…and all too typical for today’s GOP. Normally, Frank Lucas doesn’t show up in the news, but here he is:

Leaders of a new GOP group, the “Rural American Solutions Group,” are distributing a document attacking climate change legislation as an economic burden to most of the country. As it turns out, the information in the press release was provided to the Republican congressmen by Peabody Energy, a juggernaut of the coal industry. Staffers for GOP Reps. Frank Lucas (R-OK), Sam Graves (R-MO), and Doc Hastings (R-WA) are emailing around a map that purports to detail “how the Democrats’ National Energy Tax unfairly targets rural Americans.”

A closer look at the source of the image reveals the document’s origins:

Two employees of Peabody Energy are listed in the metadata of the map document: Chairman and CEO Greg Boyce and Communications Manager Chris Taylor. The congressmen opposing climate change legislation — Reps. Lucas, Graves, and Hastings — are simply copying-and-pasting information that has been directly fed to them by Peabody Energy.

It’s somewhat charming to realize these guys still think they can let the industries they’re supposed to be regulating literally write the laws and press releases and think no one will notice it. They’ll have to do a small amout of actual work to avoid that, and that’s certainly not what we’ve come to expect from our modern GOP.