Complicating matters is that most faiths do not oppose vaccines. Pope Francis has called immunization against the coronavirus "a simple yet profound way to care for one another," for example. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, objected to vaccines but said Christian Scientists should get them, where required. (A believer should "obey the law, and then appeal to the gospel to save him from bad physical results.")

I appreciate the collective efforts and concern on behalf of incarcerated firefighters. But they fail to take into account the hundreds of thousands of people in jails and prisons across America in conditions so terrible as to make fire camps seem like country clubs. Places where people are forced to choose between working for nothing and losing their humanity.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words are necessary to express alarm when one looks at the "dozens of stacked columns of steel" worth $100 million dollars lying at the border? This is material that was supposed to finish a portion of the wall to reduce the flow and discourage new migrants from coming.

Question 3, or the “Right to Food” as it’s called, is a constitutional amendment to protect the individual’s right to grow and produce our own food for ourselves and our family’s well-being. It is a right we may be grateful to have in the future, just like our other constitutional rights.

The slogans by both sides of the NECEC project are most effective at revealing the folly of Maine's initiative process.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a private employer to get rid of a worker deemed bad for business, he or she can. Such appears to be the fate of Jon Gruden, who resigned as the Las Vegas Raiders football coach after a trove of racist, sexist and homophobic utterings came to light.

The missing element in Jon Gruden's behavior, as in the behavior of millions who post lies and rubbish on the internet, is responsibility. To quote Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, "With great power comes great responsibility." Gruden had great power as a head coach and TV analyst. He needed to show some responsibility. He didn't.

Would threatened mass military resignations have given pause to an administration rife with credentialed mediocrities convinced of their own genius? Would they have reconsidered their "perception driven, political optics" Beltway strategy, accepted the horrible facts and acted to stop an impending debacle?

Cutting a gifted and talented program and not requiring kids to read, write or do basic math flunks the test of what education is supposed to mean and limits a child's job and career opportunities. That is a form of child abuse.

Predictive maps based on historical and current weather data show peak season will occur in mid- to late October over much of the eastern U.S. this year, but climate change is expected to keep nudging these dates backward in the coming decades. Through the Second Century Stewardship Foundation, Stephanie Spera, an assistant professor at the University of Richmond, is analyzing fall foliage changes at Acadia National Park on Maine's Mount Desert Island.

Of the 50 historical figures most frequently honored with a monument, only three were women: Joan of Arc, Sacagawea and Harriet Tubman. Tubman, the only one of the three who would have called herself American, was born enslaved and was not considered a citizen until she was in her 40s.

A team led by Jan Langbein, an animal psychologist at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany, has proposed training cows to use a toilet. In a recent study published in the journal Cell, 10 out of 16 calves were successfully trained to urinate in a "MooLoo," a designated area of their pens.

The practical obstacles are insuperable, and the likely effects would be very unwelcome to its proponents. If an insufficient patriotism is one of the ills of contemporary America, then a national divorce would prescribe arsenic as a cure. It would burn down America to save America, or at least those parts of it considered salvageable.

The Pandora Papers, "an expose of the financial secrets and offshore dealings of dozens of heads of state, public officials and politicians," writes CNN, could not have come at a better time for congressional "progressives" who are seeking to win over enough Democrats to pass the massive Biden-Pelosi $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill, which is loaded with enough pork to infect the nation with financial trichinosis.

Ultimately, Maine should not be ashamed of its redistricting process, but it should not celebrate it as the pinnacle of democracy and representation either. By entrusting map drawing to politicians and limiting time for public feedback, there is a question as to how well the new district lines truly serve the public interest. As a state that avoids the worst of redistricting, we should continue to ask ourselves how we can do better.