The U.S. Supreme Court upheld President Obama's landmark health reform law requiring 32 million more Americans to obtain medical insurance. Conservatives called it a "loss of freedom." That's weird. Apparently they mean that a person should be free to shun health insurance, run up a $300,000 hospital bill, and walk away, sticking other Americans with the tab. What kind of "freedom" is that? Do they want freedom to be a parasite?

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During last week's statewide power outage, various reports said 600,000 or 500,000 were in the dark. But the figures didn't mean people -- they meant power customers: homes and businesses. Since several people live in most homes, we assume that more than 1 million West Virginians endured the blackout.

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It's ironic that Pocahontas County's "Pioneer Days" and Fayetteville's Heritage Festival were canceled because of power loss. Delegate Danny Wells observed that pioneers lived by candlelight, just like many West Virginians last week, so holding the historic events would have been realistic.

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Out-of-control western wildfires and the deadly eastern "derecho" storm are costly evidence of global warming, Columnist Timothy Egan says. They are "the price of living in a new world that we made, but can no longer dominate."

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Bearing arms in West Virginia: Joyce Good of South Charleston filed a domestic violence petition against Larry Bonner of St. Albans -- but it wasn't served because he entered a psychiatric clinic. After getting out, police say, he shot Good in the arm, then killed himself.

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America's Mormon faith is booming, and may grow even more because of the current presidential campaign by Mormon Mitt Romney. Statisticians say the church leaped from 4.2 million members in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2010 -- easily outstripping Episcopalians (1.9 million) and Presbyterians (2.6 million), and almost overtaking Methodists (7.5 million).