Senator Ted Kennedy, who heads the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has a couple of things to say about last year’s Crandall Canyon Mine. So does Orrin Hatch.

Ted Kennedy is showing how a Senator is supposed to act.

Orrin Hatch is showing that he’d suck off a thousand Yale Graduates to keep the former Governor of Texas and his friends happy.

From Kennedy and the HELP Committee:

  • Murray Energy failed to make sufficiently conservative engineering assumptions and ignored the history of the mine’s instability.
  • Murray Energy ignored substantial evidence of instability during mining operations and continued mining until stopped by a powerful bounce.
  • MSHA ignored red flags that should have prompted an exacting review of mining operations, the most obvious being the March “bounce” that closed the north barrier.
  • Evidence uncovered by the investigation reflects that Murray Energy was illegally mining the remnant barrier pillar just before the accident in August.

And from Hatch, via KSL, we have the defense of Murray Energy and MSHA (which, you may recall, is headed by a mining guy famous for running the most dangerous mines in America) :

Utah Senator Orrin Hatch says the federal government’s non-partisan mine safety commission at the Labor Department is best equipped to investigate the matter. “Their report will come out later this year. We’ve just got to wait until all the facts are in before we decide what action should be taken. And to do anything else at this point would be simply premature,” he said.

You know, from Hatch’s twisted, unethical and obviously partisan pony boy perspective, I have to conclude that he wants to wait it out, hoping we’ll forget the dead miners, the crazy antics of Hatch’s bathroom buddy Murray, and that the MSHA report (which will blame an act of God) will give him ground to send a giant earmark to Murray Energy as a way of apologizing to Crazy Bob for all the hullabaloo about those pesky dead miners.

Or something like that.

Maybe Hatch is just that f**king dead inside.