EXCLUSIVE: Colorado Caucus Volunteers: Ballot Errors Hurt Trump Delegate Candidates, Could Have Violated State Rules - Breitbart

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by Patrick Howley15 Apr 20160

15 Apr, 201615 Apr, 2016 Volunteers at the Colorado Republican Assembly are coming forward with evidence to indicate that their state’s delegate selection process was riddled with errors that disadvantaged some Donald Trump supporters who were running to become national delegates.

The errors could have violated state bylaws significantly enough that some of the results could be contested, according to the volunteers.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) took all 34 of Colorado’s delegates last week in a process that closed down traditional caucus voting to the public.

A handful of volunteers spoke to Breitbart News about the process.

“I’m the former Chairman of the Pueblo County Republican Party and the person who developed the Slates for National Delegates for the Trump team. The Colorado GOP website was filled with errors posted about the National Delegates,” Nancy Mizel told Breitbart News.

Mizel took a photograph of a ballot in Congressional District 7 that included ONLY the ballot numbers of delegate candidates, NOT the names of the candidates as required by state bylaws.

(Photo: Becky Mizel)

But Article Xiii of the Colorado Republican Convention bylaws (Assemblies and Conventions Section A) show that a delegate candidate must be identified alongside the name of the presidential candidate that he or she is pledged to support, so long as the delegate candidate discloses that information:

Candidates for national convention delegate need not identify the presidential candidate they are pledged to support, but may do so at their option. The ballot shall include the presidential candidate each candidate for national delegate is pledged to support, or shall indicate that the candidate for national delegate is unpledged. CRC Bylaws, Art. XIII, § A(5)(c).

Here are stories of three of the volunteers in their own words:

Kimberly JaJack:

JaJack, a Trump supporter, tells Breitbart News that she was not allowed to vote at the State Assembly:

I was a delegate. I pledged support for Donald Trump. In the Arapahoe County section they had designated seating areas for your last name. When it came time to pass the ballots out, someone from the Colorado GOP came around and started calling out names. When you received your ballot you received a mark on your name.

She went directly from K to I and skipped the Js. She said she didn’t have the Js….

…I asked a few people, no one seemed to have the ballots for my last name. At that particular time, I had to do my ten-second speech because I was running for national delegate. I came back and said I don’t have a ballot and I went to Andie, the president of the Cherry Creek Republican Women in Colorado, and she looked at her board. She had my name on this page and it had a check mark next to it. She looked at it and said “this is a check mark.” I said “This is my badge, you do NOT see a mark on it, do you?”

I approached a representative of Donald Trump’s campaign and I went to Steve House, chairman of the Colorado GOP. He took my name and telephone number.

JaJack said that she found out that another woman in Arapahoe County later told her that she had her ballot, but by then it was too late to vote. JaJack said that she has not heard back from the Colorado GOP. She says her case represents a “serious injustice.”

JaJack told her story at the time in a video obtained by Breitbart News:

Becky Mizel:

Mizel told Breitbart News about the extent of the errors she observed:

While I was putting together the National Delegate Slates for Mr. Trump on April 5th or 6th, copied and pasted from the Colorado GOP website – I noticed my name was missing from the website as being a national  delegate candidate. Even though I had submitted timely paperwork.  I called the GOP HQ. They said it was an error and they would correct it. Gave me ballot number 602 over the phone.  I assumed my delegate name was corrected and added although even as ofThursday my name was still not on the website as a delegate.

I don’t know if it was ever added to the website.  If I had not checked the website, which probably few do, I would never have even known the mistake and would have been completely missed as a delegate candidate.  This may have happened to others who thought they were delegate candidates and were not. Only a guess. I have never implied my number was deliberately changed nor claimed I was deliberately left off the lists. If  names were left off possibly numbers were also confused. I have no idea regarding their process,  A series of errors that appeared to happen to myself and  others and  were not unique to only Trump candidates.

Folks with ballots numbered higher  than 588 –  those people I assume we’re errors in entry – were not published as national delegate candidates in the GOP program- nor listed in the voting booklet. Disappointing, since candidates were only allowed 10 second speeches. Being left off both informational programs was disheartening.

Nancy McKiernan:

Trump volunteer Nancy McKiernan described the chaos to Breitbart News:

Jan Herron and I and another friend were volunteers at the Trump table at the Colorado Republican State Assembly on Saturday, 4/9/2016 and witnessed a lot of confusion regarding these numbers.

When I arrived at the table at around noon, I was told by other volunteers that some of the numbers that were printed on the official Trump slates (Exhibit A) were wrong and needed to be changed.  My understanding from speaking with Becky is the numbers on the slate were taken directly off of the Colorado GOP website.  In trying to ascertain what the correct numbers should be, I looked in the Assembly & Convention program (Exhibit B, Paid for by the Colorado Republican Committee, www.cologop.org) and noticed that the numbers only went up to 588, yet for 4 of the delegates on the slate, their numbers were higher than 588, and therefore not listed in the program:

#589 Kimberly Jajack

#598 Rheba Massay

#602 Becky Mizel

#610 Gabriel Schwartz

I started asking around to try to figure out what the delegates were using as a reference to vote with; what was the “official” guide to match names to numbers?  I was given a “Delegates to the Republican National Convention Ballot Supplement” (Exhibit C) and cross referenced numbers and names on the slate with this.  Inserted into it was a blue sheet of paper containing names of delegates with numbers from 596 – 619 (Exhibit D). This sheet of paper included names for Unpledged, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and John Kasich delegates.  When cross checking the slate with this “supplement”, I found these discrepancies between the Official Trump slate and the Ballot Supplement:

Name                          Number on Slate         Number on Ballot Supplement

Robert Jenkins            #257                            #259

William Lambert          #289                            #298

Jerome Parks             #379                            #401

Becky Mizel                #602                            #606  (from blue sheet insert)

I witnessed several Trump delegates coming to the volunteer table, confused and frustrated, asking what numbers they should be using to vote for people on the Trump slate.  While I was helping one gentleman fill out his ballot, I noticed errors/misprints on the ballots themselves (Exhibit E-1, E-2), e.g. two number 523’s but no 513, two 378’s, but no 379.  I also noticed there were 948 numbers on the ballot, but as far as I could tell delegate numbers only went up to 619.

One woman reported that she was very angry that numbers corresponding to Trump delegates were left off the ballot. I do not have specifics on this, other than #379, Nicolas Robert Neitzel…

…Another woman/Trump supporter, reported that she was an alternate delegate and was elevated to delegate, and then was told they made a mistake and the delegate credential she had been given was ripped up. She said she was elevated again and then dropped back down to alternate a 2nd time.  She was visibly upset, said I feel like I’m in a third world country and left without filling out her ballot…

When I left at approximately 5:00 pm, delegates were still walking up to the Trump volunteer table, confused, upset and asking questions.  Shortly before I left, a gentleman, who was very upset, asked if he should go talk to Colorado GOP State Chairman Steve House to report the issues he encountered and set off to do just that.

Overall, what I witnessed appeared to be very chaotic, confusing and lacking in integrity.  I saw delegates walking around with ballots and wondered if anyone was keeping track of them.  Was there anything to stop someone from getting some extra ballots as they were roaming about and putting them in the ballot boxes?  I don’t know, as I didn’t go into the arena itself, where ballots were being turned in.  However, I got a general feeling of uneasiness in how things were being run.

From what I understand, mistakes were also made for Cruz delegates. However I did not track those.

The Colorado Republican Party did not immediately return a request for comment for this report.

COMMENTS

Human Rights Group Decries ‘Gendercide,’ 200 Million Girls Killed by Sex-Selective Abortions

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by THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D.14 Apr 201648

The real “war on women” takes place on the battlefield where abortion clinics target baby girls for elimination, according to congressional testimony from Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, a human-rights group.

“Sex-selective abortion is the ultimate violence against females,” Reggie Littlejohn, President of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart News. “Aborting a baby just because she is a girl is the ultimate act of gender discrimination.”

On Thursday, April 14, a congressionalhearing is being held before the House Judiciary Committee to debate the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) of 2016, a bill aimed at reducing gender-based abortion in America. The bill is being opposed by abortion-giant Planned Parenthood, NARAL and other abortion-rights groups.

The United Nations estimates that some 200 million women are “demographically missing” in the world today due to sex-selective abortion. This number is greater than all the casualties of all the wars of the twentieth century combined.

According to Littlejohn, this is the real “war on women,” despite the fact that it is ignored by many groups supposedly interested in women’s rights, and constitutes “gendercide.”

In China, there are some 37 million marriage-age men without a female counterpart, due to systematic, sex-selective abortions, Littlejohn pointed out. In India, the number is about the same. The growing gender disparity has had a notable effect on human trafficking and sexual slavery as well.

Predictably, the Huffington Post is on record as defending sex-selective abortion and opposing PRENDA, contending that Asian-American women would be unfairly subjected to greater scrutiny than Caucasian women, due to the prevalence of sex-selective abortion in many Asian cultures.

In her HuffPo essay, Miriam W. Yeung, an abortion-rights advocate who described herself as “a proud queer Asian American immigrant woman activist,” discounted the importance of sex-selective abortions, saying that legislative efforts to limit gender-based abortion constitute an “attempt to distract from the real issues at hand.”

Though Ms. Yeung may consider the targeting of baby girls for elimination to be a non-issue, her opinion is far from universal. A 2015 report from Geneva on global violence against women called sex-selective abortion “one of the most shocking crimes against humanity.”

Yeung, who is executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, is among those called to witness at the Congressional hearing Thursday.

Although the problem of sex-selective abortions is most evident in nations like China and India, it is a significant issue in the United States as well.

A 2011 study by Dr. Sunita Puri of the University of California at San Francisco found that 89 percent of immigrant Indian women who became pregnant with girls during the study period had abortions. None, however, who were pregnant with boys aborted them.  The participants identified influence from their husbands and mothers-in-law as “sources of significant pressure” to abort their children, once it was learned they were girls.

Curiously, using ultrasound and sperm-sorting technologies explicitly for sex selection is illegal in India, whereas this is legal in the United States.

This is the sort of atrocity PRENDA seeks to abolish.

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Speaker: I Can see why Trump comments rattle Mideast allies

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday the whole world is watching American politics and that he can understand how Middle East allies would be rattled by Republican front-runner Donald Trump's provocative comments.

The Wisconsin Republican, who recently led a congressional delegation to the Middle East, dismissed the notion that a war-weary United States could retreat, as reflected by Trump's demand that allies pay more or else America will step back. Ryan, who has been compelled to tamp down speculation that he could be the GOP's eventual presidential nominee, said that approach is unrealistic.

"There is a commonality that this has been our problem too long, it shouldn't be our problem any more if we just pull out, we can fortress America and we will be better off. I don't buy that," Ryan told a group of reporters. "The reason I don't buy that is it is going to come to us. Who else is going to help lead the world ... to ultimately extinguish radical Islamic terrorism? And if we just pull back and think our oceans are going to save us, the evidence of the last couple of decades disproves that theory."

The congressional delegation traveled to Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Germany. Back on American soil, Ryan faulted President Barack Obama's foreign policy on dealing with Iran and Syria, and said allies wanted to know if the United States is "still in the game."

He said allies were rattled a bit by administration policy. Asked if Trump's comments had rattled them as well, Ryan said, "Sure. I get that too. Everybody pays attention to our politics."

Ryan expounded on his tacit criticism of Trump, who has proposed a ban on Muslims coming to the United States. Earlier this year, Ryan rejected that idea. He said allies knew about it and thanked him for speaking out.

"When he proposed the Muslim immigration ban, that really got under my skin, so I spoke out very forcefully the day after," he said. "When you see our beliefs our values and conservative principles being disfigured, you have to speak out for it if you're a party leader."

Ryan also has assailed Trump on other occasions, but never by name. He complained about Trump's slow disavowal of white supremacist groups.

Ryan, the 2012 vice presidential nominee, hastily called a news conference this week to state that he would not accept his party's nomination and that the choice should emerge from among the candidates who have sought the party nod, including Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

But Republicans fear that a Trump nomination will alienate women, minorities and independent voters, costing them not only the White House but control of the Senate as well.

On foreign policy, Trump suggested in an interview with The New York Times that the United States boycott oil from Saudi Arabia unless the country provides ground troops in the fight against Islamic State militants. He also has suggested withdrawing U.S. forces from Japan and South Korea if the countries don't pay more to cover the cost of the American military presence.

In other interviews, Trump has said NATO is obsolete and questioned U.S. involvement after more than half a century of ensuring Europe's protection.

During his trip, Ryan said the Saudis "didn't say Donald Trump this and Donald Trump that. They just said, 'Where is America?'"

The speaker said he raised the issue of allegations of human rights abuses with Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. Secretary of State John Kerry and several Western European nations have rebuked Egypt amid reports of killings, torture and secret detentions.

"You make it more difficult for us to be supportive of you when you have so many human rights violations," Ryan said he told the Egyptian president.

Ryan, a foe of the international nuclear agreement with Iran, also expressed concern about business deals with Tehran and other outreach in the aftermath of the landmark pact that lifted years of economic sanctions in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.

"I worry about that," Ryan said. "I worry that so much toothpaste is going to get out of the tube that we're not going to be able to put much back in. And I do believe that next year, with the new government, we need to put as much of this toothpaste back in the tube that we can."

COMMENTS

Emerson Poll: Trump Positioned to Sweep Connecticut Delegates

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By Sandy Fitzgerald
Wednesday, 13 Apr 2016 7:53 AM

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Donald Trump is well-positioned to sweep Connecticut's 28 delegates in the April 26 primary election, according to results from an Emerson College poll released Monday.

According to the statewide poll conducted on April 10-11 of 354 likely GOP primary voters:
Trump, 50 percent;Ohio Gov. John Kasich, 26 percent;Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, 17 percent;6 percent, undecidedTrump holds the lead in all five congressional districts with margins of 18 to 38 points, with Kasich coming in second and Cruz third, the poll showed. 

Trump also commanded the most loyalty:
80 percent, Trump;38 percent, Kasich;37 percent, Cruz;The Democratic race is much more tight in the state. According to the 356 likely Democratic voters polled:
Hillary Clinton, 49 percent;Bernie Sanders, 43 percent;Six percent, undecided.However, with Connecticut being a closed-primary, same-day registration state, Sanders' gap is only 1 point, if people switch parties to vote for him. Once independents and Republicans who said they support Sanders are added in, bringing the gap to 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Sanders. 

And in head-to-head matchups in the general election, both Trump and Cruz would lose to either Clinton or Sanders, the poll showed:
Kasich over Clinton, 49-38 percent;Kasich over Sanders, 48-40 percent;Clinton over Trump, 48-40 percent;Clinton over Cruz, 52-31 percent;Sanders over Trump, 49-40 percent;Sanders over Cruz, 55-30 percent.Democrats and Republicans alike said dissatisfaction with government is the most important issue in the election. 

Republicans said their second-most pressing issue is stopping ISIS and terrorism, while Democrats said their next most pressing concern is jobs and unemployment.

The margin of error by parties was 5.2 points. Meanwhile, the general election sample consisted of 1,043 likely general election voters, and carried a 3 point margin of error.

Related Stories:
Clinton, Sanders Tied in Support among DemocratsQuinnipiac: Trump Holds 35-Point Lead in New York

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Newspaper reporter rated worst job in America

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NEW YORK (FOX5NY) - A new survey of the best and worst jobs in the country has declared that being a newspaper reporter is the worst career you could be pursuing.

CareerCast just published its Worst Jobs of 2016 list.

It cited fewer job prospects because of publications going out of business and declining ad revenue providing less money for decent salaries.

The survey put the annual median salary of a print reporter at $37,200.

It is the third year in a row that a newpaper reporter ranked as the worst job.  Being a broadcaster didn't fare much better.  It came in third worst on the list.

“The news business has changed drastically over the years, and not in a good way,” says former Broadcaster Ann Baldwin, president of Baldwin Media PR in New Britain, Connecticut. “When people ask me if I miss it, I tell them ‘I feel as if I jumped off of a sinking ship.’”

The report says that one factor that has many media jobs among the worst is the decline of advertising revenue. And, a drop in advertising sales translates to a decline in positions for advertising sales people. Advertising Sales Person appears on the 10 worst jobs list for the first time (#193), after finishing just outside the bottom 10 a year ago.

As for the best job of the year, that went to data scientists.  The survey cited a strong growth outlook and an annual median salary of $128,240.

COMMENTS

Ted Cruz Defends ban on Dildo's, No Right to Pleasure Genitals....

The Time Ted Cruz Defended a Ban on Dildos

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In one chapter of his campaign book, A Time for Truth, Sen. Ted Cruz proudly chronicles his days as a Texas solicitor general, a post he held from 2003 to 2008. Bolstering his conservative cred, the Republican presidential candidate notes that during his stint as the state's chief lawyer before the Supreme Court and federal and state appellate courts, he defended the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the display of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol, a congressional redistricting plan that assisted Republicans, a restrictive voter identification law, and a ban on late-term abortions. He also described cases in which he championed gun rights and defended the conviction of a Mexican citizen who raped and murdered two teenage girls in a case challenged by the World Court. Yet one case he does not mention is the time he helped defend a law criminalizing the sale of dildos.

The case was actually an important battle concerning privacy and free speech rights. In 2004, companies that owned Austin stores selling sex toys and a retail distributor of such products challenged a Texas law outlawing the sale and promotion of supposedly obscene devices. Under the law, a person who violated the statute could go to jail for up to two years. At the time, only three states—Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia—had similar laws. (The previous year, a Texas mother who was a sales rep forPassion Parties was arrested by two undercover cops for selling vibrators and other sex-related goods at a gathering akin to a Tupperware party for sex toys. No doubt, this had worried businesses peddling such wares.) The plaintiffs in the sex-device case contended the state law violated the right to privacy under the 14th Amendment. They argued that many people in Texas used sexual devices as an aspect of their sexual experiences. They claimed that in some instances one partner in a couple might be physically unable to engage in intercourse or have a contagious disease (such as HIV) and that in these cases such devices could allow a couple to engage in safe sex.

But a federal judge sent them packing, ruling that selling sex toys was not protected by the Constitution. The plaintiffs appealed, and Cruz's solicitor general office had the task of preserving the law.

In 2007, Cruz's legal team, working on behalf of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott (who now is the governor), filed a 76-page brief calling on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to uphold the lower court's decision and permit the law to stand. The filing noted, "The Texas Penal Code prohibits the advertisement and sale of dildos, artificial vaginas, and other obscene devices" but does not "forbid the private use of such devices." The plaintiffs had argued that this case was similar to Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decision that struck down Texas' law against sodomy. But Cruz's office countered that Lawrence "focused on interpersonal relationships and the privacy of the home" and that the law being challenged did not block the "private use of obscene devices." Cruz's legal team asserted that "obscene devices do not implicate any liberty interest." And its brief added that "any alleged right associated with obscene devices" is not "deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions." In other words, Texans were free to use sex toys at home, but they did not have the right to buy them.

The brief insisted that Texas in order to protect "public morals" had  "police-power interests" in "discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors." There was a  "government" interest, it maintained, in "discouraging...autonomous sex." The brief compared the use of sex toys with "hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy," and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution. In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz's office declared, "There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one's genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship." That is, the pursuit of such happiness had no constitutional standing. And the brief argued there was no "right to promote dildos, vibrators, and other obscene devices." The plaintiffs, it noted, were "free to engage in unfettered noncommercial speech touting the uses of obscene devices" but not speech designed to generate the sale of these items.

In a 2-1 decision issued in February 2008, the court of appeals told Cruz's office to take a hike. The court, citing Lawrence, pointed to the "right to be free from governmental intrusion regarding 'the most private human contact, sexual behavior.'" The panel added, "An individual who wants to legally use a safe sexual device during private intimate moments alone or with another is unable to legally purchase a device in Texas, which heavily burdens a constitutional right." It rejected the argument from Cruz's team that the government had a legitimate role to play in "discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation." No, government officials could not claim as part of their job duties the obligation to reduce masturbation or non-procreative sexual activity. And the two judges in the majority slapped aside the solicitor general's attempt to link dildos to prostitution: "The sale of a device that an individual may choose to use during intimate conduct with a partner in the home is not the 'sale of sex' (prostitution)."

Summing up, the judges declared, "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the State is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence...Whatever one might think or believe about the use of these devices, government interference with their personal and private use violates the Constitution."

The appeals court had rejected the arguments from Cruz's office and said no to Big Government policing the morals of citizens. But Abbott and Cruz wouldn't give up. Of course, they might have initially felt obligated to mount a defense of this state law. But after it had been shot down, they pressed ahead, relying on the same puritanical and excessive arguments to justify government intrusion. Abbott and Cruz quickly filed a brief asking the full court of appeals to hear the case, claiming the three-judge panel had extended the scope of Lawrence too far. This brief suggested that if the decision stood, some people would argue that "engaging in consensual adult incest or bigamy" ought to be legal because it could "enhance their sexual experiences." And Cruz's office filed another brief noting it was considering taking this case to the Supreme Court.

Cruz and Abbott lost the motion for a hearing from the full court of appeals. And the state soon dropped the case, opting not to appeal to the Supreme Court. This meant that the government could no longer outlaw the sale of dildos, vibrators, and other sex-related devices in the Lone Star State—and in Mississippi and Louisiana, the two other states within this appeals court's jurisdiction.

The day after the appeals court wiped out the Texas law, Cruz forwarded an email to the lawyer in his office who had overseen the briefs in the case. It included a blog post from legal expert Eugene Volokh headlined, "Dildoes Going to the Supreme Court?" and a sympathetic note from William Thro, then the solicitor general of Virginia. "Having had the experience of answering questions about oral sex from a female State Supreme Court Justice who is also a grandmother," Thro wrote Cruz, "you have my sympathy. :-) Seriously, if you do go for cert [with the Supreme Court] and if we can help, let me know." But for whatever reason—Cruz certainly doesn't explain in his book—Abbott and he did not take the dildo ban to the Supreme Court. And Cruz, who was already thinking about running for elected office, missed out on the chance to gain national attention as an advocate for the just-say-no-to-vibrators cause. Imagine how his political career might have been affected had Cruz become the public face for the anti-dildos movement.

COMMENTS

Promise Kept: Barack Obama Breaks the Coal Industry

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by STEVE MILLOY13 Apr 20162,818

President Obama’s war on coal has bagged its biggest trophy to date: the bankruptcy filing by the largest U.S. coal company, Peabody Energy.

Make no mistake about it, though, Peabody’s management and that of the rest of coal industry bears much of the blame for its own demise. It ought to serve as a lesson for everyone else targeted by take-no-prisoners progressives.

Peabody’s bankruptcy filing follows that of other major coal companies including, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, and Patriot Coal. The irony is that coal is actually the world’s fastest growing source of energy, according to the International Energy Agency. So what happened?

Even before Obama vowed to “bankrupt” the coal industry in a 2008 interview with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, the coal industry had already allowed the seeds of its destruction to take root. It had failed to believe global warming hysteria was an existential threat. The industry thought the demand for cheap and reliable electricity combined with the power of politicians representing coal states would suffice as a defense against attack. But contrary to the myths propagated by global warming activists, the coal industry was never a serious funder of climate skeptics.

This strategy was completely upended when decidedly anti-coal Obama became president and Republicans lost control of Congress. Not only did an unprecedented coal industry-hating “progressive” government come to power, but also an up-and-coming new technology for producing natural gas was coming into its own. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, commonly referred to as “fracking,” began to change the U.S. energy market.

With respect to the anti-coal Obama administration and Congress, the coal industry thought that problem could be managed. Maybe even a deal could get cut. A senior Peabody executive told me in the spring of 2009 that it supported the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill because it would settle the issue and provide a path forward for the industry. At this time, much of the coal industry was operating under the illusion that carbon dioxide emissions could be affordably captured and stored underground, so the modest emissions cuts contemplated by the bill could be achieved.

Although Waxman-Markey squeaked by in a 219-212 House vote, it was never brought up in the Senate and other Senate efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill faltered — thanks largely to the coincidental rise of the tea party. With the failure of cap-and-trade in Congress, Obama turned to the regulatory agencies he controlled to wage war on the coal industry, the most powerful of which was the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA began issuing a series of devastating anti-coal regulations.

The coal industry was ill-prepared to fight the EPA — an aggressively arrogant, if not entirely rogue, activist agency. The EPA took advantage of the fact that its rules didn’t target the coal industry directly, but instead pressured the coal industry’s customers — coal-burning electric utilities. The EPA’s regulations forced the utilities to reduce emissions from their coal plants.

The EPA regulation known as the Mercury Air Transport Standard was so expensive for utilities to implement that it made more economic sense just to shutter many of their coal-burning power plants — a task made easier by the surge in cheap natural gas and the fact that the moribund Obama economy has not expanded in such a way as to necessitate an meaningful increases in electricity generation.

It’s not that natural gas is necessarily a less expensive way to generate electricity, but it became cost-competitive with coal. And given the regulatory and political pressure on utilities to not burn coal, utilities began switching from coal to gas wherever possible. The natural gas glut has also placed a price ceiling on coal that dramatically thinned the profit margin from coal mining. As the Obama administration has slow-walked the approval of natural gas export terminals, the gas glut is here to stay.

What about exporting U.S. coal to the rest of world, which is in the process of building 2,440 new coal plants? The coal industry does export some coal, but that has been made difficult by environmental activists who have blocked new rail lines and coal export terminals. And while China and, especially, India are burning more and more coal, they are increasing exploiting their own domestic supplies for economic reasons. So global coal prices are way down, again, pressuring export profit margins.

While the entire story of the U.S. coal industry’s demise is worthy of much more discussion, it can be summarized as follows: The coal industry’s political enemies have successfully used expensive, heavy-handed, junk science-fueled regulation which, in combination with an unforeseeable coincidental glut of cheap natural gas, has virtually broken the coal industry’s back.

What is the future of the coal industry? About one-third of our electricity still comes from coal, though that may shrink further. Under current conditions — a natural gas glut, constrained energy demand and heavy EPA regulation — there will not be much profit in coal for the foreseeable future even though we will still rely on it for much electricity.

The best scenario for what’s left of the coal industry is if Republicans win the White House and maintain control of Congress. That would likely relieve the regulatory pressure on the industry and some of the natural gas glut since Republicans would greenlight natural gas exports.

Even if Democrats win, the coal industry is not likely going away, although its management will change dramatically. As I forecast here last year, no one will leave trillions of dollars worth of coal in the ground, especially since future governments will need cash to run the welfare state. So instead, Democrat-friendly billionaires will buy coal companies for a song, politically rehabilitate the fuel, donate to their political allies, and profit.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is a former coal company executive.

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