On June 23 in New York City,  John Todd, one of the founders of New Alchemy Institute,  received the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge Award for his Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World, a practical plan to remediate Appalachian coal lands with

An economy built on environmental restoration, carbon sequestration, renewable energy and ecological design

He wants to apply his decades of experiences with Eco Machines for water remediation to cleaning coal slurries and rebuilding healthy soils from the slag.  He has outlined a process that goes from waste and water treatment to reforestation with a full renewable economy based on biomass and local wind power.  With his experience building Agricultural Industrial Ecologies, as in Burlington, VT, he proposes a regional succession of industrial ecologies that can provide healthy lives and environments for larger populations over centuries if not millenia.

Full report at [pdf aert]
http://challenge.bfi.org/...

In the last year, West Virginia has taken quite a few hits in the media. A journalist friend described it as a "target-rich environment."

The hits I'm thinking about now are images hurtling through the Web and airwaves portraying us as racist and xenophobic. Obviously, West Virginia, like other places, has its share of racists and bigots - and quite a few of them wound up talking to the press.

But I get upset when people paint the whole state and its history with that brush. West Virginia has a pretty interesting past in terms of race relations. Even before statehood, there were tensions between western mountaineers and the slaveholding elite that dominated Virginia politics.

Part of this diary was originally published on June 9 at West Virginia Blue.

My connecting train was late tonight. It was hot as hell and I struck up a conversation with three young men, two black, one white, at the station about the heat and the lateness of the train. When we boarded, someone warned us the next car down didn’t have air conditioning working so I went up to the second deck and all the way to the end seat where I could stretch out. The other three followed me up and I had the end seat facing them as they sat sideways.

The man sitting closest to me, an African American in his 20s, was muscular with a tattoo of a flaming skull on his left bicep with "Protect Me From Evil" written around it (the skull not the bicep). He pulled out a book, Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. His friends also began reading their books too though I could not see the titles.

No. Not in Iran (yet).
And not another invented cause for staying at war in Iraq (they've run out of excuses).
The Republican "Dirty Tricks" brigade has been redeployed... this time to reinvent the American Civil War.

The newest battle rages around the Republican Attack Machine's attempt to turn Jim Webb into Scarlett's Webb (my apologies to both Margaret Mitchell and E.B. White). Senator Webb has written extensively and with authority and thoughtfulness on the Civil War and the socio-economic roots of the South. Of course, The GOP "Dirty Tricks" class of 2008 has been parsing these and other Webb writings in order to leave their usual slime trail of fabricated controversy. The greatest enabler of these societal slugs remains the abject ignorance of the American voter - but the ignorance is now enhanced but the sheer stupidity and spinelessness of the American press.

Over the jump is a (hopefully logical) progression that came to me as I played with the question that will continue to engross us for the next couple of months - who would make the best vice-president for a President Obama?

and I can say that Barack Obama has a lot of work to do there.  

I live in Northern Virginia and my son's Boy Scout troop (yea, I know, many people on this list have issues with Boy Scouts.  Please accept that our troop is somewhat different from the National Council and emphasizes the good parts of scouting without the burden of some of the more archain policies) scheduled the annual family white water rafting trip to take place in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania (yes, its a real place).

Are they the same person?  Very much so.   The New York Review of Books Volume 55, Number 11 · June 26, 2008 has a review of A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America entitled "The Jim Webb Story", by Elizabeth Drew.  She starts bt saying:

Webb is a serious writer, not a politician who writes books on the side. His first book, Fields of Fire, published in 1978, when Webb was thirty-two, is a sweeping, unflinching novel about Vietnam featuring two of life's losers who signed up for lack of anything else to do. It conveys with stark vividness, and also a touch of farce, the stench, the filth, the fear, and the bewildering unexpectedness of fighting an elusive enemy in a jungle. Fields of Fire has often been called the best book about Vietnam and likened to the war writing of Norman Mailer and Stephen Crane.

 Look beneath the break for more.

Here are a few thoughts about the tightrope between the 50-state "campaign everywhere" strategy, and the need to make sure we keep enough resources to compete in must-win states.  

We need to expand the map, but competing EFFECTIVELY in a "solid red" state like South Dakota would mean a LOT of time and money spent on 3 EVs that the odds are we wouldn't get anyhow. And that money might better be spent shoring up Ohio?  Does that mean we should give up on all the small red states?  Not necessarily...

Friday evening I came home from a short trip to find that my house had to have an emergency AC repair. I've chatted with one of the several brothers who own the HVAC company before. The first brother I met a few years ago was a typical southwestern Virginia good old boy with a big NASCAR sticker collection on his metal clipboard and a side business/hobby of restoring classic VW Bugs and other cars. A family owned and well-established business, they are probably the largest in our rural region at the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, AKA Appalachia.

Last night I met another one of the brothers. I've been here for quite a while, visit daily, and comment occasionally but this is my first diary - I just have to share this experience with everyone.

The last two election cycles found West Virginia voting for George W. Bush. Why? In 2000, with a stable economy, issues such as God, Guns, and Gays allowed voters to give in to these fears. In 2004, it was the War on Terror. There are many veterans here and many serving in Iraq too. They were still convinced this war was honorable and could be won. Others believed that "we had to fight’em over there so we wouldn’t have to fight’em over here." Will these be issues that determine how West Virginia votes in the upcoming 2008 election?  

I am ready to look toward the general election, and I know this particular group of "hard working white voters" caused many to do a doubletake over the primary results and also to write off the entire region. Several had written on the topic around the time of the votes, but I thought that in consideration of the more important challenges facing us through November, I should attempt a diary on this issue. You see, I think the area can be won over; I am not convinced it is a lost cause.

I'm a relatively new member of this community and this is my first diary. Many here intimidate me with their breadth and depth of knowledge on important issues, but it's a great community from which to learn. This is a topic I know well, though, both personally and professionally. These are my people and my history. More on the flip:

Today was a big day for Southwestern Virginia.  Our next president our newest senator and a senator to be were there as you already know.  In July, There will be another visitation located in the Wise County Fairground.  It is called the Remote Area Medical (RAM)project or RAM for short.  My wife and I have participated for the last three years and will be going again this year.  We go as members of Lions Clubs International.  The Lions provide a large number of volunteers for the project along with three mobile sight and hearing screening units, eyeglasses and other support.   At RAM Lions from all over the state are active in providing visual screening, hearing tests, eyeglasses, and more.  They are part of a much larger group that includes doctors, dentists and other health care professionals.  The project takes place on one weekend a year and for some of the people consists of their total care for the year.  Read on to find out more about this project and its relevance to today's events.

Marie Cocco, writing in the Washington Post and Real Clear Politics, says that "Obama Needs to Ask for the Votes." It's at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/...  Her main point is summed up here:

The question for Obama now is not whether he will ask for the votes of Democrats who failed to support him in the primaries -- that is, roughly half the 35 million people who cast ballots. I am assuming he will. The puzzlement is whether he understands that one reason these voters remain so cool to his candidacy is that as yet, he has never really asked for their votes -- and at times has been downright dismissive of them.

More below...

I have not cross-checked this report against Obama's official schedule but Seth Colter Walls says that Obama is heading straight to Appalachia:

While not all of Virginia is properly inside Appalachia, the cities Obama will visit -- including Bristol, Abingdon and Castlewood -- are all nestled within western Virginia, close to the Tennessee border.

I like this move for a number of reasons.  Foremost, by going directly to his weakness he shows guts and toughness.  Voters and the MSM respect toughness and you don't have to be a military hawk to show you are tough.  Taking on challenges, and Appalachia is a huge one for Obama, is a great way to prove your mettle.

This is my first diary, but I had to get out the word.  I live in Bristol, Virginia, which is in Rick Boucher's 9th Congressional District....the only district in Virginia, I might add, that did not support Barack in the Virginia primary.  Bristol is a city split by the the Va-TN line.  This is the Appalachia that Barack supposedly cannot win.  The UMWA.  Racism.  Poor white voters.  And yet, it has now been officially announced that Barack will hold an event at a local high school on Thursday.

I know that many folks on this site may disagree with my suggestion in this diary, but I have to say it!  As an ardent Obama supporter, about the only thing that I have been dissapointed with the Senator with during this campaign has been the fact he has not really made that much of an effort to reach out to Appalachia.  Visiting Kentucky and West Virginia once or twice in the run up to each state's repspective primaries doesn't quite cut it in my opinion.  Even in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina, Obama didn't spend as much time in the Appalachian regions of these states as should have. This has to change now that the general election campaign is about to begin.

More below the fold.

This morning in the news there were reports about a Brookings Institution Study that analyzed carbon footprints in the top 100 US Metro areas by carbon footprint per capita.

In looking at the map, something looked awfully familiar.

DHinMI did a couple of front-page stories about Obama's Appalachian problem, with nice color-coded maps of the vote by county where Clinton got more than 50%.

Strange but true: the top 12 worst carbon-emitting metro areas in the report are in a band stretching right through "Clinton Country." Why? Who knows? Call Mark Penn for an explanation! Speculation and a map on the flip.

I've seen a lot of analysis that talks about Hillary's appeal in Appalachia, or more to the point, Obama's distinct lack of appeal there.  Related to this there's a bit of history.  It seems that, shortly after emancipation, former slaves were brought in by coal mining companies as scabs to break the hold of unions.  This, quite logically, created a lot of racial tension in these areas.  

The theory is that Hillary has won by large margins in Appalachia due to lingering racism, and I found some really stark visual evidence to back that conclusion.  Check it out after the jump.