Quick hits: Visit the last linotype machine newspaper; 'app store accountability' law; memoir celebrates snail mail delivery; small town battle over Buc-ee's

While other papers have transitioned to computer technology, the Saguache Crescent remains the country's last linotype machine newspaper, reports Jared Ewy for The Daily Yonder. While other newspapers use keyboards, this small-town Colorado paper continues to use heat and metal to produce the news, just as it has since 1882. "News outlets from around the world have come to visit and pay tribute to the century-old linotype machine," Ewy reports. "At the Crescent, a keystroke sends us through time and into an America dominated by heavy, hot industry. When even the words were made of molten labor. Letters and characters are hammered with Steampunk gusto on different-sized mattes and assembled into information."

In a bid to protect minors from downloading apps with questionable content, Louisiana became the third state "to pass what it described as an 'app store accountability' law, joining Texas and Utah in instituting such legislation," reports Christ Teale of Route Fifty. The bill requires app stores conducting business in Louisiana to "identify when users are children and obtain parental consent before apps can be downloaded." Louisiana's law also requires app stores to include age-appropriate ratings and "prevents them from enforcing terms of service on minor users without parental consent."

The U.S. Postal Service and its brave mail carriers helped shape the nation, and some would contend, it's part of the glue still holding the country together. "The Postal Service is America’s first miracle and among its most endangered, threatened by private delivery services, email, texting and the pensions owed to retired carriers," writes David Von Drehle for The Washington Post. "Memoirist Stephen Starring Grant offers a highly personal, utterly charming tribute to this American treasure in his new book, Mailman. . . .The Postal Service, he convincingly argues, is far from outdated; it is the embodiment of an indivisible nation."

A drama pitting anti-sprawl conservation against a beaver-booming, mega-gas station continues to unfold in the small western town of Palmer Lake, Colorado. "Emotions have boiled over in Palmer Lake since the Texas-based Buc-ee’s chain — featuring a grinning beaver mascot — targeted undeveloped land along Interstate 25 for a new outlet: a 74,000-square-foot store with 60 gas pumps and parking for nearly 800 cars, open 24 hours a day," reports Jim Carlton of The Wall Street Journal. "It has become an epic battle over the soul of the American West — and it has descended into accusations of harassment, slashed tires, crude name-calling and vicious private texts made public."

Thousands of American children have type 1 diabetes, which, when treated, can mean a lifetime of carrying equipment and a list of activity restrictions that can make kids feel self-conscious. To help ease some of those challenges, Mattel released a Barbie with the disease. "The latest Barbie slays in a chic blue polka-dot crop top, ruffled miniskirt, chunky heels and an insulin pump. She is the brand’s first doll with type 1 diabetes," reports Brenda Goodman of CNN News. "Dollmaker Mattel worked with Breakthrough T1D, formerly known as the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, to design the doll, which aims to represent the roughly 304,000 kids and teens living with type 1 diabetes in the United States . . . . The new Barbie comes with an insulin pump, a glucose monitor and snacks to help her control her blood sugar."

With all the business of life, it's still important to take time to look up and see what going on in our skies. On the mornings of July 21 and 22, the Moon, Venus and Jupiter will provide a beautiful scene "with the crescent Moon and Venus, plus several bright stars. And if you have a clear view toward the horizon, Jupiter is there too, low in the sky," writes Preston Dyches for NASA. During the entire month of July, the Eagle constellation, Aquila, "appears in the eastern part of the sky during the first half of the night. Its brightest star, Altair, is the southernmost star in the Summer Triangle, which is an easy-to-locate star pattern in Northern Hemisphere summer skies."

Opinion: U.S. Postal Service should deliver mail, not profits. Privatization 'would be a nightmare for rural Americans.'

U.S. Postal Service history dates back to 1775. Its goal
was to deliver mail. (Photo by Joel Moysuh, Unsplash)

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy deployed plans to make the U.S. Postal Service profitable. But turning a profit isn't the point of mail delivery, write Tribune Phonograph editorial members Kris O’Leary and Brian Wilson. Service is the heart of the USPS, and its lack significantly impacts rural areas.

"The U.S Postal Service should focus on delivering the mail, not delivering a profit," they write. "Privatization of the postal service has been a dream for some who see the opportunity for profit, but it would be a nightmare for rural Americans who would see service cuts, additional delays and increasing costs. These would disproportionally impact rural residents simply due to the economics of having fewer potential customers over a wider area."

In many business ventures, privatization "can be a wonderful thing. . . . . It can bring about innovation. . . and the adoption of new efficiencies," O'Leary and Wilson add. "In a recent interview, President-elect Donald Trump broached the idea of revisiting privatization of the postal service as a potential goal. . . . Trump’s comments come at the same time that Postal Service leadership is under increased bipartisan scrutiny for spiraling increases in rates and ever-diminishing service standards."

In a December congressional hearing, members berated DeJoy for failing to meet service benchmarks and repeated upgrade delays. "Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick, a Republican, lambasted DeJoy," the editorial board writes, "leading to DeJoy covering his ears during the hearing." DeJoy defended his optimization strategies and said lawmaker interference could "end" the Postal Service.

However, profit-margin goals have little to do with the Postal Service's actual purpose. O'Leary and Wilson write, "DeJoy and other postal leadership have lost sight, if they ever had it, of the service that is at the core of the Postal Service. If DeJoy’s version of operational leadership and strategy were applied to highways, we would see interstates being turned into gravel roads."

If the U.S. postal service is privatized, its goal will become profits above all. "It will funnel off large city metro areas that can make money and drop rural areas that cover more land miles than people," O'Leary and Wilson add. "This is most of the U.S. population not living on either population-dense coast. The Midwest could lose any mail or package service if this becomes a reality. . ."

Why U.S. rural policy matters: An essayist's response to readers, and thoughts on 'rural rage' and anti-rural rage

By Anthony F. Pipa
Brookings Institution

On Dec. 27, 2022, the New York Times published an essay I wrote calling for a renaissance in federal rural policy. My motivation for writing the article was borne from a frustration of the media’s obsession with rural politics—that is, who in rural America is voting for whom, and why—with little regard or attention to rural policy, or how federal, state, and local governments could do things differently to help rural places to thrive.

Federal policy has historically played an important role in helping rural places contribute to American economic and social life, but it is no longer fit for purpose. This is leaving rural places starved for investment as they navigate 21st century shifts in the economy and seek to become more vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable. The essay included a call for a national rural policy to help “put local assets to creative use, unleash entrepreneurial activity, share the benefits widely and retain the value locally.”

Tony Pipa

It resulted in almost 1,700 comments from readers and a flood of reactions in my inbox. “Don’t read the comments,” counseled colleagues, warning against the rabbit hole of negativity. Yet many comments surfaced thoughtful questions and gaps, and in the spirit of advancing a policy discourse, I offer responses to several of the themes that emerged:

1. “Ask rural places what they want.”

Some commenters read my call for a more active and effective federal role as a recommendation to overtake and usurp local agency and authority. To the contrary: Sustainable development frameworks are most successful when local people design, direct, own, and execute the solutions to the problems they are facing.

So I wholeheartedly agree with asking rural people, and ensuring that the federal government invests much more directly in local leaders and their innovation. But the federal government should also provide incentives or boundaries to ensure maximum public benefit in line with national policy priorities. This might mean incentivizing cleaner energy sources or ensuring that minority populations who have been politically marginalized in the past are included in the design or decision making of new development efforts, so the benefits are widely shared.

2. “What about the role of state and local governments?”

Several commenters rightly surfaced questions about the importance of state and local governments to the well-being of rural communities. State governments set the parameters of their local jurisdictions’ taxing and legal authorities, provide revenue, and are often the decision makers on how federal funds are spent. For example, about 45 percent of the resources in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) will be decided by state and local governments.

States are increasingly limiting the flexibility of local jurisdictions and sharing less of their resources, moves generally attributed to political differences between state leaders and large metros. Yet such shifts can have negative consequences for local rural governments, as evidenced by the impact of the tax cuts enacted in Kansas. Some rural leaders are recognizing that state policies driven primarily by culture wars could have negative consequences for their communities. The impact on local rural governments of state policy changes driven by tensions with metropolitan governments is an area ripe for further research.

In general, the capacity of local rural governments is significantly constrained, especially compared to their suburban and urban counterparts. In a recent survey of rural county officials, fifty-two percent reported that their governments experience “moderate” or “significant” levels of fiscal stress. Rural governments are often led by volunteer, part-time elected officials and thinly staffed town halls, struggling to provide basic services and possessing limited ability to respond to major economic or social shocks. For more rural places to succeed, we must strengthen the ability of local governments to govern.

3. “Big business is killing rural.”

Readers pointed to the impact of big-box chains and national franchises on locally owned businesses. Yet national retail and restaurant chains are simply emblematic of larger trends toward financialization and corporate consolidation that have challenged many local institutions that traditionally create a sense of security and self-sufficiency.

Sixty-eight percent of counties without a daily or weekly newspaper are non-metro. Forty percent of rural counties lost bank branches between 2012-2017, and 190 rural hospitals have closed or converted since 2005. Local leaders in rural communities now try to attract stores such as Walmart and Dollar General, not only to improve access to groceries, but because it provides jobs and a signal to the market that their community is worthy of investment.

4. “It’s not just rural: What about other places that are lagging?”

Many small and mid-sized cities in former industrial centers are also facing challenges, leading some to suggest less focus on rural and more on lagging places overall. Indeed, the future of many rural places will be linked to their nearest metros. But rural places are often minimized in regional efforts, resulting in distrust and approaches that fail to meet their unique challenges related to governance, distance, workforce, and access to capital. Perhaps a national rural strategy would ultimately be a subset of a national economic strategy—but leveling the playing field depends upon articulating one.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the comments expressed negative views dismissive of rural America, with many opposed to any targeted policy.

One set asked “Why should we care about those people and places?” This ignores the important inter-dependencies between non-metros and the rest of the country. As the country seeks to address climate change, for example, and shift to a clean energy economy, rural places will be where the solar and wind farms are sited, the minerals for batteries are mined and the batteries themselves produced, and where agricultural practices evolve to reduce methane gases.

Indeed, rural places are implicated in many dimensions of the 21st-century economy, from data processing to fabrication plants to cryptocurrency mining to online retail distribution. How these economies evolve, who benefits, and how well communities manage them—these are clear and present policy issues that are receiving little attention, leaving rural places to their own devices and offering few guardrails to prevent a modern version of the extractive arrangements prevalent throughout history.

Even more heated were the comments suggesting “it’s their own fault:” i.e., that rural people are getting what they deserve, their votes the primary cause of what they are experiencing. This has odd echoes of the arguments wielded against single mothers during welfare reform debates—ascribing all bad outcomes to bad choices—an argument that was dehumanizing then, and is dehumanizing now.

Several weeks after my essay, the Times published an editorial by Paul Krugman asking what could assuage “rural rage”? While the essay made a tentative foray into exploring the implications of, and offering support for, newly enacted policy, the image that rural residents go through their daily lives filled with fury left even local Democratic leaders in so-called Trump country shaking their heads. Such a broad brush conveniently thwarts consideration that policy decisions associated with trade agreements, the movement of capital, enforcement of anti-trust legislation, and regulation of transportation may have played major roles in abetting the challenges rural places now face -- p olicy decisions, I might add, that many rural people didn’t control or necessarily vote for.

Getting past the “anti-rural rage” and the vitriol reflected in the reactions to my essay will be as important as addressing whatever resentment rural people are harboring. When I listen to the stories of real people in rural places working to provide the best for their families and communities, I find commonalities that cut across the divisions defined and deepened by the obsession with rural politics. So my final response to readers is where I began: We urgently need a constructive bipartisan dialogue to consider policy solutions that can enable thriving, sustainable economic and social structures and create opportunity in all sizes of places across America—and specifically rural ones.

U.S. partisan divide now runs along rural-urban lines, and that has worsened rural-urban conflict in state legislatures

"The relationships between big cities and rural-dominated legislatures have often been hostile. But a rift between Nashville and the Tennessee Legislature suggests the nation’s partisan divide is making things worse," and there are examples in other states, The New York Times reports.

Michael Wines writes, "For most of American history, the rivalry has played out in state politics more so as a matter of parochial divisions than national ones. Now, a dispute in Nashville raises the question of whether the nation’s barbed political divide — which splinters along the rural-urban axis as well — is infusing old local antagonisms with contemporary partisan acrimony. It’s not just in Tennessee. In Wisconsin, North Carolina, Kentucky and elsewhere, old city-country political tensions have taken on a harder edge as Democratic-leaning urban areas become ever more isolated islands in an ever-redder, rural-dominated sea."

Music City Center (John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)

In Tennessee, the Legislature split Nashville among three congressional districts, eliminating a Democratic seat. Then the city council's Democratic majority, citing security concerns, killed Republican leaders' bid to bring the party's 2024 national convention to Nashville, and the GOPers vowed revenge. The House floor leader has filed a bill to limit municipal legislaitve bodies to 20 members; only Nashville, with 40, exceeds the limit, and its voters rejected shrinkage seven years ago. The Senate president, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, "is proposing to defund the largest civic project in the city's history," Nate Rau of Axios Nashville reports. His bill would repeal "tourism-related taxes dedicated for the $623 million Music City Center." A McNally spokesperson told Rau, "Metro has made it clear they are no longer interested in aggressively recruiting top-tier conventions to Nashville." Councilmember Bob Mendes, who opposed the convention, told Rau he expects the flogging will continue: "There's a massive culture war going on in this country, and the state of Tennessee's leadership doesn't like the culture of Nashville and is going to keep coming after us."

A 2020 study found that Tennessee "led the nation in overruling local laws and policies," Wines reports. "State laws that override city ordinances and policies have mushroomed over the last decade, especially in states where Republicans controlled both the governor’s office and the legislature." He cites examples, such as Missouri laws that keep St. Louis from banning plastic grocery bags and Kansas City from raising the minimum wage, the North Carolina House speaker's bid to block a local sales tax to finance mass transit in Charlotte and so-called "war on Louisville" laws in Kentucky "that sapped the authority of the elected board running the metro area’s 100,000-student public school system, weakened the ground rules of a city-county merger approved by voters two decades ago and limited the city’s mayor to two terms."

The study "found that such laws were more common in states with a Republican government, a strong conservative bent and a higher share of Black residents," Wines reports, quoting Professor Thad Kousser of the University of California, San Diego, who tracks the urban-rural divide: “A hundred or even fifty years ago, Democrats in Atlanta may have wanted different things than the Democrats who were governing the state of Georgia, but they were in the same party. Now they both have different legislative interests and different political interests, too.”

Wines notes, "The dynamic can work the opposite way, too: In New Mexico, the Democrat-controlled State Legislature has drafted legislation to overturn local ordinances passed in conservative towns that restrict access to abortion clinics and abortion pills. The state attorney general on Jan. 23 sued New Mexico cities and counties to overturn the ordinances."

Nearly 40% of U.S. adults say they've not met a farmer; consumers say they want to learn about origins of their food

Almost 40 percent of U.S. adults have never met a farmer and 23% don't know where they could meet one, reports Spencer Chase for Agri-Pulse, citing a new study released by Land O' Lakes, an agricultural and food cooperative based in Minnesota. 

Many American consumers are eager to learn more about where their food comes from, a survey found: 87% were at least somewhat interested and over half were extremely or very interested, Chase reports. But many are unaware of how their food is produced and who is growing it. A vast majority of respondents didn't know the that average age of U.S. farmers is 60. In a press release, Land O' Lakes said many Americans believe less than half of their groceries come from family farms, but according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 88% come from family farms. 

Interest in origins of food was strongest among urban consumers; 68% said they had a heightened interest, Chase reports. Only half the rural respondents shared that same interest. Almost all of the respondents in the 1,000-person survey, conducted by Wakefield Research, said that it was "at least somewhat important that their food be grown or sourced sustainably," Chase writes. 

Vaccine disparities pit rural America vs. urban America

"The U.S. vaccine campaign has heightened tensions between rural and urban America, where from Oregon to Tennessee to upstate New York complaints are surfacing of a real — or perceived — inequity in vaccine allocation," Travis Loller, Jonathan Mattise and Gillian Flaccus report for The Associated Press.

"In some cases, recriminations over how scarce vaccines are distributed have taken on partisan tones, with rural Republican lawmakers in Democrat-led states complaining of 'picking winners and losers,' and urbanites traveling hours to rural GOP-leaning communities to score Covid-19 shots when there are none in their city," AP reports. However, it should be noted that many rural counties lack the health infrastructure to administer vaccines, forcing residents to drive long distances.

Part of the problem is that the Trump administration provided vaccine-eligibility guidelines but let states distribute vaccines. Many delegated authority to county governments, sometimes resulting in large disparities, wasted doses, and wildly inconsistent eligibility standards, AP reports.