The Pope and Climate Change

The Faith section of the "newspaper" carried an AP story about Pope Francis and the coming encyclical on climate change and the environment:

Pope Francis warned the rich and powerful this week that God will judge them on whether they fed the poor and cared for the Earth, his latest exhortation on the environment ahead of his eagerly awaited encyclical on climate change and its effects on the world’s most vulnerable.

What surprised me was the descriptive headline that the Intelligencer used:
Pope: God Will Judge Stewardship Of the Planet

I assumed it would be something like:
Pope Joins War on Coal

The Michael Myer Column

Over 700 words to tell us that bipartisanship is sometimes good and sometimes not-so-good. Life is far too short to spend time analyzing this column but I have to confess that there was one paragraph that stood out for all the wrong reasons:

Bipartisanship would be a terrible thing for our state, as it would for the nation, at least as some people envision it. They belong to the Rodney King "why can't we all just get along" school of governance.

Invoking a phrase from Rodney King in 1993 in a column on bipartisan politics? King was talking about race and most certainly not talking about governance so why bring him up? Is this some sort of guilt by association? Myer never explains the point. What a bizarre reference even for Myer.

Ignoring the Attorney General Morrisey Story

In the previous two posts I highlighted how those favored by the local "newspapers" received coverage far in excess of what was deserved. Being an Ogden favorite also means anything negative will probably be ignored. Such is the case with Attorney General Morrisey. Here is some background on an ongoing conflict of interest for the AG as covered in a front page story in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail:

Morrisey inherited the Cardinal Health lawsuit from ousted attorney general Darrell McGraw, who alleged that the drug distributor helped fuel Southern West Virginia’s problem with prescription drugs by shipping an excessive number of pain pills to the region.

Cardinal Health, the nation’s second largest drug distributor, later contributed to Morrisey’s inauguration party, and the company’s executives wrote checks to Morrisey’s campaign before and after the November 2012 election.

Morrisey’s wife, Denise Henry, is a longtime Capitol Hill lobbyist for Cardinal Health. The drug distributor has paid Henry’s lobbying firm, Capitol Counsel, $940,000 since Morrisey took office in January 2013.

Morrisey is now attempting to block the Charleston paper's access to a critical email. As the Gazette-Mail notes:

Morrisey’s office has changed the description of the email’s contents three times over the past 18 months.

It's a complex story; the Charleston papers have been actively pursuing it as the Wheeling papers, not surprisingly, have been totally ignoring it. If you remember how our local "newspapers" covered his predecessor, Darrell McGraw, just imagine how much local attention this story would be getting if this were McGraw rather than Morrisey.