Reader says ‘nurture nature’

Editor,
The wolf is the last vestige of Wisconsin’s wilderness. Our wilderness heritage is sacred. Its preservation is in our hands.
Let us not let the “thrill of the hunt,” the “thrill of the kill” selfishly override our responsibility to preserve our God-given wilderness. We are its guardians. It has been entrusted to us. If not us, who?

Please put aside the thrill of the hunt, the thrill to bring down a living being by baiting (e.g., bear with apples and Oreos) or stalking with dogs. Is there no end to this savage urge to kill?

God, please help us to revere the wilderness entrusted to us. Help us to, instead of wanting to kill all things great and small, to protect ALL of Mother Nature’s creatures.

Remember, they were here first.

Put aside your urge to kill and nurture nature.
Karen Blumenstein, Rhinelander

Readers praise health department vaccine clinic

Editor,
My wife and I just had a great experience due to the diligence and great planning of Linda Conlon, RN., Medical Officer of Oneida County Department of Health. In this time of COVID-19 confusion and lack of compliance, Linda Conlon has organized and successfully administered the Covid Vaccination Clinic in Rhinelander. The entire process was flawless.

Starting with online registration which was simple and quick. We received an acknowledgment immediately, followed by a phone call the same day to schedule the appointment for the next afternoon. When we arrived we were given a beeper and told to wait in our car in the parking lot until paged. When paged we sanitized our hands going in, and were given our already signed consent forms (from the online registration) along with an information packet. We were directed to a staging area of spaced out chairs. The nurse took us one at a time, administered the vaccines and directed us to chairs to wait in for the assistants to collect our paperwork, answer questions and ensure we didn’t have any adverse reactions.

They explained the next steps to register for the second shot, and then released us. Outside waiting for any medical problems was an ambulance. The facility was well sized for the vaccinations, everything was clean and orderly, and all we spoke with were glad to be there, happy to provide the service, and pleasant to deal with. Behind the scenes someone coordinated getting the vaccine, recipients and staff all coached and prepared for the onslaught of people eligible to be vaccinated.

This sort of clinic operation doesn’t happen by accident. Our complements to Ms. Conlon for providing exemplary leadership and the team that ran such a professional program.

Paul Olinski
Khemissa Bejaoui
Minocqua

Reader’s open letter to U.S. Rep. Tiffany

Dear Representative Tiffany:
1. I wrote as a constituent asking why on Jan. 6 with the Capitol in violent “Stop the Steal” disarray you voted to object to certification of Arizona and Pennsylvania Electoral College votes.

2. On your Congressional letterhead sent, I believe, as well to other constituents, your response was that there’d been vote rigging there just like in Wisconsin (failing to mention that the Senate had confirmed the Wisconsin votes); namely: election officials in Dane and Milwaukee Counties “took active steps to undermine and circumvent [election] laws” in that they “openly defied” a state ban on ballot harvesting; “intentionally misinterpreted” a law to allow people sheltering from COVID-19 to get absentee ballots without a picture ID; and illegally ‘cured’ incomplete or incorrectly filed mail-in applications and envelopes.

3. What you didn’t mention was that the Wisconsin Supreme Court had already considered and rejected those claims, stating in relevant part: “The claims here are not of improper electoral activity. (….) In each category of ballots challenged, voters followed every procedure and policy communicated to them, and election officials in Dane and Milwaukee Counties followed the advice of [the Wisconsin Elections Commission] where given. (….) [Trump] waited until after the election to raise selective challenges that could have been raised long before the election. We conclude the challenge to indefinitely confined voter ballots is without merit, and that laches bars relief on the remaining three categories of challenged ballots. [Trump] is not entitled to relief, and therefore does not succeed in [his] efforts to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.”

4. Instead of mentioning that, you flip off the highest court in the state: “Wisconsin’s legislature did their job by enacting common-sense [election] laws….Unfortunately, our state Supreme Court failed in their responsibility to uphold them and a handful of local election officials chose to subvert them.”

5. There was indeed a failure of responsibility on the Court’s part: its responsibility you yourself feel to act as Trump’s fixer in support of his stolen-election lie, acknowledging as you do Biden’s swearing-in, but with a wink and a nudge advancing doubt as to its legitimacy: “As a result, Wisconsin voters will never truly know who actually won our state in November.”

6. Solzhenitsyn saw it in the USSR: “In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State.”

So, here: persistent support of Trump’s election lie under color of office by a Congressman is an effort to have a syphilitic effect on our democracy. Can you defend that?
Tom Dickson, Rhinelander