Quiz time

See if you can spot which of following is the largest headline on the front page of the Sunday News-Register. (The rest of the headlines come from the local news section of The Onion, the online satirical newspaper.)

• Man Wishes There Was Some Sort Of Sign He Could Put On His House To Let Visitors Know He Has Gone Fishing

• Man Guessing He’s Stared At Giant Sequoia Long Enough To Appreciate It

• Struggling Used Bookstore Has Tried Everything But Organizing Books By Genre And Author

• Man Who Grew Up Locally Takes Vintage Raceboat for Inaugural Run

The last one was in yesterday's paper. In fairness to the News-Register, that’s the sub-headline. The actual headline informed us that

’It’s Pretty Exciting’

and its accompanied by a large picture of a man in a speedboat.

Note – For readers of this blog who live outside the Wheeling area, I am not making this up.

What did other newspapers find to be more important?

Compared to a man in his raceboat, here are yesterday’s biggest stories at major U.S. newspapers:

The New York Times:

Hailing McCain, 2 Presidents Diverge from a 3rd

The Washington Post:

Last hurrah for all that’s lost

With the subheading:

Trumpism is assaulted as Washington mourns the senator and hails his values

The Los Angeles Times:

Farewell to John McCain transcends partisanship

The local Sunday paper did not cover the McCain funeral. (Note – today’s paper did have the first half of the AP article on McCain’s private burial service at the U.S. Naval Academy on page 3.)

Reading the opinion section

The Sunday Mike Myer column was about the British restricting the use of knives. Myer may have been satiric or maybe he was making a point about British laws or even gun control. I couldn’t tell. I guess when your job requires two columns a week, it’s just a matter of time before you end up writing a column about the British controlling the use of pocket knives.

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One of yesterday’s editorials is concerned about Don Blankenship running as a write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate. It concludes with an erroneous statement:

It has been suggested Blankenship should run as a write-in candidate. For the good of the state (insert Republican Party), he should not do that.

Fixed it.

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Finally, page C4 contains an op-ed on the West Virginia Supreme Court by Garrett Ballengee who is “executive director of the Cardinal Institute for WV Policy, a nonprofit research organization in Charleston.” I was struck by the beginning of column:

It is unclear what is to become of the sitting justices of the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia . . .

“Unclear”? A quick Google search revealed that the column is almost four weeks old – it first appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Daily Mail on August 8. (It may be old but it does take up space.)

And what is the Cardinal Institute for WV Policy? Here is the description at Sourcewatch:

The Cardinal Institute(CI) for West Virgina Policy is a state think tank member of the State Policy Network, a web of state pressure groups that drive a right-wing agenda in statehouses nationwide.

Sourcewatch tells us that they are closely aligned with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and other organizations supported by the Kochs. By the way, Garrett Ballengee is the “research group’s” only employee.

I have no problem with op-ed’s from Koch and ALEC-supported organizations but their connections should be clearly labeled.