Back in conservative Barry Goldwater’s heyday, the U.S. senator from Arizona and presidential candidate had a striking statement for which he will always be remembered: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
Why vaccine hesitancy? People gifted with radar for irony are pointing out that many of today’s vaccine resistant citizens were preaching the gospel of herd immunity just a year ago. Sadly, some vaccination refusal originates in lands to which the unsuspecting consumer has been carried by th…
When told to wear face masks two COVID-plagued winters ago, we thought: “Can’t wait until this is over and we no longer have to wear a piece of cloth over our mouth and nose. It’s ugly. It interferes with breathing. It muffles voices and makes some conversations hard to follow.”
The unraveling of Rachel Hollis’ empire is the train wreck that I just can’t look away from.
People act in their self-interest. If someone wants to give me money without adverse consequences, then it will be in my self-interest to take it unless someone can explain why I shouldn’t.
Growing populations are giving two additional seats in Congress to Texas and one to Florida. New York and California are each losing a seat, not because their head counts are falling but because they’re not rising as fast.
Ours is a business lined with hazards mostly metaphorical. Among these is being fed what we serve. Dispensing criticism on these pages subjects us to it, not that the reality of these circumstances is discernible in the modern hour. Opinions are like that singular aperture that everyone poss…
How about that recent, generous offer made by Brad and Alys Smith to draw young workers with remote positions to West Virginia? Beyond being a single piece of marketing genius, it could be the moment to become more self-confident in what we have to offer the rising generation.
Young people are pushing Congress to protect our voting rights with passage of the For the People Act, even as Republican state legislatures, including West Virginia’s own, enact law upon law to make voting more difficult. Un-PAC is an exemplary cadre of students and nonstudents that now has…
Harm reduction programs, mainly the syringe exchange portion of them, have been a divisive issue for many West Virginians over the past several years.
There are those who believe there is a fast track to regain socioeconomic normalcy in the country. There are clear signals that this thinking has major flaws.
Should legislators choose which voters should vote for them? Or is that a conflict of interest and should some other method be used? For me, it’s a “yes” to the latter question. Here are some reasons why.
Newspapers’ fortunes and those of the communities in which they are located long have run parallel to one another, as they have to that of the country’s vicissitudes, both economic and visceral.
Early in my career, I worked as director of marketing and communications for a relatively small Appalachian liberal arts college.
It would surprise no one if, during a gathering of a large Mountain State family, several uncles, aunts and cousins were heard discussing their certainty that the 2020 election was rigged.
What’s better than getting back to normal during a pandemic? Trying something completely new. And failing. Spectacularly.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had a warning for American business: “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex.” The sector’s complaints centered around Republicans going state to state to undermine free and fair elections.
There’s at least one place Congress needs to spend more of our money sitting in plain sight. Where? The Internal Revenue Service. Why? Up to $1 trillion per year of legitimately owed taxes go unpaid. Right. $1 trillion. A little investment in enforcement and collection would return far more …
Fifty years ago, the famous African American singer Paul Robeson forcefully sang the spiritual “Go Down Moses/Let My People Go” about people seeking to leave Egypt because of economic and social conditions imposed by the pharaoh.
Heroic is a word overused in any era, but especially one when heroes are so extraordinarily rare. Ours is a society obsessed with self. The modern era is one in which talking not only suffices for doing but equates to it. Our attention is so affixed on worlds not our own — Washington, celebr…
Col. Zackquill Morgan was the founder of Morgantown and a hero of the American Revolution. He raised a regiment and marched to New York to aid the Continental Army at the Battle of Saratoga, a key win in the fight for American independence. Morgan’s contributions were commemorated with a new…
“Nomadland” is a remarkable movie about struggling Americans wandering the vast spaces of the interior west. Most of them are white, middle-aged and up, living in vans. The filmmaker, Chloe Zhao, is a Chinese woman who has captured their bare existence as they move through a bleak but beauti…
Christian evangelical Lauri Armstrong, a Texas nutritionist, refuses to take the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent New York Times report. “It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here,” she said. Armstrong is convinced that God designed the body to heal itself, if given the …
I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know how to solve the gun violence epidemic in America. I agree that easy access to firearms that can unleash mass death in a short span of time is a huge problem. I’ll readily fess up that the Second Amendment doesn’t say to me what it seems to say to a lo…
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., makes sense in his approach to the collaborative legislative process, although Democrat progressives don’t give him the credit he deserves. Fact is, they want him to do exactly what they want.
Given the spectacular nature of the recent legislative session — spectacular here meant in its original form, derived from spectaculum, Latin for “a spectacle or show” — it now seems late to launch a column. Fodder flowed for the past 60 days. Why forgo it?
Republicans and other conservatives have had a longstanding critique of Public Broadcasting for having a liberal bias.
If QAnon isn’t the most far-reaching hoax of the century, it deserves my apology. The conspiracy theory’s followers insist that global elites spend their down time enjoying membership in a sex-trafficking, baby-eating cult. “Q” is said to be a close associate of Donald Trump who, in turn, is…
It was a job that brought me to West Virginia. I had been working in the state since 2007, at the Herald-Dispatch in Huntington, where they let me try just about anything. I was a reporter, then an editor, then a sports writer, then a reporter again and then running the newsroom.
A saying often attributed, possibly wrongly, to Dr. Martin Luther King asserts that “budgets are moral documents.” Even if he didn’t say it, I’m pretty sure he would have gotten around to it, if his life hadn’t been cut short.
“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” declared Gov. Ron DeSantis. “It’s completely unacceptable,” he said, for either government or the private sector to require showing proof of vaccination against COVID-19 “to just simply participate in normal society.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed a sweeping voting bill into law that caused immediate outcries of voter suppression. Especially egregious to most was a provision that is said to disallow water or food from being passed out to voters standing in line.
For most West Virginians, even if the state income tax is repealed, their taxes are destined to increase without providing any benefits. In essence, services will decline and living costs will go up.
When will we be able to attend a live performance? That question is being asked angrily in France, where theater is more central to the national culture. (America has no national theater.) But we should ask that here, as well. Broadway remains shuttered, as are indoor theaters and concert ha…
History — whether that of the world, nation, state or region — is real and powerful. However, to educate and inspire us, it needs dedicated people to bring it to life for us.
Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., surely understands that a moment of destiny is upon him. It has arrived as a tide that rolls over the many moments of note in his lengthy career of service to the state and the nation. It is the collision of our democracy with the filibuster. It is the tyranny of a…
I was never much of an April Fools’ guy.
Last year, the Legislature passed a bill creating a sentencing commission to jump start reforms in the criminal justice system.
Didn’t all our American forefathers migrate from somewhere at some time? Even American Indians migrated from Asia, and all but the first were looked down upon by their successors.
Gov. Jim Justice has taken two interesting positions recently.
Had you told any West Virginia Republican 20 years ago that in 2021 their party would control all of the statewide-elected Board of Public Works, all but one of the members of the state’s delegation in D.C., and hold supermajorities in the Legislature, they would have seriously doubted it.
It is evident that many vaccine refusers matriculated at the University of Fox News. There, on March 15, Professor Tucker Carlson, with his head cocked in Hollywood sincerity, asked his students, “How effective is this coronavirus vaccine?” As most third graders know, the Moderna and Pfizer …
In the 14 days after the death of George Floyd, 19 people across the country died in violent protests. Not all the deaths were gun-related, and some of the dead were engaged in criminal activity. Nonetheless, the nation responded with shock and talked of little else in the weeks that followed.
It’s been three months since the Democrats gained their slight advantage in the U.S. Senate.
This week, the West Virginia House of Delegates will vote on House Bill 3300, its version of repealing the state income tax. It’s quite a bit different from Gov. Jim Justice’s proposal.
In the beginning, states set their own voter qualifications. Then our Civil War produced three constitutional amendments limiting this discretion.
It is difficult to suppress visions of yet another dozen suffering Latin Americans putting on backpacks and heading north every time a congressional Republican falsely shouts that President Joe Biden has “opened the borders.” Thus, the GOP adds refugees to former president Donald Trump’s bor…
I have a friend — a cousin, actually — who used to work for Rolling Stone magazine and now is an entertainment writer at the Houston Chronicle.
Many know that Christmas, the Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus, coincides with a pagan feast of the winter solstice. For example, the older term “Yule” is likely derived either from the German “jol” or the Anglo-Saxon “geol.”
It’s often said that, in the American legal tradition, a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, these days, it’s more like guilty until proven wealthy.
