Change my location 
Washington DC Editorial
District must overhaul child protection agency
- S harlynn Bobo tendered her resignation as head of the District’s Child and Family Services Agency just one day after she refused to accept responsibility for the deaths of two infants under her supervision. Bobo’s sudden departure briefly raised hopes that Mayor Adrian Fenty was finally going to overhaul the troubled child protection agency, hopes that were soon dashed when he selected Roque Gerald, Bobo’s deputy, as interim director.
Let’s use tolls to finance roads
- Raising taxes is not the only way to pay for a much-needed expansion of the Washington region’s clogged road system. Tolls aimed at reducing congestion would also save gas and create a new revenue stream to pay for additional road capacity. Most drivers would consider tolls a pretty good trade-off to sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic watching the gas gauge inch toward “Empty.”
Metro scam is worst kind, at worst time for agency
- J ust as it was begging Congress for $1.5 billion in additional funding, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority got what it didn’t need — another scandal less than a month after Metro employees were caught using subway stations to run a prostitution ring.
McCain’s straight talk on D.C. schools
- I n the course of a bold speech to the NAACP last week, presidential candidate John McCain strongly endorsed the District of Columbia’s Opportunity Scholarship Program. McCain has no chance of winning D.C.’s three electors in November, so it was especially heartening that he is paying serious attention to the District’s education problems.
Rewarding bad behavior
- W hen the federal government steps in to cushion the inevitable consequences of bad decisions, taxpayers almost always are left paying the bill. Rewarding risky or even fraudulent behavior in this manner guarantees more of the same. Congress chartered the Federal National Mortgage Association, better known as Fannie Mae, during the New Deal to make it easier for the average American family to buy a house, still a cornerstone of the American Dream and one of the best ways to accumulate family wealth. Fannie Mae buys home mortgages from lenders to free up money for new mortgages. When it went private in 1968, Fannie Mae retained significant tax benefits and could borrow money at a lower rate than anybody else in the mortgage industry. That should have practically guaranteed its continued profitability.
Pelosi's two cons of a kind
- Less than a year ago, the Democratic majority in Congress noisily enacted widely heralded ethics reforms requiring significantly increased disclosure by lobbyists of the money spent ib tge care abd feeding of senators and representatives. Now we learn that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, has approved new administrative guidelines relaxing the heart of the reforms - the requirement that the influence peddlers make public their political contributions and event sponsorships.
Four keys to lower energy costs
- People who don’t live in places like Wyoming have no idea of the potential power of the sage grouse. The diminutive “prairie chicken” can force the world’s most powerful country to submit to the whims of OPEC. The feathered creature needs help to do it, though, and well-funded environmental activists and their allies in government at all levels are more than happy to lend a hand with costly lawsuits, endless regulations and multitudes of other restrictions on those who might come into contact with the sage grouse in its natural habitat.