[CoalWatchers] Obama, Biden Will Attend Miners’ Memorial

[The Cunctator]

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/obama-biden-will-attend-miners-memorial/

Obama, Biden Will Attend Miners’ Memorial

By PETER BAKER

President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will travel to West Virginia this weekend to mourn the 29 miners killed in an explosion earlier this month in the worst mining accident in the United States in four decades, the White House announced Monday.

Mr. Obama “will deliver a eulogy honoring the lives of those who perished and offering his deepest condolences to the loved ones they left behind,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said in a statement sent to reporters.

The memorial service in Beckley will be the latest event where the president acts as the nation’s chief mourner in a moment of catastrophe. He likewise spoke at a service last November honoring 13 active and retired soldiers killed at Fort Hood in Texas by an Army psychiatrist who had been communicating with a radical Islamic cleric in Yemen.

Mr. Obama took a tough stand last week against both the company that operates the Upper Big Branch mine where the workers died in the April 5 blast and the federal regulatory system that oversees the industry. Speaking in the Rose Garden, the president blamed the deadly disaster on “a failure first and foremost of management but also a failure of oversight and a failure of laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow unsafe conditions to continue.”

In response to reports of safety violations at Upper Big Branch, Mr. Obama ordered a new review of mine safety. The company that operates the mine, Massey Energy Company, responded that the president had been “misinformed about our record and the mining industry in general” and said that some “are rushing to judgment for political gain or to avoid blame.”

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