The Courier-Journal editorial board must have selectively forgotten that it’s not just Dubya and McConnell’s wife who have given the coal industry the velvet glove treatment:

For eight years, of course, the coal industry received the velvet-glove regulatory treatment from the Bush administration that it had paid for, and especially from Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

Yup. That’s it. Surely the ed board has just forgotten that Steve Beshear has treated King Coal as well as – if not better than – any prominent Republican.

Take a trip down the wormhole…

On November 13, 2009 I broke the news that Ron Mills had been fired from the Division of Mine Permits. On November 17, 2009, the Courier-Journal exposed that Beshear and his office were directly involved in the firing. And that’s the last we heard about it in those pages for a while.

Several weeks later, the firing scandal exploded on the pages of the Herald-Leader. John Cheves delivered news on December 4, 2009 that Mills could have been fired by the Beshear Administration at the request of Ray Ashcraft of Alliance Coal.

It only got worse from there. The C-J loosely demanded that the governor start answering questions but left it at that. The H-L, on the other hand, expressed solid outrage at the firing of Mills and pointed further to Beshear’s direct involvement.

On December 9, 2009, the Courier-Journal editorial board decided it had a few more questions for Steve Beshear (after public outrage, of course) about the firing of Ron Mills. But it forgot that Beshear’s own staff members admitted – in that very paper – that Beshear himself was involved in Mills’ firing. That must be when the paper started being forgetful.

At the same time and on the same day, Cheves and the H-L were revealing that the Alliance Coal executive involved in the firing had been lobbying the governor without being a registered lobbyist. That came with tons of denials from Beshear’s spokesperson.

To further prove just how dedicated Beshear was to the coal industry, he went out of his way to ignore and marginalize mountaintop removal opponents on February 11, 2010.

Just some innocent forgetfulness on the paper’s part. That’s all it is.