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Rough first year

To say the very least, Donald Trump has had a rough first year. His coalition is strained, with MAGA losing ground and traditional Conservative Republicans gaining more say. Nothing he does other than claim he is prepared to annex Greenland or a faux boast of being a peacemaker advances Populism. He sounds more like Richard Nixon every day, tough talk without purpose. As to the similarity with traditional hard-shell Conservatism, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture urged austerity when she highlighted a three-dollar meal. Brooke Rollins suggested a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, ...

Remembering the Challenger disaster

I learned this week that there were two teacher candidates from each of the 50 states for the ill-fated Challenger mission by reading an article in the Charleston Gazette. Melanie Vickers was a teacher candidate from West Virginia, and she knew Christa McAuliff in a NASA training class. After the Challenge explosion, Vickers helped raise funds to create a memorial statue for Christa McAuliff in Charleston near the former Sunrise Museum. Melanie Vickers said she believed that “Christa would want us to protect the future and show our children what’s possible … And that the ...

Losing control

Minneapolis has become a symbol of the trepidation felt by Americans toward Donald Trump; it is quickly becoming on a par with Birmingham in 1963, Chicago in 1968, and Boston in 1774. This will mark a time when the administration lost control of events. The deaths of Renee’ Good and Alex Pretti, could have been avoided with responsible control of ICE. Trump seems baffled that the false claims of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller have not been readily accepted. Yet all films depict an out-of-control organization that appears to be the problem and not the solution. They even managed to ...

Cold War?

Since former governor Jim Justice took his oath of office as a U.S. senator last year and former attorney general Patrick Morrisey was sworn in as West Virginia’s 37th governor, there has been somewhat of a cold war between the two officials. I won’t go over the entire history of the cold war, but the most recent incident involves the announcement by the Morrisey administration last week that Arizona-based Frontieras North America finally closed on the purchase of 183 acres in Mason County to move forward with a proposed $850 million investment in the state to construct a new coal ...

Status Quo vs. Alternative

The last two weeks have been, like the preceding weeks, nuts. The president insisted the United States must own Greenland and he would not rule out military force, if necessary, to take the island. He imposed tariffs on the NATO allies who oppose his territorial lust. Then he walked it all back for the framework of a deal. The reality is, President Donald Trump has a knack for getting things he could have gotten without all the drama, but the drama is salesmanship for his base. They insist it is the art of the deal, he is the best negotiator and the deal is amazing. Most often, the ...

Trump’s outrageous threats get results

Think about it. Heads of government do not normally reveal the texts of private communications from other heads of state. Yet that is what Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store of Norway did Sunday, on the first weekend of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the international press would have no difficulty finding appalled foreign leaders to comment. You could think of this as a hostile act of a statesman appalled that the American head of government does not know that the government of Norway does not decide who gets the Nobel Peace Prize. It is probably better to think of it ...