I was coming out of one of the big box stores the other day, passing the line of people waiting to get inside. Right as I was exiting, a security guard motioned to a man coming into the store. The gesture was obvious. “Mask up.” The man burst into a short, mostly incoherent tirade on the tyr…
Protests that get violent rarely gain much traction in West Virginia. We’re more of a “respect authority” kind of people. But that’s not always the case. Mine wars come quickly to mind, as well as the Kanawha County textbook controversy. We even started the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. So,…
Will Trump Nation devolve into chaos upon learning of a presidential epiphany that wearing masks is “patriotic?” If that wasn’t sufficient to reverse Earth’s rotation, possibly equally discombobulating to the faithful was his confession that, up to now, he had no plan to fight the pandemic.
It seems like a decision is looming on whether or not to play college football, my personal favorite sport, this season as the coronavirus remains with us.
It kind of baffles me that so many people seem to pop their clogs when asked to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus.
Stripping Confederate names from our schools is the business of preserving actual history rather than the fictionalized version of mint julips, Spanish moss, Confederate nobility and African Americans contentedly humming spirituals while picking cotton for free.
We headed down the hill, my son on his bike, me trotting behind, hand gripping the seat.
President Trump commuted the sentence of convicted felon Roger Stone on Friday, not because of innocence but because Trump didn’t think the charges should have been brought in the first place. He claimed that since the overriding case was never fully pursued, these lesser charges shouldn’t h…
The recent decision to change the name of Charleston’s Stonewall Jackson Middle School made me think of my late mother. An alumna of the school, she died in 2015 at 90.
The Statue of Liberty turned 134 this month. Homeless immigrants from all over the world saw the Lady of the Harbor as a welcoming symbol of a better way of life as they fled oppression and poverty elsewhere.
The opening sentence in Leo Tolstoy’s classic Anna Karenina is justly famous: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Whether or not he ignored alleged Russian efforts to place bounties on U.S. troops, it is past time that Donald Trump resigned. Republicans should agree, if for no other reason than their response to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski episode.
I don’t know how the latest wrangle between the Trump administration and Russia will play out. But I do know as a lifelong Republican, I’ve been concerned with the coziness this president has had with Russia from the get-go. Why? History — his and theirs. Here’s some background.
The events following the horrific death of George Floyd have brought America’s relationship with race into a focus not seen in generations.
The Kanawha County Board of Education meets next week to discuss renaming Stonewall Jackson Middle School, which has a student body that is 42% African American.
I am struck by the image of a Black soldier who, upon considering the name of his military base, asks himself, “Why are we honoring a man who believed that his great grandchildren should buy and sell me?”
The name of Stonewall Jackson Middle School should be changed. While Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson is part of West Virginia’s history, he is not part of our heritage. There is a difference, which clarifies why we should keep other memorials honoring other admittedly imperfect people. Allow m…
COVID-19 is not at all over and shows every sign of staging a return. We’ve been through a lot of fear, depression and losses of income and loved ones. Much can’t be changed, but the leadership can, from sloppy governors to President Donald Trump at the top of the heap. Trump seems not just …
Among major upcoming events, three deserve special focus as we reflect on the chaos currently taking place on many fronts in the United States of America.
Business Insider recently reported some interesting survey results about our current economic system, courtesy of the Harris Poll and Just Capital.
Gov. Jim Justice, in his Wednesday coronavirus briefing, appeared at his most passionate when he uttered the phrase, “Please, please, please wear a mask.”
Boss Hogg and Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane spring to mind when people like me, and those of a similar make and model, think of corrupt law enforcement.
Changing the police’s right of qualified immunity is one objective of the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 sponsored by House Democrats. Some Senate Republicans and the president are opposed. What is qualified immunity and why you should care?
Columnist George Will, a tower of conservatism, evidently has succumbed to the lure of the “deep state,” as evidenced by one of his recent columns in which he termed the president the “Cry-Baby-in Chief,” a “malignant buffoon,” “mentally crippled” and a “vulgarian who is unhinged.” Which onl…
It’s good to see that voters in West Virginia’s 27th District didn’t allow Republican incumbent Eric Porterfield even the slightest chance of retaining his House of Delegates seat in November.
Are you for the police or are you for the demonstrators? That seems to be the newest political polarization. Like most, I’m for both. Here’s how I see it.
Racism and sexism are insidious parts of our society. They are the result of the original sin of slavery and continued in our history of discrimination against people of color, and women as well, as in the continuing issues with white male privilege.
I’ve been a bit selfish lately in how I’ve viewed everything going on in the world. Maybe I’ve had little choice.
When I first ran for office of justice of the Supreme Court of Appeals during the fall of 2018, our court was in crisis. Much was written about lavish spending practices, indictments of justices, unprecedented impeachment proceedings and appointments of justices with questionable qualificati…
Could some creative thinking from the 1950s enable today’s students to return to their classrooms more safely in August? It was called “split session” and it was a response to a very different sort of crisis — schools that were bursting at their blackboards with Baby Boomers.
When I’m wearing my face mask, it isn’t to make a political statement. I don’t wear it to prevent me from getting COVID-19, either. I wear it so I won’t give it to you. And that’s not because I think you’ll die, although you could. I wear it out of concern that I will give you COVID-19 and y…
When I was a kid, there was a magical hangout in my hometown called The Merryland. It had a friendly proprietor, soft drinks, snacks, comic books, paperbacks and pinball.
With an utterance that could have come from Yogi Berra, President Donald Trump recently said of the novel coronavirus, “If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.” As a corollary to that wisdom, I maintain that, if we never sent the fire truck, nobody’s house would burn down.
On Oct. 27, 1945, Raymond Martin was 7,656 miles from Charleston on the tiny island of Tinian, in the Northern Mariana Islands. He was an aircraft maintenance officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps. From his perch, he saw history made. But on this day, he wasn’t pondering history. Here’s the story.
Atop an earthen hedgerow appeared the familiar form of the man they called “Bull,” his character carved from the hard timber of central West Virginia. The colonel stood now a world apart from the place of his upbringing, 5,884 miles away as the crow flies, at an air strip in Exeter, England,…
People know well that, to avoid COVID-19, they have been prescribed home confinement and ordered to work from home. Lately, in a frantic effort to mitigate the shattered economic impact, this has been relaxed to advising that it is “safer at home.”
When it comes to amateur epidemiology these days, I think there are two kinds of people: those who know they’re not experts and those who don’t.
More than 150 years ago, our forefathers engaged in a mighty war to determine whether our country would remain united or divide in two. Patriotism won out and, today, the states remain united.
President Donald Trump says he doesn’t take responsibility for the troubled coronavirus testing rollout. Then he puts most of the onus on governors to develop sufficient testing and contact tracing systems. Many governors, not ours mind you, say they’ve done all they can do and it’s our resp…
Maintaining the balance between our health and our economy is a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls. Many of us have lost patience, which is a separate matter from the reasons that some protesters wave Nazi flags and carry guns. Maybe they hope to wing the virus with a well-aimed shot.
I remember, sometime in early April, there was genuine optimism that the novel coronavirus would be fading within a few weeks and I might be able to be in the hospital with my wife as she received her final chemotherapy treatment. That seems way longer than a month ago and completely ridicul…
Since becoming the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, I have had the privilege of getting to know and working with many of West Virginia’s law enforcement officers, federal, state and local.
What should be first? People’s lives or the economy? That’s the debate many are having. But it’s a wrongheaded argument.
If you’ve been paying attention to the economic news over the past couple of decades — we’re talking here about long-term trends, not cyclical shifts — you know that one of the great disappointments is the lackluster performance of productivity. You’ll recall that productivity is economists’…
So it’s come to this. After (what is it, six, seven?) weeks of being mostly at home, I’ve started yelling at birds. Well, one bird, anyway.
If you want to start a fight, just say that President Donald Trump has been good for our country, or for West Virginia. You could also say that he has been bad for West Virginia. You’ll get a fight either way.
When stay-at-home orders were being issued from coast to coast, the joke was that dogs would be overjoyed, while cats would be peeved at the prospect of their owners being home all day.
Even with the risk of another COVID-19 wave, the push to open the economy isn’t entirely about cabin fever and the need to feed the family. Small-business owners are desperate, and their rate of survival might be our only hope of avoiding an economic collapse. Right now, it’s borderline betw…
In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the octopus-like Martians almost wiped out humanity — until they died from infection from earth’s micro-bugs.
Friday night at 10 p.m. seems like a weird time for West Virginia to start accepting gig workers’ unemployment applications, but that’s what they did. I guess they figured most entertainers are on stage at 10 p.m. on a Friday, but since we are all unemployed because of the coronavirus, we ha…
