STATE FIRE MARSHAL BLAMES FIREMEN FOR HIM NOT WEARING MASK: Harnett County removed a handful of pictures from its official Facebook page this week after a cavalcade of comments criticizing officials who weren't wearing masks. The post showed state Insurance Commissioner Mike Causey visiting the Coats Grove Fire and Rescue station. A number of others, including state Sen. Jim Burgin, R-Harnett, posed for a photo outside, in front of a fire truck. The post also included images from an indoor meeting. Causey and others were standing apart from each other, but they weren't wearing masks. Causey, who is also the state fire marshal, said he tends to follow the firefighters' lead on such visits. "Most of these firefighters are not wearing masks just around the fire station," he said. "I stand with the firefighters, so whatever they say."
https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/harnett-county-takes-down-pictures-of-maskless-meeting/19199591/

Completely subservient to the industries it's supposed to regulate:

Not long after President Trump’s inauguration, the head of a fossil fuels industry group requested a call with the president’s transition team. The subject: Barack Obama’s requirement that oil and gas companies begin collecting data on their releases of methane. That outreach, by Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, appeared to quickly yield the desired results.

“Looks like this will be easier than we thought,” David Kreutzer, an economist who was helping to organize the new president’s Environmental Protection Agency, wrote of canceling the methane reporting requirement in an email to another member of the transition team on Feb. 10, 2017. Three weeks after that email, the E.P.A. officially withdrew the reporting requirement — and effectively blocked the compilation of data that would allow for new regulations to control methane, a powerful climate-warming gas.

This isn't just willful ignorance (burying your head in the sand), it's a concerted effort to conceal information that's vital to the public and its institutions. Among many other things, it allows fossil fuel cheerleaders like John Hood to write glowing Op-Eds about natural gas to a public that is kept ignorant on purpose. Just as methyl mercury once was for coal, fugitive methane is the dirty secret of the natural gas industry, and Trump's kakistocracy has been working overtime to maintain that secret: