The last inspection by federal regulators of Adair Grain Inc.’s West Fertilizer Co. was in 1985. It was inspected by Texas regulators 7 times in the last ten years, and it has received a string of piddling fines — a few thousand dollars here and there. It was storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate.

Lobbyists for the chemical industry are already complaining that there is too much regulation.

Lobbying groups for these plants say the risks are limited and they now face a panoply of regulations and oversight.

“It’s extraordinarily out of the ordinary to have this kind of experience,” Kathy Mathers, vice president of the Fertilizer Institute in Washington, said in an interview. “Both the producer and retailer side are heavily regulated.”

Oh, look at it’s prime location:

A good chunk of that town was flattened, and many people killed and injured, when the plant blew up. Are those costs factored into the chemical industry’s profit-and-loss measurements, or are they advocating a reduction in regulation because they know they’ll never have to pay that price?

So…this guy Paul is considered a likely presidential candidate?

Does he really think educated students at Howard University are completely unaware of the Southern strategy, that the racist Southern Democrats switched parties as soon as it was clear that Democrats were endorsing civil rights legislation, while Republicans were opposing it? How patronizingly ignorant.

While we’re playing games with labels, I have another question. I saw a copy of our campus’s far right wing, conservative, alternative student newspaper, the NorthStar. Inside, it has a joke (“A person with a liberal arts degree says, ‘Would you like fries with that?'” —pathetically tired, and at a liberal arts university), an article praising Andrew Breitbart, an analysis of gay marriage that concludes it would not be good for the country, an article on Zora Neale Hurston that breathlessly reveals that she was…a Republican(!!!) (in the first half of the twentieth century — see Jon Stewart, above), an article titled “True Feminism” that is basically an anti-choice tirade, and a tribute to Margaret Thatcher.

But here’s the funny thing. The paper does not call itself conservative, or right wing, or pro-Republican, or anything like that…no, the label splattered on the front page and scattered throughout is that they are “classically liberal”. OK, sure, there was and is a movement that arose in 19th century Europe that mirrors the goals of a certain current political subgroup, but the meaning of the labels have shifted in the US, so that phrase is now an attempt at obfuscation. “Classical liberalism” is basically identical to “Modern libertarianism”, and on some issues (such as the importance of capitalism) it’s farther to the right than modern conservatives, and on others (personal liberty, for instance), it makes noises about being somewhere towards the left — although a paper that decries abortion and gay marriage isn’t quite so tolerant as they’d like to claim.

Even their campus organization record makes this claim.

The NorthStar is a classically liberal monthly publication. We promote the Marketplace of Ideas and limited government principles.

What amuses me, though, is that they seem to have become embarrassed by the label “conservative”, and don’t even want to be known as “libertarian” — so they reach back into their history books and dredge up an old term that can be easily confused with the current understanding of what it means to be “liberal”. Why? Because conservatives have been tainted by their long courtship of the fringe wackaloon side of the American electorate. And now they’re trying to escape the consequences of their long romancing of the deeply racist side of American culture by trying to remind everyone of their role in the Emancipation Proclamation…a role they have most effectively repudiated in the last 60 years.