It was a little over four years ago when a Clay County woman found herself at the center of a global controversy. Donald Trump had just been elected president, and this woman, elated in the aftermath, made a racist statement on Facebook about outgoing first lady Michelle Obama. The mayor of …
I caused quite a kerfuffle on MetroNews Talkline on Monday when I said President Donald Trump should be impeached, removed from office and barred from holding office again.
Joe Manchin was not on the ballot in Georgia’s hotly-contested Senate runoff election last Tuesday, but he emerged a clear winner anyway.
As the old saying goes, “You can fool some of the people all the time.” Last week’s historic open revolt against civil authority is proof. Most rioters were true believers in Donald Trump’s dishonesty that the election was stolen. It wasn’t. But Trump isn’t the first to use misdirection, lie…
If there was a scarier place for a soldier to be in the American Civil War than a battlefield, it might have been a hospital, of either the field or conventional variety.
“We’re in! We’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol.”
Politics is like a stadium crowd watching a tennis match. Back and forth, the players hit the ball, often scoring points by drawing the other player way off to one side.
On Dec. 26, writing in Huntington’s Herald-Dispatch, a local columnist concluded, “... Trump and his allies have not been given a chance to present much evidence [of election fraud]. The courts are as mired in the deep state as anyone else so they just summarily reject him.”
On Dec. 23, Gov. Jim Justice pleaded with West Virginians to follow safety protocols during the holidays.
My professor was going around the room, asking each of us what we thought the near future might look like in the United State. It was the late 1990s, the economy was good and we were just beginning to look at people who pulled out cellphones as an example of the height of rudeness.
What’s with the hubbub about tomorrow’s joint session of Congress? That’s where Vice President Mike Pence will preside, and Congress will validate President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. Here’s my take.
Smoke rises skyward above the near dead embers of Donald Trump’s administration, a presidency like no other, the first in memory during which there was no White House dog, unless you count Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Chris Hamilton’s op-ed, “W.Va. coal: back to the future,” is unrealistic, at best, when current economic facts of job growth and energy costs are studied.
Whatever West Virginians might think of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., or Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., you don't know how lucky you really are.
As one with pardonees in my lineage, Donald Trump’s recent spate of pardons has extended the pardon process to common criminality. It wasn’t intended that way though. Here’s the scoop.
Whatever happened to having a “stiff upper lip?” One of the most unfortunate effects of this hyper-partisan age we live in is the hyper-emotional drama so many on both sides of the political aisle exhibit.
If you’ve never heard of Liz Mair, you’re not alone. But Mair, a Republican communications strategist who has worked with the likes of Sens. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Rand Paul, R-Ky., became briefly infamous among journalists this week after suggesting that local news outlets struggle because r…
“The word ‘hoax’ was uttered more than nine hundred times on Fox News in the first six months of 2020. Every time Trump tweeted it, or [show host] Sean Hannity shouted it, a little bit more truth was chipped away from America’s foundation ... .” That is the conclusion of “Hoax: Donald Trump,…
West Virginia legislators are again discussing an idea to “tweak” state taxes by moving much, if not all, of the personal income tax burden to consumers’ sales tax. That doesn’t make sense to me. Here’s why.
I have a center-left Texas friend from graduate school with whom I talk politics and government from time to time. A center-left Texan would be center-right about anywhere else.
At Christmas, we contemplate Christ’s teachings, which, taken as a whole, lead to the conclusion that Jesus was pretty much a lib. The New Testament provides verse upon verse of confirmatory evidence.
While we focus on the pandemic and Christmas holidays, our legislators and other power brokers ponder redistricting. That’s so they’ll get or maintain a political advantage in the West Virginia Legislature. And while some county leaders think it’s good for counties, it’s not good for “we, th…
The old maxim for a successful business — location, location, location — probably holds true for donation drives.
My late mother would have turned 100 this week. She was born in the first year that women could vote. Now, a century later, Kamala Harris will become the first female and first Black vice president of the United States. That is a change worth noticing.
When I heard the sad news that aviation legend Chuck Yeager had died this week at age 97, it immediately sent me to a specific time and place in my childhood.
So which is it? Is the president a noble warrior, trying to save the nation from a stolen election? Or is he just a sore loser? Is he the victim of a great wrong? Or is he settling into the role of the disheveled old man, wandering the streets of New York, fuming about how the crown was stol…
Politics is less important in Charleston since last Tuesday. So is the pandemic, as well as presidential succession. For last Tuesday was the day Charleston Police Officer Cassie Johnson, 28, was shot. On Thursday, she was taken off life support and died that afternoon. Today is her funeral.
One must especially admire the young voters across West Virginia and the nation who voted at the end of the recent, vitriolic presidential campaign. As new voters, they may not have had the opportunity to be involved in a less fractious election yet. This is all they know.
Nefarious characters have been fingered by the fellow who wrote to me that, “It’s the liberal democrats, academia, BLM, antifa, the biased media and big tech that are the real threats to democracy…” He was reciting the Trumpian mantra, roughly translated to mean that our collective suffering…
Last month my wife and I took a trip. She hadn’t been anywhere other than hospital facilities in and out of the state since January. I hadn’t, really, either.
“Pardon me.” That’s a common admission we’ve done something wrong and a request for forgiveness.
Home for the holidays might have taken on a new meaning for Gov. Jim Justice with the recent West Virginia Supreme Court ruling on residency requirements.
Emily Murphy, director of the government office where the keys to the presidential transition are kept, has, less than graciously, permitted the work of the transition to begin. With her decision, the death rattle of the Donald Trump administration has reached levels of audibility sufficient…
My family and I were watching a Thanksgiving-themed cooking show the other day and I remarked that I wondered when that day became my favorite holiday.
The Fields clan was never large. My father is an only child from a small town in Kentucky. My mother was one of five children from an extremely Catholic family in Cincinnati, but we rarely spent time with them on holidays, especially since my grandparents on that side died.
The old story goes that the mad Roman emperor Nero fiddled while Rome burned, a disaster that he blamed on the early Christians, who paid for it with some nasty persecution.
There’s a concern with the Electoral College besides how votes are allocated among states (population or by number of senators and congressmen). It’s faithless electors or ones who vote for someone for whom they’re not pledged. It probably won’t happen, but could. So, our Legislature should …
I’ve been through enough election recounts and canvasses to know that results can be changed.
To our young athletes, unable to play:
Last week, for the first time since at least February, my son and I went to a barber shop.
Everybody’s a media critic these days — and Barack Obama is an astute one. But for those who remember certain aspects of his presidency, he’s got a bit of a credibility problem.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services updated the civics oral section of the naturalization (citizenship) test last Friday. Passing requires a candidate to orally answer 12 out of 20 questions from a known possible pool of 128. Here are some questions from the pool to see if you and …
It’s difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the Republicans’ Nov. 3 annihilation of West Virginia Democrats. Just 10 years ago, it would have been impossible for GOP partisans to even dream of such success.
President Donald Trump lost. The nation knows it. The world knows it. And, although he won’t admit it, he certainly knows it, too.
We recall our mothers’ instruction that it is unmannerly to stare at a goiter, and so we avert our eyes from a president who struggles with the heartbreak of election reality.
After Republican state and legislative candidates blew the barn doors off in the recent election, a call for the Party of Lincoln and Reagan to reassess its priorities may seem unnecessary.
Back in 2017, the Gazette-Mail hired a new Statehouse reporter who barely had any experience in newspapers and put him on the job smack in the middle of the legislative session.
President Donald Trump’s petulant decision to fire Defense Secretary Mark Esper, via Twitter of course, was both shocking and predictable.
Did you focus on Pennsylvania or Nevada during the presidential vote count last week? If you say both, as well as Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, then you were witnessing the genius of the Electoral College.
Most West Virginians across political lines must feel like rubbing their eyes. The headlines telling us that both houses of the West Virginia Legislature now have Republican supermajorities seems surreal to those of us who remember Sen. Donna Boley, R-Pleasants, holding down the fort as a mi…
