AT LAST, A TRUTHFUL POLITICIAN

‘Course she isn’t much of a politician, this being her first run for office, but the Rev. Nancy Jo Kemper at last has dared to touch “the 3rd rail of Kentucky politics”: coal.

 

On her tv ads and in her recent KET debate with incumbent Republican Andy Barr, she has said that Coal, as we have known it, is over. And it is. It will never again employ hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of miners in Kentucky...and the sooner this state faces up to that and starts finding new jobs for unemployed miners the better.

 

(There is enuff guilt here to go around..natural gas competition, Wyoming, “clean coal” projects never supported by operators or the unions, etcetcetc)---but the industry, unions, et al keep denying the current state, and especially the future of King Coal instead of working on solutions that will re-employ miners.

 

And politicians, at every level and party, keep denying this and delaying solutions.

 

Ms. Kemper does not...she is not anti-coal, she is not a soldier in the  “war on coal,” she instead feels much more deeply for the miners and their families, and offers solutions.

 

Now, lest you think the debate was one-sided and she won, it wasn’t, and she didn’t. Barr, a lawyer, was the more skilled debater and made his points more clearly and more often.  But he also often accepted some of the foolish “facts” put out by the RNC. Ms. Kemper also made the debate a re-run of  the national Presidential debate, but also stated some independent positions at odds with her party. Nor did she hesitate to compliment Barr on some of his presentations, where he is knowledgeable after 2 terms in Congress.

 

He would overturn the Iran nuclear agreement, she would not.  He opposes raising the minimum wage, she is for raising it.  He would repeal Obamacare, she would amend it.  You get the differences.

 

So take your choice in this race, a microcosm of the national one.

 

I'm just sayin'...