Now that the West Virginia primary is behind us, I can’t help but reflect on the constant drumbeat from certain circles that bemoans the role of money in politics. The truth is, money is the life blood of political campaigns and the reason for that is obvious. Voters demand it.

In mid-April there was an article that appeared in the Charleston Gazette Mail entitled “Tomblin: No special session until there’s a budget agreement”. The article said that Governor Tomblin doesn’t plan to call the West Virginia Legislature into special session to pass the 2016-17 state budget until there’s agreement on how to close a $270 million budget shortfall. There are those that say that in so doing he is risking a state government shut down.

This year, instead of having to file our federal taxes by April 15 as we usually do, we didn’t have to file until April 18. For those living in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, or Maine, the due date wasn’t until April 19. I asked a lot of people if they knew why the filing deadline had been extended and not one knew the answer. Not one.

This year, instead of having to file our federal taxes by April 15th as we usually do, we didn’t have to file until April 18th. For those living in the states of Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Maine, the due date wasn’t until April 19th. I asked a lot of people if they knew why the filing deadline had been extended and not one knew the answer. Not one.

Over this past weekend, the golf world held its Masters Tournament for the 80th time. I’m a fan of the game and happened to catch an interview with Gary Player, who coincidentally turned 80 this past November. Player married his wife Vivienne and joined the PGA tour in 1957. At the age of 80, he’s no longer playing professional golf, but he and Vivienne are still married. He has 173 professional wins to his credit, 9 of them majors and three of those were at the Masters.

Writing in the National Review, Jonah Goldberg, in an article entitled The Decline of Political Power, asserts, “Whether or not Trump and Sanders go on to win the nomination, they’ve already played an historic role. They’ve exposed the parties as the weaklings they’ve long been”. Goldberg goes on to say of his old boss, the late Ben Wattenberg, a conservative Democrat who fought a losing battle to save the Democrats from their relentless drift to the left, “I remember asking Ben on more than one occasion why the Democratic Party would allow this or that thing to happen. He’d always respond pretty much the same way. ‘What Democratic Party? The Democratic Party is a dozen people with fax machines.’ “