tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-158474602012-01-26T11:34:42.709-05:00Beth Wellington on politics and cultureBeth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.comBlogger521125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-69135952474239506612012-01-18T09:56:00.054-05:002012-01-18T12:46:57.965-05:002012-01-18T12:46:57.965-05:00

Illustration is a screenshot from Mozilla. January 18, websites are joining the Electric Frontier Foundation in calling for an end to current internet blacklisting legislation S. 968 PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and  H.R. 3261 Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Under the current drafts, courts could order credit card firms, online payment companies like PayPal and advertising

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-11864792851520554542012-01-06T16:46:00.000-05:002012-01-06T16:46:21.469-05:002012-01-06T16:46:21.469-05:00

In April 2010, a tornado ripped through Newport, Tennessee, damaging the roof of the Tanner Cultural Center. Although money to conduct repairs was distributed to the City through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to William Isom II and Friends of the Tanner Cultural Center, the City is now talking about demolishing the center.  This despite a the National Trust’s Rosenwald

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-68551175543420432292011-12-21T15:20:00.003-05:002011-12-21T15:37:48.314-05:002011-12-21T15:37:48.314-05:00

 Photo is from a screenshot of  WCHS television's video. * Thomas Carlyle is reputed to have written, "Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers." As a lover of your newspaper, that's why I was disappointed today when I checked your archives and couldn't read more about Mary C. Snow, an educator in Kanawha County, West Virginia Schools for more than fifty years and the first

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-6600737819560370512011-12-12T01:58:00.006-05:002011-12-12T13:04:01.952-05:002011-12-12T13:04:01.952-05:00

If you were to believe the above coal ash "facts" circulated by the American Coal Ash Association 's Educational Foundation, coal ash is safe. Or, "Coal ash offers our society extraordinary environmental and economic benefits without harm to public health and safety when properly managed." One wonders who is going to make sure things are "properly managed?" Not the Environmental Protection,

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-73289083447391914512011-12-07T00:01:00.003-05:002011-12-07T14:17:28.790-05:002011-12-07T14:17:28.790-05:00

Editor's note: This was my draft of an article commissioned by The Guardian which appeared later the same day as, Who will pay for the Upper Big Branch mine disaster?: "Massey Energy's owner makes a $209m settlement, but safety violations that killed 29 miners in West Virginia go unpunished" Montcoal, WV.  3:27 PM on Monday, April 5, 2010.  It was the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in nearly

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-16321633123930511612011-12-04T22:55:00.017-05:002012-01-06T13:47:59.131-05:002012-01-06T13:47:59.131-05:00

So sad to learn from Wes Chappell and Randy Marchany that Bob Thomas, the bass player for No Strings Attached (NSA) since 1984, died unexpectedly on Saturday, December 3 from  complications following a heart attack. That's a screenshot of  him on the right playing "Lady Be Good" with Randy. Wes, too, but he's off-frame. Bob took being a bassist seriously, playing not only acoustic bass, but bass

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-19461519324902913762011-11-17T15:31:00.006-05:002012-01-06T15:29:55.269-05:002012-01-06T15:29:55.269-05:00

Affrilachian Poets  member and UK English Department prof  Nikky Finney wins National Book Award for Head Off and Split. I was wowed when I got to hear her read at the  Symposium on Affrilachia  @ UK in March.  In an november 11 interview with WUKY, Finney explains the title of her collection: When I was a girl, my mom would send me to the fish monger. I would go in, choose the fish, hand

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-67491882081760448292011-09-29T22:03:00.000-04:002011-09-29T22:03:25.789-04:002011-09-29T22:03:25.789-04:00

September 26, House Republicans stages its Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources Oversight Field Hearing on "Jobs at Risk: Community Impacts of the Obama Administration’s Effort to Rewrite the Stream Buffer Zone Rule"  Say what?  It was the Bush administration which tried to eliminate the Stream Buffer rule.  You can listen to the whole hearing and read the testimony here, with Bo Webb

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-23896299764465990642011-09-02T20:01:00.032-04:002011-09-18T20:25:56.980-04:002011-09-18T20:25:56.980-04:00

Table adapted from Beyond Red vs. Blue Political Typology, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, May 4, 2011.  See question  on pp 136-7 on public support for environmental regulation.  This is a first draft of a piece commissioned by The Guardian,"Why the GOP is going after the EPA: Republican lawmakers aim to cut back or even abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, even though

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-42244013421468217422011-09-01T00:01:00.032-04:002011-09-01T00:57:38.633-04:002011-09-01T00:57:38.633-04:00

Photo of Don this July at the Ruritan fish fry by his neighbor Carol Brandt used with permission. * Don Langrehr received the Democratic nomination for 12th District to the VA House of Delegates July 29. August 31, my friend and retired organizer Mark Barbour forwarded me something from Don's campaign.  Don says  that this week, the Town of Blacksburg received a Freedom of Information Act

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-7401924451510666672011-08-31T15:00:00.014-04:002011-09-01T22:23:20.608-04:002011-09-01T22:23:20.608-04:00

Illustration adapted from a photo of the seismograph from Virginia Tech at the time of the August 23 earth quake with a epicenter near Mineral, Virginia.  If readers have additional questions, please add them in the comment section and I'll pass them on to Klose.  You can read reviews of this piece and/or add your own at NewsTrust. Life on the internet imitates  art  Hurricane Irene, and

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-17141422570136766362011-08-27T17:01:00.006-04:002011-12-04T22:43:23.677-05:002011-12-04T22:43:23.677-05:00

Illustration is an adaptation of the Google satellite view of the North Anna plant, 11 miles as the crow flies from the August 23 5.8 earthquake's epicenter. (H/T to Sue Sturgis at the ISS whose post  alerted me to the 1970's WaPo coverage). Interesting that the The The Washington Post (WaPo)  writers didn't look in their own archives when writing about the August 23 earthquake, whose epicenter

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-24153326175472420972011-08-26T17:22:00.000-04:002011-08-26T17:22:46.865-04:002011-08-26T17:22:46.865-04:00

Jay Rosen (with whom I got to work on a project when I was at Newstrust) is in Australia today giving the keynote address at New News 2011, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, co-sponsored by the Public Interest Journalism Foundation at Swinburne University of Technology. He's posted "Why Political Coverage is Broken" and I'm looking forward to reading this closely and commenting in detail. 

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-67251547666003757872011-08-24T00:56:00.025-04:002011-08-25T15:30:44.459-04:002011-08-25T15:30:44.459-04:00

Illustration adapted from Google Maps.   Author's note: the date stamp reflects when I first posted this piece, it is being  updated as other sources of information become available. I already knew that nuclear power presented problems with waste disposal and potential terrorism. Now I know about earthquakes. Some pundits on the right used the quake as an opportunity to take a dig at a

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-76082983964684642082011-08-17T14:07:00.009-04:002011-08-24T22:09:45.519-04:002011-08-24T22:09:45.519-04:00

Photo montage from Razing Appalachia, a PBS Independent Lens film from Sasha Waters Freyer . After I published this, The Guardian commissioned me to do a slightly longer version, published on August 19 as "The myth of mountaintop removal mining: The myth of mountaintop removal mining: Big Coal says it's a tough choice: we can have prosperity and jobs or a pristine environment, but not both.

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-27074844465085546802011-06-15T14:15:00.001-04:002011-06-15T14:36:40.362-04:002011-06-15T14:36:40.362-04:00

5/23/10 Cartoon by Atlanta Journal Constitution's Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Luckovich, used by permission (blog including bio, email) * Remember the uproar when Facebook made your list of friends, pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region and networks publicly available to everyone? Now, the social networking behemoth has silently enabled facial recognition software without your

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-86990033499829767692011-02-22T20:59:00.001-05:002011-02-23T11:46:43.958-05:002011-02-23T11:46:43.958-05:00

Poster from Labor is Not A Commodity blog Many have heard of the quotation of Ike on the military-industrial complex, but my friend Mark Barbour brought my attention via his facebook post to a less known Eisenhower quotation about those who would abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws Something to think about as the Governor of Wisconsin would end

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-80815707330217866752011-02-16T18:35:00.004-05:002011-02-17T17:23:13.031-05:002011-02-17T17:23:13.031-05:00

This photograph is a screen shot of Winnie Fox from my friend Jordan Freeman's film Low Coal @ 46:51. Fox is telling the officer at the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection --aka " Department of Every Polluter"about things "going right down the toilet. The corporations are so corrupt.  They'll do anything to make a dollar."  Juanita "Winnie" Fox would have been 91 this March. 

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-75055839618234343342011-01-17T15:29:00.007-05:002011-01-19T20:41:50.751-05:002011-01-19T20:41:50.751-05:00

 Photograph from"The Plan" at Mountainstopremovalstopshere.org "They have taken everything away from me and now the final insult is, in what should be my retirement years, area coal companies want to buy our life's work and destroy it and run me and my family out of Twilight along with everyone else that lives here, just to mine the coal." --Frankie Mooney  * I thought folks who read this

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-40135781357960106222011-01-04T20:58:00.000-05:002011-01-04T20:58:50.112-05:002011-01-04T20:58:50.112-05:00

Photograph of Judy Bonds by  Sam Eaton of American Public Radio's Marketplace. Again it was a note from Vernon Haltom, letting me and others know that Judy Bonds, our beloved warrior against mountaintop removal had succumbed to lung cancer. As I think of Judy, gone now barely a day, in my head, I'm hearing Bernice Johnson Reagon sing, "They are Falling All Around Me" It is your path I walk

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-78696125511957921882010-12-22T13:51:00.009-05:002010-12-22T15:02:33.808-05:002010-12-22T15:02:33.808-05:00

Graphic from the Florida non-profit journalism site, Flaglerlive, on its September 12, 2010 post," Net Neutrality: The First Amenment Issue of Our Time."  The following is a draft my next piece commissioned by The Guardian. *   Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time. Today, a blog can load as fast as the Wall Street Journal — and, if the blog is good, it can get more traffic

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-81845436408499567532010-12-13T13:47:00.000-05:002010-12-13T13:47:09.389-05:002010-12-13T13:47:09.389-05:00

Cartoon from the November 3, 2007 Roanoke Times by Chris OBrion (email, website, RT archive), used with permission from Mr. OBrion, who cartoons regularly for the paper, in addition to doing artwork for other clients from his home in Richmond, VA. * In November 2007, I wrote about Coles Hill in Chatham, Virginia in Pittsylvania County, which has been in Walter Coles's family since 1785. Cole's

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-13065464514773094242010-12-08T14:46:00.002-05:002010-12-08T14:56:41.377-05:002010-12-08T14:56:41.377-05:00

Photo of Mike Hudson, author of The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America – and Spawned a Global Crisis. This piece was commissioned the Guardian, which published it today as, "Let's not foreclose on financial reform:  The modest Dodd-Frank Act is under threat, yet the foreclosure crisis shows the dire risks of an unfettered mortgage industry."  I've

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-56334590539497903102010-11-22T13:52:00.001-05:002010-12-08T14:10:43.510-05:002010-12-08T14:10:43.510-05:00

Kenny King took this  photo of a new metal gate on the dirt road running north from Route 17 at Blair Gap and says he encountered armed guards patrolling there.  The following piece was commissioned by The Guardian, where it was published as "Fighting the battle of Blair Mountain:  The struggle to conserve from stripmining the historic site of a labour struggle in West Virginia could not be more

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15847460.post-9716637372978277852010-11-10T14:01:00.003-05:002010-11-12T16:23:32.908-05:002010-11-12T16:23:32.908-05:00

Folks may remember the Battle of Blair Mountain from  the 1987 John Sayles film, Matewan, or the 1987 Denise Giardina novel Storming Heaven, or the 2004 Diane Gilliam Fisher poetry collection Kettle Bottom. I hadn't realized that the number of UMWA workers shrunk from 50,000 to 600 after the battle, or that the army had enthusiastically sent 17 planes to strafe American citizens until I read

Beth Wellingtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13318537209567202826noreply@blogger.com0