West Virginia lawmakers were considering amending or implementing water pollution standards in January when they invited a member of the business community to testify.
Outgoing Cabell County Delegate Kelli Sobonya, a Republican who was chair of the House rule-making review committee, called on Rebecca McPhail, president of the West Virginia Manufacturers Association, to speak.
“We do have some concerns among our membership,” McPhail said, before telling lawmakers that they wanted the DEP to consider that West Virginians drink less water, eat less fish and are heavier than the national average. She also said she had concerns about accuracy when testing for low levels of pollutants.
Yep, you read that correctly: Because West Virginians already have health problems, there’s really no reason to enact more stringent pollution rules.
We left West Virginia more than a year ago, but I just can’t stop watching the statehouse antics. You probably heard about the teachers strike during last year’s legislative session, when the Republican dominated legislature got their asses handed to them. This year, in a bald faced revenge move, the GOP attempted to push through an education “reform” bill that, amongst other things would have permitted charter schools in the Mountain State. That’s what got me paying attention again this year, but West Virginia being West Virginia, something even worse than this Koch-funded nonsense came along: Eric Earl Porterfield, (R-Mercer).
Porterfield
Delegate Porterfield first came to my attention after he railed against “the LGBTQ” on the House floor. He refers to the LGBTQ community as if were a singular block, or perhaps an actual block. He’s compared the LGBTQ [sic] to the Ku Klux Klan, adding, “The LGBTQ — not homosexuals, but the LGBTQ — is the closest thing to political terrorism in America.” What the hell is talking about? Damned if I know. After these and other similar statements, Porterfield was given the opportunity to explain, or at least reframe his assertions on a local television interview. Instead, he threw fuel on the fire by saying that if his children (both quite young) told him they were gay, he would take them to a creek and “see if they could swim.” What a guy, right? But wait, there’s more.
If you’ll notice in the above photo, Delegate Porterfield has, what the late Frank McCourt would have called “two eyes that look like pissholes in the snow.” You see, Porterfield is blind. Before you start feeling too sorry for him, let’s look into how he lost his eyesight. When he first came to great attention, the rumor was that he’d lost his sight in a bar fight after dropping a racist slur, but no one had the complete story. Then along came Jake. Jake Zuckerman, of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, that is. Zuckerman learned that Porterfield actually had his eyes gouged out, Three Stooges-style, in a brawl in the parking lot of a strip club in Indiana while he was . . . wait for it . . . in divinity school. I suppose when I introduced him, I should have said that his day job is as the founder and minister at Blind Faith Ministries (get it?). I’ll let Zuckerman’s reporting take the story from here:
“According to his own deposition, Porterfield and a friend, Steven McPherson, left Sky Box, a strip club in Harvey, Illinois, around 10:30 p.m. on the night of Saturday, Dec. 10, 2006. They headed across the Indiana state line to Cavanaugh’s, where they remained until closing time around 3 a.m.
According to her statement to police, Andrea Acevedo, a patron at Cavanaugh’s, was walking to her car with her cousin and two friends nearby, after the bar closed. McPherson approached her and touched her arm without permission. She told police McPherson told her to “shut the f–k up”; in her deposition in the lawsuit, she told attorneys he said “f–k you bitch.”
She said she told him it was late and he was drunk. He apologized. McPherson told police he knows he said something derogatory to Acevedo, and he might have told her to “shut the f–k up.”
Then, according to Acevedo, Porterfield approached.
“What are you apologizing to this bitch for?” Porterfield said, according to Acevedo’s deposition. “You don’t have to apologize.”
As two of her cousin’s friends, Jesus Venegas and Jason Dorado, approached, Porterfield addressed the bunch. “What are you bitches gonna do about it?” he said, according to Acevedo’s deposition.
According to Acevedo and her friends, Porterfield threw the first punch. Dorado said he’s 100 percent sure Porterfield took the first shot. Venegas said Porterfield threw the first punch, knocking him out cold.
Anthony Acevedo, Andrea Acevedo’s cousin, said he heard yelling before the fight.
“I just noticed like people were yelling and it kind of caught my attention, and then like I turned around and looked over, and I see this guy hit Jesus,” he said in his deposition.
McPherson told police the fight began among Porterfield and the others, not himself. He also told police that Porterfield told him not to talk to police.”
Nice guy, huh? But wait, there’s more. What led to the eye gouge?
“In the police report, an officer details information from a doctor, who said Dorado told a nurse that Porterfield bit his ear when Dorado had him in a headlock.
Dorado then “poked his eyes out,” during the fight.
“What the f–k do you want, he bit me?” Dorado said to the nurse, according to the report.”
Ah, ya gotta love the colorful candor of a police field report.
Everyone involved in the melee seems to have declined prosecution, but the depositions quoted come from Porterfield’s civil suit against the strip club for failing to provide adequate security.
This would all be fairly comical, if Porterfield weren’t now in a leadership position in state government. But he is. And I cannot take my eyes off the mess.
Well, I had a whole post prepared about the ravings of John Kelly in regards to the American Civil War, but anything I might have said has since been eclipsed by people far smarter than me.
I haven’t beaten on Facebook for a while, so let me remedy that.
Virginia Heffernan writes in Wired magazine, comparing Zuckerberg’s shrugging, “Aw gosh, we’re just an apolitical platform” with the gut wrenching reckoning Leslie E. Robertson put himself through after the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001. Robertson was the chief engineer in the Twin Towers project and wondered after their collapse what he might have done differently, whereas Zuck . . . well, after the election, he said it was “crazy” to say that Facebook could have influenced the vote, and then he went on walkabout trying to get to know American hoomans.
Facebook is indeed a new world order. It determines our digital and real-world behavior in incalculable ways. It does all this without any kind of Magna Carta except a vague hypothesis that connectivity is a given good. And yes, it’s largely unregulated, having styled itself as nothing more than a platform—a Switzerland pose that lets it seem as benign as its bank-blue guardrails, which stand as a kind of cordon sanitaire between Facebook and the rest of the unwashed internet.
In 2006, a college kid talked me off Myspace and onto Facebook by insisting that Facebook was orderly while Myspace was emo and messy. That kid was right. Facebook is not passionate; it’s blandly sentimental. It runs on Mister Rogers stuff: shares and friends and likes. Grandparents and fortysomethings are not spooked by it. Like the animated confetti that speckles Facebook’s anodyne interface, our lives on Facebook—the bios and posts—seem to belong to us and not to the company’s massive statehouse, which looks on indifferently as we coo over pups and newborns. (Or is it a penal colony? In any case, it keeps order.) Facebook just is the internet to huge numbers of people. Voters, in other words.
Further into her piece, Heffernan quotes Siva Vaidhyanathan, who has written a book about Zuckerberg and Facebook. Vaidhyanathan says that Zuckerberg may well have been better off had he finished college, as it may have addressed his lack of “appreciation for nuance, complexity, contingency, or even difficulty.” Adding that “He lacks an historical sense of the horrible things that humans are capable of doing to each other and the planet.” Sound like anyone else we know?
Quiet time in 2017 seems to get interrupted by two things: sitting next to your partner reading the news of the day and one of you ejaculating1 either
“Oh my God!” Which precedes the description of yet another outrage by Trump, his family or his collection of cartoon administrators, or
“Oh no.” Which precedes the disclosure of another death or ailment of someone dear.
I suppose we should be thankful that the “Oh my Gods” are outnumbering the “Oh noes,” but it’s a hard way to live, ya know? The first thing I do upon waking each morning is check my iPad for overnight news alerts, hoping there are none. They’re bound to come through the day (like today’s alert that employers are largely off the hook for including birth control in their health insurance packages. Why? FuckifIknow. It’s certainly not because Trump is a prude or a typical sex-fearing evangelical, maybe just another case of undo-what-the-black-man-did, is my best guess), so it’s a relief when the screen is blessedly blank before my first coffee. Someone remind me why health care (via insurance) is linked to employment again, because that is some stupid shit right there. Oh, and while we’re at it, how come dental care is not health care when it comes to insurance?2
But back to the “Oh my God” that prompted me to write this. Last night, after dining with many senior members of the military (and their plus-ones, who must have had fantastic feelings of ambivalence about being invited to the White House, but this White House), Trump, in a photo op, commented that this was the calm before the storm, and when asked by the press what he meant, replied, “You’ll see.” Presidenting by reality show rules, ain’t it grand? And it makes for an awesome night’s sleep, let me tell you. Will we bomb North Korea? Invade Mali? You’ll see. Tune in tomorrow.
1 I am trying to rehabilitate this verb to include definition number two in common conversation again. 2 I know the historical reasons for this, I just want to know who thinks they still make sense in the 21st century.
It should come as no surprise that a man who demands loyalty from others, but gives none himself would tuck tail when the going gets rough. But for their sakes, I hope all the (as yet) un-indicted co-conspirators are paying attention to how Trump reacted when his man Luther Strange was beaten in the GOP primary for one of Alabama’s senate seats. The Beast of Twitter deleted the now embarrassing tweets in support of Strange. Of course, dummy doesn’t understand that the internet is forever. In fact, I’ll go ahead and commemorate them here too:
