Front Pages from All America 7/28

Every day, I comb through the front pages of all the daily papers in America (provided via?The Freedom Forum) and will highlight 5-10 front page items that have national significance, with my quick commentary

The Wausau Daily Herald (Wisconsin)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Nearly One if Four High Schoolers Getting College Credit

WHY IT MATTERS: With college costs soaring again, ways for families to cut into tuition charges are getting more attention.

THE TAKEAWAY: AP courses and community college classes that high school students can take during the summer have always been great ways to prepare for college-level work and cut down on the number of credits students have to pay for once they do go to college. But am I the only one who worries that as more students take these cost-cutting opportunities, the colleges will just raise tuition prices accordingly to make up for their revenue losses?

The Parkersburg News and Sentinel (West Virginia)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: SCOTUS Lifts Stay of Mountain Valley Pipeline

WHY IT MATTERS: This is another example of a state taking advantage of more favorable conditions in the Supreme Court to push back on environmental groups blocking and delaying projects.

THE TAKEAWAY: A long period of litgation-based environmental activism is likely over; at least in states where governors and attorneys general are willing to push back.

The Columbian (Washington)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Memorial Health Center to Close

WHY IT MATTERS: Hospital closings and consolidations continue in many parts of the country despite a never-ending need for more health care.

THE TAKEAWAY: Almost every smaller circulation newspaper in America has featured a front page story about a hospital closing in recent years. But the larger news media continues to ignore the systematic reduction in health care supply whenever it "looks into" health costs or insurance coverage stories. Hospitals have been allowed to become monopolies in America with more power than any banks or Big Tech companies. This would be alarming for economic reasons alone, but it's also a public safety emergency.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Board Votes to Shut 2 Early Voting Sites

WHY IT MATTERS: Early voting boxes, early mail-in voting, etc. continue to be under scrutiny as critics say they encourage voter fraud.

THE TAKEAWAY: If voting on Election Day is really that time consuming and hard for a significant amount of people to do, then the demand for these kinds of early voting options would have been massive decades ago. There's nothing wrong with providing more convenience for voters, but a system that often ends up delivering massive piles of uncounted votes in the wee hours of the morning after an Election Day creates undue mistrust. On the other hand, if a state or city is going to have early voting boxes at all, it must make them accessible to people in all its areas. This seems like a half measure by Richmond's Republicans that doesn't really help anybody.

The Burlington Free Press (Vermont)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Vermont Items You Can Buy with the Grand Prize

WHY IT MATTERS: Tonight's Mega Millions Jackpot is $920 million, and several news outlets are thinking of ways to make this more of a story.

THE TAKEAWAY: Look, I get that this is a fun story to run and read and there's nothing wrong with a little daydream. It's also a smart "talk past the sale" free advertisement for the state lotteries and the convenience stores where people just happen to see papers like the Burlington Free Press while their in line to buy lottery tickets. But unless the newspapers also do regular looks at what the government is doing with the lion's share of the lottery money, this feels irresponsible.

The Tennessean (Tennessee)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: DOJ Launches Civil Rights Investigation of Memphis Police, City

WHY IT MATTERS: The beating death of Tyre Nichols earlier this year has brought a lot of understandable scrutiny for the Memphis PD.

THE TAKEAWAY: The article and the DOJ go to great lengths to insist that the Nichols case isn't the reason for this probe, but of course it is. One of the reasons the DOJ may want to downplay the Nichols case publicly is because it probably doesn't want to deal with the fact that the officers involved in this case were hired after the Memphis PD lowered hiring standards. Looking at that part of the story is not a place this DOJ wants to go politically.

The Texarkana Gazette (Texas)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Determined Detective Brings Arrest in 5-Year Old Murder Case

WHY IT MATTERS: This case looks like it will result in justice done for the kind of victim who is rarely featured in the American news media.

THE TAKEAWAY: There are a lot of documentaries on the airwaves now working hard to give the impression that police don't care about minority victims. I wish there was more awareness of stories like this.

The San Antonio Express-News (Texas)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Officers Charged in Killing Aced Their Reviews

WHY IT MATTERS: Three Latino police officers on the SAPD have been charged with murder after shooting and killing a woman who throw a glass candlestick at them and charged them with a hammer.

THE TAKEAWAY: This aspect of the story is a good reminder that in both the public and private sector, performance reviews have little real value in determining the quality of any individual employee. They only tell you about the priorities of the person doing the reviews.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Texas Man Ships Red Heifers to Israel for Ceremony

WHY IT MATTERS: If you know your Bible, you know why this matters!

THE TAKEAWAY: This is a complete mystery of a story to the great majority of supposedly-educated Americans in major coastal cities who know little or nothing about the Bible. For everyone else, it's something to get excited or curious about as it develops.

The Sun News (South Carolina)

THE FRONT PAGE STORY: Walmart Road Access to be Diverted along Highway off US 501

WHY IT MATTERS: This is a good look at just one way municipalities take on major expenditures for businesses.

THE TAKEAWAY: There's nothing wrong with being pro-business, but the dominant strategy that led to Walmart's climb to the top of American retail is embodied in stories like this where the local governments do the hard and expensive parts of the job of setting up a store location: the road work. The problem is when the Walmarts and other big box stores inevitably close down one day, and the municipalities are left with expensive roads to nowhere.