Anthony Rust farms 21 million hens, which makes him an expert on the egg business. He’s done it his whole life, first as a 9-year-old picking eggs on the family farm, to today, as executive vice president of Rose Acre Farms, which is found on the Internet at the pastoral-sounding www.goodegg.com.Except there’s nothing docile about […]

We’re glad somebody, finally, is talking about Dirigo Health.This week, the Legislature’s Insurance and Financial Services Committee heard bills regarding the struggling state-subsidized health insurance program, which has been a missing person since voters rejected a bevy of new beverage taxes last November to pay for it.Nothing has changed. Dirigo enrollment is still capped and […]

Give Harley Lee credit. He’s been persistent in his attempts to build wind turbines in the Redington Pond Range and on Black Nubble Mountain, returning this year with a plan to have his mountaintops annexed by adjoining Carrabassett Valley and his project revived.A public hearing on the annexation was held in Augusta last week, during […]

Cheers and jeers from around the news:• Cheers to public service. An Eagle Scout from Paris, Justin Cummings, is proposing to bestow a proper monument for Officer Tim Willard, a policeman from Paris who was murdered in the line of duty. Willard, 22, was shot and killed during a traffic stop, a few days after […]

Despite all the political posturing and made-for-television-rubric that accompanied Wednesday’s “tea party” protests in Maine and across the land, they got their basic message across: People are madder than hell and want something done. Pronto.The tea parties merely gave times and places for widespread, volcanic emotions to erupt; they were billed as Tax Day protests, […]

As good as it might have felt to the American psyche, Sunday’s heroic rescue of hijacked captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates was far from a decisive action. If betting on either three desperadoes or a U.S. Navy destroyer, always take the warship and the points.Nor was it final. Since the rescue, pirates have seized […]

If you’ve ever wondered how public employees obtain job benefits much more generous than your own, well, here’s how.A bill working its way through the Legislature would automatically grant Workers Comp benefits to firefighters who contract cancer. The thinking here is that firefighters are exposed to smoke, which can cause cancer.Cancer, for the purposes of […]

Increasing government secrecy is never good policy, but that is exactly what we’re looking at with LD1353, a bill to censor public salaries at all levels of government.Public workers are paid with taxes and fees wrestled from our collective pockets. We have an absolute right to know where that money is spent, every penny of […]

It is understandable to be ambivalent about legalizing marijuana. Ambivalence about executing and upholding the law, however, is not. This is the scenario Maine lawmakers face this year.Several years ago, a citizen-initiated petition that allowed marijuana to be administered for medical purposes was approved in Maine. Since then, the statute has languished on the books […]

It is time for Bates Mill No. 5 to come down.There is neither glee nor remorse in this statement. It is simply a statement of fact. Only so long can taxpayers be expected to subsidize the massive building’s existence, as it awaits a redevelopment plan that may never arrive. The practical thing to do now […]