West Virginia Blue
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Could somebody send a dictionary to the State Journal's opinion writer so he can look up the word "diversify?" Out of 463 words in the column, the words "renewable," "green," "alternative" are no where to be found.
If you think comparing Beck's dystopic rants to this low-budget Kids in the Hall skit is just silly, then compare it to another YouTube (below the jump) comprised completely of Beck clips.
All it lacks is the spontaneous laughter of a live Canadian studio audience.
Hours after the West Virginia mine explosion Monday, scores of journalists from all over the country started arriving - in a very rural area with no communications or places to sleep closer than an hour's drive away.
When the governor began giving press briefings at Marsh Fork Elementary School (this week happens to be spring break, so the children are out), journalists began getting comfortable at the site a few miles from the mine entrance, and we never left. By Tuesday, a couple dozen satellite trucks filled the parking lot, and classrooms with tiny chairs and paintings on the walls were turned into newsrooms and bedrooms.
And all of a sudden there was food - a lot of food. Pepperoni Pizza. Pulled pork and beans. Fried chicken, potatoes and green beans. Cookies. Crackers. Doughnuts of all stripes.
snip
Imagine, here we are, an aggressive and hard-charging bunch of journalists in the middle of this devastated community, and it's THEY who are taking care of US!
The kindness hasn't been lost on any of us. By Thursday, two plastic jars - "school collection" and "community collection" - were put out, and by Friday both had a few hundred dollars. I feel like we owe this school and these people so much more.
When I asked interim principal Shelly Prince how folks could be so giving at a time like this, she said that many felt it was soothing to help others. This situation made them feel helpless, and helping others was doing something. She also said it gave people a chance to show the world what West Virginians are "really like."
"Often on TV, we are not portrayed in such a good manner. We often are portrayed as ignorant and backward," she said. "But we are just ordinary people who live ordinary lives."
I have to disagree. These people are extraordinary.
Survey results released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reveal that public trust in the US media is eroding and increasing numbers of Americans believe news coverage is inaccurate and biased.
Ths poll revealed that 29 percent of 1,029 adults surveyed believe that news organizations get their facts straight.
"Sixty percent of those polled said the press is biased, up from 45 percent in 1985. Just 26 percent in the latest survey said that news organizations are careful their reporting is not politically biased.
"Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides."
RAW STORY published the APF's report on the historical aspects and the political breakdown of the poll at this link.
Mountain Top Removal is a mining technique that makes strip mining look good. Large quantities of explosive are used to expose seams of coal, and the leftover "waste" is bulldozed into nearby valleys and streams. This is all legal, courtesy of George W. Bush.
There's some news involving MTR, Verizon Wireless, and a Labor Day Event.
The Legacy of Coal series and your diarist thank Jeff Biggers and Clem Guttata for permission to use their entire works. Because these authors, along with Ken Ward of the blog Coal Tattoo, live local to this issue and write far better than I do, I am using their words.
Red State's Erick Erickson proves once again the Force is weak in him as he stretches out for a Star Wars metaphor and fails to grasp it:
"You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
- Obi Wan Kenobi
It appears that the left's urgent boycott of Glenn Beck's advertisers in an effort to destroy Beck is like Darth Vader strking down Kenobi. It's making Beck more powerful. He is Kenobi.
As I recall, Darth Vader not only won that fight, he turned good in the end. Vader had turned evil in large part due to Obi-wan's mistakes, as Kenobi admitted to Luke Skywalker.
Chief technology officer Kyle Schafer confirmed today that the site had been inaccessible to some employees, but says it was a mistake caused by filtering software. Some agencies had asked the office to block "travel sites," Schafer told me.
A Web site with a very similar address - www.wvblue.com - fell under the travel category (though it doesn't look like a travel site).
Schafer says cabinet secretaries can ask his office to block certain kinds of sites, but it's rare that an individual site is targeted. Usually, they ask to block broad categories, like social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
I've been trying really hard to reconstruct the sequence of events required for the InterMountain website to be miscategorized as a travel site and then manually entered incorrectly into a list of sites to block.
Simply put: this explanation does not add up.
What I'd like to know...
Alison Knezevich is off to a great start on uncovering something is amiss. But, W.Va. CTO Kyle Schafer leaves a lot of questions unanswered:
1. Which agencies requested blocking of "travel sites"? When did they request it? (Question for those agencies: why did they request it?)
2. Has any agency requested the blocking of individual sites so far this year? If so, which agency requested what site to be blocked (and when)?
3. When one agency requests blocking of a specific site or category of sites, does that block access for all other agencies?
4. What is the process for identifying what sites are in what category? Does the state categorize sites itself or does it use a third-party service that categorizes sites? Is it done through a individual check of each site or through automated keyword matching?
5. What criteria was used to categorize the InterMountain property development company as a travel site? (The word travel appears nowhere on the site.)
6. What is the quality control process to make sure that websites are properly categorized?
I am reluctant to make any guesses about why access to our site was blocked. But, the provided explanation suggests a level of incompetence that is troubling unto itself.
One of the central tenets of right-wingnuttery is the media is "liberal" despite example after example after example after example of much of the media carrying water for the Bush administration and conservatives.
The reason the right-wingers do it is to 1) coach the refs (although as the first link shows, the Washington Post and others are too often not impartial observers, but active supporters of the right) and 2) discredit legitimate sources of information like the Charleston Gazette as being "liberal" simply for being reality-based (facts, as Stephen Colbert has pointed out, have a known liberal bias).
This is a stunning video. I think we all know at some level what 'fake grass roots' means. Rachel Maddow does a great job of laying it out in 10 minutes in the health care debate.
Can someone please explain to me why there is a media blackout on the PATH line?
More than 230 people have petitioned to intervene in the PSC case, probably the biggest number of intervenors ever, and there is nothing about it in any state or national media outlets?
Bloggers and newspapers in WV are debating lots of abstract policy ideas about alternative energy and global warming while 230 West Virginians are doing something about it.
National media outlets are covering PATH as if it were three different power lines in three different states. Why aren't they covering the amazing story of citizens and groups coming together to fight PATH across state lines?
Why aren't Washingon area media outlets letting their listeners know about how West Virginians feel about PATH and vice versa?
Why are the Charleston and Parkersburg and Wheeling papers not informing their readers that if PATH is built, they will be paying for this obsolete project on their electric bills?
The state media outlets ignore all the most important reasons why PATH is a bad idea and focus on land owners. Then, to confirm their self-made self-fulfilling account, they claim the only opponents of the line are land owner NIMBYs who don't want the line in their backyard.
Major media outlets spend their time xeroxing power company press releases and cashing advertising checks from power company ads, paid for by every rate payer in West Virginia. Right now, the best current reporting on PATH is being done by the Buckhannon Record Delta, Calhoun County's online Hur Herald and the Martinsburg Journal. Where is everyone else?
In West Virginia, you just have to buy an ad to have this kind of access to most of our state's newspapers:
For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" - Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.
The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."
The offer - which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters - is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.
And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.
At least WaPo is finally being honest that it shills to the corporate world. This kind of access was usually free to lobbyists on the Georgetown cocktail circuit. Now that WaPo is admitting they're media whores, the only issue seems to be haggling over the price.
But for those who have followed the editorial pages of many newspapers, there's been no doubt why so many in the so-called "liberal media" always take the side of the powerful against the people. The powerful pro-coal lobby buys a lot of full page ads so in too many publications, the views of the people harmed by the coal industry - the Charleston Gazette and a few smaller papers being notable exceptions - are not heard.
I wonder how much the pro-coal side spent to have that factually inaccurate, pro-PaTH editorial placed in The Post?
Update:
For the record, if you're a lobbyist and you want access to West Virginia Blue, you sign up an account and post. If you want one of our writers or "editors" to hear your point of view, shoot us an email. It's free. We don't charge anyone to have access to us or the site. And taking out an ad on the site won't guarantee you favorable writing as the national Chamber of Commerce found out last year.
Sadly No! slaps around Don Surber so we don't have to:
Poor Don Surber. Apparently he's locked himself in his shack, barricading the door with various auto parts he found lying around his living room. He's sitting in a corner clutching a .22 in one hand and three bottles of Tylenol in the other. "Obama will have to pry the Tylenol from my cold dead hands," Surber keeps muttering to himself while pointing his rifle at the front door. Surber is certain that the FBI, the CIA, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, CNN, La Raza and The Poca, West Virginia Department of Park and Recreation are all amassed just outside his door, heavily-armed and waiting for the signal to burst through the door, guns ablaze, in order to take away his Tylenol.
Part of the reason why we keep returning to the deep well of the blog postings of this Pliny of Poca - other than to ridicule his personal appearance through the magic of Photoshop - is just that there are only a handful of wingnut bloggers who manage to maintain that perfect balance of laziness, stupidity and insanity that Surber does. In any given post, there are general only slightly fewer errors than there are vowels.
Facts are stupid and irrelevant to the likes of Surber - probably why he's banned our own CA_Berkeley and WV26003 from his comments. Can't have reality introducing on whatever fantasy Surber is freebasing.
But as TinTin at Sadly, No! points out, Surber apparently can't even bother to read the material he links to in his hilarious efforts to back up his delusional claims.
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