Hits & Misses
A quick look at some of the key issues making headlines recently in the Observer-Reporter
HIT: To put it in baseball terms, nine students at Washington & Jefferson College hit a grand slam. The students in David Kieran’s history class curated a museum exhibit explaining how baseball helped the nation to cope after 9/11, along with other trying times in the country’s history. This display isn’t appearing at the college or a museum, but instead it’s being featured prominently at the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville. The class had to balance the joy derived from baseball with the solemn atmosphere of the memorial. Talk about pressure. These students hit the ball out of the park.
MISS: A mountain of trash that piled up at Monongahela’s beloved Chess Park was a fitting art installation to government incompetence. State Rep. Bud Cook’s Redd Up The Valley went awry after his office posted vague details about the roadside cleanup event that soon took on a life of its own through social media when people assumed they could dump anything and everything at the park, including hard-to-recycle televisions and tires. Cook, R-Daisytown, had claimed it was an official Great American Cleanup of Pa. event, but his office never registered it with the organization that coordinates it with the state Department of Transportation and the state Department of Environmental Protection. State Sen. Camera Bartolotta, R-Carroll, compounded the problem when she mistakenly canceled the trash disposal company that had been contacted to remove the televisions and tires. It was supposed to be a good cause that turned into a fiasco. We’re glad the trash pile is finally gone, but it showed how government officials can make quite a mess.
HIT: It seems that West Virginia Republicans learned something from last year’s special U.S. Senate election in Alabama, where Republican Roy Moore, an extreme right-wing, twice-removed state Supreme Court justice who became ensnared in a sex scandal involving underage girls, lost to a Democrat who should have been a huge underdog. On Tuesday, West Virginia Republicans voting in that state’s Senate primary showed no love to Don Blankenship, an extreme right-wing former coal baron who did prison time for his role in the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster. Republicans see a chance to knock off Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin in November, and nominating Blankenship would have made that a tougher hill to climb. Instead, two-term state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey will take on Manchin in what promises to be a bare-knuckles brawl.
HIT: Kudos to Pennsylvania House Majority Leader Dave Reed, R-Indiana, for proposing a package of changes that would improve the political process in the commonwealth. Reed is calling for an end to the exclusion of independent or non-affiliated voters from the state’s primary elections. He also offers a new approach to redistricting. Finally, he’s suggesting a three-legislative-session limit on how long a lawmaker can chair a committee whose leadership is based on seniority. Anything that gets Rep. Daryl Metcalfe out of the top spot on the State Government Committee sounds like progress to us.