I’ve flown over West Virginia plenty of times.

The scars from the “mountaintop removal” type of mining are terrible. Hideous. Ugly beyond description.

(Go to YouTube to see the rest of the series.)

It is also destructive to the lives of West Virginians.

It has led to increasingly severe floods in West Virginia.

So this is beyond atrocious:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday approved a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that will allow coal companies to bury streams under the rocks leftover from mining.

The 1983 rule prohibited dumping the fill from mountaintop removal mining within 100 feet of streams. In practice, the government hadn’t been enforcing the rule. Government figures show that 535 miles of streams were buried or diverted from 2001 to 2005, more than half of them in the mountains of Appalachia. Along with the loss of the streams has been an increase of erosion and flooding.

The Republican Party: Fellating the rich and buggering the poor since 1868.

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