Earlier this year the Chairwoman of the Democrat Party, Belinda Biafore, sent a letter of apology to Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Additionally, 38 of the 41 Democrats in the West Virginia House of Delegates signed a letter of invitation to a spokesperson for the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) to come visit the state capitol down in Charleston. CAIR is an organization with ties to Hamas and to the Muslim Brotherhood, both of which have been associated with terrorism A growing number of people believe that CAIR itself might itself be a terrorist organization as this article in the American Thinker suggests.

“Mountain State Values” is an Independent Expenditure Committee. What that means is that, while it cannot make donations to a candidate it can spend unlimited amounts of money on “issues”. There are no limits on the amounts any given individual, corporation or group can donate to an Independent Expenditure Committee. There, for all intents and purposes, Mountain State Values is a “SuperPAC” receiving almost half of its money from other PACS. It’s a PAC of PACs if you will. It is registered to do business here in West Virginia and it has launched a tsunami of negative advertising against Senate candidates across the state of West Virginia, all of whom are Republican. In our area incumbent Senator Patricia Rucker is in their cross hairs. In their reports filed with the Secretary of State’s office they have already spent over $150 thousand dollars spewing out vitriol against her.

The subject of Rockwool has come up again in recent statements by local political figures. Delegate John Doyle did a segment on local radio last week dedicated to Rockwool. Doyle came out of retirement in 2018 to run for the West Virginia House of Delegates in the 67th District. He defeated the incumbent Republican, Riley Moore and credited the Rockwool issue as the reason for his victory. Delegate Doyle is currently running for re-election (disclosure – this author is his opponent) and he is apparently banking on squeezing still more political mileage out of the issue. He just might be chasing his own tail.

At a recent candidate forum hosted by the Eastern Panhandle Business Association, a member of the audience posed a question to Pete Dougherty, candidate for the West Virginia State Senate in the 16th District: “Why are you a Democrat?” The assumption, I believe, is that most people consider Mr. Dougherty - the current Jefferson County sheriff - to be a moderate centrist sort of Democrat. You know, the type of “conservative Democrat”, if there is such a thing, that might even consider a switch over to the GOP.

Now that the political season is in high gear and Facebook is curtailing political speech I’m reminded of the antics of the West Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties back in February. They issued “warning letters” to nine West Virginia office holders and a municipal police department for allegedly blocking constituents from posting on their respective Facebook pages. The six state-level office holders cited were all Republican, of course. There was one non-partisan office holder on a county school board and for window dressing they included two Democrats that are county level elected officials, one of whom is not running for reelection.

The campaign season is in full swing; the Republican National Convention is being held in scaled-down mode due to the coronavirus and I’m reminded of an event back in November of last year. It was the second in a series of happenings hosted by the Stubblefield Institute for Civil Political Discourse at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. It was emceed by local radio personality David Welch and moderated by Dr. Mary Hendrix the school’s president.