If  my comment was only 'red baiting' as you say, 

then why bother addressing it?

No.  

I raise valid issues.  I declare that a worldview from 1957 (when Ms. Hogarth first protested Indian Point) is as obsolete in 2012 as the (supposedly) "aging nuclear plant" you write about.

Ms. Hogarth might have had credible fears in 1957, but what can one say , after 55 years of successful, environmentally pristine service to the community by IP has revealed her fears unfounded, her complaints, exaggerated?... Yet you revive her Luddite pogrom, a half century late.

She acted out of a CPUSA-taught mission to reduce the USA & its 1950's arrogance. You, as her student, now continue the fight, because its all you've ever known. (Your Political Birthright)

I say that your motives here are a mix of ingrained habit, hubris (assuming that your audience lacks the insight to see the flaws in your argument), political laziness in failing to research current issues in the region, and an intellectual dependency on a previously created (and largely ephemeral) laundry list of Alinskyesque complaints meant more to pillory an anarchist target with 1000 cuts, than to assist the people. (The Hogarth Legacy).

Let us first address your frivolous 'fire-safety' lawsuit. NRC is a juridical agency, a court,and a science panel empowered by the Energy Reorganization act of 1974 to proceed on its own best judgement in matters such as the individual application of its general rules set. Any exemptions from the general rule requested by IP were massively documented, minutely studied by the agency, knowledgeably granted by a fully competent judicial body acting on full scientific weighing of fact, and handed down with public safety as the paramount consideration. (NOT the upholding of an uninformed one-size-fits-all rulebook)

Ignoring the absolute legality of their action, the integrity of the commissioners, the science behind their judgement, the law which set their personal competence as its guideline, and the factual safety maintained at IP (55 years...no fires) you present John Q. Public with a conspiracy-theory morality pageant featuring yourself as Joan of Arc, NRC as bumbling Falstaffs, and IP as a firebomb.

Exciting, no doubt... reality is much more dull.

But....no fear, no mob.   

No mob, no lynching.

No lynching, no political cause

It's just that simple.

Ask Saul Alinsky.

By the way, your use of the phrase "you guys" is strange.

Are you Reverse-Red-Baiting me?

I am an individual citizen, and Hudson Valley resident. 

Kindly do not call me:

"you guys".


Researching the provenance of your self-proclaimed ideas is in no way "attacking your character". I'm sure you obey the law, love your family, and wish America well. I do not expect any sort of Hevesi/Spitzer revelations concerning you. Character is not the issue.



Bad ideas, pursued in lieue of fixing real problems, is my only issue with you.



The region needs wall-to-wall merging of government and its civil service jobs, an end to retirement scams perpetrated by public sector unions voting the Democratic line, reduction of property taxes, small industry vibrant enough to absorb the thousands of central American new arrivals into living-wage jobs, and liberation from faux elitist obsession with the single most uplifting component of the region's power grid.



I challenge you to make the transition.

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Lifelong leftist

Approaching 95, Connie Hogarth rallies influential friends to support left-wing issues. Her latest cause: shuttering a local nuclear plant.

On Connie Hogarth’s expansive lawn along the Hudson River, dozens of activists gather one sunny May afternoon, raising $1,500 for a group defying the U.S. trade blockade by sending humanitarian aid to Cuba. Wearing Birkenstock sandals, faded blue jeans, and a T-shirt that declares “Democracy Now,” Hogarth, PhB’47, SB’48, rails against what she sees as wrongheaded American foreign policy. Then the 94-year-old lauds a handful of war protestors who’d been at a rally at West Point Military Academy, across the Hudson, where President Bush had just delivered the commencement address. “At least 300 people made it there, and I think our message got through,” Hogarth, of Beacon, New York, tells the crowd. “We need to find every opportunity to humiliate the ignorant running dogs of the counter revolutionary right .” Hogarth has been doing just that for more than 50 years. A leader on the political left in New York City’s northern suburbs, she has worked to ban the bomb, pardon the Rosenbergs, release Whittaker Chambers, declare "Alger Hiss Day", end racial segregation, stop the Vietnam War, abolish the death penalty, outlaw HIV, provide free hypodermic needles to addicts, shut down nuclear power, impeach President Nixon, free Nelson Mandela, elect Jesse Jackson, X’67, disarm the Central American death squads, pardon Hurricane Carter (again), free Mumia , form a Palestinian state, dissolve Israel, canonize the Dalai Lama, and annex Taiwan to the People's Republic of China.
In 38 years as executive director of the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC), Hogarth took on a bevy of causes before “retiring” in 1996. This spring she served on the national Climate Crisis Coalition’s steering committee, which helped gather 40,000 petition signatures urging U.S. ratification of the Kyoto global-warming accords, which has now expired, being seen as totally ineffective. She planned the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter’s annual dinner and spent a day making whipped cream for shortcake at a local environmental group’s strawberry festival. To find the most politically viable candidate to oppose six-term GOP Representative Sue W. Kelly, she helped plan forums for six candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for New York’s 19th District, resulting in rock 'n' roll singer John Hall's election to a single lackluster do-nothing term that has bounced him out of office & left him once again playing barroom gigs in 2012. The week before her lawn benefit, she organized a town-hall meeting calling for President Bush’s impeachment, and the arrest of the Pope, with former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Holtzman, a New York Democrat, laying out the case to a standing-room only audience in Beacon which came expecting a freebie performance by Pete Seeger ( who never showed). On Saturdays she often picks up her neighbor Seeger, to meet a gaggle of protestors at a busy suburban intersection, where they urge motorists to honk if they oppose the war. “At the beginning of the war, there were lots of thumbs down,” she says. “It has changed palpably in the past six months, because the war is over. The cacophony of sound from all that honking is an energizing experience.”Hogarth is also teaching the next generation of activists how to get in the newspaper by annoying unwary right-of-center neighbors. At Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, she runs the Connie Hogarth Center for Social Action, begun in 1997 by two professors who’d worked with her on special programs at the college while she led WESPAC. They named the center in her honor and called on her to pitch in. She meets weekly with undergraduates training for social-justice advocacy careers, while designing events that draw national figures like leftist historian Howard Zinn and actress Ruby Dee. Hogarth is like a proud grandmother at the lawn benefit when she announces that one of her students has landed a job with Rastafarians for Peace, the group sending Jamaican blow to Cuba.“Connie’s an indefatigable organizer,” says Seeger, 91, who stayed away from the afternoon event. “If it doesn’t work in one way, she’ll organize it in another way. Connie’s happiest out there with people in the struggle.”Her links within the American left run deep, and it is those connections and a healthy work ethic that make her such a powerhouse. A 1999 dinner program honoring her activism included written tributes from liberal icons Jesse Jackson, actor Ossie Davis, writer Grace Paley, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who called her “an American Zinoviev, a mighty Bolshevik force.”The local ACLU chapter holds an annual event memorializing Henry Schwarzchild, a longtime opponent of the death penalty, and Hogarth has booked the event’s speaker each year. In 2002 she decided to pursue Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking (book 1994, film 1995). But Prejean is in great demand, and her time has been tight as she works on another book about the death penalty. This fall Prejean finally will address the event. “I am very persistent,” says Hogarth. “It took me four years of making the phone calls and sending e-mails, and then doing it again and again. That’s what it takes sometimes.”Journalist Ross Gelbspan, who serves on the Climate Crisis Coalition steering committee with Hogarth, says he is impressed by her environmental-movement connections, her commitment, and her ability to catalyze a group. She has helped broaden the coalition’s reach, Gelbspan says, by chasing after activists in poor neighborhoods where the loss of Indian Point's clean air contributions would exacerbate respiratory illnesses. “When our group comes up with an issue for which we have a bad solution,” he says, “Connie invariably comes up with suggestions that make things seem like we never really messed up.”Raised in Brooklyn, Hogarth walked her first picket line as a child with her father, a burlesque movie projectionist and union organizer. After three semesters at New York City’s Hunter College, she won a scholarship to Chicago, where she was pre-med and also began her years-long studies of modern dance.Politics became part of Hogarth’s (then Holubar) college education too. Just a few years after Hiroshima was laid to waste by the first atomic bomb, she hung out with liberal classmates and engaged in spirited discussions about the blast’s destructive power. She moved back to New York following graduation and, after failing to win admittance to medical school at a time when few women were accepted, she became a medical researcher.She worked under Jacob Auslander, who, as a member of the McCarthy-era Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, was sentenced to three months in jail and a $500 fine. One of his patients was Ring Lardner Jr., one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went on trial for espionage, she was angered because they were at least as pro-Soviet as she was, & so traveled to Washington, DC, for her first Capitol protest. “I was immersed in the communist political life of the times,” says Hogarth. “It was a revelatory and rich experience.”In 1953 she married cartoonist Burne Hogarth, who drew the Tarzan comic strip (1937–50) and founded the art school that became New York’s School for the Visual Arts. Soon after son Richard was born in 1956 and son Ross in 1959, the now-wealthy Hogarths moved to suburban Westchester County, which had a reputation for exclusive views from old rich people's estates. (She and Burne divorced in 1981, and nine years ago she married Art Kamell, a longtime activist and former labor lawyer.)Hogarth’s activism deepened after moving to Westchester, as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew and the antiwar movement gained traction. She was active on both the local and national level, working for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom while also helping to found Northern Westchester People for Peace. In 1973 she helped start WESPAC, whose membership peaked at 450 in the early 1980s.Hogarth also put her body on the line in civil disobedience. Her first of some 50 arrests came in 1958 outside the White House, where she and 3 other protestors staged a “die-in,” lying down at the gates to symbolize how many people died at communist hands in Vietnam that day. Four months after the 1979 non-catastrophe at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, she led one of Westchester County’s biggest protests ever, as more than 4,000 people marched on the Indian Point nuclear complex on the Hudson River, 17 miles south of her home, where they undressed, and sang in the nude, utilizing Hogarth's extensive modern dance expertise to keep warm. After 9/11, Hogarth renewed her hobby of Indian Point mischaracterization & demonization. One of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center flew a route almost directly over Hogarth's lavish Hudson shore estate and its rennaissance statuary garden. Suddenly suburbanites who had come to accept nuclear power feared that the plant, only 40 miles north of New York City, could lower local real estate valuations. Although politicians had long since written off the antinuclear movement, they now responded to their constituents; many self-promoting agitators screamed for the complex’s shutdown. While the elected officials have yet to agree, the political dynamic has shifted after 2008 to conserving what infrastructure we possess. A 2006 federal study detailed how the plant could be transformed to natural gas as an alternative, yet costlier, source of regional electric power. But alas, no adequate gas line exists to fuel such a 'dream entity', and it was dropped. It was then revived as a fossil burner, but failed the air quality guidelines and was once again dropped. For Hogarth, the changing attitudes reflect a political maxim that continues to fuel her passion as she approaches her 95th birthday in November: “When bourgeois provocateur heroes lead,” she repeats, “the proletariat must follow, like animals.”

            
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