Check out this article on Obama's continuing war on the coal industry.  Why any president in economic times like these would do something like this is just inconceivable.

The only real explanation is that he really does want to seriously damage the United States.

From the article:

Lest we forget that the Obama administration has made it their mission to forcibly change the face of American energy as we know it — most notably by removing the blemish that they’ve deemed the coal industry to be — House Natural Resources Committee ChairmanDoc Hastings has an informative op-ed in Politico today that describes the White House’s commitment to making it practically impossible for coal to succeed, all of the lost jobs and costly neighborhood effects be damned.

The nonpartisan U.S. Energy Information Administration has all but confirmed the president’s aggressive war on coal with a report detailing a record number of coal-fired power plants to be closed this year — largely because of burdensome regulations and other compliance costs. Worse, 175 coal-fired power plants are scheduled to be shut down from 2012 to 2016, EIA estimated, requiring 27 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power 27 million homes — to be replaced by more expensive forms of energy.

The shuttering of record numbers of coal-fired power plants threatens thousands of the 555,270 direct and indirect coal-related jobs that help supply America with nearly half of its generated electricity and pay $36 billion in wages.

Highly convenient that the bulk of these new regulations won’t start kicking in until after 2012, but there you have it. Hastings goes on to argue that one of the most specific covert actions by the Obama administration has been their decision to rewrite a coal production regulation known as the 2008 Stream Buffer Zone Rule, which highlights the lengths to which they’re willing to go to flout the free market and accomplish their goals: