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Leadership multiplicity

There is a popular meme often shared on the internet of two individual Spider-Men pointing at each other. Sometimes the meme includes four Spider-Men or more. Replace the Spider-Men with Gov. Jim Justice, outgoing Senate President Craig Blair, incoming Senate President Randy Smith, and Governor-Elect Patrick Morrisey all pointing at each other. The one thing all four have in common is one is the current governor, one is the incoming governor, and the two senate presidents might have had to briefly act as governor. But that possible Golden Horseshoe question is no longer a ...

Lawsuits and apologies

Maybe the lesson this Christmas season is that even if turnabout is fair play, at some point, enough is enough. Start with the specious lawsuits brought against President-elect Donald Trump, to the great glee of many of his “Never Trump” and Democratic detractors. Some of them, especially Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s March 2023 indictment charging that Trump’s signing off on allegedly false business records in 2017 somehow swindled the electorate in 2016, had an immediate turnabout effect. Within a few weeks, what had looked like a close Republican primary race ...

Immigration moratorium needed now

For the past few days, certain highly visible elements of the MAGA coalition have been sparring with one another. Specifically, X users have been privy to an extensive immigration policy flame war between two competing MAGA coalition camps: the pro-immigration “tech bros,” on the one hand, and the nationalist-populist immigration restrictionists, on the other hand. The debate has focused, above all, on the thorny question of so-called high-skill immigration. A Politico headline summarized the dispute as “Elon Musk vs. Stephen Miller.” The “tech bros,” led by Musk and his ...

Kump Education Corner employment

At Kump Education Center we are looking forward to significant institutional changes. Over the last seventeen years, volunteers have served the City of Elkins by funding preservation projects and providing educational programing since 2008 with no paid staff. We have been an all-volunteer organization raising funds from donations and grants to pay contractors and casual laborers for a variety of construction projects and educational programs. Now Kump Education Center is a 501-C (3) non-profit organization establishing a newly endowed fund to help pay a part-time ...

Spirit of hope

2024 has been an incredible year full of surprises, and it ends as unpredictably as it started. Donald Trump accomplished what only one other president has, Grover Cleveland in 1892, in having two non-consecutive election victories. But although this triumph ranks as the event of the year, there are others. Joe Biden renounced his re-election bid even when he had the delegates committed to re-nominate him. And of course, the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania. It was quite a year. For Americans, there was a feeling of foreboding during this period. Wars raged in Ukraine ...

Christmas potpourri

One of my favorite movies is “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” It’s the fictional story of a composer who starts work as a high school music teacher in 1960s to make ends meet. While not his desire for a career, he begins to care for teaching and his students over the decades. The movie ends with Mr. Holland’s forced retirement in the 1990s. He spent his lifetime working in his free time on a musical composition that he thought would never be heard. He wasn’t entirely sure whether he had made an impact as a teacher. But then he is led into an auditorium filled with former students ...