Supporting Senator Shelley

Today on page 6 of the Wheeling Intelligencer, Steven Allen Adams, Ogden’s political reporter, rewrites a Shelley Moore Capito press release about a partisan Afghanistan bill that our senator and a majority of the Senate Republicans are supporting:

In a statement Monday, Capito, R-W.Va., announced she was joining 27 of her Republican colleagues in the Senate in supporting the Afghanistan Counterterrorism, Oversight, and Accountability Act.

The bill was introduced by U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Capito said the bill seeks to address several of the pending issues and questions surrounding President Joe Biden’s administration withdrawal plans and the future of relations with Afghanistan.

The act will go nowhere but it will give the appearance that the senator cares about the Afghans. The senator has had her chances to support those who helped us in Afghanistan, but she has backed down when the action was bipartisan, or the vote counted. For example, back in August, Capito did not sign a bipartisan Senate letter that would have encouraged

the Biden administration to expedite the evacuations of at-risk Afghans and create a specific humanitarian parole category for female leaders, journalists, activists, security forces and others who are at risk.

And last week, Capito supported

a Republican amendment Thursday that sought to curtail assistance to Afghan refugees who were rapidly evacuated to the United States and that would have made it more difficult for them to obtain Real IDs.

Yes, Capito supports the Afghans when it doesn’t count; she also knows that no reporter will ask her about it.

An interesting Intelligencer edit

If you go online and read Adams' column in other Ogden papers, you may notice this last paragraph did not make it into either the morning Intelligencer or the afternoon News Register:

According to a survey released Monday by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 72-percent of respondents said they supported granting refugee status to those who worked with the U.S. and Afghanistan governments before the fall of the country to the Taliban. Out of the 53,000 Afghanis spread out across U.S. military bases overseas, 14,000 are expected to start coming to the U.S. as soon as this week.

Why was this paragraph dropped from Adams’ report? Does it have anything to do with the fact that West Virginia is one of only five states that have refused to take refugees and that neither Capito, the governor, or the state GOP has done anything to get WV involved in the process? I’d bet that if you asked the Intelligencer, they would tell you that the paragraph was eliminated because they simply ran out of room. Here’s the bottom of page 6 in both papers:

It seems to me that if the “Word Search Solution” had been moved to another page, there would have been enough space to print Adams’ last paragraph. (Of course, since I don’t do “Word Search, maybe there is an Ogden rule that the “Word Search Solution” must always be placed at the bottom of page 6.)

Another day, another old Ohio editorial for our Ogden papers

Today’s “Set Medical Screenings” is special, however. Yes, it’s old and originally from an Ogden Ohio paper, but this is the second time that this editorial has appeared; it was previously published in the Intelligencer on August 10. (It’s first publisher appears to have been the Marietta Times on July 26.)

So now Ogden is recycling their own two-month-old editorials. (That’s getting bang for their editorial bucks!) Yesterday’s editorial – plagiarized; today’s – recycled. What’s next?