Give It Up, GOP. Its over.

[Mountain Mule]

39. The Traitor's policies will destroy what's left of those small towns' economy!

I couldn't agree more with your reply. Opening up the Western landscape to activities like fracking, coal and gas extraction, etc is only going to make things worse, not better. My small rural town depends heavily on tourism and agriculture. We've already undergone our first raking over by energy giant Kinder Morgan which came out here and put in hundreds of pumping stations, a zillion miles of natural gas pipelines, fracking - every conceivable sin the extractive fuel industry can commit. KM has destroyed a nearby National Monument. What tourist is going to want to go out there and take pictures of an industrial complex? And KM didn't bring in a bunch of new jobs either. They hire out of some other state and then send their workers here to make sure locals are priced out of the rental market, thanks to out- of-town KM employees with big per diem checks. This benefits local landlords, but at the cost of local families being priced out of their homes. Once the pipeline building and well drilling operations are finished, they don't need all those workers, so they pull them out, leaving a few dozen people or so behind to monitor things. Even if hired locally, a few dozen jobs don't make up for the hit to tourism from the ugliness and the hit to agriculture from polluted water - never mind LACK of water. I haven't noticed much excitement around here from ANYONE in regard to the Traitor's energy policies - even conservative ranchers are not pleased over having their water shares threatened.

I have every sympathy for laid off coal miners, but this is certainly not the fix they need. As for all the haters and bigots attracted to the Traitor's cause, I have no sympathy for them at all, and I lose no sleep over their plight - whatever it might be. I lose sleep over their blindness to the loss of our Democracy and mentally, I consign all the haters to hell.