This morning the Wheeling Intelligencer finally commented on last week’s CNBC analysis that ranked West Virginia as America’s worst state for business. The editorial, “Blame Game No Solution for W.Va.,” argues that instead of pointing fingers, as Governor Justice recently did in a press release, he should be providing “solutions or leadership.”

The editorial begins by noting that Justice’s press release last week blamed the Republican legislature for the state’s poor showing. As might be expected the editorial then argues that Justice shouldn’t be blaming the Republicans for the state’s poor showing – the damage was caused by Democrats:

Our governor responded in entirely predictable fashion, issuing a press release in which he blamed the Republican lawmakers who have spent the last couple of years trying to reverse the 80 years of damage done by Gov. Jim Justice’s party.

(Okay, somebody needs to explain to me how the editorial is not playing the “blame game” it accuses the governor of playing when it points to “80 years of damage” done by Democrats.)

The rest of the editorial discusses some of the criteria that the survey used to rank West Virginia 50th for business climate noting positive gains while explaining away or ignoring some of the negative ones. For example, the editorial completely ignores the rankings for the “business friendly” category which places the state at #49 despite all the Republican legislation in the last two legislative sessions that supposedly promoted the friendliness of the state to business interests. As Ogden editorials told us again and again, getting rid of the prevailing wage, while passing a right-to-work law and tort reform to combat our “judicial hellhole” couldn’t help but significantly improve our business climate. Except that it didn’t.

Readers interested in the CNBC studies can find them here:

• 2017.

• 2016.

• And if you’d like to see a comparison to when the Democrats had the majority: 2014.

A final note – Many newspapers are now linking to documents referenced in their online editions. I think that it would be beneficial to some of its readership if the online versions of Ogden articles and editorials linked to the documents it referenced. While laziness might explain why it’s not done, my hunch is that it’s more likely that they don’t want readers actually checking their sources preferring that they simply take the writer’s word for it.