It’s the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

I can’t wait for 2009.

When the ball drops and the calendar changes at one minute after midnight this Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, I’ve got a feeling the world is going to take a dramatic turn in a better direction. I could be wrong, but I say change is good.

If what I’m thinking turns out to come true, 2009 may be the year the human species turns it all around and starts living up to a smarter, more positive destiny. Maybe we can begin to escape the yoke of ignorance and religious dogma once and for all.

For starters, there will be a massive celebration among intellectuals on January 20, the day when George W. Bush boards that presidential helicopter with his dog Barney and leaves the White House lawn forever to head back to that fake ranch in Crawford, Texas.

On the same day, of course, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. He will arrive in Washington, D.C., on a train, after riding a two-year campaign of “hope.” We will be drinking more than one toast to his victory on this New Year’s Eve, full of hope that he will be able to fulfill his promises.

The mainstream, corporate-news media will treat every proposal he offers with a fake skepticism, questioning whether he can really make a difference. But here in Webland, we are going to reserve judgment and keep hope alive.

In addition to coverage of the new world under Obama, we will be spending a good bit of time and space in 2009 celebrating a couple of noteworthy anniversaries.

You will not be able to escape coverage of these events, so you may as well learn about them here first, since few American news organizations have turned the page to these issues, yet.

For the next year, it will be hard to turn on the TV and not see something about the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The year 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his myth-shattering book, On the Origin of the Species.

A column in the British newspaper The Guardian has the first story we’ve seen on this yet, and even acknowledges a fact you won’t see reported by any American news organization, since the religious backlash to Darwin is still powerful after 150 years.

According to the British author, it is reported that Darwin “is one of the three great intellectuals of the 19th century who shaped modernity, along with Marx and Freud.”

That would be Karl Marx, the social theorist who is attacked by the ignorant on a daily basis in the U.S. because of his association with socialism, and Sigmund Freud, who pioneered explorations of the mind known as psychoanalysis.

All three of these men had a profound impact on the 20th century, as much for their influence on other thinkers as for the ideas they published themselves. That’s what the uneducated masses and the anti-intellectual news media don’t get.

Glynn Wilson

I captured the legendary blue mist of the Smoky Mountains on film one day in 2000. This is not just fog. It emanates from the pine trees there and is the reason the Cherokee people called it “the land of the blue mist.” European settlers came up with the translation “the Smoky Mountains.”

I spent a good deal of time in Tennessee in the late 1990s studying Darwin myself in a science-communications doctoral program, so you can bet we will be following these stories all year with a great deal of relish.

And speaking of Tennessee, the year 2009 will also mark the 75th anniversary of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which means, of course, that several camping trips to one of my favorite places on Earth will be in order this year.

According to one of the first stories out on this subject in the Scripps newspaper in Knoxville, the mountains have been home for my ancestors the Cherokee for centuries, and for researchers, “the park is an 810-square-mile laboratory containing more life forms than any other comparable location on Earth.”

Of course there is still a serious question as to whether my home state of Alabama is quite ready to join the rest of the country in this new world, since there are some who are still trying to fight the final battles of the Civil War here.

Even my old friend and the best columnist still working for an Alabama newspaper, Tommy Stevenson, just had to fall for it the other day by putting up a blog post suggesting that the Ten Commandments Judge, Roy Moore, may run for governor in 2010.

OK, we know a majority of the population of Alabama might very well vote for this religious zealot and authoritarian personality, long before they would vote for the black guy, Artur Davis. So if Alabama wants to continue being the laughing stock of the nation, go ahead people. Vote for the dumbass.

If you want to live in the past, keep reading those print editions of newspapers where they still think Karl Rove is a genius and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman was guilty.

Meanwhile, we’ll be spending more time this year in another Southern state, Tennessee, camping out in the Great Smoky Mountains and thinking about the accomplishments of Darwin and his predecessors in science. Come along for the ride if you’re interested. There will be amazing photography to go along with the stories, budget willing.

Here’s to hoping you have a happy New Year in 2009.

You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

A blog is like a vinyl disc in a way. It’s not all about news or creating something that sells. It’s a canvas for creating art.

As I took a break from the news during the holidays of 2008, I took the time to re-watch the documentary film about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, produced for the Sundance Channel.

My conclusion is there are important lessons in the story for any creative person searching for answers about life or art.

For one, corporate chain newspapers are dying because the business school managers who run them don’t get this. They have no imagination. And most of the people they’ve hired over the past 30 years, at least those who cling to their daily jobs, also lack imagination.

Tom Petty was not like most rock stars of the 1970s. He was a true artist and a poet who refused to compromise with commercial forces and pressures. In the end, that paid huge dividends, both artistically and commercially.

I’ve seen it time and again in my life. There are people who will try to tell you that you have to conform to be successful. You have to wear certain clothes, cut your hair a certain way, write a set type of story, cut a pop record. And they will say, whatever you do, don’t do anything to piss anybody off.

Just yesterday, my part-time copy editor tried to convince me that I would lose readers by using the word “fuck” on this Website.

Once again, I tried to explain that this is not a “family newspaper.” I mean, watch cable TV. Read a New York magazine. Fuck is the favorite word of Dennis Miller, the conservative Republican comic from Saturday Night Live.

Publishing on the Web Press is where freedom rings true. That’s what draws an audience, the wide open freedom of it all. It may offend the occasional corporate advertiser or Christian Republican, but so what? They are among a shrinking minority of the population now anyway.

As of this writing, for a case in point, Blue Cross is running blog ads targeting this site trying to sell insurance. We’re not sure why. We’ve not published a single post sympathetic to the insurance industry. Our editorial position and philosophy is all about supporting a single-payer national health care plan and the rights of juries to rule against corporations in law suits.

We believe for this country to have a chance at pulling out of this recession and continuing to be successful in this world, every citizen has a right to health care.

We don’t know if the new president, Barack Obama, will be able to pass such a plan in the coming months. But we would urge him not to back down when moderate members of Congress try to water down his plan.

Be a rebel. Fight for what you believe in. Surely that creates a hard road at times. But in the end, that’s what makes lasting rock stars, successful writers — and political heroes.

So take a lesson from Tom Petty. You don’t have to live like a refugee.

Wiki: Runnin’ Down a Dream

Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday a few weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the sixth part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

In case you missed Chapter 1: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ’79
Or Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print
Or Chapter 3: Chapter Three: The Crimson White
Chapter 4: The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette

Chapter Five: A Christmas Story

by Glynn Wilson

The weekend before Christmas in 1984, I made the rounds in the Baldwin County courthouse and ended up in the office of the new district attorney, David Whetstone, who had an open-door policy for the press. Actually, that’s an understatement. He was a media-hound like no politician or lawyer I encountered before, or since. He would prop his cowboy boots up on his desk (which he always wore even with his best Sunday suits and in court), light a cigarette (since you could still smoke in public buildings in those days) and regale me with the details of cases he was prosecuting. Mostly, though, we talked about national, state, and county politics.

On this day, however, his door was closed. And I could tell from the body language of his secretary that something was up. So I hung around for a while. While sitting in the outer office, I distinctly heard a woman crying behind the closed door. My reporter instincts told me big news was about to walk out that door, so I waited, and waited.

After a little while, a young woman came out of Whetstone’s office, still wiping her eyes. I asked him what was up. He hesitated at first, but our relationship was such that I finally broke him down and got him to talk. It seems the young Fairhope woman had married a man of Syrian descent, had his baby, and then divorced. The day before, the man had visited the woman at her apartment in Mobile and gained her trust long enough for her to go to the grocery store — and leave the child at home with him. When she got back, her ex-husband and her baby were gone.

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Glynn Wilson

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

To send an e-card and save a tree, go to SaveATreeCards.com.

My kind of Christmas, a science story: The Ten Days of Isaac Newton

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Michael Connell, the crucial techno-lynch pin in the theft of the 2004 election, and much more, is dead at the age of 45. His unnatural, suspicious death raises serious questions about the corruption of the American electoral process that now may never be answered.

Connell died Friday, December 19 when his Piper Saratoga plane crashed near his northern Ohio home. He was flying himself home from the College Park, Maryland airport. An accomplished pilot, flying in unremarkable weather, his death cuts off a critical path to much of what may never be known about how the 2004 election was shifted from John Kerry to George W. Bush in the wee hours of November 2. His plane crashed between two houses in an upscale neighborhood, one vacant, just 2.5 miles from the Akron-Canton airport.

A long-time, outspokenly loyal associate of the Bush family, Connell created the Bush-Cheney website for their 2000 presidential campaign. Connell may have played a role in various computer malfunctions that helped the GOP claim the presidency in 2000. As a chief IT consultant and operative for Karl Rove, Connell was a devout Catholic and the father of four children. In various interviews and depositions Connell cited his belief that abortion is murder as a primary motivating factor in his work for the Republican Party.

Connell recently wrote the following in his New Media Communications newsletter, regarding Barack Obama’s election: “In our 230 year history, our democracy has suffered worse fates. It’s just that none come to mind right now.” Connell wrote: “This is just a moment in time and this too shall pass. Enduring is the fact that 2000 years ago, a babe was born in Bethlehem. When our Lord God sent his only Son for our salvation,…In spite of the current economic and political conditions, salvation is eternal.”

Ohio Republican Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell hired Connell in 2004 to create a real-time computer data compilation for counting Ohio’s votes. Under Connell’s supervision, Ohio’s presidential vote count was transmitted to private, partisan computer servers owned by SmartTech housed in the basement of the Old Pioneer Bank building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell’s company, New Media Communications worked closely with SmartTech in building Republican and right-wing websites that were hosted on SmartTech servers. Among Connell’s clients were the Republican National Committee, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and gwb43.com, that housed at one point Karl Rove’s missing emails. Rove’s email files have since mysteriously disappeared despite repeated court-sanctioned attempts to review them.

In 2001, Michael Connell’s GovTech Solutions, LLC was selected to reorganize the Capitol Hill IT network, the only private-sector company to gain permission from HIR [House Information Resources] to place its server behind the firewall, he bragged.

At 12:20 am on the night of the 2004 election exit polls and initial vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner of Ohio’s presidential campaign. The Buckeye State’s 20 electoral votes would have given Kerry the presidency.

But from then until around 2am, the flow of information mysteriously ceased. After that, the vote count shifted dramatically to George W. Bush, ultimately giving him a second term. In the end there was a 6.7 percent diversion—in Bush’s favor—between highly professional, nationally funded exit polls and the final official vote count as tabulated by Blackwell and Connell.

Until his death Connell remained the IT supervisor for six Congressional committees. But on the day before the 2008 election, Connell was deposed by attorneys Cliff Arnebeck and Bob Fitrakis about his actions during the 2004 vote count, and his continued involvement in IT operations for the GOP, including his access to Rove’s e-mail files and the circumstances behind their disappearance.

Various threats have been repeatedly reported involving Connell and other IT experts close to the GOP. On July 24, 2008, Arnebeck emailed Attorney General Michael Mukasey, stating: “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell, a principal witness we have identified in our King-Lincoln case in federal court in Columbus, Ohio,….”

Connell’s death comes at a moment where election protection attorneys and others appeared to be closing in on critical irregularities and illegalities. In his pre-election deposition, Connell was generally evasive, but did disclose key piece of information that could prove damaging to Karl Rove and the GOP. Examining attorneys in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit, stemming from the 2004 election theft, were confident Connell had far more to tell.

There is widespread concern that this may be the reason he is now dead.

A brochure

Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman have co-authored four books on election protection, including AS GOES OHIO and HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICAS 2004 ELECTION…, available at FreePress.org, where this article first appeared. They are attorney and plaintiff in the King- Lincoln-Bronzeville civil rights lawsuit which subpoenaed and was deposing Michael Connell.

A Letter to the Editor
by Loretta Nall

What a shame that Alabama students will be the first to suffer the effects of the economic downturn when Alabama already has some of the lowest per-pupil spending in the nation. According to the most recent data that I can find, Alabama on average spends a little more than $8,000 per student per year. Yet we spend a minimum of $13,000 per year to lock up a non-violent resident for smoking pot.

Instead of making responsible adult cannabis consumers a burden on state tax payers by forcing taxpayers to pay for incarceration, why not regulate and tax marijuana like we do with alcohol and tobacco and use the taxes collected to make our education system better? After all, we use the taxes from the sale of alcohol to fund the Department of Human Resources. There’s a whole base of cannabis consumers in Alabama who would be more than happy to be taxed in exchange for a safe, regulated market.

Not only could we use the money raised in taxes for public education, we could also use it for drug-prevention education and to fund treatment for those addicted to harder drugs. It would be a superb deal all the way around.

It’s time to tap into the multi-billion dollar marijuana market in this country and start reaping the many benefits available as opposed to filling our prisons with people who don’t belong there at the expense of our children’s education.

Tax us, please.

Loretta Nall of Alexander City, Alabama, is the former Libertarian candidate for governor. You can read her writings at NallForGovernor.Blogspot.com.

Environmentalists filed a lawsuit today challenging the Alabama Department of Environmental Management’s approval of a permit for a proposed strip coal mine, which would discharge pollutants into the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River — less than a quarter mile from an intake for one of Birmingham’s major sources of drinking water.

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the lawsuit challenging the Shepherd Bend Mine permit in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County on behalf of Black Warrior Riverkeeper. The groups say ADEM violated state law and its own rules by issuing the wastewater discharge permit without notifying the public. Also in violation of state law, the permit lacks a plan to prevent or mitigate pollution, according to the suit.

Read the complaint in pdf format on this page.

“ADEM should have reviewed this permit very carefully, given that the drinking water of thousands of people is at risk. Instead, ADEM went badly astray in granting this permit without ensuring that an adequate plan to prevent pollution was in place,” said SELC attorney Catherine Wannamaker.

In December 2007, Shepherd Bend, LLC, applied to ADEM for a permit to discharge wastewater from the proposed 1,773-acre mine on Mulberry Fork in Walker County. Black Warrior Riverkeeper and others, including the Birmingham Water Works Board, submitted comments pointing out deficiencies in the application and their concerns about the impact to the city’s drinking water. The discharge would be just 800 feet upstream from the water works intake pipe, and would contain, among other toxins, iron, aluminum, manganese, chlorides, and sulfates. The water works board, noting that the proximity of the proposed mine to the drinking water source was, to its knowledge, “unprecedented,” said the cost to clean the water would likely increase.

ADEM issued the permit July 21 without notifying the public, despite continued inquiries by Riverkeeper and others. When recently asked by the news media about the failure to follow the required procedures, an ADEM spokesman said the agency did “what’s best for the state.”

“This was not a mix-up. The permit was deliberately issued without notifying the public of ADEM’s decision to allow more pollution in our drinking water supply,” said Nelson Brooke, Executive Director of Black Warrior Riverkeeper. “ADEM can’t be allowed to get away with this. With more than 90 coal mines in the Black Warrior watershed, we must have strong regulatory oversight to ensure the river stays healthy for both human use and aquatic habitat.”

“It’s inconceivable that the agency OK’d this permit, first without telling anyone, second without any plan to prevent pollution of the Black Warrior watershed, and third with very weak limits for toxic metals,” Wannamaker said.

The groups also filed on Monday an administrative appeal of the permit pursuant to state requirements for challenging environmental permits. The legal actions seek revocation of the permit and an injunction preventing any activities that purport to be authorized by the permit.

Guest Editorial
by Jenny Dorgan
Alabama Environmental Council

A recent report found that data indicates air surrounding Alabama schools contains high levels of toxic pollution.

In response to the report, officials have claimed that the supporting documentation is not sufficient, that the models used to obtain the data is not specific enough and that to really know what level of toxic air surrounds our schools, specific samples would need to be taken. Alabama Department of Environmental Management officials have tried to pass the buck regarding air toxics, claiming that the state “lacks the resources and toxicological and epidemiological expertise and therefore rely on EPA for setting standards.”

It’s also been stated that many local decision makers were not aware of problems and that resources aren’t available to obtain data necessary to quantify pollution levels we are exposing our children to. We’ve also seen the usual finger pointing away from industrial sources such as coal burning power plants and industrial sources. We agree that those sources can’t shoulder full responsibility for the state of our air, although they do produce a lion’s share of our air pollution. But that makes the issue even more critical.

If we combine the tons of toxic pollution being released from power plants, oil refineries, industrial manufacturing facilities, pollution from mobile sources, toxic waste sites, sewage treatment plants, landfills, lead in the soil and indoor air pollution — one begins to make the connection between the multiple sources of pollutants affecting our children and subsequent health problems facing the sons and daughters of Alabama.

I heard recently on the radio that, pound for pound, a child breathes in 2 times the amount of air with each breath as we do, while their susceptible lungs are still developing. And children of low income and minority communities suffer disproportionately from exposure to these dangerous pollutants. They are also the ones who are less likely to receive adequate health care to address related complications such as (increasingly common) childhood asthma.

Alabama has been in the news a lot lately. But not just for football. We recently ranked No. 1 in the United States for mercury pollution — a toxic pollutant that is a known neurotoxin and that studies suggest may be related to autism in our children. The Alabama Power Miller Plant in Jefferson County along the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River was ranked No. 1 in the nation for the amount of mercury it released in 2007.

Even if health effects from cumulative exposure to these pollutants were unlikely — shouldn’t we do the monitoring necessary to find out for sure, if our children are safe? Are we not obligated to the children of Alabama to protect them?

Because the simple fact of the matter is that it is unacceptable if pollution levels are in excess of what is healthy for our children. The only explanation could be that industries, state decision makers and regulatory agencies have chosen profits over the health of the people of Alabama.

Despite opposition from the public, Alabama’s air regulations were weakened just this past summer. Public advocacy groups, like the Alabama Environmental Council, are often forced go to trial, as we are right now with TVA, to try to defend our right to clean air. Alabama Power Company, Tennessee Valley Authority and others consistently oppose these efforts.

We need to use the resources that we have available to us to implement the kinds of health-based regulations and technologies that are going to make a difference for our children and our grandchildren. ADEM needs to work with appropriate statewide and regional agencies to adopt a multi-pollutant approach to addressing air pollution from the cumulative sources of pollution that are putting our children in harm’s way. We can’t continue to mortgage our children’s future by fouling the air they breathe.

Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday four weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the fourth part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

In case you missed Chapter 1: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ’79
Or Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print
Or Chapter 3: Chapter Three: The Crimson White

Rod Duren

My first mugshot in 1984

Chapter Four: The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette

by Glynn Wilson

In the final months of 1983, the Reagan administration authorized a series of military exercises in Honduras that some believed might lead to a full-blown armed conflict with Nicaragua, and then launched Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean Sea. Reagan had already declared his intention to run for reelection in 1984.

While watching these events unfold on the three television network-news channels then, and reading about them in the mass-circulation daily newspapers of the time — there was no Cable News Network yet, that would not come until 1985 — I packed my belongings into a U-Haul truck and headed south for Bay Minette. My fiancée and I found a small, reasonably priced apartment right in town, just about a mile from The Baldwin Times newspaper office on the courthouse circle in the county seat of Baldwin County, Alabama.

On the first day of January, 1984, an ominous year considering the book title of that name, I took my place in a newsroom as a full-time professional newspaper reporter. Looking back at the history now, I see it was the very same day when the Reagan Justice Department split the nation’s giant telephone monopoly ATnT into 24 independent Bell System units. We would all watch again 22 years later during the Christmas holiday season in 2006 as the Bush Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission put it all back together again, this time run by Southwest Bell out of Texas — Bush country. That will play a major role in the future of the Web Press, as we will see in a later chapter.

But there was no way to predict that in January 1984. I just remember being thrilled and fascinated on my first few days on the job, walking across the street from the newspaper office to explore a small-town courthouse. It is my contention that one of the most important things for young reporters to learn is how to cover the legal system, from arrest and arraignment through indictment and trial. I told these stories often in my nine years of university teaching, although I’m not sure how many of my students were impressed. Only big-time celebrity seems to matter now, in Bush’s America.

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