An excerpt from yesterday’s editorial:

Mining money is talking especially loudly in this year’s midterm campaigns. The White House has rightly committed itself to new initiatives to regulate and, we hope, eventually end the ruinous practice known as mountaintop mining. Yet these initiatives are now being challenged in court by West Virginia’s Democratic governor, Joe Manchin III. Governor Manchin — grandstanding as much as running for the United States Senate seat of the late Robert Byrd — has bagged $81,000 in industry contributions with alarums that environmental protections threaten the coal industry and miners’ jobs.

Does the Times really think that $81,000 — basically a rounding error in today’s political environment — would buy off Manchin? I certainly don’t remember the Times making the same implication about President Obama when it was revealed he was the top recipient of BP money — a whopping $77,051 from a single company.