Richard Disney

This is another Harry Reid moment of “open mouth, insert foot.” When Harry Reid says that “coal makes us sick”, he is not tuned into reality. Electrical power from coal and transportation from oil based products have improved the lives of Americans and the world enormously.

Also, without ample amounts of electricity and gasoline driven engines, Las Vegas would still be about the same size as Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nevada. Maybe that is how Senator Reid prefers it.

Article follows:

Hat Tip: Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey

When the editorial board of the Las Vegas Review-Journal calls Harry Reid a “YouTube sensation”, they don’t mean it as a compliment. Given that the city runs on a tremendous amount of coal-based electricity and depends on oil-based transportation to bring gamblers and tourists to the desert oasis, they find Reid’s latest comments sickening in their own right. Far from making the world sick, the industrialization spurred by fossil fuels has made the world and its residents healthier than ever:

By Thursday afternoon, the video clip had close to 400,000 hits on YouTube. Like an “American Idol” reject who has no idea he can’t sing, Sen. Reid serves up speechification that crashes and burns in spectacular fashion.

Doesn’t the Democratic Party have its own Simon Cowell, someone with enough common sense to cut off the Slipup from Searchlight before he finds all new ways to embarrass his home state?

Funny thing about coal and oil. Before they began transforming Americans’ everyday lives by providing electricity and transport that didn’t require a horse, average citizens trudged though life with mouths half-full of teeth, fortunate to live past age 40. Far from making us sick, they’ve powered advances that have extended the country’s collective life expectancy to about 80, helped eliminate hard-core poverty and made us the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet.

Today, coal still provides half the country’s electricity — power that allows Las Vegas air conditioners to run 24 hours per day during the soul-searing heat of July, power that lets partygoers enjoy the city’s luxuries at all times. And how did they — and the foodstuffs they ate for breakfast — get to this otherwise uninhabitable tourist outpost? They drove or flew here on a tank of fossil fuel.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Las Vegas Review-Journal: Been to Vegas lately, Harry?

Tags: harryreid, searchlight nevada, las vegas, nevada, senator reid, energy, coal, gasoline, oil, electricity, solar power, slip up

Hat Tip: Inside Nevada Politics

Senator John Ensign (R-NV) gave a chunk of coal to Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) as a humorous lead-in to the coming battle over whether coal fired power plants should be built in Nevada.

Senator Reid is kowtowing to his enviro-collectivist task masters to prevent the building and operation of coal fired power plants in Nevada. One thing to always remember is that the ultimate goal of the modern environmentalist movement is to stop the motor of the industrialized world through ignorance and paranoia about things like Global Warming.

To deny Nevadans and other Americans inexpensive electricity using one of the most plentiful energy sources in North America is extremely misguided. I guess Senator Reid does not only want to be known for declaring the defeat of U.S. Forces in Iraq, he also wants to declare the defeat of the U.S. economy.

There is buzz growing that Hillary Clinton is not the only one with a “Hsu problem” in the political fundraising arena. Senator Harry Reid’s Searchlight Leadership Fund recieved $1000 from the fugitive fundraiser Norman Hsu on May 17, 2007 acording to Federal Election Commission documents.

The $1000 donation from Hsu in and of itself may not appear suspect but donations by Hsu associates on the same day make one take notice of the Harry Reid, Hsu connection. According to Federal Election Commission records, the same day Norman Hsu donated $1000 to Reid’s Searchlight Leadership Fund, $1000 was also donated by Hsu’s business associate Winkle Paw. Yet another $1000 was donated to Senator Reid’s Searchlight Leadership Fund by Paul Su of the Dilini Management Group which Hsu listed on a contribution form when donating money to Senator Dianne Feinstein.

See much deeper analysis at Free Republic.