Breaking News

Editorials

Free Speech

Freedom of speech is on a lot of minds these days — even Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who spoke at the state Department of Higher Education’s Trustees Conference recently. According to a report by the Ohio Capital Journal, DeWine felt it important to remind policymakers on college campuses that an environment in which people are comfortable speaking freely is essential. His remarks were inspired, of course, by the killing of Charlie Kirk and its aftermath, though he noted the notion of whether Kirk’s death could have been prevented was a security issue, not a speech issue. “I’m ...

Struggling

Americans struggling to make ends meet probably don’t care to know how many billionaires there are in the United States, where most of them reside or how much the size of the “billionaires club” has increased since 2020. Struggling Americans today do want to know the prospects for more and better jobs and their prospects for markedly improving their lives. Unfortunately, it appears that for the “struggling crowd” more disappointment and frustration awaits them, as well as deteriorating confidence in general. It is not what people in this country have been anticipating ...

Vigilance

If you consider yourself to be a carnivore, the West Virginia Department of Health has given you yet another reason to be vigilant about avoiding ticks. Earlier this month, the agency reported multiple cases of the tick-borne Alpha-gal Syndrome, which can cause a variety of symptoms as a result of allergies to meat and meat products caused by the disease. This one is carried by lone star ticks — larger than deer ticks and with white spots on their backs. Worry over the disease is severe enough that the state health department issued an advisory Sept. 11, making AGS a reportable ...

Grabbing The Wheel

Two of the state’s top political leaders — Sen. Jim Justice and Gov. Patrick Morrisey — are now taking jabs at one another over the efficacy of vaccinations, with Justice, the state’s former governor, standing firmly behind the science. It is getting hard to understand Morrisey’s position on this matter — particularly at a time when he is working to make the state more attractive to business and more competitive with its neighbors. Morrisey’s executive order expanding religious exemptions for school vaccination requirements represents a worrisome departure from ...

Urgency

“The program tackles the root causes of rural health care failure. It gives states the tools to design solutions that last, not Band-Aids that fail.” That was Dr. Mehmet Oz, on the speedily unrolled Rural Health Transformation Program that will make available $50 billion — a possible $10 billion per year to states — each fiscal year from 2026 through 2030. Four years of potential federal funding, half of which is to be distributed evenly to all 50 states IF they apply for it; and half to be distributed based on health care metrics. Federal officials have given states until ...

Citizenship

Tuesday was National Voter Registration Day. Wednesday is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day. In other words, it is a week during which Americans are asked to think a little harder about what our founders had in mind when they were signing the Constitution back in 1787, and whether we are holding up our end of the bargain. In 2004, the late U.S. Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., (hard not to wonder what he’d have to say about the state of things these days, isn’t it?) tacked on an amendment to the omnibus spending bill that modified the law so that during the federal observance of ...