Editorial:

The Register-Herald
Beckley, W.Va.

To many, a national effort to encourage tobacco users to give up their habit is viewed as an infringement on personal rights. Perhaps, to some degree, it is.
However, when the American Cancer Society launched the Great American Smokeout, its intentions were based on mounds of clinical evidence detailing the pervasive damage smoking and other forms of tobacco use can bring.

Editorial:

Times West Virginian
Fairmont, W.Va.

The numbers vividly portray a dire situation.

The nation’s Big Three automakers — General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., and Chrysler LLC — are seeking an emergency infusion of cash as the industry is being battered by current economic conditions that are affecting sales and making credit much tougher to arrange.

The U.S. Senate, in a lame-duck session, is scheduled to take up a $25 billion bailout package.

What would a collapse of the domestic auto industry mean to the country?

Editorial

Bailouts are bad business and poor public policy.
Which means it’s almost guaranteed to happen.
And since we’re creating incentives for poor decisions, mismanagement and arrogance, it’s guaranteed to happen again and again.
At the very least, though, these bailouts better come with a steep price for Wall Street and now Detroit.
The Big Three automakers don’t want Washington, D.C., telling them how to run their business, but now it’s OK for them to back up to the public treasury and drive away with $25 billion in taxpayer money.

Editorial

The California referendum vote this month that banned gay marriages won by a slim margin. It shows how divisive this issue is in that state and all across the country.
It’s a divisive issue that will continue because our view of marriage is a mix of religious conviction and secular regulation. So as one state, California, votes to make same-sex marriages illegal, another, Connecticut, allows them on a ruling by its Supreme Court.

Editorial

Right, left, conservative, liberal, young and old. It didn't matter.
When the Record-Eagle reported that a local gun shop employee referred to President-elect Barack Obama as "the n-----" in a story about the store flying the American flag upside-down, reaction was swift and nearly universal -- this we will not accept.
People from across the political spectrum made phone calls or wrote letters to express not just outrage at the use of the slur but to reject the mind-set its use represents. Political speech is one thing, but this wasn't it. It was hate speech.