The UMaine Black Bears hockey team is pretty good, but not as good as the Lewiston Maineiacs.The Maineiacs are younger, and stronger, than the local American Hockey League affiliate in Portland, too.And forget the Boston Bruins. To paraphrase an underwhelming former Boston basketball coach, Ray Bourque isn’t walking through that door. Bobby Orr and Cam […]

Walter G. Noble, we wish we hardly knew ye.Even after printing his photograph, and urging people to call police if they saw him driving, he did it (allegedly) anyway. Winthrop police picked him up Thursday. They charged him with operating under the influence.Noble’s driving record is atrocious, and as long as the miles of pockmarked […]

Stephen Eldridge seems to have a penchant for the tough job.Mere weeks after escaping the cauldron of Rumford politics, he’s plopped into the frying pan that’s the monstrous task of joint services coordinator for Lewiston and Auburn.“This is the kind of stuff I like to do,” Eldridge said on Friday. “This will be fun.” We […]

In the rush to find fault with accelerated daylight savings time – such as mourning the dysfunction of computerized clocks – let’s breathe for a moment and ask one, important question:When is the last time government did something to bring a smile to your face?Yeah, rising early was a drag. For the first few hours. […]

Buried inside LD 850, a sprawling tax reduction bill sponsored by Rep. Thomas Watson, D-Bath, is an outline of new taxation on “amusement and recreational services” that’s neither laughable, nor relaxing.Under Watson’s proposal, a slew of entertainment options for Mainers would lose their sales tax exemptions. Aquarium passes, for example. Dirigible rides. Admission to puppet […]

By comparison, Maine’s projected shortfall from the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, is a dinghy amongst the national fleet. At $6.5 million, it’s less than 10 percent of the anticipated shortfall in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, 4 percent of New Jersey, or 2 percent of Illinois.Fourteen states in all expect SCHIP, which funds […]

Maybe a guardrail could have saved Jeannine Morin.On March 2, the 66-year-old Lewiston woman, suffering from a stroke, drove her vehicle through decorative downtown metal fencing into an ice-covered canal below. She died of hypothermia, after lying undiscovered for several hours.Or, perhaps a guardrail could have killed Jeannine Morin. Slippery conditions on the day of […]

Just as many Mainers wouldn’t choose to drive a vehicle built in the 1920s, they shouldn’t have their cars and trucks taxed by a policy created during the giddy days before the Great Depression, either.Maine’s vehicle excise tax, however, is just that. In 1925, the Maine Legislature decided the fairest method of taxing these newfangled […]

Well, well. There is a new sheriff in town.Guy Desjardins has reached his maximum internal temperature with the Androscoggin County commissioners, whose petty treatment of the popular, and popularly elected, county sheriff and his once-and-future chief deputy has our personal mercury bubbling as well.The sheriff has finally, and deservedly, blown his top. He’s well within […]

Committees, as has been observed, are quiet cul-de-sacs down which ideas are lured, and quietly strangled. The Legislature’s Education Committee, in revealing its dead-end “consensus” plan for school consolidation on Thursday, is certainly garroting hopes for tax relief.With a crowd behind them, and the Appropriations Committee ahead, the Education Committee unveiled a diluted version of […]