With luck the migration will be seamless and no one will even notice except that pages should load faster and I will be able to provide streaming video and audio when the need arises.

Little Trinity Fett joined us about 5:30 today but her first two hours were a bit rough. A great team of nurses at McKenzie Willamette Hospital worked to help the baby, stunned after a tough birth to keep her oxygenated until she could breathe on her own.

Great staff and we now have a beautiful baby and happy mom.

All this time I thought research and development and prototype design was the hardest part (and believe me it isn’t easy), but the procedural side of launching a new product is pretty damned intense. The brain power required from conceptualization to production is not only extensive but the diversity required puts the old ‘thinking ten moves ahead’ process in a chess game to shame.

There are so many facets to consider and I am so grateful to have backers, partners, friends, lawyers, accountants and employees capable of contributing so much to this effort. This is both an exhilarating time and a critically demanding time but I love what I am doing and look forward to each 16 hour day.

These stills will be animated into some educational videos describing how the LIM works and placed on the Rogue River Wind website that is also being professionally designed.

The above is fun but there is also the nuts and bolts paperwork side, shareholder agreements, manufacturing contracts, procedural manuals and regulatory issues. Tracking regulatory changes and legislative issues like investor owned utility PG&E trying to make competition illegal.

The state wants to encourage power-company competition, green energy and lower rates with the Community Choice law.

So, how does Pacific Gas & Electric Co. respond to these threats to its monopoly?

The utility giant bankrolls a deceptive June ballot initiative that seeks to rewrite California’s constitution, kill upstarts in their tracks and block the expansion of municipal utility companies such as the one saving money for residents of Sacramento.

Considering that Congress hasn’t been able to accomplish much requiring a 60 vote filibuster proof majority rather than the old 51 votes, PG&E’s request to require two-thirds of voters to approve an alternative energy option, dooms renewable energy in California to painful and costly death. Grrrr!

Okay, back to business and the website will carry all our technical information soon and will provide an energy blog with updates just like the one above.

After at least seven different people suggested I read Joe Bageant’s, “Deer Hunting With Jesus. Dispatches from America’s Class War”I finally gave in and downloaded it to my Kindle several months ago where it stayed unread. This week, while working up in Portland I gave it a try hoping to put myself to sleep in the hotel room and though it didn’t put me to sleep and I haven’t finished it, I am really glad I started it.

One of the biggest quandaries besetting my fellow progressives and me is what mechanism exists that allows working class Americans to consistently vote against their own interests. More specifically, I have watched it happen here in the almost seven years I have lived in Coos County despite all my efforts to provide data, both empirical and statistical to my fellow working class citizens, proving the folly of this or that course of action. Willful, prideful ignorance I have proclaimed and speculated while the objects of my frustration accuse me of liberal elitism.

The World Forum (if you can call heavy handed moderation of non conservative ideas a forum) is rife with the kind of pro-big-business, anti-Islam, anti-environmentalists, anti-taxes, anti-entitlements, all welfare mothers drive Cadillacs and eat lobster. All union workers are lazy, overpaid and priced themselves out of the market and that’s why mill jobs left Coos County and went to China. People here really believe the unions are to blame for Weyerhauser baling out in the eighties while they ignore the multimillion dollar bonuses of the CEOs running major corporations. They think nothing of the fact the working poor pay higher taxes and their taxes subsidize jobs in foreign lands by virtue of offering ‘enterprise zone’ exemptions, property tax exemptions (remember NW Natural) and tax credits and federal grants all while white collar crooks like Ken Lay didn’t pay a penny in taxes.

Progressives like me stand in stunned amazement as the working class not only stand there and take it in the shorts but bloody hold ‘tea parties’ extolling the rights of the rich to stick it to the poor, and “oh, and by the way keep the goddam government out of my medicare!” I don’t read The World Forum anymore because it makes me sad and it makes me want to wrap myself in my liberal elitism like a thick blanket against the bitter cold and escape the hell out of here.

While Bageant doesn’t offer solutions (so far anyway) he makes a really good point

I don’t mean to reinforce the false neocon-generated label of Brie-eating, microbrew-sucking, Volvo-driving wimps. I’ve done all those things and more – except for the unaffordable Volvo. Besides, if liberal America has been somewhat too smug of late, my working-class brethren have been downright stupid to be so misled by the likes of Karl Rove, Pat Robertson and the phony piety of George W Bush.
The fact is that liberals and working people need each other to survive the growing economic calamity delivered to us by the regime that promised to “run this country like a business.” Sooner or later, despite the Democrats’ wins in the 2006 midterm elections, the left must genuinely connect face to face with Americans who do not necessarily share all of their priorities, and especially with Americans who have not been voting, if the left is ever to be relevant again to working America. If the left is not about class equity, what is it about?
With that in mind, I would like to take the reader someplace closer to the lives of America’s homegrown working folks than our media ever ventures, closer to those whose kids’ high school trip is to Iraq, who are two paydays away from homelessness yet in their pride cling to the notion that they are middle class Americans.

A year ago, New Year’s Eve, twenty two road workers were laid off from the Coos County Road Department in an undeniably underhanded way and I had the opportunity to sit in on the meeting where Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean effectively gave them all the ax. The event triggered an unusual but encouraging opportunity for me to get a snapshot of what I had previously viewed as the ‘other side’, even though I regard myself as working class, and while we will never see eye to eye on everything we found common ground. From that experience I believe we proved the highlighted point of Blageant’s graf above… we need each other and together we changed the political landscape of Coos County.

Blageant, a former redneck conservative turned liberal elite, (he even lived in Oregon for a time) returned to his hometown of Winchester, VA to live and his political transition coupled with the homecoming prompted him to write the book and I am glad he did because it has helped me understand what I am really up against.

Upcoming commissioners elections with two incumbents facing multiple opponents will mark just how much the landscape has changed but one thing I know we all have in common is a real sense of fairness. The thread that binds that fairness, I believe will be jobs. Not temporary jobs as created by building a pipeline or an LNG terminal but real long term family wage jobs that only can come from independence and sustainability in communities that have learned to shake hands and disagree but still work together and have a dialog.

Everyone, redneck and liberal alike should read this book!

Just in case you didn’t see it you can read it here

Mary Geddry, CEO of Coquille-based Rogue River Winds, said the ultra-efficient, low-profile, sturdy wind turbine with a built-in generator called the V-LIM, is generating interest.

She’s gearing up production. But don’t expect any local manufacturing jobs to spin out of it — at least not anytime soon.

“There just isn’t the infrastructure in Coos County at this time,” she said.

After attempts to get the V-LIM off the ground locally failed, Geddry relocated the project to Portland where a prototype was in the works, before she again relocated it to Cottage Grove where it was completed and may be manufactured.

She said some manufacturers in Alaska and the East Coast have expressed interest in producing it, as well.

Federal agencies including the DoD are under heavy pressure to meet 25% of their energy needs from renewable sources.

Driven by new government requirements that call for each military branch to purchase or generate at least 25 percent of the energy they use from renewable sources by 2025, the project is funded by a $4 million federal investment under the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill…

One factor causing concern with wind energy is the belief that traditional wind turbines interfere with radar, hence the interest in a low profile system like the V-LIM.

Hard to say but the ultralights are patrolling our waterways and bike routes. We should all feel safer knowing the Iron Cross is on the lookout.

Despite narrowly surviving a recall effort for what even The World referred to as the undeniably “stealthy” manner in which twenty two county road workers were laid off, Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean is still curtailing public access.

…Commissioner Kevin Stufflebean outlined his new vision for board meetings. First step was to rearrange the courtroom, secluding employees to one side of the room…Next, he addressed how employees interact with audience members and the board. From now on, all public questions will be directed to the board. Commissioners can either answer them or give the person at the podium permission to take the floor… Stufflebean reminded the 20 or so department heads in attendance they do not have to respond to inquiries by the media and can filter responses through the commissioners’ office.

Stufflebean has been the center of controversy relating to public transparency and public access for some time and a strong case has been made the county, with the apparent approval of County Counsel, Jaqui Haggerty, misuses the executive session. Prior to the meeting Bob Main refused to attend an executive session claiming he didn’t feel comfortable keeping the details from the public. Whitty had no qualms about holding the executive session.

Further, Stufflebean wants to further complicate public access, thereby impairing the public’s ability to participate in its own governance by taking over the video taping of BOC meetings raising many eyebrows

The following was sent to the Editor. It refers to an article printed on January 27th.
It is the same sentiment that I share along with other volunteers at Coos Community Media Center.

I was apalled to note Commissioner Stufflebean’s comment reported in Wednesday’s World, quoting a cost
to the county of $30-50,000 to record county meetings and place them on the web. Channel 14
currently records these meetings at a rate far lower than that. Channel 14’s subscription rates are
determined by hours of service rendered to the subscriber. Should the Commission continue to hold two
public meetings a month, that subscription cost would be around $7000 per year. For that sum, Channel 14
records 24 meetings, posts them on the web (where they remain for at least two months),
provides one week of “air” time (at least 12 repeats) on Charter Cable Channel 14 in the Bay Area and environs and on Comspan Channel 73 in Bandon, Coquille, Myrtle Point, and Reedsport, and provides a
DVD archive copy if requested. Additional meetings are charged at $90/ hour.
When the website went active in September of 2009, all the agencies who subscribe to Channel 14
were invited to place a link to it on their site. No government agency (or anybody else) has ever paid
a dime to have their meetings or programs posted to the web by Channel 14.
The care and maintenance of that website costs around $3000 per year.
During the county’s negotiations for the year’s contract with Channel 14, Mr. Stufflebean suggested
that the meeting content was the property of the county and that the commissioners should have
ownership of the sole DVD copy of each meeting. This smacks of censorship and all
citizens need to be wary of such attempts. Public meetings are public domain and can
be recorded by anyone and distributed at will.

Gordon Young
Channel 14

So to recap, Stufflebean still wants to control the message and apparently doesn’t trust his own department heads to answer questions about their own departments. (We can all understand why he wouldn’t want Colby talking) Aren’t the commissioners busy enough without vetting questions and answers about ongoing county business? Does he really feel they are incompetent or is he hoping to disguise his intentions and actions from the public as it appears he did with the road department layoffs?

Again, where is Whitty in all of this? Does she share Stufflebean’s apparent contempt for the department heads skills? Does she share his apparent contempt for the public’s right to know? It sure seems like it.