West Virginia Blue
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Considering how poor of a job Sen. Jay Rockefeller did as Senate Intelligence chairman (see here for one example), the fact he doesn't like Leon Panetta for CIA director is a point in Panetta's favor.
A number of other experts in intelligence -- including former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet and Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9-11 Commission, praised the choice and dismissed the reservations of Feinstein and Rockefeller.
Tenet, CIA director during Bush's first term, said Panetta was "a great choice."
"He will bring stature and leadership to the agency," Tenet said in an interview.
Panetta, 70, would take over the Central Intelligence Agency as Obama is promising to break from President George W. Bush's policies regarding interrogations and surveillance in the war against terrorism.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo prints an email from an intel professional in support of Panetta:
I think there is a lot more here than is being said. I believe that Feinstein did not want someone like Panetta who has a large and independent power base and network. If you get a career guy they are a lot easier to isolate and move around. Panetta has been around for a long time and has his own network. I actually think that it is a good choice. He knows how intelligence needs to be presented to the President - that is the critical issue here.
I do not discount the notion that many in the CIA feel slighted by the creation of the DNI and not being the "premier" agency anymore, at least when one looks at the totem pole. But if you look at the PDB more than 80% of the product still originates from the DI. It is the gold standard of intelligence agencies, both here and abroad. As a old colleague once said to me: there are a lot of jewels in the crown of the United States government but there are only a few large critical ones: CIA DI, NASA, NIH, State; that is where the intellectual might of the government is.
The issue is not intell guy or non-intell guy. The big issue for Blair and Panetta is strategic or tactical orientation. We are fighting two wars and the warfighter always screams they don't have enough intel or enough of anything for that matter. The dice are so loaded for support to the warfighter that critical strategic intelligence for the President and other senior leaders goes wanting due to time constraints on collection assets.
We need a significant re-orientation away from tactical support by CIA and other National agencies and back to their primary mission - direct intelligence support to the President. The last 15 years have seen an explosion of tactical intelligence capability with the advent of UAVs (which DoD fought against for so long due to the fighter pilot mentality). National systems need to be re-oriented to national priorities and away from tactical or operational desires of the warfighter.
I think the Panetta selection is another indication of the change coming. I was concerned that the selection of Jones as National Security Advisor and Blair as DNI underscored the great concern that I have about the militarization of intelligence. The selection of Panetta, with a much wider and deeper power base than either of them, makes me hopeful in this regard. Panetta is a skilled operator, he knows how to get things done. He knows how to get a budget approved and to make the wheels of government work. He will be a force - both in the Administration and on the Hill -- much larger than any career guy could be. This is good. It gives the CIA the opportunity to re-create itself within the current structure.
Marshall also agrees about the Democratic opposition to Barack Obama's pick:
But I feel instinctively suspicious of the congressional reaction to this appointment. Rockefeller is saying he's not happy. But he was a very poor ranking member and then chairman of the senate committee. So I don't think that means much.
Feinstein and Rockefeller sense a real individual with real clout at the agency, whom they cannot control. There may have been a lack of foreisght here in not phoning Feinstein ahead of time. But it is also indisputable that many leading intelligence Democrats were deeply complicit in the Bush torture program and his illegal wire-tapping. It was just as important for the president-elect to pick someone not beholden to them either.
Some are now citing Panetta's appointment as somehow "political" rather than substantive. But it's obvious that Obama has actually found someone both capable of running a bureaucracy as complex as the CIA, of a stature to be approved by the Congress and maintain good relations, and with the good sense to know how interrogation based on torture is never right and much less effective than legal methods.
It remains an inspired choice. And the critics help show why.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- More than two dozen of his ex-colleagues from across the country believe West Virginia's new chief justice was wrong to hear a case involving Massey Energy.
A group of 27 former justices from 19 state Supreme Courts say Brent Benjamin created an appearance of impropriety. Retired West Virginia Supreme Court Justice Richard Neely is among them.
The jurists and several other groups have filed briefs supporting an appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Benjamin helped overturn a $50 million verdict that was won by Harman Mining and its president. Their pending appeal argues Benjamin should have recused himself because Massey chief executive Don Blankenship spent more than $3 million to help get him elected.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - West Virginia's first lady says her husband's second inauguration later this month will reflect and celebrate the ways West Virginia has changed over the first four years of the Manchin administration.
Gayle Manchin said the theme grew out of Gov. Joe Manchin's first inauguration, when the Capitol dome was under wraps for renovations, and the state's economy was also, figuratively, undergoing repairs.
In the past four years, she said, the state's economy has improved and attitudes about the state have changed.
The theme of this year's inaugural is to celebrate the positive change in the state over the last four years, first lady Gayle Manchin said.
"Over the four years, we have sort of evolved into a new West Virginia," the first lady said.
Via, the always worth reading Al Giordano highlights James Wolcott's winners and losers of 2008. In addition to Al in the winners column was Nate Silver of the indispensible FiveThirtyEight.com. Here's how James Wolcott described Nate and his work in 2008:
No shiny arrow shot swifter and loftier from obscurity to quotable authority than Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight.com site became the expert sensation of the election season. (Five hundred thirty-eight is the sum of electoral-college votes up for contention.) Crunching poll numbers until they sang with clarity, Silver, a managing partner and sabermetrician at Baseball Prospectus and a former Daily Kos diarist, made many of the old pros look as if they were stuck in the previous century, milking cows. Not only did his disciplined models and microfine data mining command respect, his prognostications hit the Zen mark on Election Day. "This uncanny accuracy is the equivalent of dropping a penny from the top of a 50 story building and landing it in a shot glass," John Cole wrote at Balloon Juice. "This is sick accurate." Silver also became an instant cable-news savant, his geek-genius glasses and owlish mien worthy of a Starfleet sub-adjutant whose quadratic equations coolly foil an attack from a Romulan vessel while the senior officers are frantically poking at their touch screens.
This gives me a chance to revisit one of Nate's posts where he revisited Obama's so-called "Appalachia problem" that other lesser lights had claimed existed. Silver found it was based less off race than familiarity with the candidate:
I think the most telling example might be South Carolina, which Obama did not campaign in because of any particular demographic strengths, but merely because it happened to enjoy an early position on the primary calendar. In that state, Obama did 4 points better than John Kerry among white voters, even though he didn't really visit the state after January. (Interestingly, it did not seem to matter whether Obama visited a state during the primary cycle or the general election; merely spending time on the ground there was what counted.)
The question, really, is to what extent Barack Obama's underperformance among certain types of white voters was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not asking for somebody's vote, you're usually not going to get it. This may be particularly true if you're a black person and the voter is a rural Southern white person.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the voter is hellbent against you. I tend to think that racism runs along a spectrum. Many, or perhaps even most white voters are a little bit racist, but for relatively few is race a complete deal-breaker. Many of them will vote for you if you're actively soliciting their votes, and they've had time to grow comfortable with you. If Obama had been targeting Georgia's or West Virgina's electoral votes as actively as he sought Florida's or North Carolina's, might he have won them? I don't know, but I think he'd have had a fighting chance.
Those of us who know West Virginia, from Gov. Joe Manchin on down, said if Obama had campaigned here, he would have won here. Certainly he would have had a better chance. But others in the blogosphere would rather stick with their superficial narrative of villifying those of us in West Virginia instead of looking past their preconceived stereotypes.
Remember Bow Tie Boy, Chris Stirewalt? OK, he's easily forgotten so you're forgiven if you don't. He was the rightwing columnist for The State Journal. I was reminded of him as I read this article because he was always pushing Ireland as an economic model for businesses.
Everything, it seems, has grown worse here. The recession started earlier and its bite has been deeper. Housing prices have fallen by as much as 50 percent. Bank shares have plummeted by more than 90 percent. Unemployment is approaching 10 percent.
The roots of Ireland's fall date to more than 20 years ago, when a clutch of economists, politicians and civil servants put their heads together in this very pub and planted the philosophical seeds for the Irish economic miracle.
Known widely as the "Doheny & Nesbitt School of Economics," these beery musings soon became government policy that chopped taxes in half, sharply reduced import duties and embraced foreign investment - a radical transformation that gave birth to the Celtic Tiger and perhaps the most open and vibrant economy in Europe.
But beyond the glow of this sudden efflorescence that made Ireland the fourth most-affluent country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a housing bubble had begun to form. Low interest rates, a wave of inward immigration and a bank lending spree drove housing's share of the economy to 14 percent, the highest in Europe, from 5 percent, according to research done by Finfacts, a financial Web site that analyzes the Irish economy.
Developers like Mr. Dunne became multimillionaires and - much like the hedge fund and private-equity elite in America - became visible public and cultural figures. They were living large in a country just coming to grips with its ability to show a little swagger.
Ireland's policy makers, like their counterparts in the United States and Britain, were seduced by record tax inflows and a full-employment economy. They paid little heed to the lonely voices that warned of the crash that finally came over the summer, when interest rates in Europe began to rise. Banks that had steered more than 60 percent of their loans toward property stopped lending, and asset values plummeted.
"We have repeatedly warned that the government's housing policy was extremely dangerous," said John Fitz Gerald, an economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute, a leading policy center in Dublin, who has long urged that the government stanch housing demand by raising taxes. "You will now see unemployment going to 10 percent and we will experience a sharp drop in output."
He shakes his head and sighs: "This was predictable, but the government just did not deal with it."
Meanwhile, West Virginia, the most "socialist" state in the nation according to our last GOP gubernatorial candidate, is seeing unemployment go up slightly, but remains at a far lower rate than our neighbors in surrounding states. I'll have more on that later. One of the things I thought this blog has done best in the past couple of years is pushing back against the WV GOP's "Unleashing Capitalism" campaign. Considering how much deregulation has helped create the global financial crisis and discredited their policies, the state GOP's next slogan should be an apology for the last one.
Outgoing Sec'y of State Betty Ireland will most likely beback:
In a state where Democrats dominate most levels of government, Ireland is the only Republican since 1996 to win one of the six statewide elected executive branch offices that form the Board of Public Works.
"I have no concrete political plans,'' she said, adding that "if something opens up politically, and I choose to walk through a door, I may do that.''
There are many topics I know too little about to blog intelligently on--or, at least, to feel that I can add anything new.
There are also many topics--no matter how important as national or international political issues--where there is no obvious direct connection to West Virginia.
Then there are other topics--like war between Israel and Palestine, terrorism in Indian and Pakistan, continuing genocide in Darfur--where the enormity of the tragedy leaves me even further speechless.
My heart goes out to all those directly effected by these tragedies. I wish there was something I could say, something I could do, some productive idea I could promote to help these situations.
Instead, I'm left feeling inadequate, like there's nothing I can say, and, yet, that saying nothing is even less adequate.
Area delegate receives new appointment
Daryl Cowles, R-Morgan, will be the minority vice chair of a panel
You know even we have some standards about just printing every press release yet alone putting it prominently on the front page.
The guy is a Republican delegate in Charleston where Democrats dominate, which makes his appointment to a committee about as relevant as, well, a Republican in Charleston.
Calling climate change "the most important matter of our times," Dr. Hansen encourages the President-elect to undertake three policy directives to address climatic change. First, Dr. Hansen calls for a moratorium and phasing out of coal-fired power stations that do not incorporate carbon capture adding that this step is "the sine qua non for solving the climate problem." Continuing to build coal-fired power plants, which he calls "factories of death," would "raise atmospheric carbon dioxide to a level at least approaching 500 ppm (parts per million)" and lead to "the extinction of perhaps a million species." Current carbon dioxide levels are 385 ppm up from 280 ppm in the pre-industrial period. Dr. Hansen concludes that an urgent geophysical fact has become clear: "burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know."
Second, he proposes a "carbon tax and 100% dividend" scheme. The idea is to tax carbon at the source, then redistribute the revenue equally among taxpayers, so that high carbon users are penalized while low carbon users are rewarded with a rebate. However, the carbon tax is revenue neutral apart from administrative costs for the Federal government. According to Dr. Hansen, high fossil fuel taxes are essential to "decarbonize" the economy but they are also required to "spur innovation as entrepreneurs compete to develop and market low-carbon and no-carbon energies and products." He adds that "the carbon tax has social benefits. It is progressive. It is useful to those most in need in hard times, providing them an opportunity for larger dividend than tax."
Finally, Dr. Hansen urges a renewed research effort into fourth generation nuclear plants (4th GNP), which can "burn" nuclear waste, leaving a small volume of waste with a half-life of decades rather than thousands of years as with current nuclear plants. Noting that extensive R&D is still required (the plants are unlikely to come on-stream before 2030) but Dr. Hansen argues that only a substantial effort to develop 4th GNP will wean China and India off coal-fired power plants.
Quietly, the professionals at the Department of Justice have been working this massive scandal-that is complex by design-to build cases that move from the outer edges to the heart of political corruption in Washington DC. Abramoff is just a doorway in-not an endpoint-and prosecutors are zeroing in on some big fish in a corrupt stream.
The investigation was very active in 2008 and expanded its scope. More shoes are dropping. More details are being exposed. This is why the GOP fears the future, Obama and Eric Holder.
Tragically, in 2009, I fear we're going to usher in an era when obtaining healthcare will hinge on your ability to pay, and on your credit worthiness. 2009 could become known as the Year of Pay or Die.
[snip]
There is only one way to fix this terminally diseased system, and that's with a single payer healthcare. And for anyone who still doesn't know what single-payer is, I'll tell you, privately delivered healthcare (you choose your doctor, hospital, etc.), paid for by one entity, the government. All of our precious healthcare dollars go for healthcare and we eliminate the parasitic middlemen, you've just read about.
"When Miners March," a book filled with previously published articles Blizzard wrote about the birth and growth of the United Mine Workers in West Virginia, was published in 2004. The articles were first published in Labor's Daily, a nationally circulated newspaper based in Charleston.
[...]
"Bill Blizzard wrote the definitive story about the struggles of coal miners in Southern West Virginia to win justice for themselves and their families through the UMWA," Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers, said Tuesday. "He wasn't just a bystander, he was there," Roberts said.
[...]
He also wrote for The Nation magazine and United Mine Workers Journal, and worked as a feature writer and photographer for The Charleston Gazette for 12 years.
In 2008, we had another Walmart open here in the Eastern Panhandle. This one appears from a distance to be a super-humongous version with everything from turnips to tables to tractors. (I haven't set foot inside, so I don't know for sure.)
Over at OpenLeft, Eating Liberally Food For Thought writer Kerry Trueman asks a question worth periodically revisiting, "Should We Shop At Wal-Mart?"
Here's an extended version of the question:
I used to shop at Wal-Mart, until I figured out that low prices based on lousy labor practices and shoddy made-in-China schlock are not such a bargain. But now that Wal-Mart--America's largest food retailer--has jumped on the organic bandwagon, it's making organic products available to folks who lack the access or means to shop at farmers' markets or, say, Whole Foods. Wal-Mart has also made a great show of going green, and just shelled out more than $352 million in what may be the "largest settlement ever for lawsuits over wage violations. ... Is it OK to advocate shopping there if it's the only way you can get your hands on organic stuff (even if it's industrial organic)?
The entire post is well worth a read. You'll learn a lot about the organic foods and why what you get at Walmart is not quite the same as what you get elsewhere.
Some considerations:
Wal-Mart is so huge that it's easy to make the argument that any "good" thing Wal-Mart does - from stocking organic food to changing to energy-saving lightbulbs - makes a huge impact. And in a sense, that is absolutely true. But its potential to make a huge positive impact in one arena can't be viewed in isolation from its potential to hugely screw things up in other arenas. Looking at the sum total seems to be the only way to answer that question fairly.
Fair enough. And what does that sum total look like? On organic... Walmart's relentless pursuit of low prices is inconsistent with the spirit of organic. In the process of offering organic products, they are undermining the standards for organic production and giving consumers a lower quality product than many assume they are purchasing. In other arenas... Walmart's labor and supplier practices are largely unchanged.
For me, I'm still boycotting the Walmart in 2009.
What do you think? Is shopping at Walmart consistent with progressive values?
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