Thursday’s thumbs

Podcasts highlight jail expansion discussions

It’s Thursday and another chance to fire off a few up or down thumbs about some news developments in our neck of the woods and elsewhere:

Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder and sheriff-elect (he’s unopposed in November) Jay Cantrell were kind enough to visit our office the other day for an episode of the Speaking of Arkansas podcast, hosted by editorial page editor Greg Harton. The county will ask voters in November to approve expansion of the jail and the juvenile detention center, all supported by a temporary, quarter-cent sales tax that expires once the money for construction is collected. Listen at https://www.nwaonline.com/105forjail/

Also kind enough to record a separate Speaking of Arkansas podcast were Sarah Moore, executive director of the Arkansas Justice Reform Coalition, and Mac Mayfield, an AJRC board member and a leader in a newly formed group called Neighbors Against New Taxation. They explore their reasons for asking voters to oppose jail expansions, whether in Benton or Washington county. Listen at https://www.nwaonline.com/105againstjail/

We’ve heard for years about families’ homes being broken into as they attended funerals and laid loved ones to rest, but someone decided to take their criminal behavior a step further. A West Fork man was recently arrested after several vehicle owners attending a memorial service reported their cars had been broken into. Broken windows and the stolen goods totaled about $6,500 in value. It was outstanding collection of information by a Nelson-Berna Funeral Home employees and victims of the break-ins that helped police make an arrest. Two employees had noticed a man and a car he was standing next to before the service. Another employee noticed the vehicle leave as the memorial service ended. Then, one of the victims used cellphone location services to show where the missing phone was. That led police to a car that matched the description. They reported finding the stolen items in the car. What great teamwork by those affected, by the employees of the funeral and officers to resolve the matter quickly. It takes a lot of nerve to hit people attending a memorial service, but thankfully the collaboration among everyone involved made for a speedy recovery of the stolen items.

Among the evidence that big things can come in small packages was the musical life of Loretta Webb, a 5-foot-2-inch woman known round the world by her married name, Loretta Lynn. She died this week at age 90 after a full life of delivering cutting edge music in the country genre. She was a star of the 1960s and ’70s and a country legend beyond that, having forged the way for untold numbers of traditional female singers. She wrote songs and sang with honesty, always informed by her Kentucky mountain upbringing. She was a musical original.

We suppose there’s no real downside for the president, as he did last week, to ambitiously declare his administration’s goal of ending hunger in the United States by the end of the decade. Evaluating hunger can be a collection of malleable measurements that range from actually being hungry to living meal to meal, so to speak, in what’s called food insecurity. Can a nation of no hunger be achieved? Call us skeptical, but that doesn’t mean the effort is misplaced. Progress is progress and a commitment at the presidential level can matter a great deal. Just turning Americans toward healthy, rather than processed, foods will make a huge difference in U.S. health outcomes.