Breaking News

Columnists

Grim forecast

For the Republican Party, the current forecast is grim. In Texas, a Democrat won a state Senate seat in a district Donald Trump won by seventeen points in 2024. Taylor Rehmet, the Democrat, won by fourteen points. It was a referendum on the Lone Star state’s belligerent Governor Greg Abbott and Trump’s immigration policy. And this is in the wake of extreme gerrymandering. Of course, the GOP will largely ignore these storm clouds. From Mike Johnson, whose arrogance embarrasses even the most hardened partisans, and Lindsey Graham, who is busy trying to get money to recompense for the ...

True D&E love story

It all started with her smile. The rest is history. Such is the love story of two Davis & Elkins College alumni who experienced Cupid’s arrow just in time for Valentine’s Day. Kaylee Yergeau was among the first students I met upon my arrival at D&E in 2016 as she began her sophomore year. Kaylee came to Elkins from a small city across the Puget Sound from Seattle, Washington, recruited to play women’s basketball. Two years later, Tycen Allan arrived on campus as a freshman men’s lacrosse recruit from a small town in western Canada. They met soon after Tycen’s arrival. ...

‘Media’ is a broad term

I’ll be the first to say that I, as a reporter, am not perfect. No one is. I can sometimes make mistakes in stories, both grammatical and factual. I can sometimes read a bill or a study too quickly and miss something important. If I get something wrong, I work as quickly as I can to send up a correction to my copy desk. Sometimes mistakes escape me and my copy desk. When you write as many words as I do in a week and you read as many words as my editors do, sometimes mistakes fall through the cracks. But when they are pointed out, we try to fix them. I believe the same goes for my ...

President Trump can’t stop backing down

Does it sometimes seem as though too many people have never learned the lessons of the schoolyard? If you capitulate to a bully, you will be bullied forever. If you stand up to him, he will back down. What’s true on the playground is also true in the office, in politics and in international relations. Standing up to bullies is not free of risk. You might get bloodied in the process. But afterward, the bully, having learned that there is a price, will hesitate to push you around, whereas if you fail to stand up to him, he will grow ever more menacing. All of the bowing and scraping ...

Census surprise

About a month late, presumably due to last fall’s government shutdown, the Census Bureau has released its estimates of the populations of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for July 1, 2025. It provides an interesting picture of what the country is, and is becoming, halfway through the decade of the 2020s and one-quarter of the way through (have we really gotten this far?) the 21st century. It also provides some political dynamite, all the more explosive because of Census Bureau statisticians’ deserved reputation for apolitical rigor and willingness to admit mistakes, as it ...

The hidden cost of leadership inexperience

How much impact does leadership inexperience have on your organization? I feel the sleeping giant today in terms of operational excellence is the number of new people. By this, I mean those who are new to the organization as well as those who are new to the role in general. For example, a person might be experienced in leadership but new to the organization. Or, they might be part of the organization, but new to leadership.  In both cases, the lack of experience impacts operations—often in a good way but sometimes in a not-so-good way. Layer in the inexperience on the ...