understandable. I wouldn't trust him."
A quote from Rabbi Michael Lerner:
"...what I call for as the fundamental ethos or the fundamental central organizing idea of a progressive movement is a call for a new bottom line or, in more technical terms, a new definition of productivity, efficiency and rationality so that institutions are judged rational, efficient and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacity to respond to other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, and enhance our capacity to respond to the universe with awe and wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur of all that is in this universe."
photo by Jude Nagurney Camwell)
I'm the one in orange...delivering
Ray McGovern, with whom I shared an umbrella ;)
Cindy Sheehan (photo by Jude Nagurney Camwell)
Then the night came, and the storm, and the path was dark, and the children shook with fear and cold, and the mother drew them close and covered them with her mantle, and the children said, "Mother, we are not afraid, for you are near, and no harm can come."
And the morning came, and there was a hill ahead, and the children climbed and grew weary, and the mother was weary. But at all times she said to the children," A little patience and we are there." So the children climbed, and when they reached the top they said, "Mother, we would not have done it without you."
looked up at the stars and said, "This is a better day than the last, for my children have learned fortitude in the face of hardness. Yesterday I gave them courage. 
And the next day came strange clouds which darkened the earth, clouds of war and hate and evil, and the children groped and stumbled, and the mother said: "Look up. Lift your eyes to the light. "And the children looked and saw above the clouds an everlasting glory, and it guided them beyond the darkness. And that night the Mother said, "This is the best day of all, for I have shown my children God."
And the days went on, and the weeks and the months and the years, and the mother grew old and she was little and bent. But her children were tall and strong, and walked with courage. And when the way was rough, they lifted her, for she was as light as a feather; and at last they came to a hill, and beyond they could see a shining road and golden gates flung wide. And mother said, "I have reached the end of my journey. And now I know the end is better than the beginning, for my children can walk alone, and their children after them."
And the children said, "You will always walk with us, Mother, even when you have gone through the gates." And they stood and watched her as she went on alone, and the gates closed after her. And they said: "We cannot see her but she is with us still. A Mother like ours is more than a memory. She is a living presence......."
Your Mother is always with you.... She's the whisper of the leaves as you walk down the street; she's the smell of bleach in your freshly laundered socks; she's the cool hand on your brow when you're not well. Your Mother lives inside your laughter. And she's crystallized in every tear drop. She's the place you came from, your first home; and she's the map you follow with every step you take. She's your first love and your first heartbreak, and nothing on earth can separate you. Not time, not space... not even death!
"MIRROR IMAGE"
In May 2004 when John Kerry was criticizing Bush on his poor leadership on the war on terror, Bush's then-top campaign-man Mark Racicot had said, "Political 'attacks' come at a price for the military."
Really?!?
How weird.
Today the president has a 29% approval rating and retired Generals are the ones criticizing the Bush administration, I guess we can say just the opposite: "The Military's 'attacks' come at a price for Bush politics!"
At a recent gathering of visitors to the Job Corps office in Syracuse, Julius Lawrence looked each young man and woman directly in the eye and told them that he refused to go to his grave not believing he'd done everything he could possibly do to help them find the opportunities that were available to him nearly forty years ago. He is a committed American citizen, steadfast in his support of young people’s success in his community. He is a link between the dropout segment of our society and the opportunity they may have never known about had it not been for his service. 
Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.Be Good For Goodness Sake
- from an AP story by Kathryn Shrader
"I cannot, in good conscience, exhort my students to pursue truth and knowledge, then collect a paycheck from an institution that displays such flagrant disregard for both."
- Steve Almond, adjunct professor of English at Boston College [Boston Globe op-ed]
These professors hold that Rice's view that countries should act in their own self-interest "stands in disturbing contrast with the Catholic and humanistic conviction that all people are linked together in a single human family," they write. They contend that her support for the "tragic war in Iraq...cannot be justified in light of the moral values of the Catholic tradition or the norms of international law." For these reasons, they object to her speaking and honoring at BC's 2006 commencement. Close to one hundred professors have signed the petition so far.Excerpts of Almond's comments from the Boston Globe:
She has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy.These professors likely experience disappointment, and possibly failure, when they see their example of strong conviction and commitment to truth lost upon the morally flaccid response from students who are more concerned for their graduation day being marred by those who would protest what are quite possibly the greatest lies ever told to garner U.S. citizens' public support for an immoral and unjust war. One student's comment [from The Observer]
The public record of her deceits is extensive. During the ramp-up to the Iraq war, she made 29 false or misleading public statements concerning Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, according to a congressional investigation by the House Committee on Government Reform.
[...]Like the president whom she serves so faithfully, she refuses to recognize her errors or the tragic consequences of those errors to the young soldiers and civilians dying in Iraq. She is a diplomat whose central allegiance is not to the democratic cause of this nation, but absolute power.
[...]To be clear: I am not questioning her intellectual gifts or academic accomplishments. Nor her potentially inspiring role as a powerful woman of color.
But these are not the factors by which a commencement speaker should be judged. It is the content of one's character that matters here -- the reverence for truth and knowledge that Boston College purports to champion.
Rice does not personify these values; she repudiates them. Whatever inspiring rhetoric she might present to the graduating class, her actions as a citizen and politician tell a different story.
Most graduating seniors..are opposed to anything that would disrupt their graduation ceremony. Amanda Grey '06, Phi Beta Kappa and soon to be Investment Banking Analyst at Revolution Partners, said, "My parents didn't pay $160,000 to watch students protest on my graduation day. I hope that the students who are opposed to [Rice speaking] remain quiet and sit throughout the ceremony respectfully."How has "silence" or "respect" been a benefit to any of us while we've been willing subjects to the Bush administration? What can we expect by offering them more silence and respect? As for myself, they lost my respect when they lied to me, and I shall never again be silent about it.
Last year, a student at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., was kicked out of the school's education program for arguing that corporal punishment — i.e. spanking and the like — could be useful in classrooms.Jonah reduces Catholicism and our freedom to express ourselves as faithful Americans to a "cudgel". As a Roman Catholic living in a country where my freedom to speak about our common values (many that are derived from our faith traditions) is welcomed, I'm free to tell Jonah that I don't think he made a good case. In fact, I think he was insulting to those who believe the Commandment from the Bible that says: Thou Shalt Not Lie. Attempts to render a sacred belief meaningless by blurring the moral issue with paranoia about "the left" is, to my Christian sensibility, an evil stunt. Nice going, Jonah.
It's about putting the "United" back in the "United States of America". It's about taking the diverse strains of American culture and tying them together with the promise of better days through better ways, with prosperity through hard work and opportunity for all, with the blood of our veins and the bones of our bodies and the last throbbing gasp for freedom that bubbles up from our collective souls.At the One America Committee blog, Xpatriated Texan has written an essay on Democrats and how they need to re-learn the lessons of great Americans past that involve putting aside petty differences and working together, united, to make a reality out of the idea that "all men are created equal".
This part [of a series] focuses on known U.S. IC reporting from May through September 2002 described in the SSCI Report. This is a time period when the use of proxy phrases like "trying to acquire", "trying to procure", "trying to purchase" and "sought" uranium - in order to specifically describe intel that alleged Iraq had purchased uranium - became commonplace in IC reporting. I discuss the possible motivations of the IC in using this terminology. It is noteworthy that the emergence of the specific word "sought" in the terminology used by the U.S. government - in this case, initiated by the Bush White House on September 24, 2002 - coincided with the British Government's release of their dishonest September 24, 2002 "white paper", in which they adopted the "sought" uranium terminology to describe intel that was about a uranium purchase, starting in mid-September 2002. This was the same "white paper" that the CIA vigorously distanced itself from in the context of the uranium claim (in the Sep/Oct 2002 timeframe).This leads us to stronger indications that the Brits and the U.S. were in collusion to make a case for a war that has been proven to be completely unnecessary.
[....] ..the semantics are significant only because of the duplicity of the Bush White House's exploitation of the misleading semantics in summer 2003 and beyond to continue to perpetrate the myth that somehow the uranium claim was justifiable because it only alleged Iraq was "seeking" uranium and not that Iraq had purchased uranium. [Left Coaster]
Edwards joined Dennis Rivera, the head of District Council 1199, which represents some 75,000 home care workers, attendants and aides, in demanding that the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation enter contracts only with home care agencies that provide a living wage. [source: WCBS New York; see VIDEO at link]tip of the hat to NCDem from OACblog
A poll conducted for a group that wants immigration restricted shows that two-thirds of American voters agree with its goal and that only 43 percent favor a Senate bill that would let most illegal immigrants apply for legal status.If you see how skillfully they were led, you wouldn't wonder why such a large majority answered this way.
"They use religion as an organizing tool. We see it as a road to redemption."Molly Ivins wrote about the Network of Spritual Progressives this week:
Rabbi Michael Lerner ("The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right") is urging a 20-year commitment of 5 percent of GDP to end world poverty. The money would not be committed to governments, but to NGOs with solid records. And I say, why the hell not?It really is quite that simple. The result of using Christianity as a political organizing tool has produced a radically Right policy that is both selfish and stupid (not to mention divisive for American Christians). It's time for all of that to change and it's time for the Democratic party to stop being afraid to admit that the majority of their members are people of faith who derive many of their values from their spiritual raising.
Is selfish and stupid working out so well for us? The progressive religious people will be meeting in Washington, D.C., on May 17-20 for a Spiritual Activism Conference. Naturally, being lefties, they pose no threat to separation of church and state. Amazing how easy it is to keep that clear just by thinking it through.
"It is not too soon for this story to be told, seen and heard. But it is too soon for us to become complacent. It is too soon for us to think of this war in only national terms. We need to be mindful that this enemy, who made those holes in our landscape and caused the deaths of some 3,000 of our fellow free people, has a vision to personally kill or convert each and every one of us. This film reminds us that this war is personal."Mr. Beamer is right. Individual conscience and liberty are at the very heart of our Declaration of Independence. If we believe our personal liberty is paramount to human rights and the rule of law, it should stand for us and for all people of this world. We need to stop acting unilaterally and begin to lead and cooperate with other nations whose people, each of them an individual of conscience, have as much at stake as we do. Mr. Beamer doesn't want his son to have fought and died in vain. Neither does Cindy Sheehan or Michael Berg want for their sons to have died in vain. America never should have split from the world community, squandering their cooperation, trust, and will to cut terror at its roots in solidarity.
In an interview with the financial news network CNBC, Mr Bush said he had yet to see the recently released film of the uprising, a dramatic portrayal of events on the United Airlines plane before it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.The President will not change his mind once he sees the film "United 93", for his mind was made up long before September 11. His sights were set on removing Saddam Hussein and forcing a democratization in which even British PM Tony Blair is uncomfortable to have his nation participating. As Stephen Colbert wryly jabbed at the recent White House Correspondent's dinner,
But he said he agreed with the description of David Beamer, whose son Todd died in the crash, who in a Wall Street Journal commentary last month called it "our first successful counter-attack in our homeland in this new global war, World War III".
Mr Bush said: "I believe that. I believe that it was the first counter-attack to World War III."
The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will.
This enemy is on a fanatical mission to take away our lives and liberty--[..] This enemy seeks to take away the free will that our Creator has endowed in us. [..] we are at war with a real enemy and it is personal. [..] This enemy does not seek our resources, our land or our materials, but rather to alter our very way of life."Because of our founding roots, Americans understand that no one alters our way of life unless we allow them to do so. What a shame to have to look to our own government with distrust because of their deliberate misleading and failure to go into a war with a strategy to win or a plan to get us out. The Bush administration has failed Mr. Beamer, Mr. Berg, and Mrs. Sheehan, along with the rest of the world's civil individuals.
"There are those who would hope to escape the pain of war."In a nuclear age, I believe that we should remember that military intervention and 'hot' war should be our dead-last resort. Let's remember Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son to what she believes has been a war of lies told to America by its very own leader. Mr. Beamer has obviously read and respects the words of our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. I wish that I saw the same respect for the Founding documents by our own President. His concern for himself and for the power of his office has trumped all respect for the rule of American law. I, and many other citizens, believe that he has run roughshod over our individual liberties and mocked the rule of law. What a pity that Americans, at this time in our history, have to be so concerned for the very life of our own democracy when we should be united against those who employ terror against all the world's people.
Former CIA station chief Haviland Smith, writing in the WaPo:Today Laura Rozen asks:
Given the way the Bush White House has handled intelligence during the past three years, it makes sense that it is angry at the clandestine service. The officers in that service are often required to give their opinions about policies in advance of their implementation. It is unlikely that any clandestine service officer, having spent a career in the Middle East, would see our current policy there as flawless. Thus many in the White House probably see the clandestine service as a nest of enemies. They might just want to consider an alternative possibility: that the service is made up of professionals who would like to save their country from the further embarrassment and potential difficulties of a truly flawed and dangerous Iraq policy...
Given his dogged adherence to the righteousness of that policy, it makes sense that the president would be angry with the clandestine service. It seems quite possible that the service is being punished for having been right... The agency's statutory responsibility is to speak the truth, whether the truth supports the president's plans or not. It would appear that this concept is not shared by this administration.
'Cutting off our nose to spite our face,' is how Smith sums up Porter Goss's White House ordered purge of the clandestine service underway.
Does something about this story line that Goss suddenly left because of his long-standing tension with Negroponte, his fraternity brother from Yale, over Goss fighting to hold CIA turf seem a bit canned to you?Why the sense of urgency about Goss' departure? What really happened? Ms. Rozen says:
The story line until today has been far different: that much of the operative camp of the Agency perceived Goss as a political enforcer, someone who wasn't seen to be looking out for them but for the White House's interests; that Goss was rather passive and out of touch and overly delegated day to day affairs to his staff, "the Gosslings," led by the fiercely partisan Patrick Murray. I don't believe I have ever heard from people in that world a sense that Goss was looking out for them. The newspaper coverage has suggested rather that a lot of the experienced bench strength cadre at the Agency had left in fights with Goss and his staff during his rocky tenure, and that the Agency had never been more demoralized. So all that time, during all those departures, Goss was covertly fighting for his folks against the new intel reorganization?Something just doesn't sit right with Ms. Rozen. This kind of hasty departure simply isn't the M.O. of Bush administration orchestral maneuvers.
If {john Negroponte] had been lobbying to get rid of Goss, and the President was inclined to support that decision, there were a hundred ways to do it in a way that would project stability, confidence, normalcy.I love Duncan Black's sense of humor. At his blog, he wryly makes the astute observation that the press pretends that they've known it all along "even though they didn't bother to tell the rest of us about it."
There also is truth to the rumor that Goss was not happy with presiding over a CIA that had been rendered a co-equal with the Department of Defense intelligence units. Prior to the creation of the National Director of Intelligence, the CIA was the lead intelligence agency. No longer. Ironically, part of the impetus for the creation of the NDI was the perceived "failures" of the CIA with respect to 9-11 and Iraq. Recent revelations by retired CIA officers, such as Paul Pillar and Ty Drumheller, make clear that the CIA basically got it right on Iraq and was ignored by the Bush Administration.You may hear that Goss left because of some poker party-hooker-and-limousine scandal (when the hell will these boys grow up?) in which he was only remotely connected because it was one of his staffers involved. After reading Mr. Johnson's statement today, no one could convince me that that is the primary reason Goss is gone.
What is even more unfortunate is the effect of this scandal on the CIA and ultimately this nation. The CIA has endured the shame of the president, the vice president, and the Republican controlled Congress, blaming it for intelligence failures in Iraq when in fact, the CIA told the truth on critical issues but the leaders did not want to hear it. The CIA also has endured a president and vice president whose immediate staff have been implicated in the outing of an undercover CIA officer. Despite a promise to get to the bottom of this breach of secrecy, President Bush has permitted one of the participants in that leak - Karl Rove - to stay on the job. And now a sex scandal that implicates, by association, the former Director of the CIA and the number-three man at the Agency.In 2004, Chalmers Johnson reminded us that:
Hopefully, President Bush will seize this opportunity to remove the taint of politics from the CIA. We need a professional, not a political hack running the CIA. We live in a dangerous world that requires an organization like the CIA capable of operating in the world of the covert and clandestine. Faced with a crisis of leadership and confidence, however, the CIA may be distracted from its mission of helping protect this nation. Viewed in this light, the sudden departure of Porter Goss is a real tragedy.
Bush apostle David Brooks [wrote] in the New York Times that the CIA is engaged "in slow-motion brazen insubordination, which violate[s] all standards of honorable public service. . . . It is time to reassert some harsh authority so CIA employees know they must defer to the people who win elections. . . . If they [people in the CIA] ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data."[4] Brooks seems to think that the CIA is the President's personal advertising agency and that its employees owe their livelihoods to him.Brooks is swift to scapegoat and diminish the best minds of the CIA, isn't he?
New York Times columnist John Tierney recently offered a suggestion that would make most politicians and citizens shudder. In a nutshell, he's saying that a new gas tax is the only way to go in order to solve the problem of conservation and the promotion of alternative energy.
It's hard to believe that, here in 2006, the middle class is being blamed for their alleged "addiction to oil" while their political leaders, for all intents and purposes, have abdicated their responsibility to effectively lead America toward less oil dependence. Mr. Tierney hops on board the blame-train and suggests that we punish the poor and middle class for their need to drive their gas-guzzling vehicles by slapping on more taxes to force them to stay at home when they feel like doing those "crazy, impulsive" things like going to work or going to get a week's worth of groceries or taking their children to football practice. Tierney's taking the issue of environmentalism and turning it into just another tax scheme.
The voodoo gas-tax plan that Mr. Tierney presents to temporarily solve the problem of high gasoline costs is a mishmash of "what-ifs" and "maybes" and "you pay now, we'll probably take care of you laters". Read this excerpt:
The problem would be selling the tax to voters, but it could be phased in discreetly -- say, a new dime of tax whenever the gas price declines 20 cents -- with the promise that all the money would be given back. The new revenue could be evenly divvied up each year, either by mailing a check to every car owner or (my pet proposal) by putting it into a new private account for every worker now paying into Social Security.
Mr. Tierney's ideas about a gas-tax are not entirely new. He's been floating them ever since the post-Hurricane Katrina days when most of New Orleans was floating. Back in October 2005 he said, "The $3-per-gallon price probably isn't going to last." Given the state of the world today, I wonder who he thinks he's kidding? When does he expect that world demand for oil will decrease? In October Mr. Tierney also said that new tax revenues from an increased gas-tax would be divided equally among all workers and go right into their "personal accounts." Given the final outcome of the popularity of Bush's Social Security scheme last year, I wonder who he thinks he's fooling?
Grover Norquist from the anti-tax lobbying group Americans for Tax Reform egged Mr. Tierney on when he reassured him that he wouldn't be "cast into the abyss" for presenting his gas-tax scheme. He figured it could be safely hidden within an annual tax-cut bill so that it wouldn't be noticed by the public as a violation of his fundamental "no-tax (at any and all costs to the public welfare) pledge."
Mr. Tierney said in this week's column:
I know it's naïve to think anyone in Washington really cares about sensible conservation.I respectfully disagree. One look at the facts surrounding Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) and Senator Arlen Specter's (R-Pa.) amendment that called on energy bill negotiators to set an oil savings target for the United States of at least a million barrels of oil a day by 2015 (blocked by a Republican majority) will show you that three are some in Washington DC who do care - on a bipartisan basis.
Hard-working American taxpayers need to hear realistic solutions, and not an economic scheme that promises them a future benefit that is more like a crapshoot than a dependable pledge. Americans can best benefit now by a realigning of our economic priorities and seeking a new energy policy. We would all benefit from:
* Rolling back those outrageous Big Oil tax breaks and subsidies that Bush signed into law. [as Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently suggested to his colleagues on the Senate floor for 4 1/2 hours]. American consumers have seen no return on their tax investments. Big Oil's current record of increased profits are an affront to the taxpayer who supplements Big Oil with corporate welfare and, at the same time, pays $3 a gallon at the pumps.
* Rolling back those Bush tax cuts that benefit the richest Americans while shrinking the middle class. Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) amounts and eligibility for poor working Americans who cannot afford gasoline to get back and forth to work.
* Repealing the law that allows Big Oil to avoid federal royalties on oil they extract from public lands.
* A renewed presentation of the Cantwell-Specter oil savings amendment requiring a 40 percent reduction in imported oil.
* Creating a transparent new federal energy program funded by all taxpayers (not punishing only the poor and middle-class gas consumers who haven't learned about loopholes). The new taxes should be firmly dedicated todirect investments in the research and development of alternative energy and should foster efforts to raise fuel-efficiency (CAFÉ) standards.
* Supporting research to find ways to gradually reduce the long-term structural demand for oil, including a public relations campaign with Hollywood stars and political leaders from both sides of the aisle coming together to do one-minute public service ads to promote conservation. Don't punish already-economically-burdened Americans with new taxes - lead by example.
* An investment in consumer incentives toward the purchase of new fuel-efficient cars and tax incentives for a retooling of the auto-manufacturing industry.
* Supporting American farmers rather than developing a brand new national addiction, this time to sugar cane from Brazil. Brazil, by the way, is years ahead of us on the development of alternative fuels within their own country. A resourceful nation like ours should be embarrassed. We should employ the Farm Bill to produce opportunity by promoting the development and production of biomass ethanol and farm-based renewable energy right here in our own country. We must continue to invest in American ingenuity or we will always be addicted to another nation's goods and will therefore be at their mercy.
Seeing the government totally unprepared for the switch to ethanol from MTBE [methyl tertiary butyl ether], cutting refinery output and pushing prices higher while demand for oil and gasoline is already high has made the public feel insecure. Republicans have blocked legislation to make price-gouging by oil companies a crime. VP Cheney's secret meetings with industry heads about energy policy did not increase the public trust. It is of the utmost importance that transparency is relayed from our government to the American people, along with a sense of responsibility, accountability, fairness, and justice.
Americans care about their own economic future and they worry about the world their children will someday face. Most of them believe that America is headed in the wrong direction. We need to see leadership that causes them to believe it is possible to have hope for a realistic and pragmatic solution to the many problems that come with energy dependence.
We don't have to make Big Oil our enemy. We should be encouraging the best minds in the business to help America come up with solutions to protect the environment while decreasing our dependence on oil and our pain at the gas pumps. We can make Big Oil more accountable by stepping in with some new federal regulations and a new way of distributing our hard-earned tax dollars to them. I think most middle-class Americans paying insane prices at the pumps today would be willing to support and trust a solution that would directly work to ease their economic pain and more clearly promise a better future for their own children. Americans don't want voodoo plans that translate to new taxes on the middle class while the government runs nightmarish deficits. Instead, Americans want a clear plan that works, even if it doesn't give them some pie-in-the-sky promise of private accounts or, as the NY Times editorial said on May 2, sticking with the "pathetic recipe" of borrowing "money from the Chinese central bank, and use it to give every voter $100 to buy more gas." There are many better ideas that will bring long-term benefit and gain to the American people. Let's tell our political leaders what we think.
- Cross-posted at One America Committee
There is a belief held by all of them that the coal mine owners are trying to blame the miners and they believe it's a horribly unfair thing to do... considering the lingering doubt about how the accident was said to have occurred, the failure of the safety equipment, and the length of time it took to rescue the miners. Lone survivor Randal McCloy has sent a heartfelt letter to the Sago families that said that three weeks before the blast, he and fellow miner Junior Toler (who died after leading a "Sinners' Prayer" with the other dying miners) found a pocket of methane gas. After reporting it to supervisors, they discovered it had been plugged with glue normally used to secure roof bolts and layers of rock. 
Helen M. Winans, of Phillipi, W.Va., whose son Marshall died in the Sago Mine, the frustration remained raw. [..] "The mining company isn't totally to blame," Ms. Winans said. "The mine inspectors don't do a good job." [..] Ms. Winans said she was pessimistic about improvement in mine safety anytime soon. "You can pass all the laws you want to pass," she said, "but if you don't enforce them, they aren't worth the paper they're printed on."
"I cannot explain why I was spared while the others perished."I'm sure he's probably wondering if God had intentions for him to help save other miners from potential disaster. Although we all know that accidents are inevitable in the mining business, making sure this kind of thing does not so easily happen to other miners in the future might be his role in the Master plan. It seems that the families of the dead in West Virginia are speaking out for the safety of others in memory of the loved ones that were lost. I can personally relate to this way of thinking because my own Grandfather died as a result of too many years and too little worker protections in the coal mines. In spirit, I am with these families in their sadness and in their quest for the truth.
