Posted on 08/10/2014 10:56:10 PM PDT by george76
For the pro-coal senator, the "war on coal" begins at home.
...
while McConnell presents himself as a defender of Kentucky coal mining, a member of his own family who serves as a key campaign surrogate is taking a role in an organization that funds one of the most aggressive anti-coal campaigns in the country.
McConnell’s wife, former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, sits on the board of directors of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which has plunged $50 million into the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, an advocacy effort with the expressed goal of killing the coal industry.
In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies teamed up with the Sierra Club to target coal plants for closure in an effort to "end our nation’s reliance on dirty coal, plant-by-plant, community-by-community, and state-by-state," according to Bloomberg Philanthropies’ website.
...
Bloomberg Philanthropies isn’t the only group Chao represents that has taken a stand against the coal industry. She also sits on the board of directors at Wells Fargo, which in 2013 announced that it would divest from surface mining of coal in Appalachia due to environmental concerns. In the bank’s Environmental and Social Risk Management report, the company announced that it would no longer lend to coal companies that participate in “Mountain Top Removal” (MTR), in which miners extract coal from mountain summits.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ping for later reading.
She apparently is a spy to learn the secrets to tell the Friends Of Coal
This will injure McConnell in Kentucky. Grimes isn’t any better, but she’ll be able to say that: “See, he isn’t any better.”
The conclusion of the article appears to be relevant to the discussion:
“A McConnell spokesman defended the senator’s record on coal and pointed to the fact that Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the grant before Chao joined the board.
“The decisions to make those grants by Bloomberg Philanthropies were made before she joined the board and she played no role in the decision to grant them,” Stewart told Yahoo News. “Sen. McConnell has a longstanding, principled record of defending coal families and jobs. Decisions made by a board before Sec. Chao ever joined do not change that and as the Obama administration will tell you, he hasn’t let up an iota in his defense of Kentucky coal families and jobs.””
My wife served on the local Girl Scouts board. I’m sure that, prior to her service on the board, the local Girl Scouts board made some terrible decisions involving support for groups that themselves supported abortion, but not only did my wife not participate in any way in such decisions (which came prior to her service), and never voted for anything untoward (particularly involving abortion, as she is 100% pro-life), but it would be risible to claim that her affiliation with the Girl Scouts would have any bearing on my position on abortion or on how I would vote regarding life issues were I to hold public office.
The Girl Scouts have made it plainly clear in discoverable ways that it stands for the tearing apart of human babies if they’re still in the womb (and possibly beyond).
Thus, the mere fact that your wife joined the GS in any capacity only serves to discredit your wife’s ability to discern who she should affiliate herself with.
“The Girl Scouts have made it plainly clear in discoverable ways that it stands for the tearing apart of human babies if they’re still in the womb (and possibly beyond).
Thus, the mere fact that your wife joined the GS in any capacity only serves to discredit your wife’s ability to discern who she should affiliate herself with.”
And more to the point, are you accusing me of being pro-abortion because my wife served for a year on the local Girl Scouts board?
If the GSA's support for abortion was known before joining the local GS board, even for just a year, than this would be indicative of a level of comfort with abortion being available, and sometimes promoted.
(There's a whole lot of that going around the country - it's easy to be in a sort of truce with abortion, and it is painful to put everything on the line - popularity, the need to leave groups and churches, etc. - to actually END the damnable act.)
If the GSA's support for abortion wasn't known beforehand, than in no way does it make any statement about support for abortion.
There are a whole lot of people in the former camp. I hope you're not, maybe you are, only you and God really know.
But if we could get the people in the latter group to change their comfort level and hold maniacally fast against the storm of abortion, the odds we could actually get rid of it would go way up.
We didn’t know about the things the national GSA did until aftermy wife joined the board of the local Girl Scouts group, and she left after one year. But in that year her local board never faced any decision that touched upon abortion in any way, and had she stayed on the board another year it wouldn’t have reflected on her views on abortion, much less on *my* views on abortion.
McConnell’s wife joined a group that does a million different things, and since she’s been there ithere hasn’t been any anti-coal initiative come before the board. Maybe having her on the board has steered the group away from anti-coal activities (just like having pro-lifer Karen Handel on the board of that Komen breast-cancer group led to the group defunding Planned Parenthood, only to yield to blackmail and fund PP again, which caused Handel to resign), but in any event it is silly to say that McConnell is anti-coal, despite his 30-year record in support of the industry, just because his wife joined a group that in the past had supported an anti-coal initiative.
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