An AP story you won't see in the Wheeling "newspapers"

From the AP: "Feeling the Heat: Earth in July Was Hottest Month on Record"

Earth just keeps getting hotter. July was the planet's warmest month on record, smashing old marks, U.S. weather officials said.

West Virginia politics

endorsements

The election of a new governor is still 15 months away but it's already endorsement season. If you get your political advice from former football coaches, MetroNews tells us:

Two leading figures in the Friends of Coal movement are backing a candidate for governor early in West Virginia, even though the West Virginia Coal Association, the trade organization that founded Friends of Coal, has not yet made an endorsement for 2016.

Don Nehlen, former West Virginia University head football coach, and Bob Pruett, former Marshall University head football coach, were making campaign stops with Democrat Jim Justice, billionaire businessman and owner of The Greenbrier Resort, on Monday.

Our local "newspapers" will not be pleased (although they probably won't mention it).

AG Morrisey joins yet another good-for-its-publicity lawsuit

Although he no longer is running for governor, Attorney General Morrisey attached the state to yet another lawsuit to appeal to his political base:

Attorney General Patrick Morrisey will add West Virginia to the list of states appealing a decision by a federal court that ruled a county commission in North Carolina was violating the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution during each meeting by opening with a prayer delivered by a county commissioner.

The court ruled that the Rowan County Commission had violated the 1st Amendment of the Constitution because the prayers were exclusively Christian and coercive in nature, but Morrisey disagrees with that ruling.

I don't know the answer but have Morrisey and his fellow Republican attorney generals won any of these lawsuits or are they all as self-serving as they appear?

BootJoe.com still alive and kicking

Last March I wrote about some of the gun rights people being upset with Senator Manchin for not being strong enough on certain gun issues. As reported in Ammoland, the Firearms Policy Coalition put together a #BootJoe campaign at Bootjoe.com. "to urge gun rights groups to revoke the memberships of Manchin and other anti-gun politicians." (I guess it depends upon where you sit on the political spectrum -- for me, Manchin is not "anti-gun.") I checked - the website is still up and running. Additionally, a recent post at Ammoland by the president of the WV Citizen Defense League explains Manchin's failings:

The Senator has failed to understand that the firearm-owning world has changed. This is not the 1960s. Firearm ownership is no longer predominately about hunting. It is about defending our lives.

I didn't know that.

By the way, an earlier state attorney general's group lawsuit dealt with the gun rights. Maybe Morissey is looking to challenge Manchin.

East Liverpool and the waste incinerator plant -- 25 years later

Samuel Vargo has an update in the form of a Daily Kos diary on East Liverpool, "home of the world's largest waste incinerator plants." The protests are long gone and so is the town. The diary is long (and depressing) but it's also instructive.