Off the Editor’s Desk 10-30-24

It’s almost over!

By the time you get next week’s edition of this newspaper the November election will be history. Some of us will be elated and some of us will not be.

If you have paid attention to television ads placed for the two leading candidates, Harris and/or Trump, no matter which one wins, our country and the world will not be the same.

Both candidates are telling us that the other candidate will strip the citizens of this nation of the Constitution.

Already the Constitution is under fire with attempts to do away with the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and pack the Supreme Court to change the First Amendment. Even Hillary Clinton has addressed the freedom of speech part of the First Amendment. She told an interviewer that Congress should take steps to regulate social media, allowing the government to more actively manage content or else “we lose total control”.

In a piece written by Jeffery M. McCall, appearing in “The Hill”, he states, “Having the government lose control of messaging is exactly what the First Amendment was designed to do.”

The campaign has got so out of hand with mud slinging as Harris has dramatically escalated her campaign’s rhetoric calling Trump a Nazi and likening him to Adolf Hitler.

Of all the items that are up for debate during this election cycle, abortion should not be one of them. We should be worried about the world at war, the high cost of our daily needs, the influx of millions of illegals and the cost to care for them, and our desire to live in a peaceful and law abiding community.

But, abortion is one of the top issues in this campaign and I am not going to get into this debate one way or the other, only to say that I am mortified at the number of abortions that were provided in the U.S. in 2023.

According to a report published by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports access to abortion, there were 1,026,700 abortions in 2023. Their report states that abortions rose nationally in 2023, the first year after Roe fell.

I hope in the next couple of weeks, we can be talking about more pleasant things, like on Saturday afternoon I attended the 90th birthday party for Doris Klatt at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Menomonie.

Thanks for reading!     ~Carlton