Here are a few Virginia (and national) news headlines, political and otherwise, for Wednesday, September 4. Also, check out the video of Al Sharpton commenting on peak “Obama Derangement” by right wingnuts. It’s truly astounding how the thought of a “black guy in the White House” drives them crazy, and also how they vehemently deny this is the case.

*Cantor backs military strike, Va. delegation split

*Kerry, Hagel lay out plan to hold Assad ‘accountable’

*Senators strike deal on resolution

*Cantor Weighs Tying Debt Ceiling to Renewable Fuel Bill: Taxes (The debt ceiling needs to be raised, cleanly, without tying it to anything. Period.)

*McAuliffe: Cuccinelli tax cut would de-fund schools

*Jackson keeps GOP establishment at arm’s length in Va. lieutenant governor campaign (Hahahaha: “The Chesapeake pastor has rebuffed the party’s suggestion that he tone down his rhetoric and steer clear of hot-button issues – much to the delight of his grassroots supporters, the frustration of some GOP loyalists and the surprise of almost no one.”)

*Schapiro: Obenshain standing between GOP and a blowout? (“Cuccinelli’s continuing ethics problems – and those that have Gov. Bob McDonnell in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors – force Obenshain to distance himself from his running mate. Further, they compel Obenshain to continue spelling out how he, as the state’s chief legal officer, would have prevented Cuccinelli and McDonnell from behaving badly in the first place.”)

*Trailing with women, Cuccinelli seeks softer image (Don’t be fooled: there is nothing “softer” about this rabid, right-wing ideologue.)

*Rep. Forbes opposes military action against Syria (You know if there were a Republican president, Forbes would be all for it.)

*Cuccinelli won’t defend school take-over law championed by McDonnell

*Va. panel hesitant on bills to ease up on child prostitutes, people forced into prostitution

*113,000 acres off Virginia coast up for auction for wind energy (“The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will auction nearly 113,000 federal acres off the coast of Virginia Wednesday to develop a commercial wind farm that experts say could one day supply enough clean energy to power about 700,000 homes.”)

*Wonderful Wednesday, fabulous Friday, and not bad otherwise

*Nationals hold off Phillies, 9-6, in mistake-filled contest (A win’s a win, I guess.)

(More attention needs to be paid to Virginia’s powerful, but little-known, State Corporation Commission. It’s a major problem. – promoted by lowkell)

The State Corporation Commission has approved Dominion Virginia Power’s proposal for a new gas-fired power plant in Brunswick County, rejecting arguments from the Sierra Club and others that ratepayers would be better served by a combination of low-cost energy efficiency and price-stable renewable energy.

The decision in the case (PUE-2012-00128) reflects the same discouraging themes we have seen from our regulators before: a tendency to believe everything Dominion tells them, coupled with an absolute refusal to acknowledge the climate crisis bearing down upon us and the changes in the energy market that make fossil fuels increasingly risky.

As the SCC put it in its order, “The relevant statutes… do not require the Commission to find any particular level of environmental benefit, or an absence of environmental harm, as a precondition to approval.” (Note to legislators: How about fixing that?)

The SCC’s state of denial is not just about the future. Since at least the 1980s, Dominion has consistently overestimated future demand growth.

A little skepticism might be in order when Dominion projects the same level of demand growth that keeps not materializing. But the SCC is not skeptical. Its order declares Dominion’s load forecasts “reasonable.”

Evidently one can be both reasonable and wrong. Demonstrating this in real time, only a few days after the SCC issued its order this month, Dominion CEO Tom Farrell had to explain to shareholders why electricity demand has not grown this year in line with company predictions.

Amnesia was also in evidence at the public hearing on the case, where proponents of the gas plant – everyone from Dominion employees to the SCC staff – kept insisting on the environmental advantages of natural gas.

But congratulating each other that at least it wasn’t a coal plant seemed odd to those of us who recall the fanfare surrounding the opening of Dominion’s newest Virginia coal plant, all of one year ago.

My, how quickly things change. No one is proposing to build coal plants any more. Now that natural gas costs half what coal does, people have suddenly noticed that burning dirty black rocks to make electricity is a terrible idea. “Look at all that pollution!” they say in wonderment. “How last century!”

But in this century, natural gas is already wearing out its welcome – and not just among unhappy landowners who say fracking has spoiled their drinking water. Scientists measuring methane escaping from extraction wells warn that high levels of “fugitive emissions” may make natural gas a major contributor to climate change.

The SCC takes no notice of climate change, but it ought to consider that others do, presenting a financial risk for any fossil fuel plant. A national plan to reduce carbon emissions could make gas very expensive.

Yet building the Brunswick plant commits Dominion ratepayers to paying whatever the market price is for natural gas for the next three decades. Worse, it’s effectively a baseload plant, designed to burn gas 24/7; it can’t ramp up and down quickly to supply power when needed on a short-term basis, such as to fill in around the power supplied by wind and solar.

Analysts predict wind and solar will increasingly become the first choice for new generation, as these renewables get steadily cheaper and offer long-term price stability as well as environmental benefits.

Indeed, wind turbines beat out natural gas plants as the largest source of new generating capacity nationwide last year. Companies are designing natural gas turbines now that integrate with renewable energy, allowing utilities to hedge their bets on gas.

Well before the end of its 36-year life, a 24/7 baseload plant like Brunswick may be reduced to a giant concrete paperweight.

It would seem wise to hold off on building this gas plant, and we could. Investments in energy efficiency would more than meet the demand the Brunswick plant is supposed to serve, at a lower cost.

The SCC brushed aside this argument, pointing out that it consistently swats down good energy efficiency proposals – and intends to continue doing it.

So Virginia ratepayers, prepare yourselves: You’ve already been stuck with one of the last coal plants to be built in America. Now get ready for 30 years of paying for a natural gas plant. As for your dreams of wind and solar, keep dreaming.

Originally published in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot on August 29, 2013.

(P.S. He should have been disbarred as well! – promoted by lowkell)

More excellent news on former UVA Professor Michael Mann’s defamation lawsuit against the “conservative” (aka, “climate science denying”) rag “national Review,” as well as other climate science deniers who viciously attacked Mann (e.g., Rand Simberg of the fossil-fuel-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute disgustingly referred to Mann as “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” because he “molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science”). Most of us missed it because of the Labor Day holiday, but “[t]his past Friday, a DC Superior Court judge handed down yet another decision that climate scientist Michael Mann’s defamation case against the conservative magazine National Review should move forward.” Check it out.

The Court finds that there is sufficient evidence in the record to demonstrate that Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits. As the Court stated in its previous Order, NR Defendants’ reference to Plaintiff as “the man behind the fraudulent climate change ‘hockey stick’ graph” was essentially an allegation of fraud by Plaintiff. Plaintiff is a member of the scholarly academy and it is obvious that allegations of fraud could lead to the demise of his profession and tarnish his character and standing in the community.

[…]

Accusations of fraud, especially where such accusations are made frequently through the continuous usage of such words as “whitewashed,” “intellectually bogus,” “ringmaster of the tree-ring circus,” and “cover-up” amount to more than rhetorical hyperbole. In addition, whether the NR Defendants induced the EPA to investigate Plaintiff is not critical to this analysis because it is not disputed that the NR Defendants knew that the EPA and several reputable bodies had investigated Plaintiff and concluded that his work was sound. The evidence before the Court indicates the likelihood that “actual malice” is present in the NR Defendants’ conduct.

Of course, that is all just as true about Virginia’s Witch Hunter in Chief, aka our Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, who was clearly filled with “actual malice” in his persecution of Mann. For instance, Cuccinelli claimed that that “Mann knowingly included ‘false information, unsubstantiated claims and/or were otherwise misleading’ in his publications.” If that’s not slander, libel, and/or defamation, I’m not sure what would qualify as such. So why isn’t Cuccinelli being sued along with National Review, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, etc? I don’t know, but I’m going to check into it, because I see absolutely no reason why he doesn’t richly deserve to be facing major, adverse consequences for his outrageous actions.

I’ve argued that the spirit that drives today’s Republican Party makes a fight over everything. Its choice of war over cooperation and compromise could hardly be clearer.  I’ve asserted — throughout this series, of which this is the 8th entry — that the spirit behind today’s Republican Party is a re-emergence of the spirit that drove the South in the era leading up to the Civil War, and that this persistence of the same spirit is revealed by the significant overlap in the character and tendencies of the two forces.

Does that overlap include the tendency to choose war, I have asked?  With respect to the political process during the 1850s, I have argued in the previous posting, the answer is yes.  It was — predominantly — the South that pressed the political battle and generated the dynamic that polarized the nation so intensely that continuation of the Union came into question.

Now the question is: at the climax of this polarizing process, when the states of the South made the decision to secede and form a separate nation, did that decision in itself represent a choice for war?

It is only recently, after much study, struggle and consultation, that the answer has become clear to me: Yes, in the drama over secession, as in the process leading up to it, the conduct of the South shows that same spirit that prefers war and conflict over peace and cooperation.

Here’s the path that leads me to that conclusion. First, it should be noted that secession was not an explicit declaration of war.  

Second, there’s the question:  When the Southerners decided to secede, did they realize the outcome of their decision would be or might be war?  Some of the leaders of the secession movement may not have expected war to result, and many may have hoped to avoid it, but – I gather from experts with whom I’ve consulted – they understood that their actions might trigger war. But this willingness to run the risk of war is only a minor part of the indictment.

Third, there’s the question of whether, by seceding, the Southerners were acting as outlaws.  Were they were so clearly violating the social contract that by their outlawry they were inviting violence the way, say, Bonnie and Clyde did by robbing banks.  Abraham Lincoln believed so, for he was clear in his mind that the Constitution gave the states no right to break up the Union.  Having taken the oath of office to defend the Constitution, Lincoln felt obliged as president to treat the secession of the South as an illegal rebellion it was his duty to put down.

(Said Lincoln in his First Inaugural Address: “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.'”)

But I will not convict on that basis.  While Lincoln regarded secession as unconstitutional, the Southerners had come to a consensus among themselves, over thirty years or so, that secession was their right within the Constitution.  The Constitution itself is mute on this point, and whereas I gather that most constitutional scholars would side with Lincoln, the issue was at least debatable, one on which reasonable people could disagree.  For that reason, it seems to me that secession cannot be regarded as a clear form of outlawry.

However, there’s another way of looking at how the South preceded: secession itself might or might not be outlawry, but the manner of the South’s seceding was not only high-handed and provocative, but clearly illegal.  Their conduct manifests a spirit so insistent on achieving its own will that it refused to abide by the order by which the Southerners, like other Americans, had bound themselves.

Regardless of who might be judged to be right on the constitutionality of secession– the Southerners or President Lincoln-there was no equality of legal status in the American constitutional system between the secessionists and the president.  The president is empowered by the Constitution to be the executor of the laws and the defender of the Constitution.  Part of his job is to decide what that means, and that responsibility gives him a status far beyond that of citizens generally.  

When citizens believe the president wrong, they have two constitutional recourses.  1) They can work to replace him in the next election.  Or, 2) they can take the matter to the Supreme Court, which is the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution allows and forbids. But until the Court gets the last word, the President gets the first word on what will be allowed and what forbidden.  

So when President Lincoln — duly elected, fair and square, by the electoral process laid out by the Constitution — tells the secessionists that they have no such right, the Constitution does not allow them to defend their contrary opinion by force of arms.

The secessionists were not willing to wait until 1864 to try to get a government either more to their liking, or amenable to their departure.  (They were not even willing to wait, as some of the saner voices in the South proposed, to see whether Lincoln as president would treat them ill, as they expected, or well.)  Nor did the secessionists take their arguments about their right to secede to the Supreme Court for judgment by the authority established by the Constitution to decide such questions.

Instead, they asserted their right on their own unauthorized say-so, and chose to wage war against the forces commanded by the constitutionally elected president.

That in itself is lawlessness.  Right or not about secession, the Southerners arrogated to themselves a power clearly in violation of the Constitution.  

I’ve heard Southerners refer to the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression.”  That’s not what it was.  Until someone in authority said otherwise about the constitutionality of secession, President Lincoln’s actions — given his interpretation of the Constitution — were entirely within his rights and power.  His oath of office, indeed, required him to use force, if necessary, against any citizens who would arrogate to themselves the power to overthrow the system by which the Constitution arranged for disagreements of that sort to be resolved.

The Southern attitude — “It must be our way, and we will fight rather than accede to a duly established authority that opposes us”– shows a spirit of war.  (It is also the same spirit that today’s Republicans have shown when, through the elections of 2006 and 2008, the American people gave the Republicans’ opponents the power and responsibility to govern.)

So Lincoln was not the aggressor in using force to counter the secession.  Whether he made the right choice to do so, however, is not clear to me. This questioning of Lincoln’s basic decision to use force to hold the Union together will be the subject of the next installment.