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There have been so many stories out there about me, so many untruths. I've always believed you can only control what you can control. I can control my attitude, my effort, my commitment to West Virginia. I can't control lies.
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and most of my family lived in our neighborhood or very close by. I had my grandparents down the street, my great-grandmother next door, and my great-aunt and great-uncle one door down.
My dad claims that he was able to trace us back to the West Virginia Hatfields. When I look at the old pictures, the patriarchs have kind of a physical likeness to some of the men on the father's side of my family. I want it to be true.
Our workers comp debt is the Achilles heel of our state's economy, and I firmly believe that in order to create more good jobs in West Virginia this system must be fixed and it must be fixed now. We cannot afford to wait even one more minute.
I hated baseball. I really didn't like baseball at all until someone decided they were going to pay me... Every year I played in the big leagues, the day the season ended, I called my buddies in West Virginia and said, 'I'll be home tomorrow.'
A West Virginia 10 is a California 4. Or at least that's what legend tells us: The Legend of Dr. Feelgood. Plastic surgery has a permanent home here, which is why Nancy Pelosi loves our Botoxed beaches. Beverly Hills looks like a moving Madame Tussauds.
My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.
We're talking about a chemical that's out there. Not just on one farm in West Virginia, not even just in the public water of an entire community there, but it's now in water all over the country, all over the planet, in the blood of virtually every living thing.
I want to talk about jobs and health care and pension security and what we're going to do to stop the brain drain in Ohio and make it possible for our young people to stay here and build a life in Ohio rather than in Pennsylvania or West Virginia or God knows where.
We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.
When President Kennedy come to West Virginia, he spoke about West Virginia and the people that gave the people here pride. And my family, my father remembers when President Kennedy was in Logan County and at places like the smokehouse, standing on chairs, talking to people.
I cannot sit here and say I was beaten by Carol Miller. Because Carol Miller did not show up. She did not debate me. She basically avoided everything and just said, 'I'm with Trump, I'm with Trump.' And sadly, that's apparently a victory here in a place like southern West Virginia.
You can't take a coal miner making $95,000 a year, the only work in these parts where you can support a family without having to hold down three jobs at once... and tell them, 'You can make minimum wage,' or, 'We can give you job training for jobs that don't exist in West Virginia.'
I, for one - despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I've seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters.
I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and she was huge and beautiful, but she was lip syncing to a song. I was legitimately stunned.
When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.
In Iraq, I listened to David Petraeus speak every day about how we had to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure and protect it. But, if we're going to go trillions of dollars in debt over Iraq, why can't we go billions of dollars in debt and make every single coal-producing plant clean in West Virginia?
Five states - Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina - have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks - stacks over 500 feet - were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere.
I've told so many stories to so many friends of mine. I have friends in Pittsburgh, in West Virginia, and in Indy. That's three different demographics of people, and they all laughed, so I assumed that if I find something funny and all my friends find something funny, I hope people everywhere will find it funny.
There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.
Katherine Johnson actually integrated the public university in West Virginia. And Mary Jackson had to petition state courts to be allowed to attend an all-white college to get the qualifications needed to become an engineer. At every turn, these women were involved in the Second World War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement.
When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state's presidential primary.
When candidate Donald Trump ran for the highest office in the land, he promised to fight for forgotten Americans. In the presidential election of 2016, the forgotten Americans of the Upper Midwest and the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, many of them life-long Democrats, delivered a decisive win for this first-time Republican candidate.