www.washingtontimes.com stories: Editorials

EDITORIAL: Obama waiting for Islamic State to attack U.S.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 18:32:20 -0500

Denial is an effective way for dreamers and incompetents to deal with reality. Left to themselves to dream, incompetents are harmless enough, but they become instruments of debacle and disaster when they're put in charge of anything more complicated than making the coffee or taking out the trash.

President Obama ...

EDITORIAL: Colorodo study shows risks of marijuana use

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 18:31:28 -0500

Certain Americans have a love-hate relationship with marijuana, and with the pleasure comes the pain. In Colorado, where residents have legalized the euphoria of pot, the unhealthy consequences of it are beginning to emerge. There's a warning for other states in the Rocky Mountain high.

Last week, the state of ...

EDITORIAL: Britain proposal to ban cigarettes logos from packages

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 17:08:23 -0500

The right of a company to sell a can of beans or a bottle of soda pop — or a pack of cigarettes — with trademarks ablaze is a no-brainer in a land of the free. But such freedom invariably makes a nanny's teeth itch. The Conservative government of Prime ...

EDITORIAL: Obama's unemployment rate lies exposed by reality

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Sun, 08 Feb 2015 17:08:22 -0500

Telling lies with statistics is so easy even a politician can do it. An economist named Darrell Huff once wrote a best-seller about it, "How to Lie With Statistics." Harry S. Truman identified three kinds of lies, "lies, damned lies, and statistics." That was more than a half-century ago, and ...

EDITORIAL: Remembering Ronald Reagan

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:11:04 -0500

We once celebrated the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in February, until several national holidays were moved to Mondays so federal workers could get more three-day weekends. Then President Richard Nixon ordered that Washington's birthday still be observed on his birthday. Fervor always cools and now most of ...

EDITORIAL: Three-parent baby uncorks unsettling future

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 18:11:03 -0500

The future arrives with such speed as purveyors of science fiction envy. Hence the baby with three parents. Heather can, in fact, have two mommies. Medical science is poised to take a bold step toward a human free of genetic disease, and with it a host of ethical questions about ...

EDITORIAL: Obama's Alaska oil drilling ban a bad deal for America

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 17:57:04 -0500

When the president announced his ban on oil drilling last month in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, he deprived the nation of access to 30 billion barrels of oil now and took 10 billion barrels of oil from future generations. The trade he offered was meant to help current American ...

EDITORIAL: Measles outbreak timing matches last year's border surge

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Wed, 04 Feb 2015 17:17:04 -0500

Measles is supposed to be dead and gone from the United States, having been declared "eliminated" by the Centers for Disease Control in 2000. But 15 years later, the disease appears to be back, not yet strongly and so far not with a vengeance. But it's back.

The new outbreak ...

EDITORIAL: ISIS burns Muath al-Kaseasbeh, Obama continues to deny terror threat

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 18:26:04 -0500

When Japanese journalist Kenji Goto was beheaded by ISIS last week, there was wide speculation that Jordanian intervention might spare the life of a second hostage, Muath al-Kaseasbeh, a Jordan Air Force pilot. ISIS militants had captured the pilot when his F-16 crashed in Syria in December during U.S.-led coalition ...

EDITORIAL: Chenjerai Kumanyika challenges NPR's 'whitness'

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 17:54:05 -0500

The folks at National Public Radio are atwitter, and not just on Twitter, about something big and new for everyone to worry about. Some of the executives, producers, on-air "talent" and even some listeners are worried that "the NPR sound" is "too white." Navels all over the building erupted last ...

EDITORIAL: Passion for climate change cools

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 17:40:05 -0500

Climate change is becoming a hard sell. When the computer models get the next day's forecast wrong, it's hard to persuade anyone to pay attention to their predictions of what the Earth's climate will be a half-century from now. Saving the world from imaginative calamity and catastrophe is never easy, ...

EDITORIAL: CPSC eyes useless regulations

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 17:40:04 -0500

Americans ought to live forever, with thousands of federal bureaucrats hard at work protecting the health and safety of all God's creatures. The various federal agencies have more than 3,000 rules and regulations now pending, most of them aimed at harassment and health, and the lights stay on late in ...

EDITORIAL: Charlie Hebdo massacre a Voltaire comeback

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 17:28:03 -0500

We're all Voltaire now, even the French.

"Treatise on Tolerance," Voltaire's 250-year-old jeremiad against religious fanaticism, argues that religious intolerance was driving the strife in the world in his time, and his book is climbing the best-seller lists in France in the wake of the brutality of Islamic terrorists who ...

EDITORIAL: Democrats dig themselves deeper in hole

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 17:27:06 -0500

Will Rogers, the political humorist from the previous century whose humor derived from actual wit, once observed that he belonged to no organized political party: "I'm a Democrat." Another of his witticisms is good advice for what's left of the political party he was so proud to be a part ...

EDITORIAL: Hillary Clinton's war in Libya

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 20:30:05 -0500

War is a terrible thing, as everyone who has ever been in one can testify, but war can tempt a president, and sometimes merely someone with the itch to be a president, as a way to burnish a warrior credential.

The temptation of Hillary Clinton is revealed in several remarkable ...

EDITORIAL: Reforming regulators is key to economic growth

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 18:13:04 -0500

Taxes take a bite out of the economy, but regulations take a bigger one. Congress has surrendered much of its lawmaking authority to the president and a growing swarm of unelected bureaucrats, and regulations are growing faster than ever. The Obama administration thinks this is the way to run an ...

EDITORIAL: Hillary Clinton's Benghazi baggage

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 17:45:05 -0500

Politics is a rough game. There's no rule that says you can't rough the passer or avoid making hits to the head. There's not even a rule that says it's unfair to take a dispassionate look at the record of a candidate who offers himself — or herself — for ...

EDITORIAL: John Kasich's pushes Obamacare expansion

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 17:03:06 -0500

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio was one of several Republican governors who agreed in 2013 to accept a grant of federal money under Obamacare to expand his state's Medicaid services. The temporary grant of $2.6 billion, accepted over protests from his legislature, expires this year and Mr. Kasich now wants ...

EDITORIAL: The blizzard of 2015 that wasn't

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 19:32:04 -0500

Nothing is more tempting to television's talking heads than exaggerating an approaching doomsday of blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, traffic jams, abortion rallies and other disasters, and nothing is riskier for politicians. What was hyped as the Great Blizzard of '15 turned out to be the Usual Snowfall of '15, and now ...

EDITORIAL: Obama's seizure of Alaskan oil reserves hurts U.S.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES — Tue, 27 Jan 2015 18:23:04 -0500

Americans are back in the automobile showrooms looking for big cars and SUVs, grooving on size, bells and whistles again. The falling price of gasoline has enabled customers to buy what they want, and what they want is often the Belchfire 8 they can afford to drive again (and trying ...