LGBTQ Pride in Pikeville

This is exceptionally good news.  This is a huge step forward for liberal values and progress in a deeply conservative part of Kentucky.  All is not lost, fellow progressives, as long as we can make this happen.

From the Herald:

Kyle May always thought he would have to leave Eastern Kentucky to find a place he belonged.

“For years I tried to get out,” said May, who is gay. “I tried to move. I tried to get jobs elsewhere. I tried interviewing relentlessly.”

But the chance to leave never came for the Pikeville native who graduated from Morehead State University in Rowan County, went to graduate school at Alice Lloyd College in Knott County and eventually moved to Paintsville.

May, 29, now works as a clinical director at Mountain Comprehensive Care in Prestonsburg.

May’s urge to leave reflects the feelings of many LGBTQ people who grow up in this rural and mostly-conservative part of the state, said Gina Bryant, who helped organize a gay pride event in Pikeville this weekend — the first of its kind for the city.

The festival, planned for Saturday afternoon in Pikeville City Park, will include music, a drag show, a “free hugs” booth, vendors and speakers. The restaurant Bank 253 will host an after-party.

Bryant and May, who also helped organize the event, hope the celebration signals a more inclusive and progressive future for Pikeville and Eastern Kentucky.

LGBTQ people who grow up here often feel isolated because of the lack of an organized and active community, Bryant said, and that feeling of isolation drives them out of the region, often to Lexington or Louisville.

“Most of us felt like we would have to move out of this area to really feel accepted and to really find a community,” said Bryant, who is bisexual. “So I think this is something, for most of us, that we’ve been wanting our entire lives.”

E. KY Middle-Schoolers Point the Way to Their Future

Ashland is coal country, made filthy and unhealthy by the refineries and coal trucks and poverty.  But these kids - these students of a public school teacher in a public goddamn school - rose above all that to point the way.

From the Herald:

Students at Ashland Middle School won a $150,000 grand prize Wednesday in a national Samsung competition for inventing a device that helps people safely pick up dirty heroin needles.

 

The students hope their invention will help keep first responders and others safe in Boyd County, where staff at a local elementary school scan playgrounds every day for discarded needles.

Students who worked on the project said they are happy to be recognized for the invention and hope it is mass-produced and distributed across the country.

“We’re just super excited,” said Aubree Hay, an 8th grader at Ashland Middle School who worked on the project. “Getting our project out and more advertised especially, this is such a big deal for us. It’s a really good feeling.”

Not another dumb robot, this is something practical and necessary that solves an immediate public health and safety problem.

Too bad that Gov. "I Got Mine, Fuck You" and repug legislators are doing every thing they can to make sure those kids will flee Kentucky the second they graduate, and go to states that actually fund their public schools and turn out budgets that grow the economy instead of stripping it bare.

40 Years Late, Solar Finally Comes to Eastern Kentucky

By 1977, strip mining in the Appalachians was turning hundreds of miles of spectacular mountain panoramas into bare, dead, empty moonscapes as far as the eye could see.

Two groups were speaking past each other on the subject.

The coal operators were shrugging off the destruction, one of them actually recorded on video saying "These mountains ain't no good for nuthin' anyway." Nothing except supporting families with the bounty of mature, diverse forests.

The environmentalists and local activists were jumping up and down with their hair on fire, accurately predicting the devastation of mountain communities to come over the next decades and demanding a solution.

You see, when you strip mine for coal, you are literally stripping everything from trees and leaf mold right down to bedrock.  Mining laws required that operators "restore" the original slope after the coal is gone, but that is just exactly as impossible as you imagine.

Then people looked at those new expanses of horizontal land and saw development that hadn't been possible on Appalachia's vertical slopes.  But bedrock is unwelcoming to water lines and septic tanks. Turns out bedrock was really not good for nuthin'. 

But even back then, some crazy hippies were shouting "Solar! Put solar panels on that bedrock!"

Silly hippies. Everybody knows solar power is a myth. Or at least not something that could bring good jobs and cheap, clean energy to the mountains.

Think Progress:

A Kentucky coal company announced Tuesday that it is planning to build a solar farm on a reclaimed mountaintop removal coal mine and that the project would bring both jobs and energy to the area.

Berkeley Energy Group, the coal company behind the project, billed it as the first large-scale solar farm in the Appalachian region, which has been hit hard by the decades-long decline in the U.S. coal industry. The company, in partnership with EDF Renewable Energy, is currently conducting feasibility studies for the project on two reclaimed strip mines, both located in the eastern part of the state. Berkeley Energy Group estimates that the solar farm could produce as much as 50 or 100 megawatts of electricity, which would be five to ten times the size of Kentucky’s largest solar farm.

Berkeley Energy Group’s project development executive told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the company did not intend to replace its coal production with the solar farm, but instead viewed the project as a chance to reclaim used land while creating job growth in the area.

“I grew up with coal,” said Ryan Johns, BEG project development executive. “Our company has been in the coal business for 30 years. We are not looking at this as trying to replace coal, but we have already extracted the coal from this area.”

Coal, which for decades has been the primary source of electricity production in the United States, has suffered from competition with cheaper sources of energy like natural gas, as well as solar and wind. Increased automation and stronger environmental regulations have also pushed the industry into decline. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, coal extraction in Eastern Kentucky fell from 23 million tons in 2008 to about 5 million tons last year. Over the same period of time, mining employment dropped from 14,373 to 3,833.

Note the power of the stinking, decomposing corpse of coal that even now renewable energy can't get a break in Kentucky without denying any intended insult to coal.

The Resistance: E. KY Wins First Round Against Nazis

So the vicious motherfuckers won't be staining our beautiful Jenny Wiley State Park. But they're still planning rallies and protests.  Eastern Kentucky is ready for them.


Bill Estep at the Herald:

White nationalist groups no longer plan to use a Kentucky State Park in Floyd County for a meeting and training event on April 28, easing concerns about potential confrontations there.

However, the chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, Matthew Heimbach, said the groups would instead hold the event on private property in the area.

The groups also still plan to showcase their ideas at a rally for “white working families” in downtown Pikeville on April 29.

Residents opposed to the groups’ ideology have planned a rally at the same time, a few blocks away, for people to “stand up for peace, diversity, and love and to stand AGAINST neo-Nazis,” according to the Facebook page for the event.

On another front, the advocacy group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth is providing education about the groups, including how to counter their message with a positive vision for the state.

SNIP

Floyd County Judge-Executive Ben Hale said he was glad the white nationalist groups won’t be meeting at the state park.

“These types of groups are not welcome by anybody in Floyd County,” Hale said. “I hope they don’t come east of the Mississippi.”

More Proof That Coal Is Even More Dead Than Before

Via Political Animal:

Here is your daily dose of irony:

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum will always commemorate the past, but now it’s also looking to the future by switching to solar power.

The museum, owned by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, is located in Benham, a once thriving coal town portrayed in the 1976 Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA…

“We believe that this project will help save at least eight to ten thousand dollars off the energy costs on this building alone, so it’s a very worthy effort and it’s going to save the college money in the long run.

Solar and wind power are now producing more energy at lower cost than any fossil fuel while employing hundreds of thousands of people at good pay.

If Kentucky's coal miners had jumped on that renewable energy train 10 years ago when it started to take off, Eastern Kentucky would be the new Silicon Valley.  But the repugs they keep voting for prefer Appalachians to stay stubbornly poor and stupid so they'll keep oting repug.

The Resistance: E. KY Tells Nazis to Fuck Off and Die

They may have given the Orange Loser 80 percent of their votes, but they're not tolerating this shit.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

Southeast Kentucky residents are organizing two rallies in opposition to white nationalists who have chosen to come to Pike and Floyd counties to recruit new members and hold their own demonstration.

The Unity for a Diverse Appalachia rally will be  April 28 from 5-8 p.m. at Jenny Wiley State Park to counter an announced gathering there by white-power groups.

"This hateful group plans to hold a dinner on the night of April 28 (at the state park) and we plan on being there to remind them that their ideologies are not welcome among our people," a Facebook event page said.

Then the next day, the Rally for Equality and American Values will "hopefully far eclipse anything that the neo-Nazis bring to Pikeville," said Christian Tyler Marcum, a Pikeville resident and medical student at the University of Pikeville. "We're going to show the state, and the country, that these people do not reflect Kentucky values."

SNIP

Marcum said the Pikeville counter-event is nonpartisan and will feature Republic and Democratic party speakers in addition to music.

"So long as you value fairness and equality as bedrock American principles, you are welcome here," a posting on the event's Facebook page says.

That rally will be held 2-5 p.m. at Pikeville City Park, about 200 yards from where the white-power groups are planning to hold their event at the same time, Marcum said, adding the separation is intended to avoid conflict: "The idea is to not have a screaming match."

People are encouraged to bring photos of family members who fought Naziism in World War II.

He said organizers have been contacted by national organizations and are discouraging people from coming from outside Kentucky or Appalachia. "We don't want it to be hijacked by busloads from out of state," he added.

My grandfather fought those motherfuckers in North Africa and Italy, contracting the Hepatitis C that killed him at 58. He was born and raised in the mountains. It would not surprise me if he rose up out of his grave to kick some skinhead ass in April.

 

The Resistance: Exposing the Racist Hate in Eastern Kentucky

Speaking of whiny white boys, they're not getting away with a White Supremacy meeting in Eastern Kentucky without facing protest.

James Bruggers at the Courier:

A white nationalist (sic - White Supremacist, or Racist Motherfuckers for short) organization has announced on Facebook its plans for an Eastern Kentucky rally and workshop at a Floyd County state park, sparking opposition and outrage on social media.

The Traditionalist Worker Party boasts in a Facebook post on Tuesday that it's holding the event and a rally in nearby Pikeville to recruit more members and to conduct workshops to professionalize its organization. Events are scheduled for April 28 and 29.

The posting notes the predominantly "European" nature of the area's population and the hard economic times there in recent years.

And they're hiding in a state park in hopes of avoiding protests. Hey moron:  Kentucky State Parks are PUBLIC and protesters will find you in whatever filthy shithole you cower in.

Gil Lawson, spokesman for Kentucky State Parks, said he was looking into the situation.

The Courier-Journal in October reported that a leader of the white-power Traditionalist Worker Party was alleged to have been involved in the assaulting of Shiya Nwanguma at a Donald Trump rally in Louisville during the presidential campaign.

The group is allied with neo-nazi organizations, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which follows hate groups across the country.

"The Traditionalist Workers Party is a white nationalist group that advocates for racially pure nations and communities and blames Jews for many of the world’s problems," according to the law center's website. "Even as it claims to oppose racism, saying every race deserves its own lands and culture, the group is intimately allied with neo-Nazi and other hardline racist organizations that espouse unvarnished white supremacist views."

Counter-protests are in the planning stage.  We will keep you updated as we learn more.

Kentucky Writers to Bevin: Take Your Award and Shove It

They see through you, motherfucker, and will not be condescended to, co-opted, bribed or otherwise disrespected by your Trumpist, austerity-loving, white privileged ass.

From Rich Copley at the Herald:

The Affrilachian Poets, a diverse Lexington-based collective of writers directly or indirectly connected to Appalachia, has rejected its 2016 Governor’s Award in the Arts, citing Gov. Matt Bevin’s positions on education, the humanities and other issues.

“It is the opinion of the group that the governor’s comments, positions and actions regarding education in general, the Humanities specifically, universal healthcare, criminal justice reform, and the LGBTQ community have been reprehensible and go against the core of who we are as writers and educators and as artists committed to resisting oppression,” the group said in a statement posted on Facebook. “It is in the spirit of Kentucky’s rich literary tradition reaching back to William Wells Brown, that we vehemently reject any award given in this governor’s name.”

No comment from Gov, Lying Coward.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/entertainment/books/article95320137.html#storylink=cpy

"Hillbilly" Betrays Family to Push Repug Lies

Shame on you, J.D. Vance.  All that powerful prose about family loyalty and beating people bloody for the slightest insult, thrown away as a defense of repug, conservatard racism.

"Hillbilly Elegy" purports to be a revelation of the real reason white working-class people are suffering in this country.

It's even written by an actual working-class white person!  A self-proclaimed "hillbilly!"  With statistics to back up his bullshit!

I'm sure his accounts of family violence, struggles with substance abuse and poverty are true; it's the lessons he draws from them that are lifted straight from the elitist conservative pages of the National Review.

T-bone steaks bought on food stamps?  That canard is older than you, son.

Poor people don't need welfare; they just need to get off their lazy asses? Um, didn't you just disprove that very lie in the previous chapter?

Poor whites aren't racist; they just hate "Obama" (never "President Obama") for unknown reasons.

Vance deplores the economic and social collapse of the Ohio town where he grew up without ever recognizing, much less acknowledging, that it was repug tax and deregulation policy that encouraged corporations to abandon places like Middletown.

And that it is repug austerity budgets that deny impoverished residents the decent jobs, housing, education and treatment they need to recover.

No, no, it's all the fault of "liberal" welfare.

For shame, J.D. Vance.  You may have a Yale Law degree and a six-figure job for a biotech company, but the uneducated, jobless "failures" you despise back in Breathitt County know the truth better than you do.

How Appalachia Needs Syrian Refugees

The refugee "debate" is backwards.  The question isn't which state will take the risk and spend the money to help refugees; the question is which state gets to enjoy the economic, social and moral power that refugees and other immigrants have brought to this nation from the beginning.

Appalachia needs all the immigrants it can get.

Dee Davis of the Daily Yonder:

Rural America is falling further behind. Farms don’t need farmers. Manufacturing moved offshore. And the rate of rural kids living in poverty is worse than it is in the inner cities.

Here’s a solution. Let’s take in the Syrian refugees. Make them rural Americans. As many as we can feed.

I live in a small town. The billboard says welcome to Whitesburg, Kentucky, population 1,534 friendly people plus two grouches. We are losing industry, businesses and people with alacrity. We are losing alacrity too. Small towns often struggle to hang on to critical mass to keep a tax base or to have enough tuba players for the school band. In small towns everyone is necessary. Not even the grouches are expendable.

We’ve got room here for more folks. Rural downtowns have empty buildings where dime stores and haberdasheries once catered to customer needs.

SNIP

 In the Appalachian Mountains, Syrians, Lebanese, Persians and Palestinians came in throughout the 20th-century booms and stayed through the busts. They were coal miners and merchants and soldiers in the great wars. This nation welcomed strangers then, and strangers pitched in. Steve Jobs’ people were Syrian. eBay’s Pierre Omidyar is Iranian. There is an upside to an open-door policy.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article46837720.html#storylink=cpy

SNIP

But why should rural people be scared of new neighbors now? This is no time to buckle. Sharing the future with people who want to be here cannot be as daunting as preserving a present that’s straining under the load. The Statue of Liberty’s plaque plainly states: “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”

That sounds like a plan. And it’s a more thoughtful rural policy than any we have now.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article46837720.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article46837720.html#storylink=cpy

How Country Music Gets Class Wrong

The true heir to the class-infused folk and protest music of Woody Guthrie and his contemporaries is not jingoistic and xenophobic - when not outright racist - modern Country, but rather Rap and Hip-Hop.

Erik Loomis on Anglaeena Presley:

Presley is also mostly wrong about what her father’s money funded. That tax money went to a military buildup, the nation’s oversized and racist prison system, servicing the nation’s debt, and replacing the high tax rates once paid by the rich. In 2012, the 1 percent became the richest in recorded history earning 19.3 percent of American income, surpassing the previous record of 18.7 percent, set in 1927, just before this income inequality contributed to the Great Depression. Between 1979 and 2007, the one percent captured 53.9 percent of the increase in U.S. income while average income for our elites grew by 200.5 percent versus just 18.9 percent for the bottom 99 percent. Between 1978 and 2011, CEO pay rose 726.5 percent versus 5.7 percent for workers.

This doesn’t mean the song is wrong or bad. Presley may well be presenting her and her father’s point of view, one typical of much of the white working class. Presley grew up in Beauty, Kentucky. That is in Martin County, on the West Virginia border, deep in Appalachia. Martin County is over 99 percent white. Thirty-seven percent of the county’s residents live below the poverty line. Despite this, Martin County gave Mitt Romney 83 percent of its vote in 2012, compared to 15 percent for Barack Obama. This was one of the highest votes for Romney in the state, with more than 89 percent of nearby Leslie County voting for Romney being his highest. If these people vote, it’s overwhelmingly for a political party with the open agenda of destroying the social safety net they benefit from at higher rates than most of the country. Even when some of the mine jobs were union, these were not middle class folks; coal mining was always dangerous and not well-paid. But the mythology of the middle class can exist when you see people who are below you in social class. In Martin County and evidently for Presley, that’s largely black people, people who do not live there, who are in Louisville, Cincinnati, New York City. These are the others taking money from the hard working taxpayers of Martin County, even as social services flow into that impoverished place.

This nation has a toxic relationship with class and race. The politics of middle class mythology reinforce the corporate powers that increasingly control our lives. If all whites are middle class–or all whites who include lifelong coal miners left with nothing–then politics that actually promote the interests of the poor are undermined. If the poor consider themselves “middle class,” how do we create institutions that effectively demand a more robust welfare state and worker power? I’m not sure we can until we disconnect popular ideas of class from race. And given the upsurge in racism over the past seven years, we are far from accomplishing that goal.

Flakka Latest War on Drugs Bullshit

"Brain-melting?"  Seriously, Gracie?  Let's see some actual melted brain cells right now, 'cause I'm calling bullshit.

And "excited delirium?"  Where have I heard that before?  Oh, yeah, the same excuse white cops have been using to murder unarmed black and brown people since the first honky asshole realized 40 years ago that the effects of PCP could be easily turned into an excuse for just mowing the ni**ers down.

This isn't about addiction, it isn't about the phony drug war and it sure as fuck ain't about what poor people in Eastern Kentucky really need to get out of endemic poverty.

This is about filling jail cells to terrify the squares into cutting social spending to build more jail cells to hold more people who need social spending.

Katrina Goetz at the Courier:

Alpha-PVP, nicknamed "flakka" — an illegal synthetic drug that has made headlines across southern Florida — has burrowed deep into Lewis County in the past six months. And some experts say it's likely to spread.

It has sheriff's deputies on high alert because it's unlike any drug they've ever seen. Users are trading heroin to get it — a substance that looks like rock salt, reeks of ammonia and sells for $100 to $500 a gram.

On the street, users call it gravel, sometimes magic, because the high lasts so long. But it also makes them paranoid, violent and can give users superhuman strength, a troublesome combination for law enforcement.

"It's kickin' our ass," Lewis County Sheriff Johnny Bivens said.

And making obscene fortunes for Corrections Corporation of America.

Take the trillions of dollars we're wasting on what Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money calls the "War on (some classes of people who use some classes of) Drugs" and spend it on creating real world-class schools and good government jobs and a strong safety net and real substance abuse programs and decent housing and superb health care and everything else actual modern civilized nations have.

Flakka and all the other trumped-up excuses for worthless politicians and the pathetic excuses for "reporters" who believe them will disappear.

If You Can't Kill All the Poors, Force Them to Kill Themselves

It's fucking murder, and every austerity hysteric from Ronald Reagan to Rand Paul is guilty.  

 

As for you, longtime chair of the House Appropriations Committee repug Hal Rogers, don't you even dare pretend you give a flying fuck about the extremely impoverished constituents your party's policies created, you hypocritical motherfucker.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

Authorities are investigating the deaths of three people in Eastern Kentucky who might have committed suicide after receiving letters telling them their federal disability benefits were being suspended, according to a lawyer involved in the issue.

Prestonsburg attorney Ned Pillersdorf said a state police detective told him about the cases late Tuesday.

The detective said police think the three deaths were "related to the suspension letters," Pillersdorf said. He declined to release the detective's name.

About 900 former clients of Floyd County lawyer Eric C. Conn recently received notices from the Social Security Administration that their payments had been suspended because of suspicion that the cases Conn submitted for them included fraudulent information from four doctors.

Most of the people who received suspension letters live in Eastern Kentucky or West Virginia.

Many of the people have no other income, so the loss of their benefits has caused tremendous concern in the area.

U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican who represents Eastern and southern Kentucky, said he told officials at the Social Security Administration about the suspected suicides during a meeting Wednesday, making the point that the agency was dealing literally with a life-and-death situation.

"You could tell it made an impact," Rogers said.

Rogers said he asked Social Security officials to restore benefits to people while going through the process of re-determining their eligibility.

It was improper for the agency to cut payments to people before giving them a chance to make the case for continued benefits, Rogers said.

"It's not the American way to treat people as convicted before giving them a chance to be heard," he said.

Rogers said agency officials committed to giving him an answer soon on whether the commissioner would lift the benefit suspensions.

Jean Ritchie Sang Everything You Need to Know About Kentucky

She died at home, in Berea.  John Cheves pens an obit that puts the New York Times' piece in the shade.

Her songs were recorded by Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and sung in the rain by Knott County women standing, arms linked, to stop bulldozers at muddy strip mines.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2015/06/02/3881155/jean-ritchie-who-introduced-mountain.html?sp=/99/164/#storylink=cpy

The $1 BILLION Lifeline for Kentucky That Only John Yarmuth Will Vote For

Kentucky's repug congressional delegation - including Mitch McConnell and AynRandy will vote against the biggest help for Kentucky since the New Deal, and they will do so only because it is proposed by That Ni**er in the White House.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

Eastern Kentucky and other areas of Appalachia hit hard by a sharp drop in coal jobs would share in a $1 billion lifeline under the budget proposal put forth Monday by President Barack Obama, though the budget faces difficult prospects in Congress.

The budget includes a proposal to release $1 billion from the federal abandoned mine land fund over five years for reclamation projects that could improve the economy of distressed coal communities.

Don't Hold Your Breath for Beshear and Rogers to Keep Broadband Promise

I've been covering the broadband-coming-to-Kentucky lies for going on five years now, and we have yet to see a pixel of actual high-speed access.

Anybody care to bet me that this time last year we still won't have seen a new pixel?

Governor Steve Beshear joined Congressman Harold “Hal” Rogers today to announce an ambitious state and federal investment to extend critically-needed high-speed broadband Internet access to the furthest reaches of the Commonwealth. 

The underserved eastern Kentucky region will be the first priority area for the project, which will be supported by $60 million in state bonds and $40 million in federal and private sources.

“Access to high-speed and high-quality Internet is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity in the 21^st century economy.  Businesses and schools demand it,” said Gov. Beshear. “Our communities that lack reliable high-speed access will lag behind in economic development, distance learning and advanced health technologies, and that’s unacceptable.”

“The new ‘Super I-way’ will level the playing field,” said Congressman Rogers. “It takes away our historic barriers to better jobs, the difficult terrain and isolation. All of a sudden, the world is flat and the famed superior work ethic of our people will be able to compete with the world from home.”

Currently, Kentucky ranks 46th in high-speed broadband Internet availability. Nearly a quarter of the Commonwealth’s population -- 23 percent -- have no access to broadband.  The Next Generation Kentucky Information Highway will offer affordable and accessible high-speed broadband to reduce the barriers of geography for businesses and citizens.

The Commonwealth will partner with the Center for Rural Development for the first phase of the project in eastern Kentucky, leveraging various federal funds and private investment to attain access throughout the region.  The Center has initiated a feasibility study that will be complete in the next several weeks outlining the costs and plans of meeting eastern Kentucky’s broadband needs.

It goes on for thousands of more mendacious words, but I'll spare you.

High-speed broadband goes two places and two places only: densely-populated cities where telecoms can make obscene profits on minimum investment, and small towns whose progressive governments provide universal broadband at public expense.

As long as the Beshear/Rogers plan is dependent on private companies to serve rural counties, it's doomed to fail.

Fun fact: this press release from Governor's Beshear's Office is nowhere to be found among all the state press releases on kentucky.gov. But it is prominent on Hal Rogers' website, to which no, you may not have a link..

SOAR Summit to Put North Korean Propaganda to Shame

I'll tell you right now what's going to happen.  More than half of the "local resident" attendees will be pro-coal shills, fully paid for and carefully instructed by Big Coal to give the Golden Triangle media the entirely false impression that everybody east of Lexington just worships Big Coal and anybody who says otherwise is a commiehippieterristmuslinobamalover.

The results of this kabuki bullshit will be a list of resolutions closely resembling the following:

- git EPA out!
- Coal Is Our Future
- The Answer to All Our Problems is More Coal Jobs
- The Other Answer to All Our Problems Is Shutting Up Everyone Who Doesn't Agree That Coal Is Our Future.

But don't listen to me; watch it live yourself.

KET to broadcast and stream special, live coverage of SOAR Summit
Interviews with Gov. Steve Beshear and U.S. Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers featured in KET coverage

Every Kentuckian will be able to access next month’s “SOAR: Shaping Our Appalachian Region” Summit, as KET broadcasts and streams live coverage of the Pikeville event to audiences statewide and worldwide.

Live coverage of the SOAR Summit airs on KETKY and at KET.org/live, beginning in the morning on Monday, Dec. 9, continuing with speeches and discussions from the main auditorium throughout the day.

That evening, KET presents a one-hour program with highlights from the Summit. Shaping Our Appalachian Region: SOAR Summit airs Monday, Dec. 9 at 8/7 p.m. on KET and at www.KET.org/live. The program, hosted by Renee Shaw and Bill Goodman, includes excerpts from the SOAR Summit and a discussion with Gov. Steve Beshear and U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers.

Kentuckians watching KET are encouraged to participate in SOAR by following the latest updates through social media: “Like” the official SOAR Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ShapingOurAppalachianRegion and follow SOAR on Twitter @SOAR_EKY, using the hashtags #SOAR and #SOARSummit.

In October, Gov. Beshear, U.S. Rep. Rogers, Senate President Robert Stivers, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, and other leaders announced plans for the Summit, which will be focused on discussing the future success of southern and eastern Kentucky.

The event, which is free to the public, is open to those willing to share new ideas and recommendations about how to move Kentucky’s Appalachian region forward. The Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI), a national policy institute dedicated fostering solutions to the challenges facing rural regions, will facilitate discussions at the event, and other national agencies supporting the SOAR effort include the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development and the Appalachian Regional Commission.

“Eastern Kentucky is a brilliant, storied region that enriches the fabric of our Commonwealth,” said Gov. Beshear. “Yet for several decades, the region has seen a decline in growth and development, hampered by a lack of infrastructure and other resources that communities need to grow and thrive. We know that government alone cannot solve these issues, and that is why Congressman Rogers and I are launching this summit – we believe that to make real progress in Eastern Kentucky, we need the input, collaboration and involvement from the people who live and work hard there every day.”

“We want folks to know that every voice will be heard at this summit, whether by submitting an idea electronically or through face-to-face interactions,” said U.S. Rep. Rogers.

“The SOAR Summit will provide an important platform for discussing Kentucky’s Appalachian region, and by broadcasting portions of the event live and then following up with Gov. Beshear and Rep. Rogers for an in-depth discussion, everyone across the state and beyond will be able to join the conversation taking place,” said Shae Hopkins, KET executive director and CEO.

As of November 26, more than 1,300 Kentuckians have signed up to attend the event.

KET is Kentucky’s largest classroom, serving more than one million people each week via television, online and mobile. Learn more about Kentucky’s preeminent public media organization on Twitter @KET and facebook.com/KET and at KET.org.

Reaping What Their Republican Votes Sowed

No, Hal Rogers is no whacko bird or even a teabagger. But as the supposedly powerful chair of the House Appropriations Committee, he has made no attempt to mitigate the teabagging whacko birds' vicious and inhuman attack on the working poor who keep voting to send him back to represent Kentucky's Fifth District.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Suzy Khimm has some terrific reporting about the horrible effects of the sequester in rural Appalachia. A teaser:

But sequestration—a series of across-the-board spending cuts that many Tea Party Republicans have come to embrace—and other austerity measures have accelerated the economic free fall. Unemployment benefits to laid-off miners are shrinking; fewer meals are getting delivered to homebound seniors; and there’s less money to help workers retool for new jobs. Beginning Friday, food stamps will be cut by an average of $36 per month for a family of four.

It’s yet another blow to struggling Appalachian mining towns like Harlan, where the mayor estimates that 15% of the town’s residents have moved out in the past year, searching for work elsewhere.

The whole thing is very much worth reading. I wish I was more hopeful that more voters in districts like this would recognize that even if their own GOP representative opposes the worst policies a vote for Republican control of the House is a vote for a war on the poor.

Hal Rogers brings home the bacon: hundreds of minimum-wage, dead-end and soul-destroying jobs at call centers in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Hundreds of thousands of which could not make up for the economic catastrophe caused by repugs' lethal combination of subsidizing Big Coal and shredding the social safety net.

Magic Buggy Whip Dead-Enders

Someday not so far in the future, people will look back on pro-coal rallies the way we look back on Ku Klux Klan rallies during the civil rights era: dangerous fools screaming against the tide.

James R. Carroll at the Courier:

Thousands of miners from Kentucky and other coal-producing states, joined by some members of Congress, rallied at the Capitol on Tuesday to demand an end to what they described as an Obama administration “war on coal.”

“I hope somebody hears it, man,” said Will Stevens, 24, an Ohio County, Ky., miner for 1 1/2 years. He and fellow miner John Russell, 23, of Providence, Ky., wore black sweatshirts emblazoned with “Pick Coal” in white letters.

“I’d like to have a future in it,” said Russell, who has been mining for two years. “There isn’t a member of my family who isn’t a miner — except my sister.”

The two Kentuckians, like most of the other miners and their families at the rally, rode buses through the night to the nation’s capital — many making their first visits — to deliver their message, as one sign put it, to “Free America and the Coal Miner.”

There is no "war on coal," though we desperately need one  The war going on in this nation is the war by coal on coal miners, their families, their communities, their environment and the future of the planet.

The only way to save coalfield communities, the national economy and the planet is to reject coal and all its evil works and find salvation in manufacturing clean energy.

Unfortunately, the latest "summit" planned for eastern Kentucky is unlikely to produce any such proposal.

Bill Estep at the Herald:

With Eastern Kentucky stung by the loss of 6,000 coal jobs, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers and Gov. Steve Beshear on Monday kicked off an effort to come up with ideas to boost the region's crippled economy.

The two announced a summit in Pikeville on Dec. 9 where residents may offer ideas for the region's future. The summit will be called SOAR, for Shaping Our Appalachian Region.

They also announced the creation of a planning committee of more than 40 leaders from the region who will come up with ideas and help plan the summit at Eastern Kentucky Exposition Center.

Beshear acknowledged there have been a variety of efforts dating back decades to draft plans for developing Appalachia's economy. If this new effort is to make a significant difference, Beshear said, the ideas for reviving the region's economy will have to be homegrown.

"For us to be successful, the people here are going to have to develop that road map for success," Beshear said during a news conference at Hazard Community and Technical College.

As long as "the people here" are the same people desperately propping up the decaying corpse of coal, the December summit is going to fail as spectacularly as its many predecessors.

For some genuinely new and practical ideas for eastern Kentucky generated by genuine eastern Kentuckians not blinded by Big Coal's lies, check out the proposals from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, Senator Mitch McConnell and his DINO opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes are competing to outdo each other in embracing coal's stinking, decomposing corpse.

Attention eastern Kentucky voters: candidates who love Big Coal hate and despise you.

ead more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/10/28/2899432/steve-beshear-and-hal-rogers-propose.html#storylink=cpy

Fifty Years After "Night"

I used to think you couldn't know anything about Kentucky until you'd read Harry Caudill's classic "Night Comes to the Cumberlands."

Now I think you can't know anything about the world the plutocrats are trying to create throughout the country until you read Harry Caudill's classic "Night Comes to the Cumberlands."

Because it's all there: the arrogance of the rich; their contempt for workers; the government corruption; the feudal society justified by fundamentalist religion; the poverty, exploitation and despair.

Harry had it nailed in 1962.

John Cheves and Bill Estep at the Herald:

Fifty years ago, lanky, loquacious Harry Monroe Caudill of Letcher County climbed onto the national stage and tapped the microphone.

For the April 1962 issue of The Atlantic, Caudill wrote an essay none too subtly titled The Rape of the Appalachians. He told of his native Eastern Kentucky mountains and the out-of-state corporations decapitating them for coal through strip mining. An accompanying photograph showed the rubble of a demolished hillside.

"During the last 15 years, coal-mine operators have systematically destroyed a broad mountainous region lying within five states — Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Alabama," he wrote. "By a process which produces huge and immediate profits for a few industrialists, the southern Appalachians are literally being ripped to shreds."

Few Americans had given much thought to Appalachia. Almost none had heard of Harry Caudill, small-town lawyer and father of three. That was about to change.

The next year, Caudill's essay begat his first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, about "the helplessness and hopelessness" of Southern mountaineers. That begat extensive news coverage of Appalachian despair, which begat sympathy for this "whipped, dispirited" corner of America.

"The mountains have become a vast ghetto of unemployables," reporter Homer Bigart wrote from Whitesburg that October in a story on the front page of The New York Times. "Crowds of listless, defeated men hang around the county courthouses of the region."

Bigart, whom Caudill had led around, told of malnourished Kentucky children plagued by intestinal parasites, so sick and starving they ate dirt. Caudill was quoted as saying, "This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell."

 "This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell."

You could use the same words today to describe Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Akron, Buffalo - the very booming cities to which unemployed miners and their families fled in the '50s and '60s and thrived for a time, only to see their children and grandchildren exploited, exposed and abandoned by the same forces.

The Herald's stories begin a year-long series. Much more at the link.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/12/16/2442971/chapter-1-he-brought-the-world.html#storylink=cpy