Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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Intellectual freedom is a fundamental human right that allows individuals to freely access, explore, and express their thoughts, ideas, and beliefs without fear of censorship or persecution. It is a cornerstone of democracy, education, and cultural advancement. It allows individuals to explore diverse viewpoints and ideas, which is essential for personal growth, critical thinking, and creativity. Without intellectual freedom, people are limited to a narrow range of perspectives and ideas, which can hinder their intellectual development....
In its first and only impeachment trial of a Supreme Court justice, the U.S. Senate in 1805 acquitted Samuel Chase of charges against him, a historic decision that raises profoundly important questions about judicial independence and accountability and illuminates the challenges facing Justice Clarence Thomas. American politics, fraught with heated partisan divisions, had reached a fever pitch in the early 19th century when Justice Chase was brought before the bar of the Senate. Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Republicans, had defeated the...
Where did the month of April go? That’s what I find myself wondering. So much for April showers. May we please get May flowers anyway? Surely the April snow had enough moisture in it to help them bloom. The next day that I’ll wake up in North Dakota is Monday, May 1, the publication date of this newspaper. I have sticky notes all over my MacBook and more on my desk, to remind me of all the things I must finish before we leave for the NASP Western National Archery Tournament in Utah. As I pre...
We said goodbye to the Golden Stratus last week. The 2005 Dodge Stratus that was supposed to last through all three teenage drivers in our household was hauled away to the scrapyard. I bought that car with cash from an older gentleman when I was driving to Jamestown for work over 10 years ago. I was looking for something inexpensive that had better gas mileage than my 4x4 SUV, knowing that it would put on many highway miles. When I started working in New Rockford again, my husband and I told...
In 2022, a number of people interested in addressing the child care crisis in North Dakota formed the North Dakota Child Care Action Alliance. The coalition held listening sessions with child care professionals, families and businesses to better understand the child care crisis in our state and to gather ideas on how to address this crisis. The lack of affordable, quality and accessible child care were constant themes. Many of the state’s child care workers earn poverty-level wages. Median wage across North Dakota for a child care worker is $...
Applying impeachment clause to Supreme Court justices National conversations surrounding the remote possibility of impeaching Justice Clarence Thomas for accepting – and failing to report – lavish gifts from a GOP billionaire with interests before the Supreme Court, have prompted important questions from readers about the application of the impeachment clause to Supreme Court justices. In a nutshell, curious readers wonder whether justices, and federal judges, are subject to impeachment? If so, what are the criteria? Have we impeached a Sup...
It’s been a long, rough winter. I haven’t seen parts of my sidewalk or most of my backyard since December. I knocked icicles off my roof at the office for the 110th time last week in the midst of the blizzard, and one bounced off my wrist before it crashed to the ground. Now I have a sunny yellow bruise in that spot. Hopefully it’s a sign that it was the last time I have to deal with ice for several months. Surely brighter days are ahead, I said out loud to myself as I rubbed my wrist. On Tuesd...
Even baseball purists like myself, who still aren't comfortable with designated hitters and restrictions on where fielders may be positioned, find themselves overwhelmingly in favor of the new pitch clock. Requiring pitchers to throw within 15 seconds (20 if there are runners on base) has not only shortened games, it has made the confrontation between batter and pitcher more inherently fair – so much so that the concept should be applied to other aspects of our lives. Restaurants, for example, n...
Defendant Donald J. Trump and his supporters have assailed the 34-count felony indictment of the former president brought by the Manhattan District Attorney as resting on a flimsy, untested and novel legal theory that converts Trump’s alleged misdemeanors to felonies. While a jury of President Trump’s peers will decide his fate, assuming the case goes to trial, it turns out that the theory of the case underlying the 34 felony charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, may not be novel at all. New York legal experts hav...
It’s budget time again – and the one President Joe Biden proposed is a beaut! Biden’s budget proposal is the kind of thing only a progressive could get enthused about. It grows the executive branch’s regulatory power, takes total yearly spending to nearly $10 trillion by 2033 (up from just over $6 billion now, post-Covid) and depends on increased regulatory enforcement actions to bring additional revenue in. That last idea is especially bad. Biden ran for the nomination as the moderate alterna...
"Death, taxes and childbirth! There's never any convenient time for any of them," writes author Margaret Mitchell. I second that, and I will add blizzards to the list, especially after the winter we've had in good ole NoDak. Tax Day is April 18, and this year it's a doozy. The IRS changed the W-4 form a couple of years ago, and since then many of us have been trying to crack the code that tells us exactly how many extra dollars to have withheld from each paycheck to avoid paying a boatload of...
A federal lawsuit reflective of the nationwide culture wars is challenging the right of a University of Wyoming sorority to induct a transgender woman, raising questions of central importance to the First Amendment Right of freedom of association and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The issues in the suit are likely to be replicated across the nation as the judicial system wrestles with legislative efforts to regulate, distinguish and deny opportunities and rights of the LGBTQ community. Seven past and present members have filed suit in...
It’s City Government Week. In the Transcript we are running essays written by third graders at New Rockford-Sheyenne School. The topic is “If I Were Mayor” and each student had the opportunity to write about what makes their city great and what they would do if they were mayor for a day. In honor of City Government Week, I decided to write the same essay and print it here as my column. So, here it is, folks! If I were mayor, I’d never hold meetings on Wednesday afternoons or Thursday morning...
The sun is shining today and Spring is upon us. Such days remind me still of the excitement I knew when I turned 16 in April and was finally able to get my driver's license – a wondrous rite of passage fewer and fewer teens choose to experience today. According to a 2019 article in The Wall Street Journal, in the 1980s half of all 16-year-olds were driving. But by 2020 it was just 25 percent. Why? Driving tests began getting stricter and more challenging in many states in the mid-1990s – tho...
Former President Donald Trump has said he expects to be indicted by a Manhattan grand jury any day now. Although widely anticipated, there is no certainty that he will be indicted by grand jurors in New York or, for that matter, by citizens serving on grand juries in Washington or Atlanta, led by prosecutors examining, respectively, his potential obstruction of justice of a federal investigation involving the “Mar-a-Lago Papers” or his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia. Trump’s supporters in Congress and those...
It's officially spring. Well, at least that's what the calendar says. We observed the Spring Equinox on Monday at 4:24 p.m., in the midst of piles of snow and a temperature below the freezing mark. At least the sun was out in all its glory, blinding me as I made the short trek from New Rockford to Carrington and back home. Little more than 24 hours later, our area got yet another round of snow, and with it came "challenging travel conditions," in the words of the meteorologists tasked with...
When my three semi-grown daughters were young (and since I work in the lucrative world of public education), we’d spend our spring break holidays riding bikes to the park, making dad-sized pillow forts in the living room, and raiding the gift shop at the zoo. Now that two of the girls are in college and one is in high school, those days (and our gift-shop cash) are long gone. This year, I spent most of my spring break competing with my youngest daughter to see who could sleep in the latest without developing bed sores. She usually won (...
In 1965, in the landmark case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court, for the first time in our nation’s history, invoked the right to privacy for the purpose of upholding the right of married couples to access contraceptives. Griswold was hailed by women, who had been fighting for the right to use contraceptives for well over a century. It granted women control over their own reproductive organs and provided married couples with the liberty to decide whether to procreate, plan families and make decisions associated with p...
Since moving to New Rockford in August 2021, I’ve covered dozens of regular and special meetings of the New Rockford-Sheyenne School Board as a reporter for the Transcript. Yes, at times there’s been drama and I’ve been able to write some interesting articles, but lately, I’ve started to appreciate something else – how different a small school like New Rockford-Sheyenne is compared to the school I graduated from, and I mean that in a good way. I grew up in Huron, South Dakota and graduated...
Along with identifying as “Swifties,” ignoring the reported Chinese threat of bad dancing posed by TikTok, and pretending that plant-based meat is actually edible, many young people in America are engaging in another fascinating trend – not driving. According to recent surveys, around 20 percent fewer teens of driving age are getting their driver’s licenses as compared to the glorious 1980s. Much to the relief of my insurance premiums, our youngest daughter, who recently turned 16, is one of these vehicular agnostics. Speaking of the 1980s,...
Racial discrimination in southern hotels and restaurants throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Congress determined in 1964 through hearings and studies, had created for Black Americans great challenges and difficulties in their desire to travel from state to state. The Supreme Court had held a century before that Americans enjoyed a constitutional right to travel, but how could Blacks realistically exercise that right without access to lodgings and places to eat? Congress sought in 1964, in the context of the historic civil rights movement, a...
I got my annual Girl Scout Cookie fix last Friday. One of my favorite two Girl Scouts, my niece Megan, showed up just before supper time to make her pitch. I was happy to take a full case (and a couple extra boxes) off her hands in support of a good cause. Now, a few days later, as I munched on a Tagalong while trying to come up with a topic for this column, I got an idea. Personality tests are popular these days, particularly in work settings. Companies want to know what motivates a potential...
I recently made a donation to SNR Baseball in memory of my dad, Ed Kurtz, a baseball player in the New Rockford area for many years (1910 to 1934). Although a catcher, I believe he was most proud of his last game when he played shortstop at the age of 42 without an error. He was outstanding both defensively and at bat. During my youth, when there were still men alive who either played with or observed him play, he was described as the best baseball player they ever saw. During his era, most base...
The immense pressures inflicted on the United States by the Great Depression of the 1930s forced the Supreme Court on several occasions to confront the scope of a state’s police power to regulate economic activity in the name of the general welfare. In the landmark case of Nebbia v. New York (1934), the Court, in a sharply divided 5-4 decision, saved the American dairy industry when it upheld the state’s milk control law that created a board to establish minimum retail prices. The dairy industry, like the rest of the agricultural sector, was...
Our physical and virtual worlds are colliding at a seemingly breakneck pace. Gaming recently joined the ranks of school-sanctioned sports. NR-S is in the middle of its third season of having a competitive team, and my son is a member of the Valorant II team. First introduced in 2019, Valorant is a team-based tactical shooter and first-person shooter game developed and published by Riot Games. Folks, this is quite a different experience than any other in high school sports. My son plays from the...
