Dwayne Yancey

2 weeks ago | cardinalnews.org | Dwayne Yancey

President Donald Trump stood in front of a group of hard-hatted coal miners this week to announce that he had signed a series of executive orders aimed at “reinvigorating America’s beautiful clean coal industry.”Some of these directly involve Virginia, the nation’s 12th-biggest coal-producing state and home to the nation’s biggest coal-exporting port. Some don’t.

2 weeks ago | cardinalnews.org | Dwayne Yancey

Virginia is now officially embarked on a historic governor’s race. With Abigail Spanberger and Winsome Earle-Sears now confirmed as the Democratic and Republican nominees, we can now say that Virginia will elect its first female governor in November. Virginia is well behind the nation on that score: Thirty-two states have had a woman as chief executive. Arizona has had five female governors. If Earle-Sears wins, she would be the first Black woman elected governor in any state.

2 weeks ago | cardinalnews.org | Dwayne Yancey

Lynchburg Republicans have filed suit to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s law that has been interpreted to require political parties to nominate candidates through primaries and not other methods, such as mass meetings or conventions. Many Republicans have never particularly liked that law, which was passed in 2021 but didn’t go into effect until 2024, but Lynchburg Republicans have been at the forefront of not liking it.

2 weeks ago | cardinalnews.org | Dwayne Yancey

A long time ago, long before William McKinley and even longer before Donald Trump, tariffs drove Americans to war. Today, we call that war the American Revolution. We’re all familiar with the clarion call of “no taxation without representation.” The taxation in question in the tumultuous years leading up to 1776 mostly involved tariffs. They were called “import duties” then, but they were the same thing — taxes on imports.

2 weeks ago | cardinalnews.org | Dwayne Yancey

My favorite scene in the mostly accurate HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” comes when the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev dispatches an unenthusiastic lower-level Kremlin bureaucrat to investigate the accident. That dull-witted apparatchik, Boris Shcherbina, is forced to take along a scientist, Valery Legasov, who desperately tries to explain to him how nuclear energy works and how he should be on the lookout for graphite, because that would indicate an alarming breach of the reactor’s nuclear core.