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Promoted from the diaries by streiff. Promotion does not imply endorsement.
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The primary election for the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat currently held by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will be held on Tuesday, May 19, 2020, 270 days from now, but that hasn’t stopped Lt Col Amy McGrath Henderson¹, USMC (Ret) from airing campaign commercials. At least so far, she has no announced competitors for that nomination, but I suppose that she’s taking no chances in getting her name out there.

The commercial I saw ran at 7:40 PM EDT today, August 23^rd, on WLEX-TV, Channel 18 out of Lexington. The usual reason for such early commercials is to get the candidate’s name out there, to increase name recognition among the voters. That would make sense in the western part of the state, but the Lexington stations were the source for her 2018 campaign for the Sixth Congressional District seat, which she lost.

In 2018, Mrs Henderson outspent Representative Andy Barr (R-KY 6^th) by a wide margin, $8,274,396 to $5,580,477, much of it on seemingly unending television commercials and campaign brochures which filled everyone’s mailboxes.² If people in the Channel 18 viewing area didn’t already know her name, they really were just not paying attention.

But, interestingly enough, the commercial I saw today — which I cannot find on the internet, or I would embed it — was criticizing Senator McConnell for not protecting Kentucky’s coal miners and their jobs. Yet if Mrs Henderson does win the seat, and the Democrats take control of the Senate, protecting the jobs of coal miners, or supporting the coal mining industry, is the last thing that the Senate will want to do. Her commercial is, in effect, a lie.

Even though Mrs Henderson announced her bid for the Senate a month and a half ago, her campaign website has no issues page, and tells us nothing about the positions she would take if elected. Indeed, at least as of 8:45 PM today, her website has only a very brief bio, and links to donate to her campaign and a campaign store. Having just finished a political campaign, you’d think that she’d already have most of the website work already done.³

What isn’t kept a secret is how the Democratic presidential candidates feel about coal mining. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently released his cockamamie “green new deal” plan, including this gem:

• Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050 – consistent with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals – by expanding the existing federal Power Marketing Administrations to build new solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources.

Reaching 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 means the complete elimination of the coal mining industry. Right now, fossil fuels provide 63.5% of total electricity generation in the United States, with coal providing 27.4% of the total. In just eleven years, Mr Sanders wants to completely eliminate the use of coal in electricity generation, and that means an end to those coal mining jobs Mrs Henderson promised to protect.

If Mrs Henderson is elected, she will be another vote to give the Democrats control of the Senate.  It doesn’t matter what she says about protecting coal miner’s jobs; what matters is what she would actually do in the Senate.  In her current campaign commercial, she is lying to us.

That’s it, that’s all it is: an outright lie.  And she knows that it’s a lie. “I am further left, I am more progressive, than anyone in the state of Kentucky,” Mrs Henderson said, in a 2018 fundraiser far from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, in very liberal Massachusetts.  She never admitted that in Kentucky, but Mr Barr’s campaign found the video.  It seems as though Mrs Henderson says one thing in the Bluegrass State, when she’s looking for votes, and another away from our borders, when she’s looking for money.
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¹ – Though Mrs Henderson has not shown enough respect for her husband to have taken his name, my website, The First Street Journal, does not similarly show such disrespect, and, when known, always refers to married women by their appropriate honorifics and names.
² – During the 2018 primary campaign, my younger daughter was a mailman working out of the Post Office in Versailles. She said that she hated Mrs Henderson, not for what she was saying, but for the immense volume of mail she was sending out, all the time.
³ – Mrs Henderson’s 2018 campaign website still exists, but is locked out as being private. Voters interested in looking at her statements on the issues last year will have to look elsewhere.
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