After all these years, I’m still trying to reason with racism, prejudice and bigotry

The older I get, the more I learn, but with all of that accrued knowledge, I still don’t fully understand racism, prejudice and bigotry.

I have seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears and I pretty much know where it happens (everywhere) and when it happens (all of the time) and to some extent I know why it happens (someone claims superiority over someone else), but the origins of it still escape me and probably always will. I don’t know who started it or what they intended to accomplish. I can’t identify the first racist or explain why he or she looked at another person, called him a derogatory name, took him into slavery and started beating him with whips.

If you know, please feel free to share.

This being the internet age, of course, you can google “the origins of racism” and read entry after entry until your eyes start to bleed. There are plenty of words written on the subject, but after reading all of them you still may not find the answer to why racism exists in your particular universe.

You will find terms like “ethnocentrism,” “tribalism” and “proto-racism” and stories about the Greeks and their slaves and a lot of other philosophical concepts that are beyond my meager ability to comprehend, but in the real world, in 2018 in the United States of America, I’m still not sure why some stupid backwoods white person with five omni-directional teeth, no job, a fourth grade education and zero critical thinking skills can look at someone like Barack Obama or Michael Bloomberg or any African American or Jew and think, “I’m better’n ’ey are.”

Or why someone goes to a supermarket and shoots two black people he doesn’t know just for the hell of it, or why a guy walks into a synagogue and murders 11 elderly Jews, most of whom were too old to even run away.

For the record, Wikipedia says racism stems from the idea that “humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different due to their social behavior and their innate capacities as well as the idea that they can be ranked as inferior or superior.” Historical examples of institutional racism include the Holocaust, the apartheid regime in South Africa and slavery in America, it says.

So yeah, I get all of that, but I can better relate to what I’ve seen for myself, up close and personal, such as these few examples from my own life:

* In the mid-1970s, when I was a reporter in Parkersburg, West Virginia, I went with two other reporters to investigate a complaint that a private club was refusing to admit African Americans. When we got there, two of us (the Anglo-looking white guys) were admitted without question but our other friend, a Jew whose last name ended in “-stein,” was refused.

* Another time in the 1970s, an African American friend of mine was denied entry into a Charleston, West Virginia, nightclub, but the five white people who were with him – including me – were told we were welcome to come on in. Instead, we all left together.

* Some years later, at my daughter’s wedding reception, a bartender refused to serve one of her guests – an African American man – telling me it was “against club policy” to even let him into the bar. When I told her I wasn’t going to pay for the reception, as I recall, my friend got his drink.

Full disclosure: Throughout my younger years, I lived in an all-white neighborhood, had all-white friends and went to mostly all-white schools. One of them, ironically, was even named White School. The only people of color I knew were one black student in one of my classes and the woman who cleaned our house. (I don't remember if I knew any Jews.) If that amounts to “white privilege,” then I guess I had my share.

It wasn’t until junior high when several of the city’s elementary schools were merged into one that I began to meet, socialize with and get to know a few people who were racially and ethnically different from myself. Later, when I was in college, I worked in a supermarket where the students hired as cashiers and bag boys were a diverse blend of men and women, whites and blacks and people of various ethnicities and maybe even sexual preferences. We all became good friends, and looking back, I realize the hiring practices of that particular store were way ahead of their time.

The point is, I’ve been fortunate enough to associate with people of varying stripes in schools and in my various jobs since I was roughly 12 years old. I say “fortunate” because once I got out of the all-white bubble, I learned that people are either good or bad or smart or dumb or friendly or cold or happy or sad because of who they are, without regard to the color of their skin or the church they choose to attend.

I suspect that the supermarket shooter and the synagogue murderer and all of the other racists and bigots and white supremacists have never spent five minutes actually talking to people who look different than they do to find out who they are or what they think or what they want out of their lives. If they had, they might have found out they weren’t so different after all. (Or maybe not.)

I have said frequently that the most dangerous racists are the ones who don’t know they’re racists or try to deny it, like the people who say “I have black friends” as though it excuses their racist behavior. On the other hand, show me a guy wearing a white sheet and hood and I may be repulsed by him, but at least I know that he knows what he is and he’s being up front about it, for whatever that is worth.

I see the white man who kills blacks or Jews because he hates them and I know what he is, too. The problem is, I still don’t know exactly why he is what he is or how he got to be that way…or what anyone can do to fix it, because chances are, he doesn’t know how he got that way either.

Maybe he just did.

Fool me four times, I deserve what I get

In the year 2000, most rational people considered George W. Bush to be too stupid to be president of the United States, yet the Democratic Party and others who opposed him were unable to muster the support needed to keep him out of the White House.

Bush hadn’t gotten any smarter by 2004, but he still managed to get himself re-elected to the job. I remember saying both times, “How bad do you have to be to lose to someone as supremely unqualified as George W. Bush? If you can’t beat him, who can you beat?”

Imagine our shock when those of us who thought Bush was the worst president in our lifetimes – and possibly forever – went to bed on November 8, 2016, and awoke to find that a make-believe real estate mogul, snake oil salesman and reality TV star with the knowledge of a cinder block and the attention span of a door knob had been elected president over a highly-educated former first lady, senator and secretary of state.

Fool me once, as the saying goes, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But fool me three times, well….

Unless he gets impeached, resigns or dies, Donald Trump is going to be president for at least two more years. We won’t get another shot at him until November 2020, but there is a mid-term election coming up in one week, and it presents a secondary opportunity to correct part of our past mistakes. We can do that by going to the polls and electing senators, congressmen and governors who will throw a leash around this narcissistic president who thinks he was elected “king” and would like to hang on to that title for life.

For roughly three years, Liberals and some Conservatives, Democrats and some Republicans and rational Independents have complained bitterly – and daily – about the policies, practices, partisanship and public persona of the country’s first Twitter president who once said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, and has spent every day since then trying his best to prove it.

I saved a paragraph that I wrote some time ago and have used frequently to describe Donald Trump:

      

Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. He has admitted to sexual assault and at one time was facing court proceedings related to alleged rape, fraud and bribery.

In light of more recent events, I’d like to add the following:

Since early in his campaign, Trump has incited his followers to violence more times than I care to write about today, but now he has refused to back down an inch, even after one of his followers mailed pipe bombs to a long list of prominent Democrats and an anti-Semite upset over a migrant caravan that Trump rails against walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., and murdered 11 elderly Jews. Trump’s answer to this new wave of violence is to blame the news media for not being nicer to him while he rolls along on his pre-election “caravans and Kavanaugh” campaign.

     

Even though he’s not on the ballot this year, Trump has been crisscrossing America for weeks, projecting his administration’s failures, fantasies and flaws onto Democrats, the news media and any other political opponent who happens to be downwind, while also telling his angry rally mobs that a vote for any Republican “is a vote for me,” so in effect this election is a referendum on him.

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep telling ourselves that a “blue wave” is coming to wash these bigots and racists and spineless demagogues out of office and restore order to America. We keep telling ourselves that we own the moral high ground and that America “is better than this,” but none of that matters if we can’t come together in one week and meet at the ballot box.

    

If we can’t do that, we’ll be waking up one more time on November 7 and asking ourselves, “If you can’t defeat the disciples of Donald Trump, who the hell can you beat?”

And I’ll hear myself saying, “If you fool us four times, we're getting what we deserve.”

The Russians are reading! The Russians are reading!

The dashboard for my blog the shieldWALL includes a feature that allows me to track my audience using a variety of statistics such as type of browser, operating system and the home country of my readers.

For you non-bloggers, the “dashboard” is like home base where I go to post new entries; edit my content; change the layout, theme, style or appearance; read any comments my readers leave; check my earnings (if I had any, which I don’t); and view my audience by the day, week, month, year or all-time.

As of this morning, the shieldWALL has been viewed more than 16,000 times since I started it in 2016. This is only a partial count, because the dashboard shows only the top 10 countries where people are reading what I write. Here’s what’s interesting about my audience:

* As you might expect, the largest number of readers – 14,001 – are in the United States.

* In second place, remarkably, is Russia, with 917 page views, followed by Ukraine with 305.

At first I was taken aback by the fact that so many Russians and Ukranians are reading my political essays and other social and environmental commentary, but then I started to think about it and it makes perfect sense to me.

First off, these statistics do not show that 917 individual Russians wake up every morning and eagerly run to their devices to find out what former journalist Scott Shields has to say about the U.S. government, Fairmont City Council, the state of West Virginia or even the Major League All-Star Game or how much my dog likes Christmas.

What it does suggest to me is that someone – maybe one person or five people or a whole room full of Russian hackers, bot-creators and Putin-endorsed trolls – have software programs that send them a notification every time any American posts the name “Donald Trump” on Facebook or in an internet blog. I can’t prove this, but I’d bet a proper sum of money that it’s true.

If I’m right, this is scary stuff. I mean, if the Russians are diving deep enough into the American political swamp to get all the way down to me – a lowly part-time blogger in tiny Fairmont, West Virginia – just imagine the volume of information they must be collecting from every American with a political agenda and a Facebook account.

We know the Russians hacked into the 2016 election and are doing it again for the mid-terms, and we know they are creating bogus “people” with actual accounts so they can plant bogus comments on Facebook, Twitter and probably every other social media platform where they can distort reality, cause anger and hatred among various groups of people and chip away at our democracy by sowing the seeds of discontent.

And now I know if they are reading what I write, it must be so much easier for them than any of us imagined. I’m sure they aren’t just reading my blog but also every comment I make – and everyone else makes – in any public Facebook forum. I almost always make my Timeline comments “public” on the off chance that some Trumpaloon will read them, see the wisdom of my logic and come to his or her senses, but deep down I know that will never happen, so I think I’ll stop doing that today, switch to “friends only” and see what effect that has on my Russian readership statistics going forward.

In the meantime, I want to add that Donald Trump has been prone to give the Russians a pass on their election interference while also blaming the Chinese and Koreans and some 400-pound man in his mother’s basement. For the record, neither China nor Korea made the Top 10 list of shieldWALL readers, and if there’s a 400-pound hacker out there, odds are he’s in one of these 10 places:

United States, 14,001

Russia, 917

Ukraine, 305

Germany, 257

France, 147

Poland, 143

Unknown Region, 140

Portugal, 139

United Kingdom, 112

Canada, 110.

That’s my complete audience list as it appears on the dashboard. Most of it is no real surprise, but I never knew I was so popular in Portugal. Now that I do, let me close this essay by saying, “Hello, Lisbon. Thanks for reading. Gotta say I love your water dogs, but your Man of War…not so much. Say hi to Spain for me.”

Over and out.

Oh Democrat, where art thou?

I watch a fair amount of television news, mostly on the 24-hour cable channels including MSNBC and CNN. I try to watch a little Fox News now and then to establish some sense of political equilibrium, but honestly, looking at and listening to people like Jeanine Pirro, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham tends to make me physically ill.

I mean, it really does.

What I’ve noticed over the past couple of years is a movement – seemingly growing stronger every day – of loud, clear voices who are outraged by the antics of Donald John Trump and the Republican sycophants who support, endorse, enable and empower him in his systematic destruction of everything good about America.

These are voices who coherently call on the American people to rise up against the authoritarian Trump regime and refuse to accept his version of America as the “new normal” – or any kind of normal, for that matter. What’s surprising about these anti-Trump voices is who they belong to.

Here’s a partial list off the top of my head:

* Nicolle Wallace, former press secretary to Florida Governor Jeb Bush, White House Communications Director for George W. Bush and senior advisor for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.

* Steve Schmidt, former strategist who worked on the political campaigns of President George W. Bush, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator McCain.

* Joe Scarborough, a lawyer and politician who served in the House of Representatives from 1995 to 2001 from Florida’s 1st congressional district.

* David Jolly, attorney, lobbyist and former representative from Florida's 13th congressional district.

* Elise Jordan, who has worked as a columnist for Time magazine and The Daily Beast and was former communications director for the National Security Council and a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

* Bill Kristol, neoconservative political analyst and founder of the political magazine The Weekly Standard.

* Jennifer Reuben, op-ed writer and “Right Turn” blogger for The Washington Post.

* Bret Stephens, opinion writer for The New York Times and former foreign affairs columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

* And Michael Steele, one-time Lieutenant Governor of Maryland and former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

What do all of these people have in common? They all are – or were until recently – Republicans.

Now I’m not suggesting that there aren’t Democrats (or Independents) in print and broadcast news who aren’t equally appalled and disgusted by Trump’s two-year reign of terror against the moral and ethical values of America, because there are. But when I listen to them these days, I’m getting a confusingly consistent, repetitive message that combines “go low/go high” with a mixture of “Trump bad/Democrats good,” “here comes the blue wave” and “we have to be better than this.”

The aforementioned Republicans, on the other hand, because they are or once were Republicans, have developed a network of solid contacts within the party who are much better at peeking behind the curtain to tell us what the Wizard of Ooze is really up to. Nicolle Wallace, for example, and the guests she invites to her show have the best sources and ask the right questions to get the information that I want to hear.

These one-time GOP operatives know what the Republican Party is supposed to be, so they excel at seeing through the fog of Trump and reading beyond the tweets, the rants, the rallies and the rage of the current administration for the inside story on where we’re going, where we’ve been and what we need to do to keep from staggering any further down the Orange Brick Road.

It makes me ponder two things:

(1) Why there isn’t anybody among the 240 Republicans in the House of Representatives or the 52 Republicans in the Senate who can see what’s happening with the same clear vision of these Republican analysts and commentators…and has the stones to do something about it? The answer to that, I believe, is they are all afraid of the tweeter-in-chief and consider getting re-elected to be more important than actually trying to govern the country.

(2) If we woke up tomorrow morning and Donald Trump was no longer the president, would we still think Wallace, Schmidt, Kristol, Scarborough and the others were the good guys we have come to respect for putting country ahead of party, or would they retreat back into Republicanism and become the same people who promoted the likes of Mitt Romney, John McCain, Sarah Palin and much of the Bush family as potential leaders of the free world?

For that one, I don’t have the answer. At least, I don't have it yet.

I rest my case on ‘psychological projection’

Yesterday I wrote a long Facebook post explaining the phenomenon of “psychological projection,” in which a person’s ego defends itself against its own character flaws by first denying they exist and then attributing them to other people. Frequently, this involves shifting the blame for your own mistakes or shortcomings to someone you want to mock, degrade, disparage, diminish, denigrate, ridicule or defame.

Today, ironically, I read the following words in the Morgantown Dominion Post. See if you can guess who the author is writing about:

“(He) is firing up (his party) before the midterms with his signature rallying cries: I, I, I, I! Me, me, me! My, my, my!

“According to a tally by The American Mirror’s Kyle Olson, (his) campaign speech Monday for (a Congressional candidate) referred to himself 92 times in 38 minutes — or an average self-allusion every 24.7 seconds.

“When he wasn’t 'I'-ing, the former narcissist-in-chief was lying.”

Oh, wait…I guess that last paragraph kind of gave it away when the writer called her subject our “former” narcissist-in-chief.

Yes, that’s right, boys and girls. Believe it or not, Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin – who I once believed to be the Anti-Christ – was referring not to faux-president Donald J. Trump, the most deplorable narcissistic liar ever to occupy the Oval Office, but to former president Barack Obama. She projected onto Obama those exact Trumpian traits, calling him a liar and a self-consumed narcissist, among other things…and that was all in the first three paragraphs of her column.

God only knows what the rest of the story said. I had to stop reading so I could alternate between laughing, crying, shouting at my computer monitor, shaking my head and finally composing myself long enough to write this shieldWALL essay. Halfway through, I stopped writing to look up “psychological projection” again in the dictionary and what do you know? This time, I found Michelle Malkin’s photo there.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never liked Michelle Malkin. I was watching her smirk and sneer and spew snarky slander about Democrats and Liberals long before her man Donald Trump oozed down the golden escalator to run for president. [CHALLENGE: Try to say "spew snarky slander" three times fast.]

I’ve always believed she was evil, nasty, chronically mean-spirited and under the egomaniacal delusion that she was the smartest person in the room. By that I mean any room and every room. I'm talking about any room in any time and any place. Narcissism? Seriously? Michelle Malkin ought to know it when she sees it, because it stares back at her every time she looks into a mirror.

Having said all that, I have also come to the conclusion that the air inside Malkin's bubble must be getting pretty thin, preventing the synapses in her brain from firing properly. Either that, or all of her computers, hand-held electronic devices, radios and television sets are broken and she’s been cut off from the daily news for weeks, because while she was writing a column that called Barack Obama a lying narcissist, Donald Trump was flying around to every red state in the country saying things like this:

“A vote for Patrick Morrisey is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Dean Heller is a vote for me.”

“A vote for Ted Cruz is a vote for me.”

“A vote for [insert any Republican name here] is a vote for me.”

Or, as Malkin likes to put it, "I, I, I, me, me, me, my, my, my." If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the lying narcissist with the “me” complex was none other than Trump himself.

According to Everyday Health, the theory of psychological projection was developed by Sigmund Freud, who noticed that his patients would occasionally accuse others of having the same feelings they themselves were demonstrating. (Click here to read more about the condition.) The classic example of Freudian projection is a woman who has been unfaithful to her husband and accuses her husband of cheating on her. 

* Or, as I noted in my Facebook post, someone who represents a political party that wants to deny health care coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and blames it on the other political party.

* Or encourages his followers to form an angry mob by telling them the other side is an angry mob.

* Or denies that he is the enemy of the people by calling the news media the enemy of the people.

* Or denies conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election while accusing his opponent of conspiring with a foreign government to rig an election.

* Or promises people he will never lie to them while telling an average of 5 or 6 lies every day of his life.

It also applies to a narcissistic liar who ignores the fact that Donald Trump is a narcissistic liar and writes a newspaper column calling Barack Obama a narcissistic liar. As I frequently say, some things are difficult to explain.

What’s the Republican Party afraid of? Could it possibly be the truth?

The Republican Party in West Virginia – and those who are supporting it – apparently have developed a statewide strategy for grabbing and keeping power during this mid-term election cycle built around three simple words: “I support Trump.”

While their Democratic opponents are actively campaigning out in the open where everyone can see and hear them, the Republicans for Congressional office have so far been willing to stay in Trump's shadow while their political action committees and out-of-state backers run hours of negative advertising on their behalf.

It reminds me of another set of three words made famous in an old Three Stooges skit. Those three words are “duck,” “dodge” and “hide.”

Consider this:

* Election Day is less than two weeks away and all three Republicans running for the House of Representatives have refused to debate their Democratic opponents, and no debates are scheduled. Their excuses for refusing to debate would almost be humorous if they weren’t so pathetic.

“Honestly, when you look at every issue between her and I, she kinda takes the liberal Democrat position and I'm a conservative Republican,” said incumbent Alex Mooney about his 2nd District challenger, Talley Sergent. “It's like Hillary Clinton's views versus Donald Trump's. I think that voters are pretty clear on the differences between us.”

For her part, Sergent thinks Mooney “needs to man up and talk to the people of West Virginia instead of continuing to phone it in.... You have politicians that are so entrenched in the partisan divide that they refuse to hold open conversations.”

In the 1st District, Democrat Kendra Fershee says she wants to debate her opponent, incumbent Rep. David McKinley, but the seated Republican has also refused. He claimed that “no credible third party had offered to host a debate,” even though MetroNews offered to do just that.

“It's truly a shame we've come to a time in West Virginia that our elected officials hide from their constituents and expect to just waltz into a seat as if they own it,” Fershee said. “I suspect the voters will have something to say about his total lack of regard for them on Election Day.”

Maybe yes, Kendra, and sadly, maybe no.

* On the Senate side, a debate between incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin and his Republican challenger, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, was canceled when Morrisey refused to confirm his participation. The debate sponsored by several media outlets was supposed to take place on October 14 in Wheeling, and sponsors sent an invitation to the Morrisey campaign on August 16 – nearly two months in advance of the debate – but he never said he would attend.

“Obviously we’re disappointed that Patrick Morrisey didn’t accept the request to meet with the top journalists in West Virginia to debate issues…of importance to West Virginians,” Andy Kniceley, publisher of NCWV Media, said at the time.

*     *     *

In the same vein and closer to home, a story appeared in today’s local newspaper concerning an ordinance passed by Fairmont City Council last year establishing a Human Rights Commission for the city. After passage of the ordinance, an out-of-town organization that opposes equal rights for gay and transgender individuals petitioned to have the issue placed on the November election ballot.

Not coincidentally, this organization known as “Keep Fairmont Safe” also supports and endorses Republican and conservative candidates and causes.  

So when the newspaper attempted to present an objective story about the upcoming vote, Keep Fairmont Safe declined to provide a spokesperson to represent its views, even after an advocate in favor of the ordinance had provided the newspaper with contact information for members of the opposition group. Instead, the organization supplied the reporter with dubious internet memes and statements of propaganda from its Facebook page, which, by the way, blocks comments from anyone who disagrees with its position.

So to recap, while the Republicans and their minions play “duck and cover,” Democratic candidates and pro-human rights advocates continue to open their campaigns for media interviews, platform statements, social media commentary and position papers which are frequently twisted into false or misleading negative advertising by the very opponents who refuse to debate them face-to-face.

When the good guys go high, you might say, the bad guys go lower and lower…and then they duck, dodge and hide.

It makes me wonder what secrets they’re concealing and why they’re afraid to come out from behind their rocks. Could it be they’re afraid of the truth? Or do they just believe that “I support Trump” is enough to get them elected and nothing else is required?

I’d like to believe that the refusal by Republicans to stand on a debate stage and tell us who they are, what they want and what they believe would make a difference to the voters in West Virginia, but unfortunately, it probably won’t. Not in a country where the president of the United States refuses to be interviewed by a special counsel investigating his alleged crimes because his lawyers know he can’t tell the truth.

That same president – afraid of losing control of Congress – is spending the month of October flying from one campaign rally to the next and telling some of the most outrageous lies that ever fell out of a sitting president’s mouth. When this is the tone set by the leader of the party, why should we expect anything better from the underlings who kneel and kiss his ring?

It makes me want to stand up and scream

Six candidates are running for three seats in the West Virginia House of Delegates – three Democrats, two Republicans and one with “no party affiliation.” The following are excerpts from their comments at a candidate forum held in Fairmont last night. See if you can spot the Republicans:

Candidate 1: “If you care about working folks and you care about unions, (the other party) weakened unions by passing Right to Work in the state of West Virginia. If you have someone that earns their living in the construction industry, they have repealed a prevailing wage…to lower the standard of living for those families. I work for you. I will never ever forget where I came from, and you will always be my boss.”

Candidate 2: “I’m a veteran of the United States Army. I gave an oath to my country and…I also gave an oath as a public servant to protect the state constitution and the United States Constitution. That’s our responsibility. We have a lot of health issues. We have women and children’s health issues. We have a health care crisis in the state along with the opioid crisis. We’re setting up plans” to deal with them.

Candidate 3:  “I was taught at a very young age about public service. I was taught that you help people…and nothing could be more rewarding. I walked into the Soup Opera to deliver some supplies and it was around lunchtime, and I was expecting to see four or five or six people. The room was packed. There were families, children, seniors, and it was heartbreaking because for most of those people that was going to be the only meal of the day.”

Candidate 4: “I want to represent all West Virginians; Democrats, Republicans, independents – I’m not running against any of these guys…. I also believe that partisan political gridlock is out of control and a majority of people I talk to are kind of fed up with that. In order to fix this state, we’ve got to have services to do it. We can’t expect people to stay in this state, taxpayers to move into this state, unless we can provide them services.”

Candidate 5: “I’m the only candidate in the race to be endorsed by the National Rifle Association. I’ve been endorsed by the West Virginians for Life (and) the West Virginia Coal Association. I also support the policies of President Donald Trump, which have made a big difference in our nation, especially here in West Virginia.”

Candidate 6: “I’m pro-God, pro-life, pro-gun, pro-coal, pro-jobs, and I was a Trump Delegate to the national convention. Unlike the people that I’m running against, I didn’t vote against coal in 2009. I didn’t vote against voter ID, I didn’t vote against mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients. I never suggested that our state needed gun control, I never failed to support your Second Amendment rights, and I’ve never ever supported dismemberment abortion.”       

If you guessed that Candidates 5 and 6 are Republicans, congratulations. You are definitely not a low-information voter and you apparently know how to read. You also have noticed, like I have, that Republicans can’t compose a sentence these days without the word “Trump” in it somewhere. I was waiting for one or both of them to say, “A vote for me is a vote for Trump.” Neither one did, but that message came through loud and clear.

While the Democrats and even the Independent were talking – without notes, by the way – about real people and real problems, both Republican candidates were reading from sheets of paper and tossing out lots of numbers and questionable statistics of unknown origin that I can’t verify and won’t repeat here. Let’s just say they were using these numbers to try and take credit for every good thing that ever happened in West Virginia while claiming that the Democrats controlled the state for 84 years and basically did nothing good during that time.

So my takeaway from this event is clear: the Democrats (and the independent) recognize and can identify the issues facing West Virginians – income inequality, health care, poverty, drug addiction, women’s rights, lack of opportunity, the need for economic diversification and the mass exodus of citizens who have given up and moved elsewhere -- and they want to do something about them. Collectively, they spoke about public service for the public good.

The Republicans, on the other hand, like to read numbers out loud and believe that because some businesses are making money again and revenue estimates from our Republi-cratic governor have been manipulated upward, as governors are wont to do in an election year, West Virginia is suddenly doing well under Donald Trump and the GOP. Every time a Republican opened his mouth last night, an economic talking point spilled out.

Every time I attend one of these events, I get to a point where I just want to stand up and scream. I want to shout, “How dare you! How dare you stand before me and extol the virtues of a man who has no virtue. How dare you idolize the most vile, despicable, deplorable sub-human being who ever crossed the threshold of the White House.

“How dare you adopt the president’s penchant for lying out in public. How dare you come to a public forum and take credit for giving school teachers a raise when last spring you told them there was no money, and then tried to have them kicked out of the State Capitol when they went to Charleston to protest.

“How dare you throw Trumpian word salads at intelligent people who are doing their best to survive in a state where the major industry is in decline, and how dare you continue to lie to them and tell them that coal is coming back and everything is going to be okay. How dare you come here and insult my intelligence, my morals and my sense of right and wrong.”

At one point Republican Candidate #5 was rambling on about something no one could understand, so I turned to the woman on my right and asked her, “What the hell is he talking about? Do you understand any of this?” She said she didn’t. Neither did the man on my left. It was argle bargle of the highest order, or as the woman beside me said, “Wah-wah-wah.”

When it was time for closing comments, I had had enough. Closing comments started sounding a whole lot like opening comments, and hearing them once was all I could take without hurling up my lunch, so I put on my jacket and started to get up out of my chair when I heard one of the Republicans telling us how good everything is now that they have control of the entire state.

I said, out loud, “Oh, yeah, everything’s great,” and the people sitting beside me were all laughing as I walked out through the door.

Hey, Democrats…who are you and want do you want to be?

When I registered to vote in 1968, in West Virginia, you had to pick a party if you wanted to vote in primary elections. I registered with the Democrats because they offered more choices than Republicans. As near as I can remember, that was the only reason. It wasn’t a philosophical choice at the time because at age 18, I had no political philosophy to speak of.

The voter registration differential back then was at least 2-1 Democratic and as a result, Republicans didn’t even offer candidates for a lot of state and local offices. I mean, why should a Republican spend the money to run for office in a state where he couldn’t win, and why should I want to vote on a ballot with blank spaces where candidates ought to be?

We didn’t have red and blue states in 1968, but if we had, none would have been bluer than West Virginia.

It was my first election since becoming eligible and I probably voted for Democrat Jim Sprouse in the primary governor’s race, but I’m pretty sure I voted for Republican Arch Moore in the general. My parents thought Arch Moore walked on water, and I was just a stupid kid who didn’t know politics from shinola. (I can’t remember voting for any other Republican in any other general election.)

Anyhow, I remained a Democrat until two things happened: (1) I started working as a journalist, sometimes covering political news, and I thought that party affiliation could give the appearance of bias on my part, and (2) the law was changed to allow Independents to vote in primaries. So I became an Independent.

(Where is this going, you ask? Trust me, I’m getting there. Just hang on a minute.)

Somewhere along the line, after leaving the news business, I became a Democrat again for what must have seemed like a good reason at the time, but that all changed in 2008-2009, when Barack Obama was elected president and took office with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. I wasn’t satisfied with the leadership of Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate and I didn’t think the party was taking full advantage of its opportunity to make real progress during Obama’s first two years.

For example, we wanted universal health care but got the B-side Affordable Care Act instead. We wanted same-sex marriage but only got benefits for domestic partners. We wanted a coherent energy policy that would also address climate change, but couldn’t get it through. I felt the Democrats could do better, but more than that, I felt they didn’t know who they were or what they wanted to be. The result was a middle-of-the-road approach that really didn’t make anybody happy. We asked for peanut butter and jelly on wheat but settled for jelly on white...and pretended that was what we had wanted all along.

I decided then I could no longer identify with the Democratic Party or its lack of focus on a winnable agenda, so I became an Independent again. Yes, I'm a liberal Independent, to be sure, and I still don't vote for Republicans, but I'm an Independent all the same.

Fast forward a decade. It’s now 2018 and I still don’t know what the Democratic Party wants.  (I told you I’d get here.) We’re less than three weeks away from the most important election in my lifetime and I can’t tell you the Democrats’ message. Other than “we’re not Trump” and “women are pissed,” I don’t know what they want me to support. I don’t even know who the leaders are or who is really in charge.

In the last two weeks alone, the party’s most recent presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, has defended her husband’s sexual promiscuity and claimed it did not constitute an abuse of power, and Elizabeth Warren, one of the most outspoken members of the Senate, decided to soft launch her presidential campaign for 2020 by getting down in the mud and rolling around with Donald J. Trump, the all-time champion mud roller among presidents of the United States, about her dubious claim to Native American heritage. Real Native Americans were not amused.

It's almost like #MeToo has become #ExceptForMeAndHer.

That they’re doing this is bad enough, but they’re doing it at a time when Democrats are counting on women voters to parlay outrage over Trump’s misogyny to cast Republicans out of office and sweep them into Congress atop a supposed blue wave. Having two prominent Democratic women say such stupid things at this critical time in the election cycle is not helpful to the party. I wish they would both go away until at least next year, and maybe longer than that.

On top of that, if someone came to my door this morning and asked me to describe the Democrats’ message, I don’t know what I’d say. I mean, which message do you want? The Bernie Sanders message? The Elizabeth Warren message? The Cory Booker and Kamala Harris message? Chuck Shumer’s? Nancy Pelosi’s? That young Kennedy? Or old Joe Biden? Listening to Democrats is like hearing the dissonant sound an orchestra makes when it’s tuning up. Just call me when the concert is ready to start.

In the meantime, Trump is more than happy to share his version of the Democratic platform, calling them traitors and an angry mob bent on stealing your money, inviting terrorists into the country, threatening your national security, killing puppies and kittens and starting World War III. The fact that he’s lying through his teeth to the gullible low-information crowd who attends his pep rallies is irrelevant when this is the only messaging that people hear.

I realize that in House races and even the Senate to some extent, the message differs from location to location. Conor Lamb, who won a House seat in a red Pennsylvania district, and Doug Jones, who beat Roy Moore in Alabama, are both more conservative than I am by far, but they appealed to the voters in their districts and states and got themselves elected. I hope that continues through November 6 and beyond.

Still, as a friend of mine said, Democrats need a platform to stand on that doesn’t start with “Trump bad” and end with “not Trump good.” It’s going to take more than that to win back our country from a party that cares about money and the consolidation of power and doesn’t give a flying fig for the normal people they are supposed to represent. I hope they find one soon.

Meanwhile, don’t even get me started on probable 2020 presidential candidates because it’s way too soon for that. (I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren.) I’ll just say one thing now and leave it at this: Please nominate someone who won’t be an octogenarian before the end of their second term. You need to do better than that.

I never asked to be white, and I didn’t expect to be embarrassed by it

I don't know how many more things can happen in this country that make me ashamed to be white...but I'm sure the Republican Party can gin up a few. Just give them a little time and the opportunity to make some kind of a profit.

Most recently, the right-leaning U.S. Supreme Court – that hallowed institution which just seated its second alleged sexual abuser out of nine justices – declined to overturn a controversial voter ID law in North Dakota which requires residents to show identification bearing a conventional street address. Those with post offices boxes need not apply.

Here’s the problem: Many Native American reservations do not use physical street addresses, relying instead on P.O. boxes for their mailing addresses or tribal identification that doesn't list an address. Sadly, Native Americans are also overrepresented among the nation’s homeless population, which exacerbates the problem.

Now, three weeks before the mid-term election, Native American groups in North Dakota are scrambling to help members acquire new addresses or new IDs that will enable them to vote. It’s no coincidence that Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, is trailing her Republican opponent in her race for re-election, and Native Americans tend to vote for Democrats.

Heitkamp is a critical component of the Democrats’ uphill battle to reclaim the Senate, so Republicans are using every dirty trick they can find to keep her from winning re-election. This is what Republicans do. They don’t know how to govern, but they know how to manipulate and consolidate power, so any time they think they might not win, they cheat.

Let me say this another way. Native Americans in the United States – those people who were here first – were shoved off their land (if they weren’t killed outright) by our westward expansion in the 1800s, and those who survived were eventually forced to live on government reservations while white people took over their property without compensation.

White people called that “manifest destiny.” That’s not what the natives called it.

Now, 175 or more years later, the white people who run our country have decided that these indigenous people shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they don’t live at 123 Maple Street or 2710 South Main. This comes just a few months after the Trump administration decided it was okay to rip through their protected lands to install a leaky oil pipeline and tell them to sit back quietly and watch while we endanger their tribal water supply.

I don’t know about you, but I'm humiliated by all of this and it isn't even my fault. I don't know how some people can sleep at night.

To top it off – before we move past the Native American issue – we now have a debate between President Trump and his army of White Walkers against U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren over the validity of a DNA test that purports to show she has Native American ancestors, to which I reply, “Who gives a rat’s ass?” I mean please, can’t we toss this shiny object into the bin where it belongs and get on with the serious issues of the day?

Serious issue like, say, what happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, where American citizens were virtually ignored by their federal government until eventually, 3,000 of them had died from lack of food, water, electricity and medical supplies. I’d be interested to know how many of the victims were Norwegians. President Trump likes Norwegians. Norway is 92% white.

I could also write extensively about the Trump Administration’s Muslim ban, but white people don’t want to talk about Muslims.  

Or how about the Republican Party’s voter suppression work against African Americans across the southern states? It’s not bad enough that Republican-controlled state governments have gerrymandered election maps to favor their own candidates, or passed discriminatory voter ID laws and changed voting times and dates to disenfranchise people of color, or dismantled key portions of the Voting Rights Act, but now a Republican secretary of state in Georgia (white guy) running for governor against an African American woman has reportedly shoved 53,000 voter registration applications into a drawer to keep mostly black people from voting against him.

Nothing to see here, right white people?  

And don’t even bring up those baby prisons for brown people on our southern border, where some young children who were taken from their families will probably never see their parents again. These are children, some as young as a few weeks old, and as near as I can tell, their most serious crime was not being born in Norway.

I’m also not going to mention the Japanese internment camps during World War II or the virtual enslavement of Chinese immigrants during the so-called "industrial" era?  (I guess I just did.) If you don't understand what I'm talking about, google "yellow peril" some time. And now white people have the audacity to declare themselves to be an endangered class and victims of religious and cultural discrimination. It simply boggles the mind.

As I reported here previously, several different surveys taken in 2017 showed that white evangelical Christians believe they are more discriminated against than African Americans, Muslims and other people of color. During the confirmation hearings for white Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, Jennifer Rubin, conservative Republican opinion writer for The Washington Post, summed it up this way:

“The people who are least entitled to claim it are now claiming victimhood, (including) rich, entitled, privileged white guys” who get angry whenever they can’t have everything they want.

So back around to me. I was born white, of course. I didn’t request it or have any input in that outcome, and for much of my life I didn’t think much about it. I never felt entitled or privileged because of it – although I guess I was – and I certainly never felt discriminated against because of my color or my Irish-American ancestry. I wasn’t happy to be white or ashamed of it. I was just white.

Today, clearly, I can't stop being white, but the older and wiser I get, the greater my white burden becomes. Like Jacob Marley, it’s a ponderous burden that grows longer and heavier every year. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not a burden like Native Americans carry, or African Americans or Muslims or Asians or Jews. My burden is the colossal embarrassment of being white in Donald Trump’s America and watching what happens to all the other people who are not.

It saddens me to see what’s happening and know there’s very little I can do about it. I never thought I'd see the day….

This is for supporters of Donald Trump

From Facebook

October 2018

This is for supporters of Donald Trump. It's a public post so I assume that means you can all see it. Please read it. It will take less than 3 minutes (I timed it at 2:35) and I promise not to call you names.

What Trump is telling you isn't true most of the time. No steel mills are being built in the U.S. and coal isn't coming back. Hillary Clinton didn't collude with Russia so she could lose an election, and she didn't commit any crimes so you can't lock her up.

Democrats aren't organizing mobs to come beat you up and no one is coming for your guns. No one has drafted an "open borders" law and the wall won't prevent illegal immigration.

Trump did not win the popular vote or have the largest inauguration day crowd. His Electoral College numbers were far from the greatest ever.

Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi are not our friends. The United Nations and our European allies are not the bad guys. Saudi Arabia is not a bastion of freedom.

Trump did not revive the economy, Obama did. The tax cuts really do benefit the top 1%. If you're not one of them, you probably got screwed. Trump does not want to protect people with pre-existing health conditions. If he did, he'd quit sabotaging Obamacare.

Trump is not a brilliant businessman. He just wants you to believe he is. He is, however, a brilliant con man. He isn't hiding his tax returns because they're under audit. He doesn't want you to see that you probably pay more taxes than he does.

In short, your president is a liar. He lies every day about almost everything, and Fox News either repeats the lies or feeds them to him in the first place.

Don't take my word for it. Call someone in the coal industry and ask them how many miners they have rehired. Call a steel company and ask them how many new mills they're going to build. Call Ford and ask about their plan to lay off 24,000 workers because of steel tariffs. Ask people from the Carrier plant in Indiana if Trump really saved their jobs.

In other words, stop being told what to think and do some self-study. Research Trump's business failures or the human rights records of his authoritarian friends. Talk to a Democrat to see what they really believe. Read some history instead of clicking web links to Breitbart News.

And for the love of god, please understand that the press is not the enemy of the people. Without a free press, all would truly be lost.

Listen, I know the guy can be seem to be entertaining and he's found a way to tap into things you don't like and make you believe he's on your side, but forget what he says and look around at what's really going on. This administration operates like a reality show, but this is not Celebrity President.

This is serious business and it's not going well. America is broken. We can either fix it before it's too late or watch it crumble into third-world status. You owe it to yourself to turn off the rhetoric and set aside the propaganda and think for yourself.

I mean, c'mon. Life is short. Don't waste it believing things that simply aren't true.

Blue wave or election day blues?

It’s almost time for another election in America and Democrats are searching for the right combination of messages and methods to regain control of the government. They are pinning their hopes on the prediction of a “blue wave” that will carry them to victories in House and Senate races in blue and red states alike.

Polls indicate they are well on their way to doing that, bolstered by expectations of a massive turnout of women voters angry over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and any number of other misogynistic policies of the Donald Trump administration, as well as a social media post by pop singer Taylor Swift that supposedly lit a fire under a large bloc of previously apathetic young female voters.

So I have a few comments about all of that:

(1) If elections were based solely on polls, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president by a landslide in 2016. I’ve stopped paying attention to polls, for the most part, and I blame Nate Silver and the misguided 538 for that.

(2)   While Taylor Swift encouraged young people to register, and many people did, no one knows how many of them registered Democrat, how many became Republicans or Independents or how many of them will actually show up to vote. I’m also not assuming that every one of them will cast a vote for the big blue wave, because they won’t. Thinking otherwise would be a mistake.

(3)   Despite everything that has happened in the last two years to turn people against them, Republicans remain smart enough, clever enough, devious enough and corrupt enough to manipulate, gerrymander and disenfranchise their way into keeping their ill-gotten power. This is what they do best, because actually governing certainly isn’t their thing.

(4)   Democrats, meanwhile, still like to claim the “moral high ground,” which means that every day when they show up to school with lunch money in their pockets, the Republicans come along and steal it. I mean, face it my friends, nobody lies, cheats and steals like today’s Trumpaloon Party, and no one has been able to stop them yet.

That said, I won’t be shocked if Democrats are able to retake the House of Representatives. I wouldn’t bet money on it, but they only need to flip something like 23 seats and some pundits are saying that 50 or 60 seats are in play. Winning the House would be good. At least it would get subpoena power away from Trump stooges like Devin Nunes and open the door for someone to finally investigate all of the current administration’s crimes.

As for the Senate, it’s highly unlikely that the pro-GOP majority will change. Consider this, from one of my previous blogs:

California has nearly 40 million people and operates the world’s fifth largest economy, yet it sends only two U.S. senators to Washington. By comparison, Wyoming has a population of 574,000 and also gets two senators. The same is true of South Dakota, population 878,000; North Dakota, 755,000; and Alaska, 738,000. Even Montana, with just slightly more than 1 million people, elects two senators even though it has barely half as many people as little West Virginia and far fewer than Greater Pittsburgh.

I’ll do the math for you. Wyoming, the two Dakotas, Alaska and Montana have a combined population of 4 million, or one-tenth that of California, yet combine for 10 Senate seats to California’s two. When it comes time to count Senate votes, five deep red states are 5X greater than one very blue one, and states like California, New York and Illinois are effectively neutralized by the scarlet waves of grain.

Knowing that, do you think anything is going to turn those states from red to blue? I don’t, and if you do, please give me a call. I’ve got some VHS tapes and landline phones for sale.

Now, there is a way to fix this problem, and obviously I have a plan. First, we amend the law to say that any state with less than 1 million people has to forfeit one Senate seat. Then, every state will add one senator for every 10 million people. That would give California four more and add two each to Texas, Florida and New York. Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Georgia and North Carolina would get one more each.

You can google for yourself, but when everything shakes out, I see a net gain for the blue states and a net loss for the reds, plus four swing states with 5 additional senators. If Pennsylvania comes back to blue where it belongs and half of the “swings” veer left, the Democrats could take control of the Senate.

So this could actually happen, right? All it would take is for everyone to put politics aside and agree on what is best for our country and our people. (Wait! Did I just say that out loud?) Well, okay, there’s one other way the good guys can get the country back. We can all go vote on November 6, so that the big blue wave doesn’t turn into the election day blues.

Like it did in 2016.

The world will never be the same again, Version 3.0

On September 11, 2001, I was standing in the back of a conference room in Hagerstown, Md., listening to an Allegheny Energy executive deliver a briefing on some subject that must have seemed important at the time. It was almost 9 a.m. and the briefing had almost concluded when a message was delivered to the room.

An airplane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in downtown New York City.

A maintenance man named Ron rolled in a TV set on a cart and over the next hour and a half, Ron and I watched as planes crashed and towers fell. Others came in, watched for a while and went on their way. I remember turning to Ron at one point and saying, “The world as we know it will never be the same.”

Now I don’t claim to be the only person who said those words that day, but in the years that followed, they certainly came true. The world is a vastly different place than it was at 8:45 a.m. on 9-11-01 when American Airlines Flight 11 was still one minute away from the WTC North Tower. Nothing that was true before the crash can ever be true again.

*   *   *

The next time I felt that way was November 9, 2016, when I woke up from a catnap some time after midnight to discover that Donald J. Trump had been elected President of the United States.

The night before, as votes were being counted, every political pundit and every campaign official and every voter in America with half a brain believed that Hillary Rodham Clinton was on her way to becoming the first woman president in the history of the United States. Political statistician Nate Silver – who was never wrong – determined that Clinton would win in a landslide over Trump, who most rational people considered to be an idiot.

Even Trump believed he would lose. Instead of writing a victory speech, he had started beating a drum of delusion while claiming that the election was rigged, apparently because illegal aliens were pouring across the California border to vote for Clinton or because of some equally stupid reason which I have successfully managed to forget.

I had fallen asleep that night believing there could possibly be a Democrat in the White House for the remainder of my life, and woke up to learn that Nate Silver was very, very wrong and that Donald J. Trump had been elected president. If Ron the Maintenance Man had been standing in my bedroom watching TV with me that night, I would have turned to him and said, “Ron, the world as we know it will never be the same again.”

We are now less than two years into the Trump presidency and it’s possible – as I said about 9-11 – that nothing that was true before the election can ever be true again. Trump began his term in office by appointing cabinet secretaries and other key officials who have made it their mission to destroy the very institutions they represent. He has alienated America’s allies while sucking up to the dictators of our greatest enemies, and has thrown the country into greater and greater debt to repay wealthy Republican donors for helping him get elected.

I could mention that he tells an average of 5.6 lies a day (or whatever the count is up to now), cheats on his taxes and uses the White House as a profit center – and don’t even mention the word “Russians” – but just recounting all of this makes me want to hurt somebody, and I’m basically a non-violent kind of guy.

So yeah, I’m pretty sure that nothing that was true before the 2016 election can ever be true again, because Trump has stolen the truth and twisted it into a farcical, fictitious and fraudulent alternative reality. I’m less sure that any of this can be fixed, and if it can, how long that would take. I don’t think it will happen during my remaining years.

*   *   *

And now, finally, to top it all off, a Republican-led Senate which has done absolutely nothing for the benefit of Mr. and Mrs. Average American has confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court a chronic prevaricator who went on TV and embarrassed himself in front of the entire world by whining, crying and lying about his high school and college years; screaming and shouting about a “Clinton conspiracy” and a liberal donor campaign to sabotage his nomination, throwing all pretense of non-partisanship out the window; and disrespecting members of the Senate who had the audacity to ask him probing questions about his past life of boofing, barfing and banging helpless drunk girls.  

It’s bad enough that I no longer believe a single word the president says, but now I have to question every decision the Supreme Court makes. Is it the proper decision, based on the intent of the framers of the Constitution and the rule of law? Or is it the decision demanded by the far-right Heritage Foundation, the spineless Republican Party and the New York crime boss who has gained control of our republic?

It is possible that the Supreme Court will never be the same again.

There used to be three co-equal branches of government in America that acted as checks and balances against each other, but we don’t have that today. What we have is one pocket of power that has melted the executive, legislative and judicial functions into a gurgling glob of denial, deception, demagoguery, disenfranchisement and deceit.

In other words, our government which was once the envy of countries around the world has become that “basket of deplorables” that Hillary Clinton warned us about. She was mocked for saying that, and it turned some people against her, but she was right. As I have said before, America has fallen...and I’m afraid she can’t get up.

Collins, Manchin and their support for Judge Kavanaugh

I really wanted to blog about yesterday's Kavanaugh news, but for now I just want to say two things:

1. Susan Collins is either stupid, dishonest or incredibly naive. Come to think of it, she may be all three. Her speech yesterday touting Judge Kavanaugh's court record and "lack of corroboration" concerning the sexual assault charges completely ignored three other important issues -- his temperament, his partisanship and his disrespect for members of Congress. She may not believe Dr. Blasey Ford, but there are plenty of other reasons to vote "no." She must have been napping when he testified the second time because she missed the mark entirely.

2. By voting "yes," Joe Manchin has alienated a large voting bloc in West Virginia who will probably vote for no one in next month's Senate race. That would seem to benefit his opponent, Patrick Morrisey. Manchin apparently believes that Trump supporters in deep red West Virginia will thank him for supporting Kavanaugh by re-electing him, and he could be right, but that doesn't make sense to me. He's now lost a lot of votes from liberals and moderates and I don't know how many angry women, and it seems to me that if Trump supporters do vote, they're more likely to support Trump's man Morrisey than DINO Joe Manchin. He could have voted "no," in my opinion, and not lost those voters who were going to vote for Morrisey anyway. Only time will tell how many more voters he has lost.

For all the news that’s fit to print, just wait a couple of days

So our local newspaper, which used to be just “bad,” has now zoomed past bad and right into the “ridiculous” category.

A few days ago, the Times West Virginian announced that from now on, the paper edition would be printed in Beckley, West Virginia, which is two and a half hours away on a clear, dry day and shipped back to Fairmont for later delivery. It seems the printing equipment in Fairmont is too old to function properly and too expensive to replace.

I’m guessing that the good folks at the Beckley Register-Herald – our “sister paper” – will be printing their own paper first, so not only will the TWV be printed in extreme southern West Virginia but it will also be standing in line to use the press, sort of like when concert goers queue up to use the rest rooms in a packed auditorium.

So why does it matter where the paper is printed?

It matters because now, any event that happens much after dark will occur too late to appear in the next day's edition, owing to the time required to drive the paper copies back here from the tail end of the state and prepare them for delivery.

Case in point: Last night’s Fairmont Senior High School football game – which ended at around 9:30 or so – is covered in today’s edition by a photograph and caption…but there is no story. A teaser headline tells me to log on to the web site to read an electronic version and “be sure to buy our Sunday paper” for a full report.

So I have to wait until Sunday to read about a football game that was over before 10 p.m. on a Friday. And by the way, I was already logged on to the web site when I received this information, so I looked for the “electronic version” of the story and, you guessed it, it wasn’t there.

What’s more, there is a story in today’s paper about the most recent Fairmont State football game. The problem here? That game was played on Thursday. So now I’m supposed to read Thursday’s news on Saturday and Friday’s news on Sunday. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

Look, I’m not stupid. I used to work for newspapers. Four different ones, in fact. I know they’re in trouble these days with the rise of electronic media and are doing what is necessary to cut costs. Hell, I even quit receiving the paper versions of local papers years ago because I didn’t want to trudge out to my driveway in the heat, rain and snow to collected them off the ground when I could click here and click there and read them on my computer, my Kindle, my iPad and my phone.

I also subscribe to electronic editions of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Morgantown Dominion Post, NPR, MSNBC, CNN, ESPN and I don’t know how many other online sources of news, weather and sports, but until this week, at least I got yesterday’s local news today, not yesterday’s news in a couple of days when the truck gets back from Beckley.

I pay good money for my e-paper subscriptions and I’d continue to do so gladly, but not if my local daily paper is going to be this far behind. In the truest sense of the words, “old news” is an oxymoron because if it’s old, it’s no longer news.

If the Times West Virginian insists on printing a paper copy of its news stories, photos and ads, maybe it should drop the pretense of being a daily newspaper and just start publishing once a week. At least then you’d expect to see “old news” and you could either read it, use it to ignite the logs in your fireplace or chuck it in the nearest bin.

Boofing and ralphing and calendars, oh my

Not necessarily my actual calendar from 1982.