Now that the presidential election is over, we should heed the calls for unity from both President-Elect Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain. This is needed not just nationally, but in Madison County as well. No matter how your political tastes run, we all need to work together to overcome the big challenges of the day. And while it’s fine to experience the joy of a new president’s inauguration, you should temper that with the realization that he inherits many weighty problems that will not likely all be solved quickly.

Compared to other places, Madison County generally has a strong voter turnout for presidential elections. Although Registrar Diana Eanes declined to make any specific predictions on the turnout for this Tuesday’s voting, when asked if she thought it would be a higher percentage turnout than the 75 percent of the county’s registered voters who cast ballots in the 2004 Bush-Kerry race, she replied, “Oh, sure.”

Written in 1787 and ratified in 1788, the United States Constitution is one of the most influential documents in the history of our country. In what was originally a meeting to revise the “Articles of Confederation,” our founding fathers painstakingly crafted this new document in secret one summer, closed up tight in the Philadelphia statehouse. They created a living document; a supreme law that would change with the times and the people.

“What’s the difference between gambling and playing the stock market?” asked Bucksnort Bugle Editor Roy Seabrooks Jr. “A lot of folks lost their britches recently in the market. Isn’t investing your hard-earned money in the stock market gambling?”

After the failure of Lehman Brothers and the purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America, now the media and most everyone in America is concerned about the condition and reliability of financial institutions. It is unfortunate that there has been no clarion call by our elected officials or media pundits concerning a far more pressing and sustainable problem. America has more than the current financial industry upheaval. I cite specifically the current and deteriorating condition of the federal government’s finances and its oppressive debt burden on current and future taxpayer generations.