John Douglas

As always, we encourage you to shop at home in the Berkeley Springs-Hancock area this Christmas season.

Driving off to those big box stores does nothing to keep jobs and dollars flowing in our community. You might save a buck in a distant town, only to find that a local store is forced to shut its doors.

There was more attention than usual given to the vice presidential candidates in this year's election. Of course, it's important to know something about the Joe Bidens and Sarah Palins since they could end up in the Oval Office. Truth is, though, most vice presidential candidates are forgotten pretty fast.

Just go back 20 years. George Bush I was Ronald Reagan's vice president, but who did Bush pick for his? And, what Democrat did Bush run against in 1988, and who was that fellow's vice presidential pick?

Each year we urge you to show the Goodwill to Men spirit of the Christmas season by helping others. This year, the need is greater than most of us can ever recall.

The national economic crisis is taking a toll on nearly everyone, but especially those who already had trouble putting food on the table and paying their heating bills. A lot of folks are worried about their jobs or retirement incomes. A hard winter lies ahead for too many of our friends and neighbors.

With all the political and economic news, many people probably missed this summer's warning from the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) about fraudulent cancer treatments.

The FDA notified two dozen companies that they should stop claiming Tumorex, Immune Ace, Ellagic Insurance Formula, PC Hope, Breast Cancer Tea Formula and a bunch of other products work as anti-cancer drugs. These things may still be sold as dietary supplements, but their makers were told to drop the anti-cancer claims or their products might be seized and they could face criminal charges.

You may have noticed a number of paid letters to the editor in recent issues of The Morgan Messenger. Generally we require that a letter be paid – and marked as such – when it does not correspond to our letters' policy. Some are simply too long, or the writer insists that no editing be done, or the content veers into advertising a product.

This fall, the product promoted in most of the paid letters is a political candidate. Some folks want to endorse a politician or tell you who to vote for. Of course, this is essentially advertising. And, just because one candidate's supporters may be more avid letter writers shouldn't have any bearing on an election's outcome.

We've often poked fun at Political Speak, the language that politicians use to cover up what they're doing, or not doing. So we enjoyed a recent column by Jim Stasiowski, a writing coach who urges reporters to use straight talk, not bureaucratic jargon.

Stasiowski began by explaining how pork barrel – the tried and tested term for special interest spending – was replaced with earmarks. From the late 1890s on, pork barrel conjured up a picture of senators and congressmen sitting around the pork barrel (or federal treasury) in an old country store and carving up the pork so they could send the bacon home to their districts and keep voters happy. Our own Senator Robert Byrd is often called The King of Pork, for better or worse.

We've been wrestling with the notion that those seeking to retain their seats on the planning commission should have to appear before the county commissioners for a new interview, as Commissioner Brenda Hutchinson wants.

We can't quite put our finger on what bothers us about this, but it feels too much like being called to the principal's office.

The West Virginia Farm Bureau has been sponsoring meetings about gas and oil leases in several parts of the Mountain State. The message being promoted is a sound one — property owners should be careful before they sign anything.

While the Eastern Panhandle isn't exactly Natural Gas Country, a number of property owners have been contacted by oil and gas landmen in recent years. As far as we're aware, there's never been a successful, producing gas or oil well drilled in the Morgan County vicinity, but who knows what the future may hold?

Last month, a state agency reported that West Virginia's two acute-care psychiatric hospitals are overcrowded. The 240 available beds are consistently below the number needed, according to the Bureau for Behavioral Health & Health Facilities.

Several communities are probably interested in being home to a new mental hospital, since it would offer an assortment of jobs for health professionals and others. An editorial in The Weston Democrat urged state lawmakers to locate any new facility there, since the closing of the old Weston State Hospital was an economic blow to their area.

The Morgan County unemployment rate reached 6.4% in May – the highest among the eight counties in northeast West Virginia and way above the state rate of 5.1%. A year before, the local unemployment rate had been 4.6%.

And with the high prices of food and oil, many working folks are having trouble putting hamburger on the table and keeping gas in the tank to get to their jobs.