There are two potential futures for Coal River Mountain, WV and the people of the Coal River Valley. Their struggle will set an important precedent for energy production in America, and is giving hope to those of us in Appalachia starring down the barrel of mountaintop removal.

Industrial Wind Power (potential) OR Mountaintop Removal (permit area)

    John King of CNN got one thing right in his coverage of the Biden pick: Strategically, the choice of Biden was aimed at winning over the swing voters of southern Ohio.

    As such, it was the ultimate defensive move. McCain must win big in the rural south to compensate for Obama's urban masses and win Ohio. And McCain MUST win Ohio to win the national election. Deny McCain a landslide in southern Ohio and you close off his one path to victory. Joe Biden does that and does it well.

    For that and four other reasons, McCain is now constrained in his choice of running mate to only one from his shortlist. That one is former OH-02 Congressman, US Trade Representative, and Bush OMB Diretor Rob Portman.
   

I was thinkin'...if Democrats want to win presidential elections, we should nominate populists.

It might seem like something very simple and straight forward, a candidate who is smart should be elected for the office. But it's not often the case.

I would have added a snark note, but this is no laughing matter.  Asking our young son how he liked his Christian summer camp experience in southern Indiana, yesterday, he reported that he loved the basketball and swimming, but he was hurt and confused by an exchange he'd had with one of the ADULT counselors.

Our son shared that he'd recently gotten to shake hands with Barack Obama after a town hall, and this was the response he got from one of his counselors:

Counselor:  "Did you wash your hand afterwards?"

Our son: "No."

Counselor:  "Well, you should have.  Obama is a baby killer who doesn't believe in God."

We were stunned.  Our church doesn't talk about politics, but rather focuses on developing a personal relationship with God.  Abortion isn't discussed. Though, our pastor and many in the congregation are Pro-life, they aren't militant about it or even vocal about it.  For that matter, my husband is strongly against abortion, and I'm Pro Choice believing it should be left to individual conscience.  So, this came completely from "right" field.

 Many of us were pleased and relieved to see American flags waving at the Berlin speech.  Why?  When Bush framed the world as being "either with us or against us," not only Europeans, but also Americans took sides.  This fear based, either or way of thinking has been fanned and fed for eight years, and if we underestimate it, or approach it with only derision and logic, we could lose.  
    We may need to go beyond railing against the MSM for not treating our message fairly and respectfully listen and talk with EVERYONE we see and know in our daily lives.  And, we may need to look at and learn from Hillary Clinton’s successful ability to reach out and regain Reagan-Democrats.  And, we need to stand beside and sincerely with rural and Appalachian America -- to face distrust, fear, hopelessness, and sometimes, hateful opinions -- to find common ground and shared interests.

This is my first diary.  Reading the Kos post about the KS woman who felt hopeless and the diary about WV, I thought I'd share my perceptions re: neighbors and friends here in KY.  I'm not much of a writer, but I wanted to try to share my perceptions for what their worth.

I've been watching FOX over the last few days regarding Obama's trip. Their main strategy seems like it's going to be, "Don't believe anything you hear from anyone in MSM, but us.  It's ALL liberal bias. Don't listen to anyone, but us. We are fair and balanced.  Don't let those elitist lefties make fools of you."  Living in KY, I think the faux-news' message may just work, again, unless we can learn to actually stand beside and with one another.  

Welcome to Mountain Monday, spreading the word about mountaintop removal, and celebrating the best Appalachia has to offer.

Take a look at the region carrying the heaviest load for American coal production, and you’ll see that we are definitively beyond "peak coal" in Appalachia. The US Geological Survey, and other crazy assorted "experts" on "science" have been telling Appalachia that our coal has what-we-call a "finite" production span. In fact, the USGS has estimated that we have around roughly 10 years of high-quality thick coal seams left.

"Sufficient high-quality, thick, bituminous resources remain in [Appalachian Basin] coal beds and coal zones to last for the next one to two decades at current production."

   - United States Geological Survey (USGS), 2000 AD

But now, thanks to citizen activists, the blogosphere, and environmentally conscious Americans throughout the land, there is now a much more powerful thing than "science" telling us that we have no choice but to get off coal in the next decade.

It doesn't always occur to us that our electricity comes from somewhere.

But for many people on the east coast, every time we flip on a light switch, we are connected to the blowing up of the oldest mountains in the world - the Appalachian Mountains - where coal is being extracted using a barbaric form of coal-mining called mountaintop removal.

This weekend, not only did the iLoveMountains.org Bloggers Challenge hit 300 participants (woah!), but I witnessed several incredible citizens who realized that they were connected to mountaintop removal put on an incredible 3 day event in NYC called New York Loves Mountains, in order to raise awareness in New York about the destruction of Appalachia, and the fact that EVEN IN NEW YORK Americans are using electricity generated by mountaintop removal.

Home is an invention on which no one has yet improved.

A man defending his home is worth 10 invaders.

There is no place like home.

Home is home, be it ever so humble.

These phrases may have graced our ears 3,592 times, but ponderings on the meaning of home mean a little bit more to those of us in Appalachia these days.

Mountain Mondays will be a weekly celebration of our mountain home in Appalachia.

You see, in many ways, Appalachia isn't what it used to be. We have lost more than 1 million acres of land, along with 1000+ of miles of our once pristine streams, and 90% of our traditional coal jobs to mountaintop removal mining. This barbaric practice has reduced much of our home to rubble, and further damaged our perennially struggling local economies. The jobs are gone. The people are leaving. The water is toxic. And they are blowing up the mountains themselves.

But the face of Appalachian resistance to "Big Coal" is changing...

On June 23 in New York City,  John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute,  received the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a practical plan to remediate Appalachian coal lands with

An economy built on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy and ecological design

He wants to apply his decades of experiences with Eco Machines for water remediation to cleaning coal slurries and rebuilding healthy soils from the slag.  He has outlined a process that goes from waste and water treatment to reforestation with a full renewable economy based on biomass and local wind power.  With his experience building Agricultural Industrial Ecologies, as in Burlington, VT, he proposes a regional succession of industrial ecologies that can provide healthy lives and environments for larger populations over centuries if not millenia.

Full report at [pdf aert]
http://challenge.bfi.org/...

In the last year, West Virginia has taken quite a few hits in the media. A journalist friend described it as a "target-rich environment."

The hits I'm thinking about now are images hurtling through the Web and airwaves portraying us as racist and xenophobic. Obviously, West Virginia, like other places, has its share of racists and bigots - and quite a few of them wound up talking to the press.

But I get upset when people paint the whole state and its history with that brush. West Virginia has a pretty interesting past in terms of race relations. Even before statehood, there were tensions between western mountaineers and the slaveholding elite that dominated Virginia politics.

Part of this diary was originally published on June 9 at West Virginia Blue.

My connecting train was late tonight. It was hot as hell and I struck up a conversation with three young men, two black, one white, at the station about the heat and the lateness of the train. When we boarded, someone warned us the next car down didn’t have air conditioning working so I went up to the second deck and all the way to the end seat where I could stretch out. The other three followed me up and I had the end seat facing them as they sat sideways.

The man sitting closest to me, an African American in his 20s, was muscular with a tattoo of a flaming skull on his left bicep with "Protect Me From Evil" written around it (the skull not the bicep). He pulled out a book, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. His friends also began reading their books too though I could not see the titles.

No. Not in Iran (yet).
And not another invented cause for staying at war in Iraq (they've run out of excuses).
The Republican "Dirty Tricks" brigade has been redeployed... this time to reinvent the American Civil War.

The newest battle rages around the Republican Attack Machine's attempt to turn Jim Webb into Scarlett's Webb (my apologies to both Margaret Mitchell and E.B. White). Senator Webb has written extensively and with authority and thoughtfulness on the Civil War and the socio-economic roots of the South. Of course, The GOP "Dirty Tricks" class of 2008 has been parsing these and other Webb writings in order to leave their usual slime trail of fabricated controversy. The greatest enabler of these societal slugs remains the abject ignorance of the American voter - but the ignorance is now enhanced but the sheer stupidity and spinelessness of the American press.

Over the jump is a (hopefully logical) progression that came to me as I played with the question that will continue to engross us for the next couple of months - who would make the best vice-president for a President Obama?

and I can say that Barack Obama has a lot of work to do there.  

I live in Northern Virginia and my son's Boy Scout troop (yea, I know, many people on this list have issues with Boy Scouts.  Please accept that our troop is somewhat different from the National Council and emphasizes the good parts of scouting without the burden of some of the more archain policies) scheduled the annual family white water rafting trip to take place in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania (yes, its a real place).

Are they the same person?  Very much so.   The New York Review of Books Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008 has a review of A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America entitled "The Jim Webb Story", by Elizabeth Drew.  She starts bt saying:

Webb is a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side. His first book, Fields of Fire, published in 1978, when Webb was thirty-two, is a sweeping, unflinching novel about Vietnam featuring two of life's losers who signed up for lack of anything else to do. It conveys with stark vividness, and also a touch of farce, the stench, the filth, the fear, and the bewildering unexpectedness of fighting an elusive enemy in a jungle. Fields of Fire has often been called the best book about Vietnam and likened to the war writing of Norman Mailer and Stephen Crane.

 Look beneath the break for more.

Here are a few thoughts about the tightrope between the 50-state "campaign everywhere" strategy, and the need to make sure we keep enough resources to compete in must-win states.  

We need to expand the map, but competing EFFECTIVELY in a "solid red" state like South Dakota would mean a LOT of time and money spent on 3 EVs that the odds are we wouldn't get anyhow. And that money might better be spent shoring up Ohio?  Does that mean we should give up on all the small red states?  Not necessarily...