THE WASHINGTON TIMES

EDITORIAL: Remaking the courts

Senate Republicans are standing up, so far, to President Obama's attempt to pack the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit with radical judicial activists. A filibuster blocked a vote on the confirmation of Cornelia Pillard last week and of Patricia Millett two weeks before that. Predictably, Senate Democrats declared that the forthright Republican opposition was another skirmish in the "war on women."

November 18, 2013

EDITORIAL: Fracturing Obama’s oil spin

With the debris of his health care scheme falling like autumn leaves, President Obama is looking for news, any news, to suggest that his White House is doing something, anything, right. He landed on the most unlikely candidate last week. He's taking credit for the surge in the production of oil, which exceeded imports for the first time in 18 years.

November 18, 2013

EDITORIAL: Mickey hijacks a treaty

The most "transparent administration in history" has a stunted understanding of free trade. A treaty called the Trans-Pacific Partnership would determine how Americans listen to music, watch movies and use the Internet. It was written in secret by Hollywood and the administration to protect the usual suspects.

November 17, 2013

EDITORIAL: The government war on choice

The government is a terrible and indecisive cook. One day the Food and Drug Administration tells the public it must eat more of something, and the next it says no, stay away from that. It's easy to conclude that the FDA merely wants to rid everyone's diet of everything that tastes good, with harsh admonitions to "eat your spinach."

November 17, 2013

EDITORIAL: Movies to rate ‘F’

Political correctness might have been born in Sweden, where excessive sensitivity is a leading cause of death. The first Swedish police dog was a cocker spaniel. Now the Swedes are revising movie ratings to protect feminists, some more radical than others, but all victims of artists who produce swashbuckling guy movies.

November 17, 2013

EDITORIAL: Farewell to amnesty

President Obama's relentless bridge-burning strategy to get his way on the budget and health care legislation turns out to have an unexpected advantage for Republicans still smarting from the sting of defeat at the hand of the president. They might not be interested in surrendering to another licking on another big-ticket legislative item.

November 14, 2013

EDITORIAL: The tipping point

Fifty-four million Americans pay not a penny to the IRS. That leaves 91 million shouldering the full weight of the supersized federal government. A Tax Foundation analysis notes that the number of freeloaders has been rising steadily since the 1980s. The freeloaders will soon make up the majority.

November 14, 2013

EDITORIAL: Feeding the trolls

Government patent examiners are overwhelmed, which is the only explanation for some of the patents they grant. U.S. Patent No. 5,443,036, for example, protects the "invention" of using a laser pointer to exercise a cat. U.S. Patent No. 7,171,625 protects double-clicking on a mouse. Even the online Web merchant Amazon has a patent on the "one-step process" of buying with an online shopping cart. Something is obvious, of course, only after someone else thinks of it.

November 14, 2013

EDITORIAL: Potty parity in California

Nutty ideas are as native to California as sunshine and earthquakes. The state lived up to its reputation by becoming the first in the nation to protect the potty "rights" of transgender kindergartners and certain middle-school students. A coalition of conservative groups calling itself Privacy for All Students, eager to preserve potty privacy, is now trying to redeem the state's reputation by giving voters a chance to kick this can not down the road, but out of the schoolhouse.

November 13, 2013

EDITORIAL: Obamacare slouches into bad taste

The government is looking for the panic button. The Obamacare administrators are desperate for customers, and they're turning to the squalid and the sordid to sell the government health care scheme nobody wants. The "Thanks, Obamacare" advertising campaign, for example, depicts a woman standing next to a scruffy man who needs a bath, giving him a thumbs up with one hand and offering pills with the other. "OMG, he's hot," she says. "Let's hope he's as easy to get as this birth control."

November 13, 2013

EDITORIAL: The Republican ‘resurgence’

Beware political prophets claiming to know the outcome of the next election. Such prophets are frauds. The whims of voters, being human, are notoriously fickle. Quinnipiac University polling, as reliable as any, now reveals that the current winds favor Republicans, proving only that voters have forgotten the government shutdown and have moved on, even if most of the pundits haven't.

November 13, 2013

EDITORIAL: A lesson from the street

Posting public information isn't a crime, nor is taking a photograph of a public official conducting business on a public street. Nevertheless, Taylor Hardy, a journalism student, must appear in court Thursday in Boston to explain why he recorded a Boston police sergeant reacting violently to his filming of cops apparently engaged in the people's business on a public street.

November 12, 2013

EDITORIAL: The Obamacare asterisk

About 40,000 customers are said by the government to have signed up for Obamacare in the 36 states that depend on the federal government's online site for signing up for health insurance. That's not much more than a thousand per state in the first six weeks. It's less than one customer for each of the 50,000 Obamacare "navigators" who were hired to persuade consumers to share President Obama's signature achievement, and how to do it.

November 12, 2013

EDITORIAL: Trouble in Paradise

Sometimes the government can make life better for everyone. This is the socialist dream. Most of the time the government fails, usually miserably, as with President Obama's miserable attempt to manage the nation's health care. So far his administration has been unable to manage a website. Socialist dreams always die hard, as the common folk — and the uncommon folk as well — are learning in Venezuela in the wake of the Hugo Chavez experiment in economic fantasy.

November 12, 2013

EDITORIAL: Playing doctor

President Obama is shredding health insurance policies across the nation, throwing millions of people who trusted him off the policies they were told they could keep. What's remarkable about this shell game is that the Obamacare changes have absolutely nothing to do with making Americans healthier. A vigorous population comes from better medicine, and better medicine is never wrought by the stroke of a president's pen.

November 11, 2013

EDITORIAL: Celebrating tragedy

The typhoon that slammed into the Philippines laid waste to vast stretches of the island nation. Houses were leveled, and wreckage was strewn as far as the eye could see. Thousands died. Officials are racing against the clock to find the missing among the 2.1 million displaced families. U.S. Marines were dispatched to lend the appropriate hand in the benevolent search-and-rescue mission.

November 11, 2013

EDITORIAL: Banning convenience

D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray apparently wants to be Mayor Bloomberg when he grows up. And it's not just about Big Gulps. The mayor wants to ban drink cups of all sizes, so long as they're made of convenient Styrofoam. That's a headache for coffee drinkers and businesses in the nation's capital. Coffee is to the capital what aviation fuel is to the airlines, and banning Styrofoam cups wouldn't reduce waste very much.

November 11, 2013

EDITORIAL: Curtains for the cameras

The courts are reconsidering the legality of revenue cameras, and that's bad news for the municipal taxaholics everywhere who prey on motorists to balance their budgets. Several cities in Missouri reluctantly pulled the plug on their red-light cameras last week after the state Court of Appeals said the robotic cameras have been violating state law.

November 10, 2013

EDITORIAL: Cheap at the price

Apologies are inexpensive, even when delivered with a lollipop. President Obama says he's "sorry" about the Obamacare fiasco, but what he's mostly sorry about is the damage done to his credibility. Mr. Obama acknowledged, belatedly, that the health care takeover with his name on it has caused millions to lose their insurance coverage despite his ironclad assurances that they never would.

November 10, 2013

EDITORIAL: Heroic and politically correct

The publishers of comic books are obsessed with the politically correct. Diversity and quotas are more important than dispatching evil. Spider-Man has been reimagined as a black Hispanic teenager. The Green Lantern is out of the closet. Early next year, Marvel Comics rolls out a Muslim superheroine.

November 10, 2013