West Virginia is the 14th most conservative state in the country. It has the third highest percentage of senior citizens in the country and it is the state where Mitt Romney won his fifth largest share of the vote. Despite all that there is still majority support for medical marijuana.

This afternoon Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) announced that his incredibly long career in politics is finally coming to a close. Rockefeller will not seek re-election in 2014.

Let’s just be very clear right up front, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco may have both collected their share of mainstream awards, like Pulitzers, American Book Awards, and the like, but with this book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, they remove any doubt about whether they are “celebrity couriers,” as they derisively term a lot of what is left of the mainstream, main street journalists out there today slapping whitewash on poverty and helping spin the machinery that manufactures rose-colored glasses. They have traveled through some of the hellholes on the dark side of the American economic reality and they are angry about the whole damn thing, fired up, fed up, and desperately looking hard for a fight. This book needs to be read, and it needs to sell very well because these guys are pretty much unemployable now. Trust me, I know this!

I was invited to photograph the protest and shutdown of the Hobet Mine in Boone and Lincoln Counties in West Virginia last week. The organizers knew me from my participation in the Blair Mountain March last year. This is the biggest mountaintop removal mine in the US, I am told. I was not aware of the location selected until we got there.

Don Blankenship was head of Massey Energy when 29 coal miners lost their lives in a massive explosion. Forced to resign, he has been largely invisible since.

Now he’s filed papers to start another coal mine venture.

An epic portrait of one community’s long-time battle to take on Massey Energy lawlessness and their Big Coal sycophants in the Coal River Valley of West Virginia, The Last Mountain just might be one of the most timely and game-changing films in years. Beautifully filmed, at once provocative and disquieting, The Last Mountain wonderfully captures the inspiring resistance and indefatigable campaigns of coal mining families — and their outside supporters — to stand up and defend their land and lives.

From Marmet, West Virginia, to Blair, West Virginia, hundreds are marching across the Appalachian region throughout this week to honor the historic labor event known as the Battle of Blair Mountain. This event designed to remember one of the largest battles in US labor history, however, is not just about history. A coalition known as Appalachia Rising is using the five-day march to call attention and protest mountaintop removal coal mining.

Today, the EPA flat-out revoked the permit for one of the largest mountaintop removal projects in the nation.

There is no better sign of just how deeply unpopular the Obama administration is in West Virginia than the newest ad from Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin. Manchin makes taking on some of the tent poles of this administration central to the ad, and uses the language of the right to do so: repealing the “bad parts” of “Obamacare,” and keeping the federal government “off our backs.” He quite literally takes a shot at “Cap and Trade” legislation.

In case the National Republican Senatorial Committee never got the memo, I think now is a good time to remind them that working class Americans don’t like it when people call them hicks behind their backs, especially when the epithets come from out-of-state political operatives.