President's address likely to be just a lot of noise

True grassroots movements not steered by celebrity politicians

The difference between parties and movements is simple: Parties are loyal to their own power regardless of policy agenda; Movements are loyal to their own policy agenda regardless of which party champions it. This is one of the few enduring political axioms, and it explains why the organizations purporting to lead an American progressive "movement" have yet to build a real movement, much less a successful one.

Leave it to voters

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Tuesday, Sept. 1:

Politicians learned long ago that one of the privileges of power is rigging the system to help your party and hurt the other. What they never seem to learn is how easily that trick can backfire. The shackles you fashion for your opponents can wind up on your own wrists.

Sense of isolation sets in when phone goes missing

Back in May, I flew to Los Angeles. My cell phone did not.

I left it in the car, a fact I only discovered as I was lining up at security. Had I found myself standing there in my underdrawers, I don't think I'd have felt more naked. There was this panicky sense of isolation, this disconcerting feeling of being cut off. Whenever I confessed my plight, I got looks of stark pity like you'd give someone with a terminal disease.

It was a very long five days.

Liberals find public support fading with last days of summer

Despite their control of all three branches of government, this has not been a good summer for liberal Democrats. Their health care "reform" bill, which has yet to be fully written, much less fully funded, has been exposed at town hall meetings as a power grab over life and death with the strong possibility that "do no harm" will be replaced by a utilitarian approach to treatment.

A return to Lockerbie

If there is one community on this planet that deserves an eternal exemption from the international spotlight, it is Lockerbie, Scotland.

The harsh glare has returned, however, in recent weeks after the Scottish government's ludicrous decision — by Justice Minister Kenny McCaskill — to free Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan agent convicted in the Pam Am Flight 103 bombing in the skies above Lockerbie in 1988.

The train (plan) is coming

Within days of submitting a column offering my take on Gov. John Baldacci's rail plan, another railroad in Maine started looking for a state buy-out. The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic railroad announced its intent to sell or abandon 241 miles of track in northern Maine, because freight traffic cannot generate enough cash to maintain the line.

Loose college system must be united

If you build it, they will come.

That seemed to work for Kevin Costner in the hit movie Field of Dreams. He plowed under his corn, spent his life savings on a baseball diamond and long-dead legendary baseball players emerged to play ball.

Reassert the rights of indigenous people

How did Europeans justify invading indigenous lands in Africa, Asia and the Western Hemisphere? They asserted a right of discovery to assert dominion over all lands and peoples they encountered, as long as no other Christian Europeans had preceded them. Mainers and all Americans live as the benefactors of this unjustified taking of indigenous land and freedom.

Rediscovering Hathaway, Part II

Amber Waterman/Sun Journal

Bill Hathaway, former Maine senator

How do sunspots fit into global warming?

On the last day of August, scientists spotted a teeny-weeny sunspot, breaking a 51-day streak of blemish-free days for the sun. If it had gone just a bit longer, it would have broken a 96-year record of 53 days without any of the magnetic disruptions that cause solar flares. That record was nearly broken last year as well.

Wait, it gets even more exciting.

Energy economy needs skilled workers

Maine's intertwined economic and energy challenges have deep roots. We have the nation's oldest housing and work force, greatest reliance on heating oil, and highest percentage of young people neither working pursuing education. Electricity costs are high, and Maine has the lowest income and education levels in New England.

President's poll numbers could continue downward

Watching President Obama's poll numbers slide in recent weeks takes me back to the worst moments of the presidential campaign. I'm not thinking of Obama's presidential campaign. I'm thinking five years ago to Sen. John Kerry's losing campaign.

And I am wondering, as I did with Kerry, why didn't Obama see it coming?

U.S. should put brakes on applying pressure to Iran

 

The September deadline set by President Obama for Iran to restart talks about its nuclear program is rapidly approaching.

The president said in July that the world couldn't "wait indefinitely" and allow Iran time to develop a nuclear weapon. If Iran didn't engage by September, Obama said, "further steps" would be needed.

'Only God is good, the rest of us are sinners'

Opinion columnists, like the rest of humanity, walk a fine line between judgment (holding people accountable to a standard we did not create) and judgmentalness (thinking ourselves morally superior because we haven't committed the acts of others).

Since writing of my friendship with the late Senator Edward Kennedy, I have been flooded with responses. Some have been kind, but many — perhaps a majority — have heaped on me the revulsion these writers also heaped on him. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was the writer who accused me of "going wobbly."

No equivocation allowed for sexual predators

 

And what should we do with our monsters?

That we have no answer to that question, that we lack consensus on what to do with sexual predators, is evident from the range of our responses to their crimes. From the Catholic church shielding pederastic priests to the profusion of databases that let you check if your neighbor is a sex offender, to the pseudo celebrity enjoyed by Mary Kay Letourneau when she married her former student Vili Fualaau, whom she raped when he was 12 and she was 34, our responses scream irresolution.

Kennedy's liberal legacy is Obama's new test

The Kennedys have always tended their family's legacy tenderly and brilliantly. Look no further than the Kennedy Library, the Kennedy Center and the Kennedy School of Government. Not to mention the notion of "Camelot," shrewdly dropped by Jackie Kennedy in a 1963 magazine interview. The rest wasn't history, but gauzy romanticizing.

Military recruiting ads present false image

The science fiction of military marketing

I'm a video game geek, so as I sat through movie previews a few weeks ago, I was sure I was watching Nintendo ads.

Allegation of fraud add up in Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — There's no confusing Qari Fazel Ahmad's gender. Yet, the 65-year-old man from Herat says no questions were asked when he used a woman's registration card to cast his vote in the Aug. 20 presidential election.

"Women's cards don't have photos," he explained. "But nobody looked at my card, anyway." Allegations of election fraud are now so numerous that it may be weeks or months before they can all be sorted out.

Investigation targets interrogation of terrorists

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday, Aug. 26:

Almost eight years ago, jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. Americans, in their rage and grief, demanded to know who had attacked them. And they expected their government to do everything in its power to prevent another attack, which everyone thought was imminent. In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, American interrogators had an urgent mission: Extract information from terrorism suspects about future attacks as quickly and effectively as possible.

Why not launch a new, combined festival?

There is an old saying that perception is reality. For a community known historically just as a tired old shoe and textile town, unless you make a visit a few miles north of I-95, that perception lingers. The challenging weekend weather-wise for the Great Falls Balloon Festival, typically a few days that draw many from away, certainly cast a long shadow on what should have been an uplifting weekend.

 

Luster is off Obama's high moral ground

 

Back in April, the U.S. government snatched Raymond Azar out of Afghanistan.

His waist, wrists and ankles were shackled, he was stripped naked and photographed, made to wear headphones, blindfolded, hooded and stuffed into an executive jet and flown to the United States. Azar says his eyeglasses were taken and he was left in an ice cold room, denied food for 30 hours and told he might never see his wife and children again.

Terrorist interrogators face grilling for doing their job

After pledging during last year's presidential campaign, and as recently as the spring, not to re-visit the past, the Obama administration, in the person of Attorney General Eric Holder, has named a special prosecutor to go after CIA interrogators who pried information from terrorist suspects, preventing more deadly assaults on the country.

Turning ourselves green

There has been much press and advertising lately about "green jobs" being, or about to be, created by construction of wind farms and other renewable energy sources. President Barack Obama, in fact, has used Spain as a model for pursuing sustainable energy projects.

Gay marriage is not a civil right

Advocates of legalizing same sex-marriage in Maine usually argue it is a "civil rights" issue, because they know that no one wants to be thought of as opposing the rights of others.

It is obvious that neither the United States nor our state constitutions say anything about an individual's right to their own definition of marriage. Their texts just can't be stretched that far.