Jay Dee's Post

By Jeff Biggers Forget the dogs days of August. Amid the ruins of the clean energy and climate change legislation, one statewide election has emerged as a bellwether for the green and climate justice movements: Ken Hechler’s campaign against Gov. Joe Manchin to fill the late US Sen. Robert Byrd’s pivotal seat in Congress. From [...]

Sarah Minear By a Unanimous vote of the TWV Editorial Board, 14-term Congressman Alan B. Mollohan is the clear choice as the Democratic candidate based on a solid career of political service that has earned him a number of critical leadership positions in Congress — most notably that of the third ranking member of the [...]

by Ken Ward Jr. The Gazette has several tributes to the Upper Big Branch miners online and in print. Here’s a link, and here’s the text from one tribute that appeared in our print edition today. via Upper Big Branch Disaster: More on the miners lost « Coal Tattoo.

Judge Who Vacationed With Massey CEO Now Running For Congress by Zachary Roth These aren’t the best of days for Don Blankenship, whose systematic downplaying of safety concerns as the CEO of Massey Energy helped lead to last week’s deadly mining disaster, and got him named the “seventh scariest person in America.” But by next [...]

by Ken Ward Jr. Well, the race to stand up for coal continues at the West Virginia Legislature … Yesterday, the Coal Association lobbyists gave their pitch about mining permits to the special committee set up by House Speaker Rick Thompson. There are reports out from Larry Messina at The Associated Press and Ry Rivard [...]

by Ken Ward Jr. You’ve got to hand it to the Daily Mail’s George Hohmann for organizing a media protest of Gov. Joe Manchin’s closed-door meeting about the future of the South Charleston Technology Park. Gov. Manchin talks a lot about how he wants his administration to be open, but more and more — when [...]

by Andrew Clevenger Earlier this week, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee released state-by-state snapshots of the economy. For West Virginia, it’s a classic good news, bad news situation. First, the bad: In December 2009, unemployment reached 9.1 percent, a big jump from December 2008 (4.5 percent) and December 2007 (4.3 percent). The 2009 percentage [...]

by Ken Ward Jr. Massey Energy President Don Blankenship and others in the coal industry are anxious to convince the public that the planet is cooling … you can understand why. If there’s no global warming, there’s no need to curb carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants. But a great new story by my [...]

Reacting to an amendment proposed by Sen. Jon Cornyn (R-Texas) during the Senate Finance Committee’s markup of health care reform legislation on Thursday, committee member Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) called his colleague a pawn of the health insurance industry. “This is a very, very important amendment and it’s a very, very bad amendment,” said Rockefeller. “If [...]

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) — West Virginia environmental officials now say a nearby coal mine may not be the only reason fish are dying in Dunkard Creek. Department of Environmental Protection officials say more dead fish have been found in the creek, but more than a mile upstream from Consol Energy’s Blacksville No. 2 mine. DEP [...]