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Yeas and nays

On Wednesday, I will begin my 15th year involved with the start of the West Virginia Legislature’s regular 60-day session. I moved to Charleston on a snowy January in 2010 a week before the start of that session. I had just started one year prior a news website on behalf of a libertarian think tank focused on government transparency and accountability called West Virginia Watchdog. This was a good 13 years before non-profit-funded journalism would become cool. As a print and radio news reporter in the Mid-Ohio Valley in the mid-2000s, I followed West Virginia politics and wrote ...

Trump and Musk demolishing USAID

A “special government employee,” wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus, chose as his first target the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. On Sunday evening, Elon Musk and his peach-fuzz goons locked employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development out of their email accounts, shut down the agency website, announced that nearly everyone would be fired and crowed that USAID had been fed into a “wood chipper.” President Onlooker muttered approvingly that the agency had it coming because it was dominated by “radical left lunatics.” Musk called them ...

Riding the vibes

After a flurry of activity — the president’s tariff threats and showdowns with Mexico and Canada, his expressions of interest in Greenland, the policy changes obtained by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s trips to Panama and El Salvador, the release of arrested Americans in Venezuela -- it seemed clear that the focus of Donald Trump’s foreign policy would be the Western Hemisphere. And then, just a few days later, as he welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the first head of government to visit the White House since Trump’s inauguration, Trump announced that ...

Building a vibrant community 2.0

EXCUSES! EXCUSES! EXCUSES! There are always excuses why a community is not growing. Pick one — lack of funds, nobody to write grants, personalities, national, state or local elections, old buildings, lack of leadership, no volunteers, no businesses, economic shifts or a host of other items. We can always find an EXCUSE! Excuses are easy — working is hard. Creating a vibrant community takes passion and a willingness to learn. Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, and others did research on why some cities thrive and others do not. Among the findings were: Retention of ...

Trump’s tactics

President Donald Trump authorized raising tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the People’s Republic of China. He has been roundly criticized by business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal. Both have warned that Trump’s actions endanger the supply chain and threaten to stoke up inflation. Perhaps it is an attempt to gain leverage over the three nations involved, but there remains nervousness over Trump’s tactics. There may be other considerations namely the greatest adjustment of government revenue since 1914. In 1913 the Underwood-Simmons tariff ...

Introducing ‘Fannie’s Crazy Quilt’

This coming Thursday at 6:30 p.m. when the local Log Cabin Quilters Guild meets at the historic Kump House, we will introduce a new book titled “Fannie’s Crazy Quilt” that is going on Kindle Direct Publishing within a week. This book is a collection of letters, newspaper clippings, and oral history telling the stories of Edna Scott Kump and Herman Guy Kump from 1877 to 1937. The book was inspired by a crazy quilt started in 1888 by Edna Kump’s mother, Frances “Fannie” Logan Scott, but it was never finished because Fannie died after her fifth child was born. All of ...