Southwest Virginia Blogs

Here is the latest recommendation and report from Magistrate Judge Sargent, in our timber-cutting case out of Wise County.

It begins dramatically:

"To a child of Appalachia, to see the mountains laid waste, whether by clear–cutting or strip mining, is to witness a dagger plunged into the very bosom from which you sprang and which has sustained you. Nonetheless, this court’s role in this case is not to pass judgment upon the policy decisions which allow such activities. Instead, its role is to decide the issue presented in this case – whether the court should issue a permanent injunction preventing continued logging activities on this property without a valid surface mining permit. For the reasons outlined below, I find that it should not, and I further recommend that the court vacate the preliminary injunction entered on August 4, 2008."

Last week someone said something along the lines of “if McCain had palled around with Ayers instead of Obama, it’d be all Ayers all the time!” Of course, there are McCain’s ties to neo-Nazis and Latin American death squads, which really haven’t been covered in detail on CNN. Or here, because — as I told a friend of mine — politicians shake a lot of hands. And I tend to agree with political scientist Kathleen Hall Jamieson that:

The notion that we would impugn the integrity of a person running for president on the other side, question their patriotism, is something that we all ought to step back from and say that is unacceptable. The evidence that one should have to mount to make that kind of case should be so clear and so overwhelming that it would persuade that person’s mother. And for practical purposes, those are charges that are out of bounds. [ On the Bill Moyers Journal ]

Nevertheless, Whiskey Fire has another example of just this kind of argument. If there was a sex scandal in the McCain camp, we’d hear about it! So why won’t they cover Obama’s sex scandal?! Well, there are drug and sex scandals in the McCain camp, and it’s not being covered because it’s just rumor an innuendo and no one but the National Inquirer will touch it. Which, incidentally, is the only publication checking into the Obama sex scandal as well.

Here the announcement was made that Virginia Lawyers Weekly has included me on a list of Leaders in the Law, with many distinguished people - because of this blog.

This kind of makes me wish I'd written something more interesting lately.

I thank the readers, old and new, including those at VLW.

YouTube has inked deals to start offering full length TV shows. The Google-backed company intends to go head to head with Hulu, which has several deals with networks to carry TV shows.

These kinds of alternatives are quickly making it quaint to sit down in front of the TV at a certain time on a certain day to watch a particular show. I'm a fan of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I could not tell you what network it is on, what day new shows air, or what time it plays. I simply go to the iTunes Store when I have a little extra time, pay $2, and watch the show at my convenience. For that $2, I enjoy it without commercial interruption.

Cable and satellite TV are rapidly becoming anachronisms.

I realize that George Soros is the great liberal evil — not sure why — but he sounded sane, grounded, and intelligent on the Bill Moyers Journal. He describes the recent economic crisis as the result of “market fundamentalism:”

It’s that markets will correct themselves, that you should leave it to the markets, and there is no need for government intervention in financial affairs. Letting markets run rampant.

Which is more accurate a metaphor than he knows. Because while these principles do drive the politics behind our recent market downturns, like Christian fundamentalism the principles get sacrificed to political and financial opportunity whenever possible. The current bailout is not the only time we’ve “socialized risk,” and government contracting has been at its non-competitive best under the Bush administration (although certainly not all that hot in prior ones, either).

Moyers asks if we’re all going to become socialists, and Soros explains that socialism is a “false ideology.” He also says that market fundamentalism is a “false ideology.” When Moyers asks him what a true ideology is, Soros suggests we abandon the search for economic ideology altogether:

[...A]ll our ideas, all our human constructs have a flaw in it. And perfection is not attainable. And we must engage in critical thinking and correct our mistakes.

That’s my ideology. As a child, I experienced Fascism, the Nazi occupation and then Communism, two false ideologies. And I learned that both of those ideologies are false. And now I was shocked when I found that even in a democracy people can be misled to the extent that we’ve been misled in the last few years.

You’re simply not going to be able to come up with first principles, a Ten Commandments for economic policy. What works in one context might not work in another. If we enact some socialist policies that does not make us socialist any more than using a pipe-wrench makes us a plumber.

I forgot to post here this LA Times story from October 5, titled "Frank talk of Obama and race in Virginia." The dateline is Whitewood, in Buchanan County, and the story begins:

"The isolated towns of Virginia's Appalachian coal region are home to strong labor unions and Democratic political machines that date back generations. Yet voters here who eagerly pushed Democrats into the Senate and the governor's office are resisting Barack Obama."

Back in May, Obama got less than 10% of the primary vote in Buchanan County.

Here is Luskin's post on the announcement that Paul Krugman will get the prize.

That seems so wrong, to give a distinguished prize to a political shill, who looks so horrible on television.

Barack Obama is the guy you remember from high school.  He’s a good-looking, charismatic smooth talker with a bad reputation. His self-worth is measured by his successful conquests … and he hangs with a rough crowd.

Like the guy that will say and do anything to get in your pants, Barack Obama will say and do anything to get in your White House.

The cad from high school had his signature tag lines such as, “If you loved me, you’d let me” and “Don’t believe the silly rumors you hear about me.” In Barack Obama’s case, he flatters you with, “I’m going to wake up every morning thinking about you” and then he plays on your sympathies by claiming that people are saying,  “He’s got no money, he doesn’t come from a wealthy family, he’s got no organization, he wasn’t born into a political family, and he’s a black man with this name that folks can’t even pronounce. And it sounds Muslim! So he’s not gonna be able to get through the difficulties of the campaign process.”

He’s the guy whose persistence and determination finally wears down your sensibilities and good judgment.  He could’ve asked any girl to be his date at the school dance but he asked YOU!  Knowing in your heart that it’s wrong and dangerous, you climb down the rose trellis in your prettiest dress  and try to dispel your doubts about him by chanting a mantra in your head of “Have HOPE, he’s CHANGED.”

When he honks his horn in front of your house, you dash across the lawn before your father can chastise him for his bad manners, before your father grabs him by his scrawny neck and informs him that he’s not worthy of you and drags you back in the house.  You hop on the back of his barely roadworthy chopper and hold on for dear life as he squeals the tires peeling away from the curb…

In short, Barack Obama is the guy that leaves you crying in your ripped dress and shredded self-respect.  You never even made it to the dance…

John McCain is also the guy you remember from high school.  The boy that you’d known since the third grade and the one that has harbored an enormous crush on you.  You’ve had disagreements and even some fist fights with one another over the years, but when the chips were down, he was the boy you could count on.  He’s the one that took you for ice cream and dabbed your tears with his handkerchief when you didn’t make the cheerleader try outs.  You took him for granted and sometimes treated him badly but he never gave up on you.  He gladly took a black eye or a bloody nose defending your honor.

He’s kinda geeky and a little awkward so he can hardly believe it when you agree to be his prom date.  When he shakes your father’s hand, looks your father in the eye and promises to have you home by 11:30, you know he means it because you know John McCain.

Because you KNOW John McCain.

The Museum of Appalachia's Tennessee Fall Homecoming is one of the finest and most-important events each year in all of Appalachia. We spent a couple of days at the museum in Clinton, TN this weekend.




More photos from the weekend are here.

Or is it an Al Franken telling a jogging story.

Apparently Norm ran an ad of Franken which used video of Franken yelling, screaming, and pointing — trying to make Franken look like an “Angry Liberal.” Franken puts the event in it’s proper — and non-political — context. Just watch:

Author Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, says he’s going to vote for Obama this year. The first time ever for a Democrat:

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance. [ Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama ]

He writes this not in his usual magazine, the National Review, because of an experience a conservative colleague of his had when she criticized Sarah Palin:

She has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. [ ... ] I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground.

This comes on the heels of David Brooks — who thought Sarah Palin did a fine job in last week’s debate, thank you very much — coming around to the notion that Republican anti-elitism has in fact become anti-intellectual. Ideas haven’t just ceased to matter, they’re now grounds for tarring and feathering.

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect. [ ... ] Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

If you look in the comments of Buckley’s post, you can see some of that anti-intellectual resentment rearing its head:

Palin doesn’t quite fit, does she? She isn’t of your sort, is she? Well, at the risk of sounding like a Hollywood cliche, I’m grateful your father isn’t alive to witness your betrayal of the principles he spent his life promoting and defending. You’re a disgrace. Go find a rock. Crawl under it. Stay there. [ comment from troyriser ]

And, of course, Kathleen Parker can also speak for herself:

The fierce reaction to my column has been both bracing and enlightening. After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

Some of my usual readers feel betrayed because I previously have written favorably of Palin. By changing my mind and saying so, I am viewed as a traitor to the Republican party — not a “true” conservative. [ ... ] Readers have every right to reject my opinion. But when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different than one’s own, then we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk. (I hear you, Dixie Chicks.)

Political rallies have become ugly with death threats (”Kill Him!” “Bomb Obama!”) becoming as common as the accusations of terrorist sympathies and treason. It’s all pretty scary. But it’s not unanticipated, I suppose. At Obsidian Wings, Publius writes:

[T]he GOP has made an unholy alliance with the mob — and now the long-term debt is coming due. And they deserve it. After all, it’s not that the GOP establishment merely tolerated them, or treated them like the crazy uncle you basically nod at but ignore. They’ve been riling them up — feeding the hate. They’ve based campaigns on things like gay marriage and immigration and terrorist appeasing. They go on the Rush Limbaugh show, and validate his venom. They tell people who don’t have time to learn otherwise things like giving mortgages to poor minority families caused the housing crisis. [ The GOP's Sorcerer's Apprentice Problem ]

Since Reagan, the GOP has been leveraging the Conservative Christian votes and running low-information/mis-information propaganda campaigns because they could play off hate, fear, and ignorance and in so doing get people to vote against their economic well-being. But now, with Palin in the Vice President’s slot on the ticket, that used-but-never-rewarded voting bloc has real power — and you know what? It turns out they hate Republican intellectuals, too. The Republicans in charge now are the ones who’ve been listening to Limbaugh for decades, not William F. Buckley. They’ve been listening to Michael Savage and Ann Coulter’s hate speech for years.

The GOP has been taken over by the Internet Trolls they invited in for dinner, and those trolls could care less about David Brooks. Thinking for yourself now is more than wrong. To a significant portion of the electorate, it is treason.

Good luck getting your party back. I sincerely mean that.

Update: McCain’s trying to claw his way back up to the high road — with enough determination that I think he might be genuine about it.

Here is an absolutely spectacular picture of Mercury from a new NASA space probe. It pretty much confirms that Mercury is not a place anyone would want to live, and it is an amazing example of technology in action. The physics of getting a space probe to travel across hundreds of millions of miles to be in exactly the right place at the right time is exacting and difficult; it's nice to know, in midst of this economic downturn, that we still have the capacity to get some very hard stuff done and done right.

Google now has its own satellite, or at least exclusive access to one. The firm made a deal with the U.S. government to help finance a new image mapping satellite in return for exclusive commercial rights to the images. It was probably cheaper than paying for images from other commercial and government satellites.

There’s a reason you won’t see this political ad on television:

Well, maybe HBO.

The City of St. Paul is taking a serious look at fiber to the home as part of a community broadband effort for the city. A local group has started a Web site that has a lot of good information on it.

McCain fought against Socialism in Vietnam - it’s HIGH TIME he does it here!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Years and years ago I discovered Aimee Mann and enjoyed her (at the time) two albums until I decided that she was a little too bitter and cynical and I stopped listening to her completely. Then I had a bad relationship experience and Aimee Mann suddenly became much more relevant.

Now Nine Inch Nails — which I enjoyed as an angsty college student but have since dismissed as being too nihilistic and angry — has found its way back into heavy rotation. Also, Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut has suddenly become a favorite album. I suspect that mood will only intensify over the next few weeks.

A lawsuit filed by the incumbent telephone company in Monticello, Minnesota sought to stop the city from building its own fiber to the home (FTTH) network. The project was designed as a public/private partnership, with Hiawatha Broadband Communications, another Minnesota telecom firm, signed up to operate the system and provide services.

Yesterday, the 10th District Court in Minnesota dismissed the case, finding that the city had the right to issue bonds for a telecom utility and that the city had the right to operate a telecom utility.

The Court went into some detail about the meaning of a "public convenience," as there is a Minnesota law on the books that gives municipalities the right to own and operate a "public convenience." Part of the lawsuit alleged that a fiber network was not a public convenience, but the court has said that it is.

This ruling applies only in Minnesota, but it still may have some influence in other states. Monticello was particularly lucky, as the case was resolved in less than a year. Courts have generally found in favor of municipalities, but the cases often drag on for years.

Jesse on why people feel like it’s a good thing to be undecided at this stage in the game:

There are only two real tools needed to remain undecided, because they cancel each other out - the first is the driving, voracious hunger for “specifics” and the second is the unyielding hatred of anything even resembling “not talking to people like me”. A plan to do X is both lacks specifics because the person describing it said it in a straightforward fashion with the assumption that they would use the requisite abilities of their job to accomplish it and, when the details of doing it are revealed, it lacks the “everyman” quality that the first statement had. Then, having been led to assume that the style of delivering drastically different plans falls into one of those two categories at every juncture, undecideds then get to assume that there’s no real difference between competing politicians because they all say the same thing (by which they mean it falls into one of two vague categories of delivery). [ Undecideds ]

When people tell me they are “undecided” or “independents,” they generally do it with an air of superiority. “I’m an independent.” Well, bully for you. I am a Democrat. He is a Republican. Adam over yonder is a Green, and Trotsky was a Communist.

I think there’s the assumption among some people that if you declare for a party you’re somehow falling in line or giving someone else the right to think for you. Some party adherents — the ones who think of politics more like football than the means through which life, death, and prosperity decisions are made — probably do this. But I am a Democrat because, after a lot of thought and a lot of reading, the Democratic party reflects my values and serves my interests the best. If tomorrow the Republicans and Democrats swapped party platforms, I would be a Republican and I would vote against Obama.

People who really are thinking about politics know where they stand on issues. Independents who haven’t made up their minds yet are people who haven’t thought about the issues or are looking for something they aren’t going to get. So when someone tells me they are “independent,” what I hear is “I am not paying attention.” Anyone who is paying attention should be able to define themselves by what they believe, not by who they fail to identify with.

Update:

A couple of clarifications. First, Fred reminds me in the comments that in some places you can register your party identity. I tend to forget this because in Virginia, party identity is a state of mind. You don’t register as a Republican or a Democrat. I don’t really have any objection to registering as an Independent; what I do object to is the notion that not belonging to either party demonstrates moral superiority or better critical thinking skills.

Secondly, Chrissy points out that people can have real, issue-based conundrums when it comes to casting a vote. That’s true; it’s possible for candidates to split on the decisions that are important to you. But I suspect most “undecideds” in the wild would be unable to tell you where the candidates stood on issues, where they themselves stood on the issues, and where their moral conundrum lies.

According to this press release, an author from Bristol has a new book, called Murder Takes The Cake, and has set free one volume of it at the Bristol Starbucks, in the manner of BookCrossing.com.