In wake of VT killings, NYPost's Michael Daly paints all Virginians with arrogant, simplistic brush

Losanjealous.com's random Nietzche's Family Circus.
Thought before I got back to writing about gun control, I'd provide the above distraction of (via Andrew Sullivan today (blog entry,email). "Neitzche Family Circus" which randomly pairs one of Bil Keane's (bio,email) The Family Circus cartoons with a quote by Friedrich Nietzche. The caption which came up for this cartoon :

Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.

Dang No distractions there. As for extreme positions, I'll send this quote to Michael Daly (email) and the Editor (email) at the New York Daily News.

In "Yes, Virginia, guns kill innocents," published the day after the Virginia Tech murders, Daly's harsh tones painted all of us in the Commonwealth with the same broad brush he'd use on the NRA or worse, Gun Owners of Virginia. I agree with Daley and Bloomberg's Mayor's that Virginia guns pose problems for New York, as well as other cities in the Northeast, yet found myself as disgusted with his words as those of the sponsor of H.B. 2653, which outlawed Mayor Bloomberg's sting operation of the same. And that's the correct bill number, not "Bill 2106," as listed by Daly.

And as for ridiculing our election of Jim Webb, did Daly notice Webb has had the spine to stand up to Bush on Iraq and Iran, to irritate the Cato Institute in talking about income disparity in the Wall Street Journal, to oppose General Pack's homophobic remarks, and to co-sponsor progressive legislation including the union card-check provisions deplored by the Chamber of Commece. He's only departing from what I'd support once, regarding, I'll admit, an anti-gun control measure for the District of Columbia.


Would Daly have preferred a vote for George Allen, who had an A+ NRA rating, as did, by the way some New Yorkers (Fosella, Kelly, Reynolds, et. al). Can Daly tell the difference between the general voting record of Allen and the equally A+ Rick Boucher (who represents Blacksburg down to Abingdon)? Does Daly know New York gun owners hope to organize to "take-out" pro-Bloomberg candidates in the Democratic primary? Did Daley notice Virginians re-elected Bobby Scott (NRA grade D-), James Moran (F) and Tom Davis (C), one of the few Republicans NRA grades low? Did Daly read Webb's dignified April 16 statement

I want to express my profound sympathies to the entire Virginia Tech community for the tragic shooting that occurred on the campus earlier this morning. My heart goes out to the parents and families of the victims of this senseless act.
Virginia Tech is a great institution. The young people who were lost today had demonstrated an enormous amount of promise. There is very little that I can add in terms of describing the depth of our feelings and our regret that this incident has occurred. It is an incredible human tragedy.
Hopefully once the grieving is done,we can find ways that will prevent these sorts of incidents from happening in the future.

Of the four current gun control measures, only one has originated in the Senate and has no co-sponsors to date, so it is hard to fault Webb. It will be interesting to see how things evolve.

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And for the other extreme position, consider Dale City Delegate L. Scott Lingamfelter (R-Dale City) who penned  House Bill 2653 which " prohibits anyone other than a law enforcement officer or someone under an officer’s supervision from attempting to persuade a firearms dealer to make an illegal sale."  Am I allowed, as an independent, to say I hope they field a strong candidate against him? After all, in Kansas, Tiahrdt has whole blog about him.  Governor Tim Kaine has announced he's signing the bill.  Below is the letter I'll email tomorrow to Governor  Kaine, so I can mail a similar one to Potomac News (email), Lingamfelter's hometown paper, with a copy to the Democratic Party chair for the District 31, Pete Frisbie (email).

Governor Kaine,

You said in a March 23 news release that you were signing H.B. 2653 because it "will ensure that trained, authorized officers, not individual citizens, media, or interest groups, are enforcing the law."

Can your office please provide me with statistics on how many such stings have been conducted by officers and which Virginia dealers were found to be allowing "straw purchases?"

How did you react when you learned that the four businesses in Madison Heights, Danville, South Boston and Richmond, among the 15 sued by New York City in May, 2006, were alleged to have sold 500 crime guns which the city's police department recovered between 1994 and 2001 and that NYC-hired private investigators from the James Mintz Group caught the dealers allowing one individual to provide the money, select the gun, and direct the purchase, while the other filled out the required paperwork? That three dealers in Midlothian, Rocky Mount and Roanoke (where I live) were among another dozen sued in December 2006 for selling 300 crime guns recovered between 1994 and 2002 and for allowing "straw purchases" by the Mintz Group investigators?
Do "straw purchases" allow friends with no criminal records to stand in a felon's place for background checks?

The Tiahrt amendments to federal spending bills now prohibit the ATF from publishing gun tracking reports. The last such report revealed in 2000 that "49 percent of traceable guns recovered in New York City were first purchased at FFLs [Federal Firearm Licencees] in Southern States: Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina." Additionally, "[n]early 75 percent of crime guns recovered in New York City were first purchased at FFLs located 250 miles or more from New York City.

Potomac News reported on April 10, 2007, less than a week before the tragedy at Virginia Tech that the NRA had awarded Dale City Delegate L. Scott Lingamfelter (R) as a "Defender of Freedom" for penning the H.B. 2653 "inspired" by NYC Mayor Bloomberg. Lingamfelter said the Mayor "has, I think, wrongly pointed to Virginia for the sources of his troubles. His problems are on the streets of his city not in the towns and cities of Virginia....If you want to clean up New York City we suggest you hire more police as opposed to coming south of the Potomac River to trifle with rights of Virginians."
Would you agree with Lingamfelter that such gun dealers play no part in crime in NYC? Please explain.

H.B. 2654 was heavily supported by the Virginia Citizens Defense League, who sponsored the "Bloomberg Gun GiveAway." The group issued a news release on April 16, "Gun Control Claims Lives at Virginia Tech." It also said in in another news release on April 16 about the failure of H.B. 1572, which would have prevented prohibiting handguns on campus, "Well, Mr. Hincker [Tech's Associate Vice President University Relations and chief spokesman] - are you still happy? Militia, Police, and Public Safety Committee - still think you did the right thing?"

How would you respond to this group?

Thank you for your kind attention to this matter.

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• Email from Sabrina that she'll take a gun control essay for LLRX.
• Phone conversation with Kim ditto for the NRFP.
• Called Yvonne about Clean Water Protection Act lobbying. She invited me to stay with her while I'm in the DC area.
• Called Cindy Rank, who tells me Frank Pallone (D-NJ) will soon submit the Act with 61 co-sponsors. Rank is sending a copy of an email, so I can get started on the blog entry for Congresspedia.

The Second Amendment was talking about muskets...

Mike Lane's (email) cartoon of April 17 on the Virginia Tech shootings. Lane left the Baltimore Sun in a buyout in 2004, after 32 years. He tells his story at Cagle's blog for July 14, 2004.
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At our writing practice group at the library tonight, Natalie, a nurse and pro-Bush Republican said this about gun control:

The second amendment was talking about muskets. It didn't give folks the right to have nuclear weapons...or for that matter, cannons.

Would that the NRA took so mild a position. According to Virginians Against Handgun Violence, the NRA keeps a "hit list" of gun control advocates. Here's a listing of Virginia weapons legislation and how the bills fared during 2007.

The Coalition Against Gun Violence takes a look at how the NRA has worked against restrictions on:

• Guns in the Workplace
• Gun Industry Immunity
• Democracy and DC Gun Laws

The Jurist maintains links to gun control court cases here and to its news coverage and links to sites here.

According to data from the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, during the period 1972 to 2006 the percentage of American households that reported having any guns in the home has dropped nearly 20 percentage points: from a high of 54 percent in 1977 to 34.5 percent in 2006. In its report on the weapons used in the Virginia Tech shooting, The Violence Policy Center notes

Since the mid-1980s, the gun industry has embraced increased firepower and capacity to resell the shrinking base of gun buyers in America...Formerly, the most popular handgun design was the revolver, most often containing six shots. In 1980, semiautomatic pistols accounted for only 32 percent of the 2.3 million handguns produced in America. The majority were revolvers. By 1991...semiautomatic pistols accounting for 74 percent of the 1.8 million handguns produced that year.

The Center has a report on trends in gun ownership here.

The Brady Campaign to to Stop Gun Violence, which worked to gain passage of the 1994 Brady Gun Law says

The Brady Campaign is working nonstop to get the message out that there are solutions to gun violence. We can ban military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips that make it so easy to kill quickly . . . we can require Brady background checks for all gun sales, including at gun shows . . . we can stop large-volume gun sales that supply illegal gun traffickers. These are just some of the steps we can take to make it harder for the wrong people to get guns.

It proposes the following actions:

• E-mail the President and Congressional leaders
• Ask the presidential candidates to take a stand
• Contact your local Million Mom March Chapter
• Get your local religious community involved
• Sign our petition
• View an interactive map of high-profile shootings.
• Read and respond to Paul Helmke's Blog: 32 dead: What are we going to do about it?

According to the campaign, the current Federal legislation includes:

• H.R.96 (Michael Castle, R-DE) that would require background checks for all firearm sales at gun shows. Although federally-licensed firearm dealers (FFLs) are required to conduct Brady criminal background checks when they sell guns at these gun shows, flea markets and swap meets, unlicensed individuals who set up tables right next to FFLs are not required to conduct background checks in most states. Terrorists, criminals and other people prohibited from buying or possessing guns seek out unlicensed sellers, because they know that they can simply put down their money and walk away with deadly weapons. Additionally, because unlicensed sellers are not well-regulated and do not keep records, criminals exploit gun shows to sell firearms and law enforcement has difficulty tracing gun-show firearms that turn up at crime scenes.
• H.R. 297 (Carolyn McCarthy, D-NY) would provide grants and other incentives to help states forward all relevant records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The NICS contains records on criminals, drug addicts, domestic abusers and others prohibited from buying guns. However, because many states do not forward all relevant records, there are many gaps in the federal NICS - gaps exploited by people who are prohibited from buying guns.

Additionally, the site mentions 2005's S. 683, the Child Proof Handgun Act (Senator Lautenberg (D-NJ) and H.R. 1423 (Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), which never made it out of Committee. The bills would have required a handgun that can only be fired by an authorized user. Modeled on a 2002 NJ law that required dynamic grip technology developed by the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the , once it becomes commercially available, such a gun, in addition to protecting children, requiring handguns that can only be fired by an authorized user would also be a major blow to gun traffickers, because they necessarily need guns that can be used by anyone -- most importantly the many criminals who are barred by law from buying firearms directly.

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Here's an archive of coverage by the Richmond Times Dispatch and Channel 10, the local NBC affiliate, as well as one for the Roanoke Times.

Fingers Don't Kill People, Bullets Do

4/17/2007 cartoon by Steve Sack, of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (email) is one of the many featured by Daryl Cagle on the topic of the Virginia Tech shootings. I found an earlier Sack cartoon on gun control at the webpage of communitarian R. Owen Barnes (email) . See also Sack's take on art masters viewing today's world over at Cagle.

Back on January 2, 2003, Canadian Randy Sutherland (email, if you replace "AT" with "@"), in response to the NRA rhetoric, "Guns Don't Kill People, People Do" posted his song "A Country & Wesson Supermarket Tragedy" (audio clip), introduced by the comment "Fingers Don't Kill People, Bullets Do."

I was in the supermarket today
a really awful thing happened
I tripped and fell, my hand gun went off
I killed a man by the napkins

ya it's bad, but it only gets worse
when he fell his gun shot a lady with a purse
when that hit the floor it filled the store clerk with lead
before the whole thing was over - seventeen of us dead

I burn in hell, the fuel is the sorrow
my story is your lesson
when you go out shopping tomorrow
put the safety on your smith & wesson

George W. Bush, who couldn't find his way to New Orleans the day after Katrina, was on hand this afternoon in Blacksburg for the memorial service after yesterday's Virginia Tech massacre.

One his kindred anti-gun contol advocates, State Del. Mark Cole (R) , tried this past session of the General Assembly to push through a measure that would have let students with concealed-carry permits bring firearms on campus, trumping the school’s policy prohibiting them. The prior year, Delegate Todd Gilbert sponsored the measure. Both Cole and Gilbert are the heroes of the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

No I will not link to the group's website and legitimate it in the view of Technorati and Google, et. al. Suffice it to say, said site touts on its homepage, an article in the Daily Press that the organization is

on a mission to root out every nugget of gun control it can detect in Virginia. It has been behind campaigns to make sure concealed weapons are allowed in local government buildings, even civic centers, and fought to open up state and local parks to concealed weapons.

These are the guys who outdo the NRA, showing up at the General Assembly with orange buttons sporting the slogan, "Guns Save Lives." These are the guys who ghoulishly published a news release yesterday headlined "Gun-control claims lives at Virginia Tech."

the university and college lobbyists swore that crime was not an
issue and that the schools did not want students and visitors to be
able to defend themselves with a gun or other weapon. They argued
that the schools had little boxes with lights that had a button
someone could press if they needed the police.

These are the guys who list as their (expletive deleted) accomplishments:

• getting Virginia's Concealed Carry Law Changed From "May Issue" to "Shall Issue" in 1995, Swelling The Number of Permit Holders From a Few Thousand in 1994 to Over 110,000 as of Mid 2002
• working with the Henrico Board of Supervisors to get ban on permit holders in parks removed
• grandfathering permit holders so they are totally "protected" ;while while carrying or possessing a firearm.
• distributing literature at The Stand For Children Rally in Washington, DC
• engineering Fairfax County's "Hunting Laws" to exempt gun carriers from County hunting restrictions
• derailing "Operation Scarlet Letter" in Bath County
• stopping a proposed gun ban in Harrisonburg, Virginia
• pressuring Lowe's Stores to allow concealed carry on premises

More tomorrow. The library's closing.

UPDATE: CD Mitchell (yahoo 360 blog with 99 page views as if 1/25/08 including two by me), the only total stranger to ever weigh in on my blog, posted this comment on 5/2/07:

I do not see everyone wanting to take away the public's driver's license because another drunk dirver killed an entire family. To remove the right to have a gun becuase some depraved fool pulls a stunt like this is another attempt to restrict freedoms in an effort to prevent something that cannot be stopped. If one student at VT had had a gun, maybe the attack could have been ended. But fools who espouse gun control will never debate that question.
You need to go find Utopia and live there.

Professor Librescu Survived the Holocaust to Die at Tech Saving His Students

Photo of Professor Librescu from his grandson's 2004 brit at Israel News.

Two shooting incidents on the Virginia Tech campus today have left 33 dead. Thirty-one, including the gunman, died at Norris Hall; two died at West Ambler Johnston Hall. Fifteen other victims from Norris are being treated at area hospitals.

The university will remain closed Tuesday. Essential personnel are to report for work. Classes are canceled.

A public gathering will be held Tuesday at Cassell Coliseum at 2 p.m.

Ironically, April 15 was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, set on the 27th of Nissan in honor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. One of the engineering professors killed, Liviu Librescu, 76, had survived Hitler only to receive five bullets shot through the door, after he barricaded his classroom and blocked the shooter from entering, giving all but one of his students time to climb out of the window and escape. Said his son Joe, "This was typical of him. He did not fear death and at all times tried to do the right thing."

Bless you, Mr. Vonnegut...

Photo of Kurt Vonnegut by Fred R. Conrad of The New York Times

I learned at John Dufresne's blog that Vonnegut had died at 84 after a fall. So as to pass muster with the library cyberpatrol which sometimes blocks John, I 'll merely say, "Durn!" Katherine Graham died the same way and at the same age almost six years ago. In Vonnegut's memory, here's the saga of the faux 1997 commencement address from James S. Huggins (email--if you delete "FIXME"). And here's a poignant memorial from KurtVonnegut.com (2005, 2006), which is maintained by silkscreen artist Joe Petro III. (email)

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John is thinking of travelling to a spa with fish in the bathtub to cure his psoriasis after reading this article in the Guardian. He may want to go grab some olive oil and/or vitamin E ampules to alternate with an aplication of Pretty Feet and Hands after he looks at this virtual tour of "Kangal psoriasis fishy treatment center" which Blue World Travel - Deren Koray Tourism--mentioned in the article--posted at its site. Or it could be a Short Story Waiting to Be Written. Here's its description of the accomodations:

A first class section having private bath, a minibar, ground based central heating system, spacious and well furnished rooms, internal telephone communication system is widely preferable for staying. A second class section rooms has also private bath however the rooms are more smaller, and having lack of features that A class offers. As a recommendation of our company, we encourage our patients to stay at A class section of the treatment center.

Unlike the other accommodation types, the center can be called as hotel however due to the strict rules of the treatment, patients must take healthy precautions like bringing their own belongings necessary for overnight stays such as towels, sleepers, soaps or shampoos. Those can also be obtained from mini market placed at the base level of the building....

Treatment center also boasts with the fresh and very clean weather all year round thanks to the isolated location from the main city. Also visitors and the patients gets the advantage of high altitude (1650 mt from the sea level), the sunny sky during the 280 days of the year. Due to the high level of altitude, the UV rays which is essentially good for the skin, gives a physical and side effect for the derm having psoriasis of the patients.

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Speaking of sunny skies--it's cold and rainy as I write this--it was almost Spring on March 8 and House Commmittee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Tom Lantos (D-CA)'s thoughts must have been turning to the growing season (of discontent with the Administration) in this statement at the “Foreign Assistance Reform” hearing (video). I think this qualifies as the Quote of the Day.

Mr. Ambassador – in Administration policies by individuals who come from the corporate world, where the top-down approach is the preferred modus operandi, and are thrust into a Congressional climate where persuading members of Congress, recognizing its function as a coequal branch of government, is a more accepted modus operandi.

I call this “tycoonitis” – people who come from the top of the corporate ladder who consider Congressional suggestions, requests for information, and participation in decision-making as intruding on their turf.

Ambassador Randall Tobias, as the first-ever Director of Foreign Assistance, you have been on the job for over a year. Your task was to reshape -- carefully, delicately -- and to bring order to our country’s tangled thicket of assistance efforts overseas. Instead, it appears to many members of this committee, you took to it with a weed-whacker. And the results are predictably unfortunate....

We are not a potted plant watching the Administration function. We are part of the decision-making process.

Wonder what Lantos thinks about the recess appointments?

"One Last Party for Molly"

The Melancholy Ramblers and others played at the Scholz Garten while friends shared beer and barbecue on February 4, after Molly Ivins's funeral in a photo by the Austin American-Statesman's Larry Kolvoord which accompanied Patrick George's February 5 article, "One Last Party for Molly."

Back on September 15, 2006, Alternet published Ivins's "Remembering Ann Richards" about a long-ago political do at the Garten:

everybody who was anybody was there meetin' and greetin' at a furious pace. A group of us got the tired feet and went to lean our butts against a table at the back wall of the bar. Perched like birds in a row were Bob Bullock, then state comptroller, moi, Charles Miles, the head of Bullock's personnel department, and Ms. Ann Richards. Bullock, 20 years in Texas politics, knew every sorry, no good sumbitch in the entire state. Some old racist judge from East Texas came up to him, "Bob, my boy, how are you?"

Bullock said, "Judge, I'd like you to meet my friends: This is Molly Ivins with the Texas Observer."

The judge peered up at me and said, "How yew, little lady?"

Bullock, "And this is Charles Miles, the head of my personnel department." Miles, who is black, stuck out his hand, and the judge got an expression on his face as though he had just stepped into a fresh cowpie. He reached out and touched Charlie's palm with one finger, while turning eagerly to the pretty, blonde, blue-eyed Ann Richards. "And who is this lovely lady?"

Ann beamed and replied, "I am Mrs. Miles."

On September 26, 2006, when Howard Dean arrived at the Garten to campaign for Democrats in his 50 state strategy for the Novemer Election, Democratic Party politics sure had changed.

At the Statesman, you can find a photo gallery with additional shots by Rodolpho Gonzalez (who took the photo from yesterday's entry) and Kolvoord. You can also find audio files of tributes by :

• Ivin's brother Andy
• her sister Sara
• co-author, Lou Dubose
• Courtney Anderson
• Sarah Speights
  

Sheila Lennon, who is features and interactive producer of projo.com, the Web site of

The Providence [RI] Journal has compiled reports on the memorial from Austin bloggers at her blog, Subterranean homepage news, which she started in 2002.

Kinky Friedman, who graciously admits that he didn't always agree with Ivins had eulogized her February 4 in the Los Angeles Times as essay as

a truth-seeking missile.

Meanwhile Theresa Alexander had this tale to offer about Ivins at the public memorial at the Texas Observer:

Everyone who knew her has a favorite “Molly” anecdote. For me it was the one she described to a group of her friends in Dallas about the endless summer of tracking and reporting legislative elections in South and West Texas (late seventies, early eighties?). Almost every meal was in some diner or other served by waitresses with teased peroxide up-dos and huge starched, folded handkerchiefs hanging out of their pockets or cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. Once when she feeling very tired and hungry she ordered the usual fare - meat and potatoes - thinking that she hadn’t eaten a non-fried vegetable in weeks. There was, however, a healthy-sized portion of parsley garnishing the plate. Out of desperation she popped it in her mouth — at which point the gum-chewing waitress admonished her: “Why, hon, if I’d a-knowed you was gonna eat that I’da washed it.”

Joseph Burgess wrote in:

I live in Kentucky, where the bottom-of-the-deck political climate rivals that of Texas, where many folks can trace their family trees back to some ancestor getting run out of the Bluegrass state for various crimes and misdemeanors. What Molly Ivins wrote and said showed that she and I — born four years before she was — shared pretty much the same political and social outlooks. For much more than a decade I have read her columns and exclaimed — “damned right!”

In trying to sum up Ivins, whom he knew only through he writings, he called her

the lately late progressive and idealistic champion of little folks, of poor folks, of set-upon-by-the-rich-and-powerful folks, of forgotten folks, of ordinary folks, of shortchanged folks, of Constitutional rights and guarantees, of justice and fairness, and more — . . . the lampooner and harpooner of the five-percenters, the fixers, the neo-John Birchers, the neo-Gilded Agers, the neo-Robber Barons, the grifters and grafters, the chicken-hawks, the political humbugs, the anti-Constitutionalists and pro-corporatists, the new-world-order ideologues, the self-servers, the power-grabbers, and worse who have gained so much ascendancy in recent years.

Gary Hart (yes, the former Senator) even signed in on the page, rather than with the celebrities here. There's also a collection of Ivin's work. When I look at Ivin's August 21, 1970 essay for the Observer, "South towards home" and realize that she had been a news reporter in Minneapolis and just three years out of school, prior to returning to Texas, I'm amazed at just how good a columnist she was from get-go.

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One fan on the tribute page talks about how he would email Ivins with his reactions to her columns and she would always write him back. I have been reading her essays since the eighties and I never wrote her, not once, not even after I had been lucky enough to hear her lecture at Radford University March 21, 2001.

So, Molly Ivins, this post is truly for you. Your words continue to bring your voice alive from the page and we write back to you, even though you vanished from our realm. You live on in your effect on us as we struggle to continue your work.

And if there is an afterlife, as Bill Moyers describes it as "that great Purgatory of Journalists in the Sky," I picture so much potential contained in our thoughts and our love for you that our energy travels out to whereever you may be.

As invisible as electrons, our energy travels out, even as tangible contact is never again possible.

Chicken Pluck

The photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez from the Austin American-Statesman and picked up by AP, is of Molly Ivin's niece, the literary agent Margot Maley Hutchison (email, bio).
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Looking at Hutchison laugh as she tells stories about her aunt at the February 4 memorial service, I'd have like to have heard what she said. The stuff the press recounted was pretty bland. Maybe I can ask Pogoer (Wes Eichenwald), a fellow Ivins fan, who being in Austin actually stopped on by the church.

Hutchison, named after Molly's mother, is the daughter of Molly's sister, Sara. You can find video and the story from KVUE, Austin about the church service, and video, story from News 8 Austin about the party afterwwards at Scholz Garten, where Molly infamously had crashed a no-press party for Clinton by borrowing a tee shirt from the owner's daughter and serving the Prez a beer. The Texas Observer has a tribute site up and Ron Weddington, who litigated Roe v. Wade with his then-wife Sarah, recounts this story:

Molly’s audacious pursuit of a story was illustrated when just-elected Bill Clinton had a luncheon with politicians, movie stars and big contributors in January, 1993 at the famous Austin watering hole, Scholz Garten. The press was excluded and Molly was beside herself as she sat outside the banquet room with those of us who hadn’t been invited. I suggested that she pose as a waitress, never dreaming she would do it.
But she did. The proprietor’s daughter, Stacy Bales, provided a Scholz’s tee shirt and a tray of beer and Molly managed an interview with Bill before security escorted her out. (Not one of the Secret Service’s finer moments)

Molly later quoted Bill as saying that he felt like a dog who had been chasing a car and then caught it. What to do now?

There are no separate permalinks per entry, so I can't even begin to tell you how to find it online.

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I hadn't planned to write about Molly Ivins again, until I stopped by Aldon Hynes's blog Orient Lodge and found a post based, in part, on our email back and forth: "Random Stuff: Media, Games, Wind, Coal and psychology" that mentions resources I provided him on MTR. While there I read his "Amanda Update" about the John Edward's campaign's blogmaster who quit after being assailed by the right.

My take on the situation made me think of Ivins and I posted the following as a comment on her entry at Salon.com.*

Although I'm a progressive activist who blogs regularly and has enjoyed some of Shakespeare's Sister's and Atrios's posts, I'm not an avid follower of all the stylish blogs, referring more regularly to the more fact-based, say Confined Spaces and Secrecy News . And after reading a few entries at Pandagon, I'll admit to preferring the less coarse, but equally hard-hitting non-blog writing of the late Molly Ivins.

So, this whole debacle with the R's could have blown over without my noticing it, like a tornado over in the next county. Then I read an entry by a colleague who's involved himself in political blogmastering. He's from a generation older than the 30-somethings and he's more scruffy than the khaki-wearers that Marcotte writes about as being the guys whom folks imagine when they think of bloggers who join campaigns.

Marcotte writes she was aware the she "didn't exactly fit the image." My question: how is that image to change if folks like Marcotte quit, allowing themselves to be driven out of a job by the "noise machine."

My advice: toughen up, gal! Your narrative leaves me wondering what candidate would want to stand behind someone only to have her quit?

Remember, the New York Times's Abe Rosenthal had to fire Molly Ivins to get her out of the big boys club. And she bragged forever after about not having shown "due respect and deference to the great dignity" of that paper. Her offense? She had called a chicken slaughtering festival in New Mexico a “gang pluck.”

More on Ivins tomorrow...

NRC completes North Anna Impact Statement

December 15, NRC issued a news release saying it had completed its environmental impact statement on Dominion Resources proposed expansion of the North Anna plant.

The report contains the NRC's finding that there are no environmental impacts that would prevent issuing the ESP.

The EIS, combined with the recent issuance of a final Safety Evaluation Report on the application, marks the end of the staff's technical review on the North Anna ESP, although additional steps must be completed before the NRC reaches a final decision on the matter. The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board must conduct a mandatory hearing on the matter before the Commission can reach a final decision on issuing the permit. The NRC expects to finish this process for the North Anna ESP by the end of 2007.

Things are moving fast indeed. On January 5, the licencing Board issued an order setting its hearing for next Thursday February 8.

On January 3, Unit 1, Dominion Energy's 925-megawatt nuclear plant at North Anna, shut down due an electrical failure that reduced the flow of feedwater to the steam generators, according to the Reuters story the next day, "Dominion sees Va. North Anna 1 reactor back soon"

My flying back from Chicago December 23 on a one-way ticket purchased the day before drew the terrorist protection folks into action, but evidently there's no need to shield nuclear power plants for terrorist attacks. Go figure.

The 9/11 Commission report (See :The Attack Looms," p. 245)

During the Spain meeting, Atta also mentioned that he had considered targeting a nuclear facility he had seen during familiarization flights near New York--a target they referred to as “electrical engineering."

Public Citizen and San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace filed a lawsuit in 2004, challenging the NRC's 2003 security requirements, which were adopted behind closed-doors with the nuclear industry and without public participation. In September 2004, the Committee to Bridge the Gap filed a petition for rulemaking to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requesting that existing nuclear plants be required to construct "Beamhenge" shields - consisting of steel I-beams and cabling - around sensitive parts of the facilities so an incoming plane would hit the shield, and not the reactor, spent fuel pool or other critical targets. A two-minute animation of the vulnerability of reactors to air attack, and how to protect them, narrated by Martin Sheen, can be viewed at http://www.committeetobridgethegap.org/

Despite receiving more than 800 comments in support of the petition (including by eight state attorneys general) and almost none in opposition, the NRC rejected the proposal, asserting that "mitigation" measures and evacuation plans for surrounding areas to lessen public radiation exposures could be activated after a plane crash that results in the release of radioactivity.

Te Energy Policy Act of 2005 directed the to to revise its "Design Basis Threat" defining the terrorist threat against which reactor operators must be prepared to protect. Congress specified that the rulemaking must consider the events of 9/11, attacks by multiple coordinated teams of a large number of attackers, attacks from the air, and the use of explosives of considerable size and other modern weaponry, among a number of other factors.

On January 26, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, had written the NRC that

communities that surround existing plants need to be confident that the NRC, as the regulator charged with nuclear safety, did all it could to ensure that plants defend against current security threats. In particular, communities should be assured that the plants are prepared to defend against large attacking forces and commercial aircraft.

And yet on January 29, the NRC voted January 29 to approve a rule which fails to require protection against attacks by airplanes or by more than a small number of attackers on the ground, arguing that The NRC also rejected any requirement to protect against attacks by groups arguing that 9/11 should be considered four separate, individual attacks involving only the number of terrorists in a single plane.

Michele Boyd, legislative director of Public Citizen's Energy Program criticized the rule:

Rather than requiring measures to prevent a plane crash from damaging ulnerable parts of a nuclear plant, which would be the smartest course, the government is relying on post-crash measures and evacuation plans to attempt to mitigate' the public's exposure to radiation....Fire prevention is always better than fire fighting. Nuclear terrorism prevention is far more prudent than trying to reduce radiation exposures after the fact.

Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, said

Rather than upgrading protections,the proposed rule merely codifies the status quo, reaffirming the existing, woefully inadequate security measures already in place at the nation's reactors.

Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for the Nuclear Information and Resource Service added.

We are shocked that the NRC would even consider disregarding aircraft attacks on existing reactors with so many operable airfields within 10 miles of most nuclear power stations....Given that it is impossible to react to a fast-breaking event such as a local private plane laden with explosives, structural defenses against aircraft attack must be inserted into regulations - if not by NRC, then by Congress.

Missing Miss Molly

Photo of Molly Ivins from her page at the Creators Syndicate, for whom she began writing a column in 1992.

*

Molly Ivins died today. Sigh. Anthony Zurcher, also of Austin, was her editor at the Creator's Sundicate. .Zurcher wrote this anecdote in his tribute today:

For a woman who made a profession of offering her opinion to others, Molly was remarkably humble. She was known for hosting unforgettable parties at her Austin home, which would feature rollicking political discussions, and impromptu poetry recitals and satirical songs. At one such event, I noticed her dining table was littered with various awards and distinguished speaker plaques, put to use as trivets for steaming plates of tamales, chili and fajita meat. When I called this to her attention, Molly matter-of-factly replied, "Well, what else am I going to do with 'em?"

In her next to last syndicated column, "Iraq Exit is Up to Us" published on January 8, Ivins declared herself on an "old-fashioned newspaper campaign" and vowed to use every column she had to "write about this war until we find some way to end it."

Becky O'Malley, editor of the Berkely Daily Planet had proposed a tribute:

And now it really is up to us. While Molly is sick, the rest of us will have to carry her “old-fashioned newspaper campaign” forward.

With that in mind, the Berkeley Daily Planet is hereby launching what we might call the “Molly Ivins Festschrift.” A festschrift is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar.” Academics are wont to create festschrifts on the occasion of a revered colleague’s 60th birthday, for example. Molly’s already 62, but no time like the present to catch up with what we should have done two years ago. And we might call it festschrift if we could reliably remember how to spell or pronounce that German word, but let’s just call it the Molly Ivins Tribute Project.

The idea is that her colleagues in the opinionated part of the journalistic world should take over her campaign while she’s sick, creating a deluge of columns about what’s wrong with Bush’s war and what should be done to set things right. It would be nice if a lot of these columns could be funny, since skewering serious subjects with humor is what Molly does best, but that’s not required.

Here at the Berkeley Daily Planet we’ve set up a special mailbox to receive the offerings, tribute@berkeleydailyplanet.com. We’ll publish them as they come in, at least one every day if possible, in our Internet edition, berkeleydailyplanet.com. We’d like them to be contributed free of copyright, so that any publication, print or online, can take them off the web and re-circulate them to their own readers. The best ones we’ll also run in our Tuesday and Friday printed papers. A good length would be 600-800 words, which would work for most publications. And of course, columnists under contract should just write pieces to run in their regular outlets.

At 10:18 tonight, Austin NBC affiliate KXAN posted its story with a place to add coments.

Molly Ivins was my favorite political columnist. She managed to combine irreverance and humor with a keen understanding of the facts. She's the one responsible for naming George Bush "Shrub." And in her last column for Creative Synidicate on January 11, she came up with the slogan, "We are the deciders" as she wrote about the January 27 March on Washington:

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

*

While I was in Washington on the 27th, I had no idea; I somehow missed the AP blurb on Friday, January 26, that Ivins had been hospitalized in her ongoing battle with cancer which had started in 1999. Caught up in writing about the march, then about the W&M president's travails, and finally working today to fill my taxes, I hadn't read the news from in Austin, which didn't seem so ominous. On Monday, January 29 at 11:31 a.m. , local station KXAN posted this story,

A close friend to Ivins told KXAN that even though the 62-year-old is sick, she still has her sense of humor, laughing and smiling with friends and family, visiting her in the hospital.

Ivins could be released from the hospital later Monday.

KXAN will keep you updated.

I missed Peter Rothberg entry January 30 at 5:00 p.m., "Molly's Pledge."In his blog for The Nation, "Act Now" spreading news of the Berkeley Planet charge.

*

September 24, 2006 Lisa Sandberg had written for the Houston Chronicle, “While battling politicians, writer is in a battle for her life / Illness hasn't dulled Ivins' wit” (available through E-Library or reprinted without a byline as an AP story on Editor and Publisher) .

At that time, going through her third bout of chemo and radiation, Ivins, Sandberg wrote, had a version of the disease had become "chronic-but-manageable, " although she suffered from constipation, "poor balance, only a few patches of hair on her head and no assurance her breast cancer won't undo her in the end."

Ivins told her, as she had told others,

I'm sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn't make you a better person.

But despite the treatments, Ivins had returned less than a week before from an 11-day, 227-mile raft trip through the Grand Canyon, a trip which she said reduced her ego "to the size of a grain of sand."

OK, a confession: The raft had a motor.

Second confession: Her loyal assistant, Betsy Moon, had warned the 16 people on the trip that she was "a fragile case." So you might have thought Ivins was the empress of China.

"People would bring me food and drink, and put up my tent," Ivins said.

Then she laughed heartily. She hadn't asked Moon to elicit sympathy, but she wasn't complaining.

"I'm not above using cancer as the world's greatest excuse," she said.

I prefer what people say during your lifetime, so some tidbits via Sandberg:

At a gathering in May, former President Clinton called her a "great journalist," who was "good when she praised me and painfully good when she criticized me."

Her brother Andy Ivins, a lawyer, 56:

"Sometimes her Texan accent can get a lot thicker depending on where she is." Her father, Jim Ivins, a corporate lawyer, argued about her about civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the women's movement. He was was a conservative Republican , which meant, according to Andy , that his sister could have been only one thing: a leftist. "She was going to be anything he wasn't."

Ivins on Bush:

She's fond of saying that calling President Bush "shallow" is like calling a dwarf "short."

On the GOP seizing both houses of the Texas Legislature in 2003:

Well, fellow Texans, they can stick a fork in us, cause we're done.

There are a bunch of good Ivins quotations at Whateveritisimagainstit.

Books:

• Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?
• Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (with Lou Dubose)
• Who Let the Dogs In? Incredible Political Animals I have Known.

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Ivins interned at Houston Chronicle while at Smith College,

where she wrote up street closings and bridal news and recalls accidentally marrying off one bride to her father and writing that another had earned a "B.O." degree.

After Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and working three years at the Minneapolis Tribune, Ivins returned home in 1970 to cover the Texas Legislature, became co-editor of the biweekly left newsmagazine The Texas Observer and was hired away by the New York Times where she was fired six years because, Ivins proudly told Sandberg, the top editor, A.M Rosenthal, didn't feel she showed

"due respect and deference to the great dignity of the New York Times.

Page View Statistics (visitor count no longer available from yahoo.)
January 2007: 9,239
2007 YTD: 9,239
2006 TOTAL: 61,308
Total since 1/1/06: 70,809

UPDATE: 2/1/07

She had been the Rocky Mountain bureau chief until she was summons back to New York by Rosenthal to cover City Hall. As the Harrrisonburg, Virginia Daily News Record, which ran her column editorialized today in "Molly Ivins,"

Her rollicking writing style often got her in trouble with one of her employers – The New York Times. Incandescent lines such as "squawked like a $2 fiddle," was transformed into "like an inexpensive instrument." Managing editor Abe Rosenthal also questioned her description of a chicken festival somewhere in Texas as a "gang pluck."

The "Gray Lady" couldn't hack Molly 27 years later. Here's how the NYT tells it in her obit, "Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62:"

Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.

Wendy M. Grossman (email, website, bio)quotes Media Circus by Howard Kurtz at her Live Journal entry:

The classic Ivins tale involves her story about an all-day community chicken slaughter in a New Mexico town. Ivins couldn't resist describing it as a "gang pluck", knowing full well the phrase would never make it past the copy desk. Ivins was promptly removed as Rocky Mountain bureau chief and ushered into Rosenthal's office.



"He said, 'You used the word gang pluck.' I said, 'I thought it was a good line. 'He said, 'Gang pluck.' I said, 'It was a play on words. He said, 'Gang pluck. Gang pluck sounds like gang fuck. You were trying to make our readers think of the word fuck.' I said, 'Damn, Abe, you are a hard man to fool.'"

UPDATE 2/3/07: Greg Mitchell's take, "The Plucking Truth," in Editor and Publisher

Surely, in swinging 2007, with some of the greyness drained out of the Grey Lady by now, the paper would finally print the phrase in its Ivins obituary? Uh, think again. Didn’t happen. Censored again.

LOOKING OUT OVER AN ABYSS IN BOONE COUNTY

Photo by Antrim Caskey, copyright used by permission.

This poem was inspired by my visit with Larry Gibson at Kayford Mountain. I was fortunate to listen to Larry and Maria Gunoe's stories at the West Virginia Mountaintop Removal Writer's Tour. The following is the first of a series of poems I'm working on.You can hear Larry and Maria talking with Steve Mellon (email) of the Pittsburg Post Gazette in the February 26, 2006 slideshow, Mountain Trouble (archive.org copy), which accompanied the story, "In West Virginia, citizens battle against the mining companies carving off their mountaintops," by Diane Jones (email)  

*
from APPALACHIA'S LAST STAND by Beth Wellington

LOOKING OUT OVER AN ABYSS IN BOONE COUNTY for Larry Gibson


Picture our fifty
acres, just one family's piece
of Kayford Mountain.

That metal farm gate
used to mark our line, the steep
farm road wound, benign,

though old growth hardwoods,
song birds in flight, both sides a
blessed continuum

of Almost Heaven
West Virginia. Our farm gate's
now The Gates of Hell.

The smell's not brimstone
but ANFO, ammonium
nitrate and fuel oil.

*

The same Devil's brew
at Oklahoma City
Belfast, Gaza Strip:

terrorists, they call
truck bombers, but Blankenship's
"a big employer."

Such liars, he hires
so few to drive the drag lines:
maggots chewing up

our hills to rubble,
burying headwater streams
that sang us to sleep.

We keep thinking we'll
wake and the knobs will be there.
We keep thinking no

family photos
need be bolted to our walls
to withstand the blasts.

Big Coal has its way
they will blow up Blair Mountain.
Permits are pending.

*

Eighty years ago
10,000 miners rose up
ten days at Spruce Run

while federal troops
fired: civil war to keep
us company slaves.

Blow up Blair Mountain?
Feature Vicksburg, Bull Run gone
for thirty year's coal.

Mountains should abide
but Massey plays God
scattering our peaks.

How can we be the
Mountain State without mountains,
our home, a war zone?

*

When I sent the poem out yesterday for Verbal Events, I also sent a copy to John Dufresne (blog), who respond:

Terrific work about a depressing situation. Damn. Time to to John Prine’s Muhlenburg County . “Mr. Peabosy’s coal train has hauled it away.”

It's always good to listen to Prine.

It's also good to let Congress know we want the Clean Water Protection Act passed. Last night, I asked Cindy Rank, (email), chair of the Mining Committee of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy what single thing about Mountaintop Removal should be broadcast. The Clean Water Protection Act was her vote.

As I wrote for November's LLRX.com essay, "Mountaintop Removal Sites - "Strip Mining on Steroids"

One of the casualties of the Republican-led House of Representatives was H.R. 2719, the Clean Water Protection Act, introduced by Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) on May 26, 2005. Although the bill boasted a bipartisan co-sponsorship with Rep. Christopher Shays, (R-CT) and gained 74 additional co-sponsors, it never made it out of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure's Committee's Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment. This is the third time such legislation has been submitted. Pallone introduced the measure as H.R. 4683 on 5/8/2002 (gaining 36 co-sponsors) and as H.R. 738 on 2//2003, (gaining 64 co-sponsors).

I don't know that the lame ducks will pass this, but it's good to write now to your members of Congress and then write again, if the item has to be re-introduced in the 110th session. You can find a model letter at the Appalachian Voices campaign. I suggest you generate your own letter from your own email or fax, in order for it to have the most weight. (I hear tell that the anthrax scare still slows the snail mail.)

I hear there's talk of organizing a national op-ed and letter to the editor campaign. I'll fill you in on the coordination, if I can get more details. In the meantime, be thinking of what you might write.


For another striking photograph of Larry on his land, see "New Coal Isn't Old Coal" by 2001 Alicia Patterson fellow, Rudy Abramson for his project ""The Latter Days of King Coal: Wealth, Poverty & Public Policy in Appalachia". Abramson (email) is the co-editor with my friend Jean Haskell (email) of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia (UT Press, 2006). He also chairs the advisory committee of the Insitute for Rural Journalism and Social Issues.


Other news:


An interesting story from the Wall Street Journal on November 15, "One More Time for Judicial Nominees."

It's not only Strickler the Bush keeps on pushing. What happened to his promised bi-partisanship? For more info on the environmental records of his nominees, see Judging the Environment, a joint project of Earthjustice and the Community Rights Counsel, two public service law firms.

*
Join my friend Barry and me tomorrow at the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy's Social Justice U if you're in Roanoke. For details (and to preregister before five today), click here.

Jim Webb: American Workers Have a Chance To Be Heard

Jim Webb takes on the Cato Institute et.al in the November 15, 2006 WSJ, "Class Struggle:  American Workers Have a Chance to Be Heard," which can be found at Webb's site.

The most important -- and unfortunately the least debated -- issue in politics today is our society's steady drift toward a class-based system, the likes of which we have not seen since the 19th century. America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country. Few among them send their children to public schools; fewer still send their loved ones to fight our wars. They own most of our stocks, making the stock market an unreliable indicator of the economic health of working people. The top 1% now takes in an astounding 16% of national income, up from 8% in 1980. The tax codes protect them, just as they protect corporate America, through a vast system of loopholes.

Incestuous corporate boards regularly approve compensation packages for chief executives and others that are out of logic's range. As this newspaper has reported, the average CEO of a sizeable corporation makes more than $10 million a year, while the minimum wage for workers amounts to about $10,000 a year, and has not been raised in nearly a decade. When I graduated from college in the 1960s, the average CEO made 20 times what the average worker made. Today, that CEO makes 400 times as much.

In the age of globalization and outsourcing, and with a vast underground labor pool from illegal immigration, the average American worker is seeing a different life and a troubling future. Trickle-down economics didn't happen. Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone. Half of that increase comes from wage-earners' pockets rather than from insurance, and 47 million Americans have no medical insurance at all.

Manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Many earned pension programs have collapsed in the wake of corporate "reorganization." And workers' ability to negotiate their futures has been eviscerated by the twin threats of modern corporate America: If they complain too loudly, their jobs might either be outsourced overseas or given to illegal immigrants.

This ever-widening divide is too often ignored or downplayed by its beneficiaries. A sense of entitlement has set in among elites, bordering on hubris. When I raised this issue with corporate leaders during the recent political campaign, I was met repeatedly with denials, and, from some, an overt lack of concern for those who are falling behind. A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism." Others claim that it's the fault of the worker or the public education system, that the average American is simply not up to the international challenge, that our education system fails us, or that our workers have become spoiled by old notions of corporate paternalism.

Still others have gone so far as to argue that these divisions are the natural results of a competitive society. Furthermore, an unspoken insinuation seems to be inundating our national debate: Certain immigrant groups have the "right genetics" and thus are natural entrants to the "overclass," while others, as well as those who come from stock that has been here for 200 years and have not made it to the top, simply don't possess the necessary attributes.

Most Americans reject such notions. But the true challenge is for everyone to understand that the current economic divisions in society are harmful to our future. It should be the first order of business for the new Congress to begin addressing these divisions, and to work to bring true fairness back to economic life. Workers already understand this, as they see stagnant wages and disappearing jobs.

America's elites need to understand this reality in terms of their own self-interest. A recent survey in the Economist warned that globalization was affecting the U.S. differently than other "First World" nations, and that white-collar jobs were in as much danger as the blue-collar positions which have thus far been ravaged by outsourcing and illegal immigration. That survey then warned that "unless a solution is found to sluggish real wages and rising inequality, there is a serious risk of a protectionist backlash" in America that would take us away from what they view to be the "biggest economic stimulus in world history."

More troubling is this: If it remains unchecked, this bifurcation of opportunities and advantages along class lines has the potential to bring a period of political unrest. Up to now, most American workers have simply been worried about their job prospects. Once they understand that there are (and were) clear alternatives to the policies that have dislocated careers and altered futures, they will demand more accountability from the leaders who have failed to protect their interests. The "Wal-Marting" of cheap consumer products brought in from places like China, and the easy money from low-interest home mortgage refinancing, have softened the blows in recent years. But the balance point is tipping in both cases, away from the consumer and away from our national interest.

The politics of the Karl Rove era were designed to distract and divide the very people who would ordinarily be rebelling against the deterioration of their way of life. Working Americans have been repeatedly seduced at the polls by emotional issues such as the predictable mantra of "God, guns, gays, abortion and the flag" while their way of life shifted ineluctably beneath their feet. But this election cycle showed an electorate that intends to hold government leaders accountable for allowing every American a fair opportunity to succeed.

With this new Congress, and heading into an important presidential election in 2008, American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade. Nothing is more important for the health of our society than to grant them the validity of their concerns. And our government leaders have no greater duty than to confront the growing unfairness in this age of globalization.

RMI's Founder Amory Lovins Takes on Nuke Industry Astroturfer Patrick Moore

The photo of Amory Lovins appeared in an article in Grist, with the credit Rocky Mountain Institute, of which he is the co-founder and CEO.

*

I wrote in "More about Nuclear Astroturf" May 15, 2006 about Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace member who now shills for the nuclear energy industry. Moore co-leads its trade group's astroturf group, the Nuclear Energy Istitute's Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, along with Christie Todd Whitman.

Now, I'm happy to report that physicist Amory Lovins (bio), Jimmy Carter's energy secretary and McArthur award winner, has taken on Moore's questionable statisitics in yesterday's Toronto Star in Lovins Q&A by energy reporter Tyler Hamilton. Hamilton asked specifically about Moore's position that large-scale adoption of new nuclear technology is the only way to avert global warming.

I think he's not well informed about energy alternatives and I hope he will become so. I've spoken with Patrick at some length, for example, about variability of wind. He thinks it's a serious problem, and he didn't realize there's a lot of empirical and analytic evidence that shows it's not a problem.

There's a more fundamental issue here, though, and that's about economics. Nuclear plants directly emit no carbon dioxide, although they have some inherent in their construction and operations from other parts of the fuel cycle. I'm prepared to ignore that indirect CO2 emission. However, because I agree with Patrick that climate is a very serious problem, I think we need the most solution per dollar and the most solution per year. If you go to the December 2005 issue of Nuclear Engineering International, you'll find a paper called `Mighty Mice' that summarizes an economic analysis. What that analysis shows from the best empirical data available last year, is if you spent 10 cents (U.S.) to make and deliver a new nuclear kilowatt-hour — notice I said deliver, so that's at your meter — you can displace 1 kilowatt-hour of coal power. That's what Patrick is talking about. And it might seem like a good idea until you look at the competitors.

If you spend the same 10 cents (U.S.) instead on micropower or efficient use, you get two to 10 times as much coal displacement for the same money, because those options are cheaper — you get more per dollar. They're also faster, so you get more carbon displacement, coal displacement, per year.

Lovins explained the cost of nuclear energy:

The balance is tilted somewhat against nuclear lately because the promised low costs already have failed to materialize for next-generation light water reactors. The Finnish plant is a good example. About a year into construction they're already a year behind schedule and getting more so. They're in serious trouble with the safety regulator, and it's already destroyed AREVA's and Siemen's nuclear profits for the year. They've made already a 1.5 to 2 billion (Euro) allowance on their books for cost overruns, and I don't think that's anywhere near the end of the story. It's driven them right into the ditch. Just look at the recent press release on their quarterly earnings. I suspect that if Canada tries to build another reactor it will have a similar experience.

Lovins added,

If you believe as I do that climate change is a serious problem, then make sure you buy the resources that will save the most carbon per dollar per year, because otherwise you're making things worse. If you buy a nuclear plant instead of cheaper efficiency and micropower, you're getting less solution per dollar, less solution per year, and therefore reducing and retarding climate protection.

*

There's lots of other good information in the article. Lovins compared nuclear energy with conservation:

Nuclear costs too much and it has excessive financial risk. In no new nuclear project around the world is there a penny of private capital at risk. Contrast that with how the competitors are doing. The first and the cheapest one is efficient use of electricity. ...Contrary to the common supposition of diminishing returns and an exhaustible efficiency resource, the actual potential savings keep getting bigger and cheaper, because the technology is continuing to improve faster than we use it. The low-hanging fruit is still mushing up around our ankles but the tree keep growing more fruit and dropping it on our heads. What part of this don't we understand?

About three-quarters of all electricity we use in North America can be saved cheaper than just running a coal or nuclear plant and delivering its power, even if the capital costs of the plant were zero. It's interesting that California, the single biggest market in North America, has held it's per capita use of electricity flat for 30 years. And some places... like Vermont, are actually sending that number downwards, because they're saving electricity faster than their economy and population are growing. But we don't have comprehensive, accurate measurements of how much electricity is being saved. We just know it's a big number, and we know it's still a tiny fraction of how much efficiency is available and worth buying.

Then he talked about other, less risky competitors to nuclear.

The two competing sources that are easy to measure are collectively called micropower — not central plants, but more distributed capacity that's at or near the customers, or at least comes in more decentralized, diversified form. Micropower is providing now between one-sixth and over half of all electricity in 13 industrial countries. Denmark is the leader with about 53 per cent last year. You'll notice this does not count big hydro. If we don't count any hydro above 10 megawatts, then the added micropower capacity last year in the world was 41 gigawatts, compared to 3.7 gigawatts for all kinds of nuclear — none of which was a CANDU (technology)."

There are two kinds of micropower. One is co-gen and combined heat and power. That was about two-thirds of the new capacity and three-quarters of the new electricity last year. The rest was distributed or decentralized renewables, which was a $38 billion U.S. global market last year for selling equipment. That's wind, solar, geothermal, small hydro and biomass. So the overall numbers are quite impressive. Micropower surpassed nuclear power in worldwide installed capacity in 2002, and surpassed nuclear in electricity generated per year just in the last few months. But more interesting is market share — micropower provided a sixth of the world's total electricity last year. Micropower last year provided 32 per cent of the world's new electricity and 16 per cent of the world's total electricity; nuclear last year provided respectively 8 per cent of the new and 16 per cent of the total. In terms of electricity generated, micropower last year had four times nuclear's market share, and it added 11-times as much capacity as nuclear, or 8 times as much if you don't count standby and peaking units, but you should.

Lovins also talked about the capacity of renewables, such as wind and solar, and their capacity to replace the baseload power that comes from nuclear plants.

The variability of sun, wind and so on, turns out to be a non-problem if you do several sensible things. One is to diversify your renewables by technology, so that weather conditions bad for one kind are good for another. Second, you diversify by site so they're not all subject to the same weather pattern at the same time because they're in the same place. Third, you use standard weather forecasting techniques to forecast wind, sun and rain, and of course hydro operators do this right now. Fourth, you integrate all your resources — supply side and demand side — so for example, in the Pacific Northwest, where we're rich in hydropower, for 0.6 cents (U.S.) per kilowatt-hour the Bonneville Power Administration will firm your wind power. That is, they combine your wind with their hydro and open and close the valves on the dams so that whenever the wind is not blowing and you need the power you can dispatch hydro instead on a firm contractual basis.

In places that don't have surplus or adequate hydropower, it's becoming equally straightforward and much cheaper to back up your wind from a virtual peaker drawn from load management. Like, for example, turning off your water heater for 15 minutes — you won't even know it's happening. That's done automatically, and the power that was going to go into your water heat instead backs up the wind. You can do other kinds of storage as well. For less than 1 cent (U.S.) per kilowatt-hour, you can store bulk electricity as compressed air in a salt cavern. Typically it's much cheaper to manage loads on the demand side than to store electricity on the supply side. But in a grid that is hydro rich, and with an end-use structure that is as inefficient and has as much space in water heating with electricity as you have in Ontario, it's really very straightforward to have large amounts of variable renewables without in any way comprising reliability. It's also worth bearing in mind that although wind and photovoltaics are quite variable, geothermal, biomass and small hydro are not. So you can't even apply this issue to a lot of renewables that are big in the marketplace.

Hamilton asked if Ontario could realistically phase out both coal and nuclear plants in the next twenty years. Lovins replied,

I think it would require a much more aggressive commitment to doing the cheapest things first, especially for modern, end-use efficiency. For example, I'm talking to you from a building at 2,200 metres in the Rockies where it can go to minus 44 C -- you can get frost on any day of the year and you can get 39 days of continuous mid-winter cloud. In the middle of my house I've harvested so far 28 banana crops with no heating system, and it's cheaper to build that way because super insulation and super windows and air-to-air heat exchangers add less to the construction cost than what you take off the construction cost by not needing a heating system. So the house was about $1,100 (U.S.) cheaper to build with good comfort but no heating system.

Hamilton asked about the reliance of micropower, such as co-generation, on natural gas and its effect on CO2 emissions. Lovins explained,

Two-thirds of the co-gen in the world is gas-fired, but both because gas is less carbon-intensive than coal and because you're displacing a separate power plant and boiler or furnace with one unit that's much more efficient overall, you save carbon. Altogether counting the gas-fired and all the other co-gen around the world, you're saving at least half the carbon compared to what it replaces. So yes, I'm making proper allowance for the carbon that does come out of the co-gen and counting the measured cost of the renewables. In fact, I'm counting a wind cost that is over twice as big as the cheapest wind farms built lately. And I'm counting all the cost of making the renewables, like wind, fully dispatchable. So it's an entirely apples-to-apples comparison, and I've done it on a consistent accounting basis but made sure I used assumptions that were favourable to nuclear and other central stations.

Hamilton asked about whether micropower could power plug-in hybrids or all-electric cars.

[I]n the right circumstances it can be an attractive option. The amount of electricity required is quite modest, and it would be at night so wouldn't add to peak capacity requirements. And the electricity needed is a very small fraction of what can be saved running existing thermal stations. So for relatively short trips, shaving into medium trips as batteries get cheaper, this could be an attractive option. It will, of course, have to compete with efficient fuelled hybrid, including biofueled hybrids, and ultra-lights that further double efficiency.

Lovins general philophy is an end to corporate welfare.

Let electricity and energy compete fairly at honest prices regardless of which kind they are — savings or production — or what technology they use, or how big they are, or where they are, or who owns them. If we did that, we certainly wouldn't order more nuclear plants and we'd be phasing out the existing coal and nuclear plants because it's cheaper not to run them than to run them.

He would also align the interest of providers and consumers as an incentive for conservation.

I would make sure that the distributors of electricity and gas...are rewarded for cutting your bill, not for selling you more energy. This could be done by well-understood techniques that decouple profits from sales volumes so the distributors are not rewarded for selling more, nor penalized for selling less. Then I would let them keep as extra profit part of what they save the customer, so that the providers' and customers' interests are fully aligned. The lack of this well-understood reform is the biggest obstacle to using electricity in a way that saves money.

Lovins concluded by talking about the current investments trends in the private sector:

I find it very instructive that essentially all of the efficiency in micropower being bought in the world is financed by private risk capital, but I can't find a single new nuclear project on earth that has a penny of private capital at risk. So what does this tell us? I think it tells us that investors perceive higher cost and higher financial risk in nuclear. They find that unacceptable, and they're buying the other stuff instead. The clean energy space, worldwide, is getting $63 billion (U.S.) of investment this year. Why is that? Why is nuclear struggling to find single orders, scouring the earth for them, and they're all ordered by central planners and largely supported by the public purse; whereas vendors of the competing technologies, which already have four times the energy market share and 11 times the capacity, they are finding it hard to keep up with the explosive growth in their businesses.

In August 2005 the U.S. passed a new law offering on top of the existing nuclear subsidies, further subsidies of around 4 or 5 cents a kilowatt-hour, which equals the entire capital cost of the next six units to be ordered, if any. What was the market's response to this? Well, Standard & Poor's promptly put out two reports saying that even this massive intervention would not materially improve the credit ratings of the builders. In other words, even paying for the whole construction of the plant has the same effect of defibrillating a corpse — it will jump but it won't revive. This technology has died with an incurable attack of market forces. I'm sorry — it was done with good intentions, a lot of talented people devoted their careers to it, but like Betamax it lost out in a competitive market. Other better, cheaper stuff got to the customers first. By now, probably less than half of the world market in new electrical services is being met by any kind of central thermal power station. So let's wake up, look at the data, and make sure we count both halves of the market; not just competition between traditional central thermal plants, but also how they are being rapidly displaced by faster, cheaper and more benign alternatives.

If the public authority is doing the opposite of what the private market is doing, should that ring your alarm bells? It sure does for me.... [Is] electricity...such an immature sector that central planners' choices should be preferred to those of private capitalists.... The word `risky' is a tip-off that the people who would benefit from the choice proposed want to put their hand in your pocket again, and don't want you to notice that the private market is choosing better buys than what your local central planners are proposing.

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Yesterday, "Harpers Targets Obama," I wrote about the candidate's take on ethanol. Lovin's Rocky Mountain Institute makes its Winning the Oil End Game available free for download. http://tr.im/RMI_Oil_End_Game. Here is the summary of its strategy from the abstract:

Our strategy integrates four technological ways to displace oil: using oil twice as efficiently, then substituting biofuels, saved natural gas, and, optionally, hydrogen. Fully applying today’s best efficiency technologies in a doubled-GDP 2025 economy would save half the projected U.S. oil use at half its forecast cost per barrel. Non-oil substitutes for the remaining consumption would also cost less than oil.

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There is an extensive section in the book on substituting biofuels and biomaterials for oil.

RMI also maintains a blog, on which I found a link to "My Big Biofuels Bet," by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla in the October 2006 Wired. Khosla has invested in a Nebraska blant that uses cow manure to produce the electricity needed to produce ethanol and to fertilize the cornfields. This will improve the energy-balance of corn-based ethanol, reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the farm, and pave the way for further development of cellulosic ethanol, such as produced in Brazil, which has proved to be even more energy efficient. To keep up on alternative energy, another interesting site is the Alternative Energy Action Network cofounded by Arthur Smith. (email) ( Smith, by the way, disputes Lovins, but readers of the network side wiht Lovins.)