Relay gives hope to cancer patients
Hundreds of people across the Flathead Valley will take a bold step in the fight against cancer as they walk together in the Relay for Life.
The annual walkathon is the American Cancer Society's signature activity and offers both young and old - and everyone in between - a chance to get involved in raising money and awareness for cancer research.
Tonight, cancer survivors in three local cities will take a victory lap, and luminarias placed around the tracks will honor those who lost their battle to the disease and those who are still fighting. Walking continues into the early morning hours. (See details in our front-page story today).
Many who participate in the Relay for Life find it a life-changing experience. Let's hope that these time-honored walks will one day stomp out the disease altogether.
Some definitive action is being taken starting this week to address the problem of dusty roads in Flathead County.
The road department is conducting tests on two roads - Mennonite Church Road and Jensen Road - of a liquid that is designed to reduce dust, stabilize the road surface and reduce maintenance work.
Granted, treating only two roads out of the county's 700 miles of gravel roads may not sound like much. But it's a start in the effort to find some way of combatting the increasingly vexing problem of dusty roads.
Those two roads should eat up the $10,000 that the county is required to spend by the state Department of Environmental Quality for previous road-dust violations.
County officials plan - and we support - going beyond that $10,000 requirement and extending treatment to as many other roads as possible.
A small story out of Missoula the other day could have big ramifications for law enforcement from coast to coast.
U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy ruled that Congress cannot federally criminalize a sex offender's failure to register in a state-run datebase. If upheld (and this will probably go all the way to the Supreme Court) Molloy's ruling could be the death knell for community efforts to track molesters and rapists in order to increase public safety.
Molloy based his ruling on what he said was an abuse of the powers granted to the federal government by the so-called Commerce Clause of the Constitution. We certainly have sympathy for any effort to reel in the federal government, and agree that the Commerce Clause has been used to justify a variety of power grabs by Congress.
On the other hand, it is reasonable and prudent that citizens of one state would want to be protected from criminals who move there from another state, especially sex offenders and violent offenders. If Molloy's opinion is upheld, some other smart lawyer needs to come up with a loophole that will permit the tracking process to continue. Criminals who jump state borders should not have free rein to prey on the innocent.