Author: Mike Lillis

One of the enduring confusions amid the debate over extending unemployment benefits revolves around the fact that the Democrats’ proposals don’t actually extend UI benefits at all. They simply extend the filing deadline to apply for existing benefits.

That dynamic hasn’t been lost on a growing number of unemployed folks who have exhausted all available assistance, and many of them are pushing for additional tiers of emergency help. Yesterday, though, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated that Tier V advocates shouldn’t hold their breath.

Asked by a reporter if Democrats “foresee having another tier of expanded benefits,” Pelosi responded:

Not — not — no.  This bill will go into the end of November.  At that time we will take up something, but not between now and then.

Pelosi also noted that local politics are playing at least as much of a role as ideology in the debate over whether Congress should extend even existing benefits.

“The phenomenon or the situation that I see is that members who are from low-unemployment areas are very concerned about the deficit,” Pelosi said. “Members who are from high-unemployment areas are very concerned about the jobs.”

House Democratic leaders just started a series of procedural votes leading up to what they hope will be passage of sweeping legislation extending a number of expiring tax breaks and unemployment insurance benefits.

To appease budget hawks in their own party, however, they’ve made a number of changes. Most significantly:

1) They’ve cleaved the bill into two parts: one that includes the tax extensions and unemployment benefits provision, and one that would prevent Medicare doctors from receiving a steep pay cut at the end of this month.

2) The bill no longer extends COBRA health benefits, which help newly unemployed workers pay their health insurance premiums.

3) And it no longer includes funding to help states cover Medicaid patients — funding the states see as vital to balance their budgets, as Medicaid rolls have increased through the recent economic downturn at the same time that revenues have dropped.

If the two bills pass the House today, they will then move to the Senate, which, for all practical purposes, has already adjourned for a week-long Memorial Day vacation. That leaves the upper chamber to take up the House bills when Congress returns June 7. Meanwhile, a number of safety-net benefits — including unemployment benefits and COBRA health benefits — will expire.

It’s pretty certain, at this point in the discussion, that Congress will leave Washington today for a week-long Memorial Day break without passing legislation to extend a number of tax breaks and emergency unemployment benefits.

Not only have House Democrats — who’d hoped to have their bill wrapped up and delivered to the Senate by Wednesday — failed to rally the support of the budget hawks in their own party, but whatever the House does send over to the upper chamber, “Senate Republicans will not allow us to pass [this week] and maybe not ever,” said one Senate Democratic aide familiar with the negotiations.

As a possible Plan B, Senate Democratic leaders might offer a much smaller proposal Friday: a $4 billion package to provide a 14-day extension of the programs scheduled to expire next week while Congress is gone, including unemployment benefits, COBRA health benefits, payments to Medicare doctors, SBA loans and flood insurance. (None of the proposals under consideration would create new tiers of unemployment benefits.)

Trouble is, the Democrats don’t intend to pay for the short-term extensions with offsets elsewhere in the budget, meaning that Republicans will almost certainly object. (GOP leaders don’t reject the policies, but they want them paid for with unspent stimulus funds — a notion that Democrats oppose.)

There, in a nutshell, is the source of the stalemate — a stalemate that will allow these benefit provisions to expire, and force Democratic leaders to try to forge a deal that can pass both chambers quickly when they return to Washington June 7. The bill they produce, said the Democratic aide, will likely be retroactive.

After hitting a wall of moderate Democrats wary of more deficit spending, House leaders on Wednesday scaled back their sweeping proposal to extend certain tax breaks and emergency unemployment benefits.

While most of the roughly $50 billion savings under the amended bill comes from trimming Medicare payments to doctors, the revised proposal — which House leaders are hoping to pass today — also shortens the deadline extension for unemployment benefits and COBRA health benefits by one month.

Translation: While the original bill extended the filing deadline through the end of the 2010, the newer bill extends the filing deadline through November (i.e., just beyond the midterm elections).

(Of note: Neither proposal would create new tiers of benefits.)

If the House passes the bill today, it then moves to the Senate, where Democratic leaders will have to rally the 60 votes needed to defeat the likely GOP filibuster. Whether they can do it before they leave for their week-long Memorial Day vacation remains a real question.

So reports the L.A. Times, citing U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen.

The “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persists, he said.

Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.

In a month of nothing but bad news, this comes as a welcome change of pace.

The New York Times reports:

The concern with the method BP chose, the document said, was that if the cement around the casing pipe did not seal properly, gases could leak all the way to the wellhead, where only a single seal would serve as a barrier.

Using a different type of casing would have provided two barriers, according to the document, which was provided to The New York Times by a Congressional investigator. …

The approach taken by the company was described as the “best economic case” in the BP document. However, it also carried risks beyond the potential gas leaks, including the possibility that more work would be needed or that there would be delays, the document said.

If nothing else, this seems to take some of the legitimacy out of BP’s claim that its subcontractors bear all the blame for the disaster.

As The Washington Post’s Peter Slevin reported last week, GOP Senate hopeful J.D. Hayworth might be down in the polls, and he might have just a fifth of the campaign funds accumulated by his primary opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But following enactment of Arizona’s draconian new immigration law, the former congressman increasingly sees his hard line on immigration as the path toward victory in August:

“If you enforce the law, people will obey the law,” Hayworth told the Thunder Mountain Republican Women, praising a strict new statute designed to curb illegal immigration. In a closely watched campaign increasingly defined by who can take the hardest line, Hayworth is a border hawk who called his book about immigration policy, “Whatever It Takes.”

And the thought of a Hayworth upset has some Democratic strategists drooling — with good reason. An April poll has Democrat Rodney Glassman, a relatively unknown Tucson city councilman, leading Hayworth by three points in a hypothetical matchup. (By contrast, McCain leads Glassman by 16.)

An internal polling memo out of Glassman’s office is hopeful that the anti-incumbency sentiment that uprooted GOP Sen. Robert Bennett in Utah will also extend to Arizona, noting the baggage Hayworth carries with him after a 12-year run in the House of Representative.

Let’s not forget — Hayworth was named one of the most corrupt members of Congress [by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] … and lost his Congressional seat in 2006 in large part due to his corrupt record and his dealings with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Still, to be taken at all seriously in this election, Glassman better start raising some cash. The $0 he had in his war chest at the end of March isn’t likely to go very far.

The coal mine that exploded last month in West Virginia — killing 29 workers and all but killing a 30th — may be shuttered in the wake of the blast, but federal regulators continue to find safety problems there. As The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. reports today, the Mine Safety and Health Administration has issued dozens of safety violations at the Upper Big Branch in the last two weeks alone.

Most of the citations related to violations MSHA inspectors found in the mine’s electrical systems — presumably problems that could be discovered without going underground — or to surface facilities at the Raleigh County operation.

Ward counts 23 new violations since May 14; we count 30. Regardless of the number, the mine is still seen as a safety threat, and it’s not yet clear how or why.

We’ve got calls in to MSHA. Hopefully we’ll have an update shortly.

Officially, House leaders are saying they’ll have the support to pass an enormous jobs proposal that would extend the deadline to file for additional unemployment benefits (but not create new benefits) through the end of the year.

“We will have the votes,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters yesterday.

Unofficially, though, they’re struggling to rally the majority they need.

Why? Well, for one thing, the bill isn’t fully paid for, leaving the Blue Dogs reluctant to support it for fear of adding to the nation’s growing debt. On top of that, the proposal would also raise the tax on “carried interest” from 15 percent to 35 percent. The provision is anathema to Wall Street, where investment managers who take a percentage of their clients’ earnings have been taxed at the lower rate for years — meaning that some of these billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries.

Still, the thought of any tax hike in an election year has given pause to some moderate Democrats facing tough contests in November.

And that’s just in the House. The bill will be an even tougher sell in the Senate, where 60 votes will be required to pass the measure, and conservative Democrats are already wary of the country’s enormous reliance on deficit spending. Complicating passage, Congress is scheduled to begin its week-long Memorial Day vacation on Friday.

“I don’t know that it’s going to get resolved this week,” a senior Senate Democratic aide told Roll Call yesterday.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Tuesday, however, that lawmakers will stay in Washington until the bill is passed. “We must pass the new jobs bill this week, in the next few days,” Reid said.

That assumes, though, that the House can pass it first.

Twice this month, Senate Democrats have tried to pass their proposal hiking the oil spill liability cap from $75 million to $10 billion. And twice Republicans have objected, calling the $10 billion figure “arbitrary” (which is precisely what the Obama administration has called it).

Today, the bill’s sponsors tried a different tack, offering a version of the bill that removed the liability cap altogether.

It went exactly nowhere.

Objecting for the Republicans, Sen. Jim Inhofe (Okla.) said that putting oil companies on the line for unlimited liability would push all but the largest companies out of the offshore drilling business — the same argument he made last week in rejecting the $10 billion cap. In fact, Inhofe said, removing the liability cap could push even the giants of the industry — BP, Shell, Chevron, Exxon-Mobil and ConocoPhillips — out of contention for contracts, leaving only the big nationalized firms (like those in China and Venezuela) to do the drilling.

“If you take the 10 billion [dollar cap] off and make it unlimited,” Inhofe said Tuesday on the Senate floor, “that could very well shut out even the five [oil giants], and leave nothing but national oil companies in a position to be doing [offshore drilling].”

Back to the drawing board for Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) et al.

When most of us flip on the lights (or type into our computers, for that matter), we aren’t thinking about how those simple acts might affect those living in coal country. Yet nearly half of the country’s electricity is generated by coal, and increasingly that coal is being extracted not by removing the coal from the earth, but by removing the earth from the coal.

In Appalachia, that means blowing the tops off mountains to get at the coal seams inside — a process that cuts company costs, but also ravages neighboring communities, poisoning wells and waterways, contaminating air, killing off wildlife and flooding nearby homes. Leading scientists say the effects are irreversible.

This week, a coalition of Appalachian environmentalists launched a campaign they hope will mitigate the disconnect between the electricity Americans use and the devastating processes that keep it so cheap, unveiling a national TV ad that could bring mountaintop removal into living rooms nationwide. The idea is simple: If consumers knew they were contributing to the destruction of the country’s oldest mountains, perhaps they would demand an end to the practice.

For effect, the ad borrows from one of the most famous commercials in the history of television: Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy Girl” spot, in which a young girl plucking flower petals looks up to see a nuclear explosion in the distance. (In the MTR version, of course, the nuclear blast is replaced by the elimination of an Appalachian peak.)

“These are the stakes,” the narrator says. “We can allow the land, water and people of Appalachia to be sacrificed. Or end mountaintop removal coal mining.”

If the explosions aren’t enough to captivate interest, the coalition has brought on Ashley Judd, a longtime MTR critic, as the narrator.

A coal miner working at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine when it exploded last month, killing 29 colleagues, described the operation this week as “a ticking time bomb,” where the management valued production over safety and workers didn’t protest for fear of being fired.

“The ventilation system they had didn’t work,” said Stanley “Goose” Stewart, a 15-year veteran of the UBB mine who was 300 feet underground when the blast occurred. “With no air moving it gave me the feeling that area was a ticking time bomb.”

There was plenty of warning that the conditions in the UBB mine were dangerous, Stewart told House lawmakers. The mine had experienced “at least two fireballs” prior to the April 5 blast, he said, suggesting not only that the vent systems were faulty, but that there were also problems with the mine’s methane sensors.

“How could methane build up to that point where a fireball could start?” he asked during a field hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee in Beckley, W.Va., near the site of the UBB blast.

The allegations — which are strikingly similar to those made by a growing number of Massey workers, both veterans and active miners — arrive just four days after Don Blankenship, Massey’s bellicose CEO, told Senate Democrats that miner safety is the company’s top priority.

“Massey does not place profits over safety,” Blankenship testified before the Senate Appropriations Labor Subcommittee last Thursday. “We never have and we never will. Period.”

Although the UBB mine had been cited for safety violations more than 600 times since the start of 2009, Blankenship argued that the mine’s safety history is irrelevant because “abatement [of hazards] is mandatory.”

“At Massey, we always fix the problem,” he said, “even if we disagree with the penalty.”

But Stewart, along with a number of relatives of UBB victims, had a dramatically different story, telling lawmakers that Massey managers frequently cut corners to maximize production, even when it came at the expense of the workers’ safety.

Steve Morgan, for instance, father of 21-year-old Adam Morgan, who was killed during the blast, testified that it was common for workers in UBB to pull down the ventilation curtains — the plastic sheets that direct the flow of fresh air and prevent methane gas from accumulating — because they can get in the way of heavy equipment, slowing down production.

“Ventilation was so bad he was sent home early several times, including once about a week before the explosion because they weren’t getting enough air,” Morgan said.

Gary Quarles, a Massey miner whose son, Gary Wayne, was also a victim of the UBB disaster, told lawmakers that Massey foremen in the mines are warned when inspectors arrive on the site — a system lending workers some time to get the place cleaned up before the inspectors get underground. “When the word goes out,” Quarles said, “all effort is made to correct any deficiencies or direct the inspector’s attention away from any deficiencies.”

And Stewart said that his crew was once asked to switch out a ventilation system without evacuating the affected section of the mine, as required by law. “I’m not sure MSHA was aware of the whole situation,” he said, referring to the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Workers didn’t complain, Stewart said, because “we knew that we’d be marked men and the management would look for ways to fire us” — a message echoed by most of the other witnesses to Monday’s hearing.

As a sign of how highly Massey values efficiency, UBB miners were denied vacation last summer after they failed to meet production targets, Stewart said.

“I felt like I was working for the Gestapo at times,” he said. “We did some things right, but were forced to do some things wrong.”

If the allegations were isolated, they might be easy to ignore. But there’s a pattern emerging from all the scrutiny of Massey that’s followed last month’s disaster. Chuck Nelson, another former Massey miner who spoke with TWI from his West Virginia home last month, said the trends are hardly limited to the UBB mine.

“I worked at six different Massey mines and every single one of ‘em operated the same way,” said Nelson, who now volunteers for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.

Massey, which was quick to issue a statement following last week’s Senate hearing, has so far been silent in the face of the more recent allegations.

By now, we all know that the federal government is pretty much impotent in the face of the seafloor gusher that’s been spewing unknowable amounts of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for a month, reliant instead on BP to clean up the mess it’s made. But why the oil giant has also been empowered to dictate where along the Gulf journalists can travel is another thing altogether.

Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland spent two days recently trying to get out to the Elmer’s Island Wildlife Refuge, “stymied at every turn” by law enforcement officials who claim they’re getting their marching orders from BP.

In an excellent piece published Monday, McClelland describes the hurdles that she and John Hazlett, a former professor of hers at the University of New Orleans, encountered before they finally made it out to Elmer’s.

The blockade to Elmer’s is now four cop cars strong. As we pull up, deputies start bawling us out; all media need to go to the Grand Isle community center, where a “BP Information Center” sign now hangs out front. Inside, a couple of Times-Picayune reporters circle BP representative Barbara Martin, who tells them that if they want passage to Elmer they have to get it from another BP flack, Irvin Lipp; Grand Isle beach is closed too, she adds. When we inform the Times-Pic reporters otherwise, she asks Dr. Hazlett if he’s a reporter; he says,  ”No.” She says, “Good.” She doesn’t ask me. We tell her that deputies were just yelling at us, and she seems truly upset. For one, she’s married to a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy. For another, “We don’t need more of a black eye than we already have.”

“But it wasn’t BP that was yelling at us, it was the sheriff’s office,” we say.

“Yeah, I know, but we have…a very strong relationship.”

“What do you mean? You have a lot of sway over the sheriff’s office?”

“Oh yeah.”

“How much?”

“A lot.”

Martin goes on to tell McClelland that BP is dictating who can visit Elmer’s because “it’s BP’s oil.”

“But it’s not BP’s land.”

“But BP’s liable if anything happens.”

“So you’re saying it’s a safety precaution.”

“Yeah! You don’t want that oil gettin’ into your pores.”

“But there are tourists and residents walking around in it across the street.”

“The mayor decides which beaches are closed.” So I call the Grand Isle police requesting a press liason, only to get routed to voicemail for “Melanie” with BP. I call the police back and ask why they gave me a number for BP; they blame the fire chief.

I reach the fire chief. “Why did the police give me a number for BP?” I ask.

“That’s the number they gave us.”

“Who?”

“BP.”

McClelland’s piece goes into much greater depth, so read the whole thing, and then get her updates here.

Meanwhile, at least there are no questions about who’s really running the show.

Transocean Ltd., the Swiss company operating the Deepwater Horizon oil rig when it blew up last month, raised plenty of eyebrows last week when it announced its plan to pay out $1 billion in dividends to shareholders.

“It’s heartwarming to see that Transocean, the same company that rushed to limit its liability in the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, seemed not to hesitate at all when it came to the decision to distribute its profits,” one maritime expert wrote of the plan.

Today, 19 Senate Democrats took the scrutiny a long step further, asking the Justice Department to investigate whether those payouts are appropriate “at a time when [the company] may be responsible for financial damages related to the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.”

“Transocean’s stockholders,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, ”should not take huge profits from polluting our country’s Gulf Coast.”

We are concerned that such action to quickly move money out of corporate coffers to individual investors may make it more difficult to pursue liability claims against the company.  Families of those who died in the disaster, the fishing industry that has been devastated by the oil spill and the governments that have worked full-time to clean up this spill deserve better.  Transocean has also reported that it expects to make a $270 million profit on its insurance policy for the Deepwater Horizon, since the rig was insured for more than it was worth.

Signing onto the letter were Democratic Sens. Pat Leahy (Vt.), Charles Schumer (N.Y.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Robert Menendez (N.J.), Mark Begich (Alaska), Byron Dorgan (N.D.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), Bill Nelson (Fla.), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mark Udall (Colo.), Jeff Merkley (Ore.), Max Baucus (Mont.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Michael Bennet (Colo.), Blanche Lincoln (Ark.) and Robert Casey (Pa.).

Of note, Transocean is not exactly known for its corporate citizenship. Until recently, the company was based in Houston, but officials moved the headquarters to Switzerland “to avoid paying higher corporate taxes.“

Having unveiled their plan to extend unemployment benefits through the end of the year (not to be mistaken for a plan to create new benefits), Democrats will no doubt be racing to pass the measure before June 1, which marks the current deadline to file for the next tier of jobless benefits. Budget hawks, however, are already balking at the price tag, leaving the fate of the current package in question, particularly in the Senate.

Today, the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, noted the consequences of congressional inaction, estimating that 1.2 million jobless Americans would exhaust their benefits in June alone if the deadline isn’t extended.

“Here we are, five days out from the Memorial Day recess, and Congress has yet to act on one of the most crucial pieces of legislation affecting the unemployed in 2010,” Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director, said in a statement Monday.

Under current law, unemployed folks have access to 26 weeks of state-sponsored insurance benefits before four separate tiers of emergency federal benefits kick in. Confusing the arrangement, recipients must exhaust their current benefits before filing for the next tier. Yet that option disappears at the end of May, when the filing deadline for all tiers arrives.

Complicating the timeline, Congress is scheduled to leave town at the end of this week for their Memorial Day recess, which puts them out of action until at least June 7. NELP estimates that 300,000 jobless folks will exhaust their UI benefits by June 12, the Friday after Congress returns.

Owens, for her part, thinks lawmakers should prioritize the UI extension legislation over their scheduled vacation.

“Unemployed Americans are pulling their hair out — and they are looking to Congress for help,” she said. “Even if it means staying in Washington as the Congressional recess approaches, the unemployment bill must move forward. Taking a break without extending the unemployment program will break faith with the millions of jobless workers Congress is leaving behind.”

Stay tuned.

Members of the House Education and Labor Committee are holding a satellite hearing this morning in Beckley, W.Va., to examine the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, which killed 29 Massey miners and almost killed a 30th not far from Beckley.

What’s striking is how closely today’s testimony from UBB miners and their families resembles the damning stories about Massey’s corporate culture that we’ve been hearing about from former Massey miners since the April 5 tragedy.

For instance, Stanley Stewart, a UBB miner for 15 years who was underground during the blast, told lawmakers today that the ventilation system inside the mine suffered constant problems, and (worse) Massey higher-ups never really cared to fix them.

“The area of the mine [where] we were working was liberating a lot of methane,” Stewart said. “Mine management never fully addressed the air problem when it would be shut down by inspectors. They would fix it just good enough to get us to load coal again, but then it would be back to business as usual.”

My experience in the mines showed me that the ventilation system they had didn’t work. And with so much methane being liberated, and no air moving it gave me the feeling that area was a ticking time bomb. I was told prior to the April 5th explosion, that they had experienced at least 2 fireballs on the drum of the shearer.

This leads me to believe the methane was indeed building in that area, showing lack of air and ventilation problems. One question that I have is how could methane build up to that point where a fireball could start? How could this happen if the methane detectors had been working?

A longer piece on this to follow.

Late last month, two young coal miners were killed in western Kentucky when a roof collapsed at the Dotiki coal mine, a non-union operation owned by Tulsa, Okla.-based Alliance Resource Partners.

Today, Rand Paul, the GOP nominee to replace outgoing Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning (R), weighed in on the disaster:

“We had a mining accident that was very tragic,” he told Good Morning America. “But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

Sometimes accidents happen? The Associated Press notes the safety history at the mine since 2009:

Records show inspectors from the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing have issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment because of safety violations since January 2009. Those records also show an additional 44 citations for safety violations that didn’t result in closure orders.

MSHA records show the mine was cited 840 times by federal inspectors for safety violations since January 2009, and 11 times closure orders were issued.

Here at TWI, we tallied the safety violations at Dotiki this year:

Since the start of the year, the mine has tallied 214 citations for federal safety violations, according to data compiled by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Sixty-five of those were deemed “significant and substantial,” indicating that they are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness.” Eleven of them are related to roof-support systems, the failure of which is the likely cause of last night’s collapse.

And the Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward Jr. pointed out the not-so-wonderful record of fatal accidents that Alliance Resource Partners has accumulated in recent years:

We don’ t have any idea yet what caused the massive roof fall that has left two miners missing at Craft’s Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky … But we do know that in recent years miners have died in Alliance’s non-union operations because the company violated mine safety laws. …

A quick check of U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration reports revealed seven such incidents that claimed nine lives in the last five years alone:

The mine’s record hasn’t been lost on Kimberly Freeman Brown, who heads American Rights at Work, a pro-union group. She issued a statement Friday blasting Paul’s comments as “simply bizarre.”

“Obviously,” she said, “he hasn’t read the published reports about the mine disaster in his own state.”

About 15 hours after Massey CEO Don Blankenship told Congress that worker safety is the company’s top priority, another Massey miner died in West Virginia, The Associated Press reports.

State of West Virginia spokesman Hoy Murphy says 55-year-old James Erwin of Delbarton died about 6 a.m. Friday.

Murphy says Erwin was pinned between a piece of heavy equipment and the wall at Massey’s Ruby Energy mine in Mingo County on May 10.

The Ruby Energy Mine — one of the 57 operations highlighted last month by the Mine Safety and Health Administration for having a troubling safety record — has racked up 82 safety citations since April 5, when 29 miners were killed (and another seriously injured) at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine in nearby Raleigh County.  Twenty-seven of those violations were deemed “significant and substantial,” indicating that they are “reasonably likely to result in a reasonably serious injury or illness.”

Under fire for his company’s safety record following a deadly mining accident last month, Massey CEO Don Blankenship tried to shift the blame Thursday, telling Senate lawmakers that interference from federal regulators might very well have caused the disaster.

Not only did the Mine Safety and Health Administration force Massey to alter its ventilation system at the doomed Upper Big Branch Mine, Blankenship charged, but “just days” before the tragedy, MSHA had also certified that the mine was in “good condition,” he claimed.

“We complied with MSHA safety orders even when we strenuously disagreed with them and believed them to be detrimental to the health and safety of the mine,” Blankenship told lawmakers on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor. “They forced us to ventilate backwards by not approving [our] plan.”

Though investigators have yet to determine the source of the blast, mine-safety experts suspect that it was caused by a buildup of methane combined with an accumulation of airborne coal dust — two conditions that mine ventilation systems are designed to alleviate.

To top it all off, Blankenship added, MSHA now wants a closed-door investigation, which he fears could allow the agency to clear itself of wrongdoing without the public knowing all the facts.

The message was clear, and it wasn’t lost on Sen. Robert Byrd. The 92-year-old West Virginia Democrat told Joseph Main, the head of MSHA, “This sounds like someone is trying to blame your agency for the death of 29 miners.”

Main was quick to push back, arguing that the ultimate responsibility for miners’ safety lies with the mine operator. “MSHA did not run the Upper Big Branch Mine — Massey Energy did,” he said. “I have no clue what the basis of [Blankenship’s] argument is.”

The comments arrive as federal, state and independent investigators continue to probe the cause of the April 5 disaster. The tragedy, the most deadly mine accident in 40 years, has put the spotlight on Massey’s safety record, reputed to be the worst in the business.

Blankenship defended Massey’s safety record Thursday, maintaining that the number of citations it’s racked up is “probably about average” for the industry. If it’s higher, he added, that’s because mining in Central Appalachia involves “difficult underground conditions,” and because Massey produces more coal in the region than anyone else.

Yet MSHA data don’t support that argument. In 2009, for instance, the Upper Big Branch racked up 515 safety violations while producing roughly 1.2 million tons of coal. Meanwhile, the Robinson Run mine, a Consol-owned operation near the Upper Big Branch, produced 5.5 million tons of coal in the same year while receiving just 158 citations.

The discrepancy wasn’t lost on Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, who accused Massey of nurturing a culture where production is prioritized over safety, and workers are scared to file complaints for fear of losing their jobs. “This isn’t the average,” Roberts said of Massey’s safety violations. “This is deplorable.”

“Mr. Blankenship,” Byrd added, “Massey is not average.”

Thursday’s hearing marked Blankenship’s first appearance before Congress since the April 5 blast. But you wouldn’t have known it by the turnout. Although two Capitol police officers roamed the room, no protestors surfaced. And aside from Byrd, only two other Democrats — Sens. Tom Harkin (Iowa) and Patty Murray (Wash.) — attended.

No Republicans showed up at all.

Roll Call reports:

Mexican President Felipe Calderon called for the reinstatement of a ban on the sale of assault weapons in the U.S. while reiterating his opposition to a controversial Arizona immigration law during an address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.

Calderon, citing his administration’s efforts to address the growing violence on the border related to the drug trade, argued that the spike in violence resulted in part from the end of the assault weapons ban in 2004.

Some Democrats on Capitol Hill, as well as Attorney General Eric Holder, have floated the idea of proposing a renewal of the assault weapons ban. But in the face of opposition from the gun lobby — not to mention the conservative Democrats who represent most of the party’s gains in recent elections — that idea has gone precisely nowhere.