WHEELING – Like more and more people, I got rid of my landline.
After a while, it seemed every call I wanted to get came to my cell phone and every call I didn’t want came to my “house phone.” Telemarketers, wrong numbers and plenty of political calls at election time.
There’s nothing more aggravating than being interrupted as a human being by a machine, telling you to hold for whatever, or listen to a tape recording.
But not everyone can cut the landline cord or wants to. Cell service is unreliable for a lot of places in West Virginia. Of course, in the area surrounding the Green Bank Telescope, you’re not supposed to use them much at all if it can be helped. So, plenty of people still have their landlines, particularly older folks and rural folks, and they are stuck getting annoying robo-calls.
They shouldn’t have to pay for them, though, which brings us, again, to AG Patrick Morrisey. Morrisey is actually taking taxpayer dollars are using them to robo call people – most recently, $77,000 of your tax money was put out there so you could be interrupted during the dinner hour.
That’s a scam that steals money from West Virginians and uses it to annoy them. It ought to be stopped. If only we could report him to the Attorney General.
But it’s not just the frivolous wasting of taxpayer money on his perpetual campaign that stands out here. It’s the blatant hypocrisy of a man who campaigned claiming no tax money should be spent on this kind of campaigning, turning around and doing that very thing. The campaign that bragged and bragged about his ethics has yielded an officeholder who breaks every rule in the book.
So, if you are not bothered about how Morrisey misrepresented West Virginia, if you’re not bothered about his end-run around campaign finance law, putting “campaign money” into his pocket, and if you’re not worried about him protecting drug companies who fuel an epidemic here in West Virginia – just wait til you’ve got your table all set, the summer burgers are ready, and the phone rings and Patrick Morrisey is calling you to talk himself up – collect.
Regan is an attorney with Bordas & Bordas in Wheeling and vice chairman of the West Virginia Democratic Party.
