Posted on 07/08/2010 10:00:20 PM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Last month, in a speech to the National Press Club, actress Ashley Judd took a break from taking on Sarah Palin and set her sights on business practices in her home state.
Judd referred to the mountain top removal of coal in Kentucky as “environmental genocide,” called the process “the state-sanctioned, federal government supported, coal industry operated, rape of Appalachia,” and said the miners should be retrained to take “better jobs” (unfortunately the “vacuous actor” career field is full up at the moment).
On Wednesday, the coal industry sponsored a golf tournament at StoneCrest Golf Course in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and launched a return salvo by way of a poster displayed at the tourney:
[see below]
“...half naked...” -
I say half clothed. Half full or half empty?
I suppose the miners could go on welfare and be totally worthless like many of their neighbors. The people I know here whom Obama still allows to mine are buying homes and trucks and raising families.
That’s a good and clever poster, but Ashley is more right then she is wrong on this. Mountaintop removal is a lousy technique. There is lots of coal available without it.
Scoop mining out west works since the contours of the land can be restored. Mined mountaintops never heal. Fly over one sometime.
What would “healing” mean? Is this a situation that is beyond “Mother Nature’s” ability to accommodate? It’s OK when God levels mountains through plate tectonics, glaciers, and such, but only disaster results when people do it on purpose?
Anyhow, since there is such a big refuse handling problem in the US, why not bring the two problems together. Re-top the mountains, with landfills.
She is the non-singing Judd, the Hollywood Judd.
Wow, look at those judds.
Her body is probably just as plastic as her brain.
I wrote her off and stopped ordering her movies after she spewed her hatred against Sarah Palin.
I like Ashley a lot from “Heat” but that was 1996. What have you got for us now Ashley. Hollyweird is cruel when you are female and 40. This is Ashley’s way of reaching out...a cry for help
She lives in Hollywood and gets to Kentucky three days a year
ashley judd is one of those "I'm better than you" arrogant elitiest if not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, she got one pretty young...
has she ever really had a job?...punch a clock?...did anything productive other than trying to act glamorous and smug?
no Ashley got famous ONLY because she road the apron strings of her mother and her sister....who were tops in country music for several years...
Ashley is married to a gas guzzling car racer.....
Royalties can only dry up when your career is at the bottom of Death Valley.
Like the Dixie Sluts, they thought they just needed to ask the “Rock” industry to bail them out after they angered the Country crowd. Looks like they found out the hard way, which side their toast is buttered on.
They made their bed. Now the have to sleep in it!
Dario Franchitti (her husband) lists his home as Franklin, Tenn. That is just outside of Nashville.
For the last few years she has been stuck on him at all of the races sucking off the media exposure. Give it to Ganassi to make the most of the exposure for his racing team, the consumate PR guy.
DW (Darrell Waltrip) occasionally mentions their home being the same town as his. I wonder if DW will be making the references as much any more.
I come from a Southwest Virginia coal mining family, and Judd's rhetoric is complete non-sense, especially her ignorant idea of "re-training" thousands of very tough working men who know nothing but coal mining.
Who's going to retrain them and what are these "better jobs" to which she alludes? Working in call centers????
Judd may be from Kentucky, but she knows NOTHING about Appalachia.
There is a need to separate Judd from the issue of Mountaintop Removal. I grew up in Clay County, Kentucky, have plenty of coal miners in the family, am a Republican, a hunter and a Baptist... definitely not the “treehugger” type. All that being said, mountaintop removal is only good for the coal companies. It fills our “hollers” with rock an debris, chokes our streams and creeks. Hunting becomes a useless exercise because there is no cover for rabbits, squirrel, grouse, deer, coon.
What our mountains are replaced with are hills of crushed rock with so little soil that the only thing that will grow is a little grass. Trees and bushes just don’t do well. I have hunted in an area for 14 years and watched one reclaimed hill, looking for signs of anything other than grass. Nothing.... just grass to this day.
The process removes more rock and mountain to get to small seams of coal than you can imagine. Go see one. Come to Appalachia and let someone who loves the mountains take you on a tour.
In the Appalachian mountains it isn’t just “treehuggers” who oppose mountaintop removal. Last of all, my guess it wasn’t “coal miners” but coal companies who paid for the Judd ad. Way different point of view, I suspect.
On the other hand, the city of Hazard and others could not exist in the present form. The strip mined sites have provided flat ground for siting schools, shopping centers and growth.
Hazard was hemmed in by ridges into a rather narrow system of hollows. The stripped sites are now connected by very good roads and the town is no longer a place where a newcomer was beset by beggers on the streets.
It is true that some of the landscape, a geological jumble of crumpled earth surface is changed, but before the change, the land was unusable. As a mountain person, I spend lots of time roaming the hills and woodlands and appreciate your point. But having traveled extensively all over South east Kentucky know that there is a plenty of untouched ridges and hollows left for looking.
Of the three types the only one that is safe is strip mining.
The vertical and horizontal shaft mining for coal are both exceedingly dangerous and people are killed and injured by both methods.
Ashley Judd prefers that people die while mining coal.
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