MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: In January 2008, with video cameras rolling, far left presidential candidate Barack Obama told the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle that he would bankrupt any new coal-powered electrical plant. Since the Chronicle’s editors were (and are) Democrat operatives with bylines, rather than putting this news in giant headlines on the front page (i.e. “CANDIDATE OBAMA VOWS TO BANKRUPT NEW COAL-POWERED PLANTS”), the paper buried Obama’s quote in plain sight in the middle of a lengthy video of Q&As between the editors and Obama. It sat online for months until an enterprising video blogger spotted it and became an October surprise for Obama, though too little too late, alas. But as with Obama’s “spread the wealth around” socialist quip to Joe the Plumber also in October, anyone not completely in the tank for Obama at least knew what to expect when he took office in January of 2009.

This past Thursday, the Chronicle reported, via their AP feed:

Under a tent perched hundreds of feet above a freshly dug coal pit, about 200 miners, business leaders, and politicians celebrated amid the surge of enthusiasm for the industry. Mining headgear lay atop red, white, and blue table cloths labeled “Make Coal Great Again.”

Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf said the mine was part of an effort to bring back jobs and industry to the state. Pennsylvania awarded a $3 million grant for the project.

“We have not always capitalized on our standing as one of the world’s leaders in these resources, but we’re changing that,” Wolf said.

Trump has made reversing the decades-long decline in coal mining the central tenet of his environmental policy, blaming federal regulations aimed at curbing planet-warming carbon emissions for job losses in the industry. Trump and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have targeted laws that protected waterways from coal waste and required states to slash carbon emissions from power plants. About a dozen protesters chanted in opposition to the mine at the opening.

Hardest hit (besides Barry himself), Democrats with bylines at the San Francisco Chronicle, who whiffed the biggest catch of the 2008 election for partisan reasons, and Hillary Clinton, who cackled gleefully in March 2016 that she would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” if elected. Her quote was made in at a CNN town hall segment in Ohio, America’s “ninth largest coal producing state in 2013,” Big Government’s Michael Patrick Leahy wrote last year regarding Hillary’s devastating Kinsley-esque gaffe.

But then, I’m so old, I remember when Democrat presidential candidates vowed to create new jobs, not crush them.