In case you were wondering...

...West Virginia's leaders have been on a major ruling class hissy fit over the Obama administration's proposed Clean Power Plan. Gee, nobody saw that coming.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD. On the other hand, two friends of mine who recently started a program to bring yoga to West Virginia's prison population got some nice coverage in the Gazette today. One of them was a guardian angel of mine on a triathlon I barely managed to finish. I now owe her a karmic debt.

MORE GOOD NEWS. WV continues to make huge strides in child nutrition. The Harrison County school board recently decided to dramatically expand its participation in a federal program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all students in schools with high poverty rates. They piloted the program at three schools last year.

Even better, one heretofore holdout county, Wetzel, recently decided to provide free meals to all kids county wide. On the cosmic scale, this might not seem like a big deal, but it's a huge one for the kids who no longer have to deal with stigma and the parents who no longer have to worry about another bill.

A big thank you to the adults in those counties who stood up for kids!

So this is my state

I sooo knew this was coming:  a command performance ruling class hissy fit regarding the Obama administration/EPA's efforts to curb carbon emissions. Everybody who was anybody, with the singular exception of retiring Senator Jay Rockefeller (and the ghost of Robert Byrd) joined in to bash the president and EPA.

AND WHILE WV IS BASHING THE FEDS, it looks like WV gets more federal $ than any other state per capita.

IT'S NOT ALL BAD.  One bright spot is this Gazette article about how Medicaid expansion is helping former prisoners deal with addiction issues. Actually, WV is a national leader in implementing the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

We used to be so much cooler...

Annals of hypocrisy

The coal industry continued its 5 year long hissy fit in Washington yesterday, where it asserted that the troubles of the industry have nothing to do with cheap natural gas,cheap western coal or the very real threat of climate change but rather can be conveniently blamed on the black guy.

But a lot of the same industry voices claiming to be the protectors of miners are the same ones who cheat them out of black lung benefits. Kudos to the Center for Public Integrity for shedding light on evil.

My wife told me to blog this

I received a direct order from the Spousal Unit to blog about a story in the news regarding the production and distribution of what El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia seems to regard as a dangerous and toxic substance, to wit, milk.

We have dabbled a bit in dairy at Goat Rope Farm, but it's hard when milk from non-industrialized (i.e., non-tortured) animals has roughly the same legal status as, say, nuclear waste or crack.

TWO TATTOO. My friend Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo was off last week, a busy week in coal news. But he's making up for lost ground this week. Here's his coverage on the latest climate change information for WV's ruling class to deny because of money and, closely related, here's his post on said ruling class's ongoing hissy fit over the EPA.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, at least WV's two senators voted against the Whackadoodle blackmail bill that threatens to shut down the government unless "Obamacare" is defunded.

FINAL THOUGHT. I love this tweet from Riann Wilson:

Things to say when you sit next to a stranger on the plane:
1) God put me next to you for a reason.
2) Are you ticklish?

I think I'll try that next flight.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED 

When bubbles bust

I've been meaning to post something for a day or so but am just getting around to it. Here are a few random postmortem election thoughts.

BUBBLELAND.  Earlier this week, the blog Daily Kos came up with an impressive list of right wing pundits who made bad predictions about the presidential election. What's up with that? Part of it might have to do with living in a bubble where all the information you take in comes from people who share your ideological biases. Two interesting articles recently came out on how the right wing noise machine blew it. The first is from Slate and the second is from the Atlantic. It's kind of like what happened with the Bush administration in Iraq: they took their own propaganda as if it was real intelligence.

DEMOGRAPHY'S UPS AND DOWNS. Shortly after the election, Politico posted this feature about the demographic trends working against the Republican Party on a nationwide basis. Ironically, those same trends are working the other way in WV, which has a bit of a surplus of grumpy old white guys. The "war on coal" hissy fit adds to the cauldron.

SPEAKING OF COAL. I had a pre-election conversation with someone who knows more about the industry than anyone I know. He wondered whether an Obama victory would mean a toning down of the rhetoric as people figured out the hissy fit wasn't working. However, the hissy fit did work at the state level, although I'm not sure how long that dog will hunt.

SPEAKING OF WEST VIRGINIA, a friend of mine observed yesterday that 2012 was WV's 2010.

MORE ABSENTEE OWNERSHIP. Outsiders have owned most of West Virginia for over a century and  are still acquiring real estate, so I guess it's no surprise that they now own the state attorney general's office.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Another slow news day

Golly, why does everybody look sleepy today?

There's a lot I could say post election but I'll just focus on one thing today: yesterday's vote means that the Affordable Care Act will survive. But it also means that the fight to expand coverage is going to take place at the state level.

One result of the US Supreme Court decision on the law was the ability of states to choose whether or not to expand Medicaid eligibility to 138% of the federal poverty level in 2014. The law as passed by Congress basically required states to do it or lose all Medicaid funding.

This means that states ruled by people who hate poor people, such as West Virginia seems to be some days,  are going to be reluctant to do so. It will take a huge effort, and lots of people power, to make that happen. But it will mean health care for well over 100,000 low income working West Virginians and for millions of others around the country.

Gird up thy loins...

ONE MORE THING. I had already posted yesterday's blog when I saw these pre-election reflections on the politics of coal by Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo. I'm wondering whether the ruling class hissy fit which blames a certain black guy in the White House and the EPA for all the ills of the world will continue unabated or will they figure out it isn't working very well. I guess the smart money is on the hissy fit.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

I could get used to this

I mentioned yesterday that after a long period of being fed up with right wing trolls who lurk around news websites and make toxic comments, I decided to try to out-troll the trolls. That involves saying trying to think of things that are even more Whackadoodle than what the Whackadoodles are saying. It's not that easy these days.

Here's one example. There was an op-ed in the Gazette supporting Senator Rockefeller's brave statement on the need to have an honest conversation about the future of coal. The article got swarmed by trolls. Since part of what drove the controversy was a Republican led effort to oppose measures to limit mercury emissions, I came up with this:

Mercury is awesome. There is nothing in the Bible that says you can't eat it so Rockefeller is against God. Put that in your illegal substance pipe and smoke it, coal haters.

Then my friends at the WV Center on Budget and Policy put up a blog post arguing that regulations weren't to blame for the coal industry's problems. I posted a comment that asked how much they got paid by the Kenyan Secret Service for doing that.

Finally, although I am not feeling well today, I could not resist the chance to comment on an op-ed on the Affordable Care Act by Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. As you might well imagine, right wing trolls swarmed all over it. I figured I'd have to really strut the troll on this one:

Obamacare is a devil plot dreamed up by the Bavarian Illuminati and the Kenyan Secret Service in the Service of the Antichrist. Read the bill. It's all in there. Here's proof: Barack has six letters. Hussein has seven. Obama has five. Take one from the middle name and add it to the last and you have 666.

On reflection, however, I think I'd better stop doing this. There are probably Whackadoodles out there who really believe all that.

So I'm going to swear it off. Cold turkey. No more trolling for me. Unless it seems like the right thing to do at the time.

NO LINKS TODAY. I have a fever.

The voice of reason

I have a feeling that the waning days of coal are going to give some folks in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia the chance to show the world just how ugly they can be. And that would be pretty damn.

A case in point is found in the comment section of a recent Gazette editorial on the reality of climate change. The bright side, however, is to be found in the comic parodies of right wing ravings by some making comments.(The sad side is that it's hard to tell the parodies from the sincere comments.)

Here's one comical comment by ProudRight, a master of the form:

These storms and the high temperatures were all the result of our Kenyan born dictator Obama. Global warming is a lie used to attack WV. Coal is who we are. Without coal there won't be any jobs. We need to mine and burn as much coal as possible so we all can keep our high paying coal jobs. Who cares what some tree hugger thinks? I don't believe in this research stuff. Scientists are liars who want us all to go around using big words like we're stuck up. I see them driving around in their Priuses with the Obama stickers. I bet my Ford F150 can out run a Prius any day. Pollution doesn't hurt anyone. We lived next to a power plant and we're fine. They tell us not to eat fish out of the river, but we eat fish we catch all the time and nothings wrong with us.

 Rock on, ProudRight!

Happy birthday, West Virginia, warts and all

Today is the 149th birthday of El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.  We've probably seen worse days here, but we sure has hell have seen better ones. By chance, two state related items caught my eye today that deal with some ugly aspects of the current scene here.

These days, it seems that some of the state's leading politicians are given to cowardly pandering to the coal industry and, however indirectly, to racist elements. The song they are dancing to goes something like this: the Obama administration, which happens to be led by a black man with a strange name, is waging an unprovoked and all out war on coal through its diabolical Environmental Protection Agency.

West Virginia native Michael Tomasky has a great piece in The Daily Beast that confronts the racism factor head on.


And it was really refreshing to see that our senior senator Jay Rockefeller was channeling a bit of the late great Robert C. Byrd and calling on the coal industry to tone down its war rhetoric. Here's a link to his speech on the Senate floor.

I can't imagine either Senator Manchin or Governor Tomblin ever having the guts to say anything remotely resembling that. Besides, Tomblin is too busy cutting child care benefits for working families anyway.

So happy 149, West Virginia. And may 150 be a bit less cowardly and ugly.

Feeding the trolls, again

Over Memorial Day weekend, some women shaved their heads in protest of mountaintop removal mining. I admire their dedication, although I obviously wasn't consulted on tactics. Maybe this is just the martial artist in me talking, but I prefer strategies that inconvenience one's opponent/s rather than oneself or one's allies.

Unfortunately for the protesters, it didn't seem to get a lot of press other than a picture and brief paragraph in the Gazette.

That was enough, however, to bring out the trolls, i.e. all the right wingers who lurk around media websites so they can spew their views. So far, over 60 comments have been made on the article. I highly recommend checking them out.

Hats off to one commentator, ProudRight, who I believe to be a great satirist. He comes so close to saying the things that real people say in forums like this so it's kind of hard to tell what is jest and what is not. Here are two gems ProudRight added to this discussion:

Either you're a friend of coal or an enemy of coal. Almost all the people here like MTR and want to keep mining the coal. By getting rid of the mountains we make WV better. If they don't like the way we mine coal, why don't they do us all a favor and leave? The people against coal are using big words and talking it up because they think they are better than the rest of us. How smart is it to shave your head, like we're not going to mine coal because you shave your head? The truth is these protesters can't stop us doing our job. They're just a wasting their time away. Coal is WV. Everybody likes coal just like they like the Mountaineers. How you tree huggers going to watch ball if your sitting there in the dark? I'm sick of looking at ugly green mountains when we could have more factories. Coal is the future they can't stop.

and

The know it alls just use the fancy facts and numbers to lie about coal. We mine the coal because WV is coal. Without coal there will be no WV. You don't see us going around shaving our heads. In November we're going to vote Obama out and vote the tree huggers to jail where they belong. I'll be watchin the Mountaineers win football games and riding my 4 wheeler while you tree huggers will be sitting in the dark. EPA out of WV, Obama prison.

I think the only thing that distinguishes ProudRight's satire from the sincere venting of those he/she imitates is the fact that the author manages to insert a reference to Mountaineer games in every comment.

Rock on, ProudRight. And wake up, America!

Then what?

El Cabrero is getting a little worried about the ruling class in my beloved state of West Virginia. As I've mentioned before, they are several years into a protracted hissy fit over the allegedly job-killing agenda of the Obama administration and its "war on coal."

They had a bit of a setback recently when it was noticed that coal jobs are actually significantly up to their highest level since the mid 1990s, higher even than the ruling class Golden Age of the Bush administration.

Resourceful guys that they are, no pun intended, they managed to dodge that bullet by essentially saying, "Yeah,  well, maybe, but he's about to start killing jobs."

(It is a truth universally acknowledged amongst the WV ruling class that declining jobs in coal mining are exclusively caused by black commanders in chief and not by things like a warm winter, cheap natural gas and competition from other places.)

Here's what I wonder about though. Suppose Romney wins in November and the EPA is gutted or abolished and mining regulation falls back into industry hands and enforcement is replaced by "compliance assistance." If coal jobs go down then, as will probably be the case, who are they going to blame?

The Obama excuse is bound to wear off in time and then it may become apparent that there were plenty of warning signs about the long term decline of Appalachian mining but that the people running the state were in a state of denial and blew any chances to work towards some kind of transition that might have eased the crunch because they were too busy throwing a hissy fit.

But, knowing them, they'll probably find somebody else to blame it on.

Quote of the week (or century)

Here's one of the best quotes about literature I've ever found. It is attributed to Southern author Pat Conroy's mother:

“All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” 

I tend to distinguish between Appalachian and Southern culture and literature, but I do recall a short story by my favorite WV author Breece Pancake which involved a bit of hoggish anthropophagy.

(And, by the way, how is anthropophagy for a cool word? It sounds way classier than man-eating.)

MUST READING. Here is yet more rationality from Coal Tattoo. Some of the links are really worth checking out.

WORK SHARING. Here's an op-ed by yours truly on a new way to deal with cyclical unemployment.

BABOONS AND PEOPLE. For both animals, those with higher social status are healthier.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Watching the show

One of my favorite West Virginia spectator sports is watching our ruling class throw hissy fits. They're really good at it. In fact, they are now starting year four of a protracted hissy fit aimed at the Obama administration's "war on coal."

Short summary: the Bush administration let the industry do pretty much anything it wanted to all the time. The Obama administration has sought to mitigate some of the negative impacts of mountaintop removal mining and to take steps to deal with carbon emissions and climate change.

No self-respecting WV politician would admit willingly to either the possibility that mountaintop removal isn't the best thing since sliced bread or that climate change is real and caused by human activity. That's just not where the money is.

So, anytime a mountaintop removal permit is challenged or denied or the EPA takes steps to cut down on carbon, it's on.

One favorite tactic of the hissy fit is to accuse the administration of killing coal jobs, as the above billboard on I-64 illustrates.

The only problem is that coal jobs here have actually increased by 1,500 or 7.4 percent since 2009, the highest level since 1995.

Now, I wouldn't expect these facts to get in the way of a good hissy fit. In fact, the rhetoric is only likely to be amped up at a series of taxpayer funded coal pep rallies that will take place this week. Everybody who is anybody, politically speaking, is sure to be there.

My favorite part of the whole thing is a comment by a coal association official about the job numbers: "We're glad to provide gainful employment."

Just in case anybody missed it, let me unpack that a bit: if coal jobs numbers are up, it's because of the benevolence of the industry. BUT if they go down (even when they don't--in fact, even when we pretend they go down when in fact they really go up) it has nothing to do with automation, competition from other areas, with plentiful and cheap natural gas or with market conditions. Rather, it's the black guy's fault.

Everybody got it?

The sad part is that it seems to be working.

THE POWER OF PIRATICAL THINKING

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

This is the final day of Pirate Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier entries.

As you have probably noticed, there is always a party pooper or two around to spoil the fun in life. The Golden Age of Piracy (1715-1725) as described by Colin Woodard in The Republic of Pirates, was brought to an end largely through the actions of one man, Woodes Rogers.

Rogers was a slave trader, sometime privateer, and eventual agent of the British crown who applied a combination of carrots and sticks in and around the Bahamas and made the world save for slave traders, plantation owners, oppressive merchants, despotic monarchs and other respectable people.

However, El Cabrero is convinced we can learn a thing or two from the pirates that can help us out today as we battle the powers that be. I call it "the power of piratical thinking" or Vitamin P for short.

Here's an example. I have a friend who has been fighting the good fight for decades. Lately he seems grim, discouraged, and worn down about the state of the world and the state of the war.

He needs a little Vitamin P...

A good pirate does not become overly distraught at the state of the world. He or she knows the world is pretty much totally jacked anyway. That's why we became pirates to start with, right?

Rather, a good pirate, when not engaged in the honorable pursuits of debauchery and Dionysian revelry, continually scans the horizon for suitable prey...I mean opportunities for positive action.

And when you see a ship you can take, take it!

Don't waste time worrying about the ones you can't. We'll get em later. In other words, focus on the things you can actually affect. The key to mental health is to think less like a purist and more like a pirate.

Aaarrrggghh!

SCOTT RITTER, former UN arms inspector, spoke about war and peace at WV State last night.

HISSY FITS have become a conservative art form. Read more here.

ARE YOU A TERRORIST? If you have concerns about unrestricted mountaintop removal mining, you just might be according to the WV Coal Association.

THE LATEST on the Megan Williams case is here.

EUROPE'S economic system was once the target of scorn in the US. This column from The Cincinnati Post suggests we take a second look.

HEALTH CARE. One hard-headed reason to push for universal health care is the high cost of providing emergency room service to the uninsured.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED