Editor's Notebook

 


The 2022 Nebraska Primary Election is less than a week away and newspaper advisors think it is the duty of quality newspapers to endorse the candidates they believe are the best qualified and deserving of voter support.

This newspaper has sometimes endorsed candidates and frequently those candidates lost the election. So I’m not sure if our endorsement helps or hurts a candidate.

Quality newspapers are also supposed to write stories explaining the candidates’ qualifications. That sounds like a good idea and we have tried to do so prior to some elections. But experience has shown many candidates do not reply to our requests for comments. Once a candidate got mad and said nasty things because we printed the other candidates’ responses and not his. He didn’t seem to understand that since he didn’t respond to our inquiries we couldn’t print his responses.

When it comes to the race for Nebraska governor, my response to which one to endorse could be “none of the above.” All are promising lower taxes and wise spending but I’ve known the politicians long enough to know they never voluntarily decrease spending. Who is expected to pay the tax and on what the tax is based on may change, but the amount of money required to operate the government never goes down.


And I’ve concluded the only fair tax is the one I don’t pay.

Our candidates for governor all appear to be well educated but they may not be wise.

Not even one candidate for governor has purchased an advertisement in this newspaper. Instead they have wasted their advertising money by spending it on other advertising.


A March 2022 survey of adults from rural and urban communities across the U.S. conducted by Susquenhanna Polling and Research for the National Newspaper Association found 62 percent reported they notice Google ads or other internet advertising banners only“occasionally” or “not at all.”

That same survey, using a 10-point scale (with 10 being the highest) found when it comes to learning about candidates for public office, local newspapers ranked at 7.38 This is higher than television stations at 6.45, radio at 5.58, mailings at 4.63 and social media platforms at 2.65.

If I were buying ads, I wouldn’t waste my money on social media.

Newspaper readers are voters. A combined 96 percent of the readers of local newspapers specifically say they plan to vote.


I’m not sure I want to trust my country’s future to politicians who don’t know where to best invest their campaign dollars. If they can’t wisely invest their campaign dollars, why should we expect them to wisely invest our tax dollars?

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This week we continue to struggle with a creaking email system. We knew in advance the provider of our email addresses which ended in superiorinet.net planned to discontinue doing so on April 30. In preparation, we had been sending email replies advising the senders using the soon to be discontinued addresses to use [email protected].

When email was first becoming popular we were told to register our address independent of a service provider. With our own address we were supposed to be able to easily move it from provider to provider and we have done that in the past.


Without warning last Tuesday noon superiorne.com, stopped receiving emails. That has been bad but it has some positives. While we are missing emails we would like to have, thankfully, we are not receiving the hundreds of junk emails we were previously being sent to that address. By far the most of the junk emails were coming from politicians.

We got two emails to that address on Saturday and two on Monday. We had been receiving hundreds of emails a day.

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This week Rita and I clipped a few cedar trees that had been growing on Blauvelt’s Hill. As we looked for the trees, I remembered going with my father on a cold, rainy day to Central City in search of cedar trees to transplant.


It was far from a pleasant day but I suspect that was why he chose that day to make the trip. He knew the weather would make for a slow business day at the filing station and it was less likely his presence would be missed.

I don’t know how he knew where to go, perhaps a neighbor had given him directions or perhaps he picked a farm at random. We stopped at a farmer’s house in the Platte Valley and the farmer allowed us to dig red cedar trees from his pasture. All he asked was that he be paid 10 cents for each tree removed.

The trees were brought back to Jewell County and used to create windbreaks.

The windbreaks were needed for the north wind was sweeping over the Republican River Valley and blasting our house and business. Cedar trees are dense, hardy trees that make good windbreaks.


Now the offspring of those trees are spreading like weeds. I shouldn’t complain, we had fewer than a couple dozen to clip around the small plot we still own on Blauvelt’s Hill. Farmers can have thousands in their pastures and spend days every year on cedar patrol.

It was hard to know where to stop. I was tempted to climb over the fence and clip ones growing on neighbors’ properties. But where does one stop? The trees are becoming noxious weeds and ruining good pastures.

The only good thing about the red cedar is that if clipped near the ground the tree is killed. There are tree species that instead of dying when clipped will come back more vigorously from the roots.

Cutting does not eliminate the cedar problem. The cut trees are slow to rot and if allowed to remain in a pasture they provide shelter which encourages the sprouting of more cedar trees.

 

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