Now here’s an interesting up and coming singer to watch…

Highlights of Nikki Yanofsky’s performance at Le Theatre du Nouveau Monde during the 2008 Montreal International Jazz Festival.

NBC’s Brian Williams did a piece on her for the New Year’s Eve “Nightly News.” What a voice — and a look! She will be a super star…

Nikki Yanofsky, a young jazz-pop singer from Montreal, Quebec, Canada. was born on February 8, 1994.

She’s working on a record of original compositions now. Can’t wait to hear it. I’ll buy it on iTunes…

Rick Dove

Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen, The Locust Fork News-Journal Person of the Year

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

When a lone writer sits in front of the glow of a computer screen in the early morning hours when most of the world is asleep trying to figure out a way to articulate what matters, that is to say, to paint a picture of the forest while everybody else seems to be counting the trees, the easiest thing to do is Google all the year-end stories written by everybody else.

Every year about this time, the Associated Press has its top stories of the year dispatch, and this year they even included the Facebook vote. According to AP and the members of Facebook, the state of the economy and the inauguration of the first black president in U.S. history shared top honors.

But where would the mainstream media be without Michael Jackson? So his death placed third, followed by the so-called “Miracle on the Hudson,” the Swine flu epidemic and the monumental fight in Congress over trying to reform the American health care system.

Then there was also the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, the woes of the U.S. automobile industry, the upheavel in Iran, and last but not least, Sonya Sotomayor’s nomination and confirmation to join the nation’s highest court.

So who does Time magazine name as its 2009 person of the year? A nerdy guy most Americans have never heard of, Ben Bernanke, the boring head of the Federal Reserve. Why?

“He just happens to be the most powerful nerd on the planet,” Time proclaims. “He is the most important player guiding the world’s most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression…”

True, sort of, although the president should get some credit for that. All of which just goes to show that nothing matters more in capitalist America than money, and as far as the media goes, it is clearly not about readers anymore. People don’t matter. Advertisers do.

Of course no list of important stories from this year would be complete without mention of the sexual transgressions of golfer Tiger Woods, who draws more people and money than any politician or athlete ever. In spite of virtually dropping out of the game after being chased down and beaten with a golf club in Florida by his scorned wife, he was still named professional golf’s 2009 Player of the Year. Go figure.

On the local scene, and just to prove that some news outlets take seriously this idea that all news is local, when the scaled back staff at the Birmingham News is tasked with coming up with a year-end list, a fire at a Woodlawn church tops the list. Please…

Here at the global and local Locust Fork News-Journal, however, when we think of the most important stories and people of the year, there really is no contest. We have no doubt if given the opportunity to vote on it, the people of Alabama would agree with us on this at a rate of nearly 100 percent.

The University of Alabama’s first Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram is without a doubt the person of the year around here, followed closely by Saint Nick Saban, who we think should easily win Coach of the Year honors.

But of course that’s just football, and football is just a game. So there must be other stories that really matter and other people who deserve some kudos, right?

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Guest Column
by Pat Byington

There is a wonderful chapter in Aldo Leopold’s book “A Sand County Almanac” called “Good Oak,” a story about the life of a fallen oak tree. Looking down at the great big stump on his farm, Leopold counts 80 growth rings — 80 years of wood-making before the tree fell from a bolt of lightning. Mourning the loss of the tree, Leopold begins to use his saw to turn the tree into a cord of firewood.

For the next seven pages, Leopold reflects, with every bite of the saw’s blades into the rings of the tree, the Wisconsin natural history that the great tree experienced. Extinction of the passenger pigeon, dust bowls, floods, fires, the creation of Arbor Day and the local Forestry Commission. With each ring, each year of woodmaking, Leopold describes the tree’s “witness to history”: difficult, sometimes tragic times intermingled with periods of prosperity and growth.

Recently, during a walk at the Jacksonville State University Canyon Center near Little River Canyon, I saw a fallen oak. Touching the rings, I thought about Alabama’s history of woodmaking.

Counting back 80 rings, I touched 1930. It was likely that this tree, as a seedling, never witnessed a deer. It’s hard to imagine how low Alabama’s deer and wild turkey populations had dwindled. In fact, 80 years ago, deer and turkey were seen in only a handful of counties.

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He Will Not Run for Congress as Some Hoped

Alabama’s Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks says he is staying in the race for the Democratic nomination for governor and will not run in North Alabama’s 5th District against Rep. Parker Griffith, who infuriated Democrats last week when he announced his switch to the Republican Party.

Sparks said in a press conference this morning at the Madison County Courthouse in Huntsville that he was more committed to running for governor than ever and that he was in the governor’s race to stay.

Some Democrats in Washington and Montgomery had urged Sparks to change races after Griffith switched to the GOP. Sparks said he was honored by the interest, according to the AP, but feels he has made a commitment to the people of Alabama to run for governor.

Alabama Dems Betrayed by Parker Griffith’s Switch to GOP

Just more than a year ago, the people of North Alabama elected Parker Griffith to represent them in Congress. It was a hard fought campaign and Griffith won by a narrow margin, Sparks said in his remarks. Griffith was elected by Democrats, people who believed in democratic ideals. They sacrificed money, time and effort to put him in Congress.

“Now, only about a year later, he has abandoned the people and the values that put him in Congress, and has joined the very people who opposed him and did everything they could to defeat him just a short time ago,” Sparks said. “As a native of North Alabama, as a life-long Democrat, I want to publicly condemn Parker Griffith’s betrayal of trust.”

While Parker Griffith tries to blame the Democratic party for being “too liberal,” Sparks said, “he finds it easy to forget the politics and the people who put him in office.”

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John Wathen

Ruby Holmes, 80, who has lived in a house right across the street from the Arrowhead Landfill in Perry County all her life, says when she tries to sleep with her window cracked, “This odor wakes me up at night.”

Originally published as the Christmas Day lead story at Truthout.org | Digg It…

by Glynn Wilson

On the third day before Christmas in 2008, the people living along the Emory River in East Tennessee were listening to the songs on the radio about a white Christmas like everybody else in the country, trying to look forward and not back. A new president had been elected and would soon occupy the White House, a president who promised “hope” after eight years of Bush and war and unprecedented corruption, as well as increasing economic hardship, squeezing the middle class like a juggernaut.

Instead of a white Christmas, though, people like Steve Scarborough of the Dagger Kayak and Canoe company woke up to a black-gray mess of epic proportions, a river full of toxic coal ash from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s coal-fired power plant at Kingston, Tennessee.

“There are no excuses for this,” Scarborough said. “One of the dumbest thing humans do is dig coal out of the ground and burn it.”

The largely affluent population of the area demanded action and an immediate cleanup of the largest environmental disaster in American history in the lower 48 states, second only to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Williams Sound, Alaska, in the spring of 1989. So within four months, by March 20, TVA began dredging the mountain of coal ash out of the river and shipping it by train to a landfill in the poor Black Belt of Alabama.

One year later, on the first anniversary of the second worst environmental disaster in American history, while the people in Tennessee are hiring lawyers and suing TVA and reading story after story in the local newspapers about their plight while the cleanup continues, the poor people of Perry County, Alabama, where TVA found a place to dump the toxic ash, are not singing Christmas carols. They are locked in their homes with their air conditioners running even in winter trying to stay out of the gaseous fumes from the landfill where the coal ash is piling up on top of household garbage by the freight train load.

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President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden…

The United States Senate passed a landmark health care reform bill in a rare Christmas Eve vote that could help define President Barack Obama’s legacy and usher in near-universal medical coverage for all Americans for the first time in the nation’s history.

The 60-39 vote on a cold winter morning in the nation’s Capitol capped months of arduous negotiations and 24 days of floor debate, according to the AP. Vice President Joe Biden presided as 58 Democrats and two independents voted “yes.” Republicans unanimously voted “no,” but the tally far exceeded the simple majority required for passage.

The Senate’s bill must still be merged with legislation passed by the House before Obama could sign a final bill in the new year. There are significant differences between the two measures, but Democrats say they’ve come too far now to fail. Both bills would extend health insurance to more than 30 million more Americans.

Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, who made health reform his life’s work, watched the vote from the gallery.

At a news conference a few moments later, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the vote “brings us one step closer to making Ted Kennedy’s dream a reality.”

“This morning isn’t the end of the process, it’s merely the beginning,” Reid said. “We’ll continue to build on this success to improve our health system even more. But that process cannot begin unless we start today … there may not be a next time.”

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It didn’t take long — after the news hit the Web in what was billed as an “exclusive” by Politico that Huntsville Congressman Parker Griffith was abandoning the Democratic Party that got him to Washington, to join the Republicans — before Democrats began to express their disappointment and betrayal.

Joe Turnham, chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party, sent out a press release expressing “extreme disappointmen.” He said he had already taken numerous phone calls from key leaders throughout the Tennessee Valley voicing their commitment to support a strong Democrat who can win the 5th Congressional District next year.

“Parker has been a friend for a number of years, but his announcement today, and the way in which he did it, deeply disappoints me,” Turnham said. “Democrats of every stripe and philosophy sweated and bled for this man. He narrowly became a Congressman through the hard work, votes and financial contributions of thousands of Democrats.”

“Today,” he said, “they feel betrayed.”

Congressman Griffith, like his successful predecessor, Bud Cramer was well-positioned as a Blue Dog Democrat in the majority party in Washington to broker for his district and become the swing voice and vote for good public policy; yet, he has left his old friends for his new friends, and will ultimately find that he has no political friends left at all at the end of the day.

“Alabama Democrats have a deep political bench in the 5th District and we will nominate a formidable challenger to fill this seat next year,” Turnham claimed, although a strong contender has yet to emerge even in the suggestions of the state’s top Democratic Party e-mail lists.

“But who can we run?” wrote one frustrated voter in Griffith’s district.

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Governor Bob Riley has issued press releases trying to take credit for a $39.1 million award by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Alabama’s Children’s Health Insurance.

According to the release, Riley said, “The fact that Alabama is one of only nine states receiving a performance bonus, and we are receiving the largest bonus, demonstrates the effectiveness of our innovative program.”

However in May, the Democratic majority in the legislature was forced to override Gov. Riley’s veto of the general fund budget, which included an increase in funding for the ALL Kids program. Riley vetoed the budget because he wanted the increase in funding for the program to go to prisons rather than children, according to a press release from the Alabama Democratic Party.

Noticeably absent from the administration’s press release was any commendation to the Alabama Legislature for passing the budget and other legislation to streamline the ALL Kids enrollment process, which led to the windfall increase in federal funding.

During the session only one Republican legislator voted with the Democratic majorities to pass the budget. Had Riley and the Republican Party’s effort to kill the budget prevailed, Alabama’s uninsured children would have suffered at the expense of putting more money into prisons.

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