Random observations

Here are a few:

*It's a bit ironic that while congress is finally talking about dealing with mass incarceration, Democratic leadership is MIA.

*Someone else dropped the F-bomb.

*Meanwhile, back at the state capitol, the wrecking crew still hasn't come up with a budget even though we're less than a month from a government shutdown. This Gazette editorial is a day or so old but it sums things up pretty well. And this op-ed doesn't pull any punches.

*Urgent Neanderthal update here.

A little progress

In keeping with the occasional theme of positive things about West Virginia, today's Charleston Gazette included an article about a report on prisons given by Corrections Commissioner Jim Rubenstein to an interim legislative committee. According to Rubenstein, the results of prison overcrowding legislation passed in 2013 are already promising, with a drop from 1,700 to 900 inmates who should be in state correctional institutions backlogged in regional jails.

The overall population has dropped by 3.5 percent between July 1 2013 and June 30 2014, even though the effects of the reforms would take a few years to start working. The Division of Corrections is also implementing other policies aimed at reducing recidivism.

Next stop: the juvenile justice system.

NOW, go take a walk.

A really big deal

El Cabrero has been in a purple agony of waiting for the last few weeks. It had to do with when and whether  WV Governor Earl Ray Tomblin would announce his decision to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Or not.

That step, if taken, would be the biggest advance for social justice that I've ever seen in this state. It would raise the eligibility level from around 35 percent of the federal poverty level to 138 percent. It would save lives, create jobs, and eliminate a lot of unnecessary misery.

Tomblin delayed his decision until he and his administration studied the results of an actuarial study about the likely results. Meanwhile, people who care about working families in this state have done everything they could to encourage a positive response and provide political cover.

By Tuesday afternoon, I heard unofficial rumors that a decision would be announce the following day--and that it was the right decision. By Tuesday night, it was official. On Wednesday, the expansion was officially announced at St. Francis Hospital in Charleston where over 100 people gathered for the occasion. Among the speakers was of course the governor but also Senator Jay Rockefeller, who fought hard to pass and improve the Affordable Care Act at the federal level.

It was a great day and a great step forward and will mean health coverage for lots of working West Virginians. Estimates range from 90,000+ to over 150,000 people. The number I've seen the most is 120,000. These are the people who serve our food, wait on us in stores, take care of our children and elderly and do all the low paid grunt work that keeps the world on the rails.

Thanks and congratulations to Governor Tomblin for taking this step!

Meanwhile, I keep thinking that something strange is happening in my beloved state. In the last few months, West Virginia has taken several steps in a positive direction. In addition to expanding health care, it made huge advances in universal early childhood education, which could help with all kinds of problems. It also passed an innovative law aimed at improving child nutrition and took some common sense steps towards reforming an overcrowded prison system while also restoring funding for child care for working families and for programs aimed at preventing family violence.

If this is a dream, don't wake me up.

We recognize our own rejected thoughts

One of my favorite Dylan songs--and the list is long--is "Trust Yourself" from the underrated album Empire Burlesque. In it, Bob strikes the familiar American chord of self reliance.

That theme might have been most forcefully laid out in a much sunnier manner in  Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay of the same title. That essay and the vehemence with which it pushed its argument may have been in part a reaction to some of the hostile reviews and controversy that came in the wake of his controversial Harvard Divinity School Address (see previous posts).

It's easy to misunderstand what Emerson meant by self-reliance. The essay is not a paean to unregulated capitalism. Rather it is a call to intellectual and spiritual independence, as this selection from the opening power shows:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—— and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

I'm not sure I'd go that far, at least with the thoughts that flit like bats around my head, but he does have a point. I have on more than one occasion read, heard, or seen something in print or in some work of art that had previously occurred to me but that I did nothing to capture. He puts it like this:

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

Ralph can be a bit out there sometimes, but passages like this make up for some of that. At the very least, they challenge the reader to not let some many ideas and inspirations get away.

PRISON REFORM is on the legislative agenda in WV, where a decent bill promoted by the governor sailed thorugh the state senate. I hope it succeeds in the house. These efforts got a boost in, of all places, the New York Times.

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY. Here are some snapshots from the growing divide.

THREE YEARS AND COUNTING. The Affordable Care Act had a birthday this weekend. The Spousal Unit and I actually attended a party in its honor (we didn't have to buy gifts anyhow). Here's a look at how it's working so far.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

An occult relation between man and the vegetable

One of my favorite Dylan songs is an early acoustic effort, Lay Down Your Weary Tune, which is about how the music of nature outdoes any human effort. The chorus goes,

Lay down your weary tune, lay down
Lay down the song you strum
And rest yourself 'neath the strength of strings
No voice can hope to hum.

Around here, a lot of the best music comes from the wind through the trees. Dylan put it this way,

The branches bare like a banjo played
To the winds that listened best

Not surprisingly, Emerson noticed that in his early essay Nature,

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

MOMENTUM. The big political news yesterday was the announcement that Republican governor Rick Scott of Florida, a major foe of the Affordable Care Act, intends to expand Medicaid coverage to low wage workers in that state. That makes him the 7th Republican governor to make that decision. Meanwhile, West Virginia's Democratic governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, hasn't made his decision yet. I hope this makes it easier.

FOLLOWING THAT THREAD, this item from Politico highlights the conflicts the Affordable Care Act has caused among Republican governors between pragmatists and ideologues.

PRISON REFORM should also be on the agenda in WV now. Here's a call for making it better.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Two for a Tuesday

A while back, I planned to do a series of posts here on why everyone should drop everything and read Moby-Dick. I plan on resuming that effort any day now. In fact, I was reminded of it today while walking around in the wet and chilly weather. In chapter 1, Ishmael speaks of "a damp, drizzly November in my soul." If that doesn't fit the WV weather on a day like this, nothing does.

Anyhow here are two items of interest:

CONSERVATIVES VERSUS PRISONS? Pretty much. I need to crank out an op-ed on this.

WHERE'S NATE IN THE BUDGET DEBATE? Click here for more.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Mercy and rain

I always thought there was something particularly appropriate about Shakespeare's linking of mercy and rain in those famous lines from The Merchant of Venice:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.

It's been a hot and dry stretch around Goat Rope Farm until yesterday. The word drought was crossing my mind. The creek, which for me is a barometer of the state of the world, was drying up and, while it had water here and there, no longer flowed continuously. The Spousal Unit even rescued some stranded minnows.

Then yesterday, the rains came. Mostly slowly, off and on, 20 minutes here, 30 there, with an occasional cloudburst through the night. Then, as unlikely as it seemed a day or so before, the creek was back. So may it always be.

PRISON REFORM. The state of WV has contracted with the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments to study and make recommendations about dealing with prison overcrowding. Here's hoping it leads to action.


MAGICAL THINKING. Everybody does it.


COOL RANT. Here's another great post on the politics of coal  from last week at Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo holding forth on the latest from WV's junior senator.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of turkey love and random news

A romantic comedy has been playing itself out at Goat Rope Farm, where we now have two male and two female turkeys. The males are much too gentlemanly to fight but they spend a great deal of time displaying and following each other around to make sure their rival doesn't get a moment alone with the ladies. Still, somebody is getting somewhere since the females are jointly sitting on what appear to be 27 viable eggs. We're hoping at least a few make it.

Meanwhile, here are a few items.

 CONFUSING AYN RAND WITH JESUS seems to be a problem for granny whacker Paul Ryan. The Jesuits cleared things up a bit.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. Here's a look at left/right unity on prison reform.

BIG FOOD. Here's a look at how the corporate food system derailed the struggle against obesity.

WHEN RED WAS RED. A friend of mine just published a book on the history of the Socialist Party in West Virginia.

ANALYTICAL THINKING AND RELIGION may not go very well together.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED