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Keeping elections safe

West Virginia is a place where people know their neighbors, and that’s exactly what makes local elections work. When voters walk into a polling place and see a familiar face, a teacher, a pastor, a coach, a neighbor, a parent, it builds trust in the system. It reminds folks that elections aren’t run by distant bureaucrats; they’re managed by people right here in our own communities. We West Virginians pride ourselves on being a state full of hard-working, community-minded people. From the southern coal fields to the beautiful river views of the northern panhandle, Mountaineers ...

Why are we already fixating on 2028?

August is usually downtime in Washington. Congress is in recess, the heat and humidity contribute to the desire to escape town for cooler weather, the president is normally somewhere else and cable news is focused on shark attacks. Not this August. Cable news, especially, along with some newspapers, seem to be fixated on the person Democrats will nominate for president in 2028. We are eight months into President Trump’s second term and we are being forced to listen and read speculation about an election a political lifetime away. Part of it can be blamed on former Vice President ...

Driving a wedge

Remember when then-candidate Donald Trump said during a rally in 2016 that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” I quickly put that aside as just another example of the New Yorker’s outlandish braggadocio, but like other political observers I have since been impressed by Trump’s seeming wall of invulnerability to scandal. However, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal boils up around our ears, I have begun to notice some cracks. The difference is apparent as new questions about Trump’s relationship with the late ...

Truman’s big decision

Eighty years ago, in one of the most consequential understatements of all time, Emperor Hirohito told the people of Japan that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” He was originally going to say that “the war situation has deteriorated day by day,” but that was considered too strong — even after the United States had dropped the atom bomb on two Japanese cities. Whether it was justified to use the bomb constitutes one of the most controversial historical questions in American history, but it was clearly the right call. If it’s nice ...

‘Happy’ message

Every recreational golfer of my generation shares at least two things in common: We grew up revering Tiger Woods, and we know “Happy Gilmore,” the 1996 Adam Sandler golf comedy, like the back of our hands. Which millennial, while lining up a putt on the green, hasn’t told himself at some point to just “tap it in — give it a little tappy, a tap-tap-taparoo”? Who among us, before hitting a challenging tee shot, hasn’t at some point first closed his eyes and attempted to escape to his very own “happy place”? And above all, which of us hasn’t spent hours upon hours at the ...

Summer heat and hot tempers

They say that heat makes people cranky, and it sure seems like tempers and egos are clashing all over the place within West Virginia state government. Take the recent drama over the Legislative Economic Development Assistance grant program, the reincarnation of the former Budget Digest, where lawmakers used to put earmarks for projects in their legislative districts. Instead of lawmakers putting earmarks in the general revenue budget, past legislatures and governors came to an agreement where the Legislature appropriates money into a line item within the Governor’s Civil ...