Cleaning out the inbox ...

Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Cheers for the Great Falls Balloon Festival, going on right now. For the first time, the balloons soaring above Lewiston-Auburn (if the weather allows) are facing uncertain skies. The festival is experiencing the fiscal pressures the recession is placing on almost everybody.

No town halls, no problem

Picture this.

You're an important person in a high-stakes debate. The country is energized; powerful interest groups are trying to influence its outcome. Whatever you decide will affect millions of people and cost billions of dollars. Everybody wants a piece of you.

You need real information, not prepackaged spiels from planted "citizens" or screeching from uninformed fear-mongers. You're searching for a precious material: The valued opinions of real, flesh and blood citizens with no other interest than what's important to them.

Getting to know you, swine flu

Camp Modin, in Belgrade, has earned national accolades for "doing things right" against the swine flu. Twenty percent of its campers and staff came down with the flu, a staggering figure that, oddly enough, saw the feared virus turn into an everyday nuisance.

Landlords and tenants have power

The fire that killed 9-year-old Taylor McQueeney on Monday morning in downtown Lewiston was a tragic accident. In sobering hindsight, there were plenty of precautions that could have been taken, chief among them simply extinguishing the candle that sparked the blaze.

That's where the blame lies.

The riddle in these murders

Was it revenge? Or a mistake?

Understanding what happened in that ramshackle house on Pine Street in Rumford requires untangling. The lives of the two victims and the two alleged murderers were intertwined. There's a reason Victor Sheldon and Roger Day were killed.

It's just a matter of determining which one.

The same, but better, on the menu?

When Maine followed California in enacting legislation to place calorie counts on chain-restaurant menus, the goal was fostering smarter eating, as diners knew more about what they were ordering.

We are being railroaded

Those familiar with the history of development in Lewiston-Auburn know Benjamin Bates and partners in the Franklin Company grew this region through strategic infrastructure investment and good planning.

As we assess where this region is going, it is unclear this generation has an architect for the next era of development for Lewiston-Auburn.

And the plaintiff, M. Nature

There are enough jokes about the American tendency to over-litigate, long before pondering whether Mother Nature needs a lawyer. Yet precedents and sentiment do exist to support giving the natural world legal standing in a court of law.

Cleaning out the inbox ...

Cheers and jeers from around the news:

• Jeers to the town of Brunswick, and all elected officials who still don't recognize it's always best to err on the side of transparency. That's the easiest rule for dealing with sticky wickets of government, such as when — or when not — to bring the public business behind closed doors.

Even clean elections need a scrubbing

There's an accusation that public financing for state elections, including Maine's system, is irreparably broken. Opponents say the presence of fraud and the lack of better, more accurate gauges for success, aside from sheer participation, prove public financing is a disaster.

Always meant to be together

"He is dead, and yet he speaks," said Oren Cheney, president of Bates College, in eulogizing Benjamin Bates, the Lewiston college's benefactor and namesake, in 1878. "How do the dead, the blessed dead, speak to us? Certainly, through their lives."

Recently, Cheney's printed eulogy from the 1878 edition of The Bates Student zapped into our e-mail inbox. The president's loving remembrance of Bates is a time capsule for local history, richly describing the relationship between Lewiston and its still-most-recognizable surname.

Correction

In the editorial of Tuesday, Aug. 11, "Chance, or pellet problem," we wrote the pellet mill in Ashland burned following an explosion. That was incorrect. The fire started in a chip grinder. It was the editorial writer's error.

An adult conversation about death

The irony of it all. How can we, as individuals, have an adult conversation about death if we, as a nation, are incapable of having an adult conversation about death?

This sure seems like the present case, given all the inflated rhetoric and demagoguery buzzing around public discourse on health care reform. What should be a solemn, serious debate about philosophies of care for the end of life has been turned into theater of the surreal.

Chance, or pellet problem?

• Editor's Note: This editorial was changed on Aug. 11 to correct the cause of the fire in Ashland. It was not an explosion; the fire began in a chip grinder. It was the writer's error.

 It could be coincidence, but it seems unlikely. The destruction of two rural Maine wood pellet manufacturing plants in less than five months should raise concerns about safety as this industry expands.

LIVE: Sen. Susan Collins speaks with SJ editorial board