a little detective work...

[acroyear]

Ed Brayton has a bit of theme today.  First, he shows how Richard Stickler, the Bush appointee for head of the Mine and Health Safety Administration (a rather important task as we've seen this past month) was a mining executive with an incident record "twice the national average", who was rejected by the then Republican controlled Senate twice before finally being stuck in there as a recess appointment.  Talk about cronyism...

Then he gives us a summary of Chris Rodda's detective work on tracing down a quote mine through the religious right's "phone tag" game, from its first source through its distortions and uncredited references to its final appearance in books saying the opposite of what was originally written.  If this is what "history" means to conservatives?  Well, I'd rather not go there...