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Year: 2019

Demographics on the Ground

David Martin

I live in the 10th Congressional District of Virginia, in the southwestern corner of Fairfax County, which on its eastern side is just across the river from Washington, DC. The Republican, Frank Wolf, was my Congressman when we moved here in 1983, up until his retirement in 2014. After 1982, Wolf won re-election by large margins every two years. His former aide, Barbara Comstock, a “moderate” Republican, succeeded him and won re-election in 2016, although, uncharacteristically, the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, won the presidential vote in the district by 10 percentage points. Noting the changing demographics of her district, Comstock had been one of the never-Trumpers in the GOP, and it had probably saved her in 2016, but the handwriting was on…

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Befuddled Juror in Thomas Merton Book Verdict

David Martin

Befuddled Juror in Thomas Merton Book Verdict My copy of the quarterly Merton Seasonal, published jointly by the International Thomas Merton Society and the Thomas Merton Center of Bellarmine University, has arrived, and I see that they have finally stopped ignoring The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation, written by Hugh Turley and yours truly and published in March of 2018. The Winter 2018 edition upon the 50th anniversary of Merton’s untimely and mysterious death in Thailand on December 10, 1968, is on the general theme of Merton’s demise. On the cover is a photograph of Merton’s grave marker at his home Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. The modest black and white magazine, 43 pages in length, contains six articles and two…

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Daniel Best: Trump’s Vince Foster?

David Martin

Hey, Donald, do you see anything fishy here? Snopes.com, of all people, has a good summary of the basic known facts in this very recent high-level suspicious death case: On 1 November 2018, the Trump administration’s senior adviser on drug pricing reform, Daniel Best, was found “unresponsive” near the garage door exit of a Washington, D.C., apartment building. He was pronounced dead at the scene by first responders. A statement released the same day by Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Alex Azar mourned Best as a “friend and colleague” but addressed neither the circumstances nor the cause of his death. No other details were released to the public. Two weeks later, on 15 November, the office of Washington, D.C.’s chief medical examiner announced that…

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