Cheers and jeers from around the news:• Cheers to anyone who made the courageous decision to quit smoking in 2009. It’s now Saturday morning, and you are three days into your new smoke-free life.If you are young, you have made one of the biggest and best decisions of your life. This, of course, is not […]

Perhaps the most discouraging development in a very discouraging year was the sight of U.S. automotive executives going hat-in-hand to the American taxpayers for money to bail out their industry.What made it doubly embarrassing was the nearly simultaneous announcement by the Chinese company BYD that it would begin marketing a battery operated vehicle with a […]

Last year was really awful, right? Job losses. Deaths. Foreclosures. War.Right.But we also celebrated births. Toasted new marriages. Worked hard. Helped our neighbors. Loved each other.The world was not all bad in 2008, so let’s say goodbye but not so exuberantly that we forget the good stuff that happened. There was, after all, the election […]

If the word wasn’t out before, it is now: Campaign reports must be filed on time. The state ethics commission fined the Maine Association of Realtors $10,000 Monday for filing a campaign spending report 20 days past the deadline.In October, the commission fined the Maine Democratic Party $5,000 for a similar violation, and a $10,000 […]

In a year of continual crisis, Mainers can be extremely thankful for the one anticipated crisis that did not develop.Heating oil, widely predicted last summer to top $5 a gallon by winter, is selling for about half that price now.Mainers are not only paying less than they did last year, but less than they did […]

Some things just have to be said. And said. And said again.Don’t walk on thin ice.Don’t speed on a snowmobile. Or in a car.Wear reflective clothing if you’re going to walk in the street at night.Take a map on cross-country ski trails.The difference between careful and careless can, as we’ve seen repeatedly in Maine, be […]

Today, the Maine Ethics Commission will take up the question of whether to increase the amount of seed money prospective gubernatorial candidates can raise to maximize their funding distribution under Maine’s public financing law.Doubling or tripling the maximum threshold makes sense, making it tougher for candidates to qualify for a pot bursting with public funding […]

President-elect Barack Obama has selected a Mainer, Karen Gordon Mills of Brunswick, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration. A venture capitalist, Mills is regarded as one of this state’s sharpest economic minds.Her selection should accomplish two goals of the Obama administration: pleasing Sen. Olympia Snowe, who had endorsed Mills, and rejuvenating a federal agency […]

Cheers and jeers from around the news:• Jeers to forgetting to clear snow from doorways. (This is an easy one.) Gary Simard, the fire prevention officer in Auburn, has reminded us about how important a clear doorway is, in case of emergency. With big fires around Maine almost daily, a little prevention is worthwhile.As are, […]

Some people are simply monsters.Like Richard Dwyer.He’s the unrepentant rapist and murderer who buried a woman seven months pregnant, Donna Paradis, in a shallow grave behind the Promenade Mall last year. In being sentenced to life, Dwyer maintained his innocence, saying he hopes the guilty man is caught some day.Well, denial is the first step.Getting […]