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Editorial

Exec order isn’t an election takeover

The way West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner talks about President Biden’s Executive Order No. 14019, you would think the executive branch was trying to wrest control of elections from the states and impose a federalized system. We read the executive order in question and find ourselves wondering if Warner — and the eight other secretaries of state who filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court to block it — read the same document we did. As far as we can tell, all the order does is instruct executive branch agencies to help people understand when, where and how ...

Randy Mazey has more than earned his retirement

Retirements are a particular kind of bittersweet goodbye, especially when the retirement is well-earned. You’re mostly happy for the retiree, but there’s a part of you that mourns the loss and looks ahead at the coming changes with a little trepidation. And so it will be as WVU baseball’s Randy Mazey steps down as head coach to start the next chapter of his life. Mazey has stood at the helm of WVU baseball for 12 years now, building a program that has seen steadily increasing success, both on the field and at the ticket office. Under his leadership, WVU went to the NCAA ...

Greedflation has hit the tipping point

If there was ever proof of “greedflation” — corporations inflating prices just because they can — it’s the price rollbacks many retailers are now touting as “for the customer” in press releases and commercials. Part of the disconnect between how people feel about the economy and the economy’s actual performance (by traditional metrics) has been what people experience daily in grocery and big-box stores and what they experience when they check on their investment accounts every few months or so. Investment metrics are off the charts, with the stock market performing ...

Why did RA bond fail? We already know the reasons

Last week, Nancy Walker — who is stepping down from the Mon County Board of Education after 28 years — recommended to her fellow board members that they pursue a “voter engagement poll” to see why the Renaissance Academy bond was rejected by an overwhelming margin. Ideally, she said, the architectural firm tapped to design the STEM school, DLR Group, would front the costs for the public survey, but we find it doubtful the company would take on the expense for a project that seems unlikely to be funded. Nor do we think it would be financially prudent for the board of education ...

The phantom campaigns of Joe Manchin

Current U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin recently changed his voter registration from Democrat to “unaffiliated” (aka, independent). This is noteworthy, though not surprising. Manchin has reiterated several times over the last several years that he’s felt the national Democratic Party has moved too far left for his tastes, and he follows the path laid by Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who changed from Democrat to independent in 2022. What’s created all the buzz, however, is not that Manchin changed his party affiliation but the timing of his switch. Some Republicans have reportedly ...

Facts, not politics, convicted Trump

Let’s start with the indisputable facts. In 2018, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty to multiple charges, including campaign finance violations directly related to the $130,000 in “hush money” he paid adult film star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet that she and Trump had a sexual encounter in 2006. In April this year, Trump was charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to reimbursements made to Cohen; specifically, that the payments constituted election interference by suppressing a story that could have damaged Trump’s ...