Editorial

A LAWSUIT filed in Camden might help clarify how hospitality taxes can be used, but ultimately the Legislature must make changes to address confusion and, more importantly, give cities and counties what they really need: more flexibility in what they can spend the money on.

Every year for the past 15, legislation has been introduced in our state that would outlaw your right to birth control. It’s just one of many policy attempts that put basic individual rights at risk. Nearly every day, I meet citizens who are shocked to learn just how aggressive the attacks on reproductive health have become.

IT’S EASY TO get so frustrated by all the things the Legislature is not accomplishing — or even trying to accomplish — that we fail to notice when it finally does something significant. That happened last month, when good-government advocates prevailed in a quarter-century effort to create an independent state inspector general with significant authority to not only root out the cliched “waste, fraud and abuse” but force state agencies to do things in a smarter way.

Mitt Romney has a gift for words — self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”

IN 2006, OFFICIALS with the S.C. Retirement System Investment Commission met with our editorial board to discuss a constitutional amendment that would let them invest in foreign companies and non-publicly traded assets, from venture capital funds and well-established companies about to go public to gold, oil and hedge funds.