We’ve spared the rod, and we’ve spoiled the child.This is the feeling of many Maine taxpayers today, nearly two years after a citizen-initiated tax referendum – the Palesky Tax Cap – was soundly struck down. With that choice, overburdened Maine citizens instead entrusted state government with providing tax relief.In response to this mandate, lawmakers gave […]

Maine Republicans must not have gotten the memo about how the Taxpayer Bill of Rights is not only bad policy &tstr; it is bad politics. In my state of Colorado &tstr; the only state to have enacted TABOR&tstr; the GOP had to learn the hard way. Our legislature lost the Republican majority in 2004 for […]

WASHINGTON – If the title of Sen. Barack Obama’s new book, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” sends you page-turning in search of daring solutions for the nation’s problems, you may feel let down.But if you’re one of many Americans who see the eloquent 45-year-old biracial senator from Illinois as a […]

Sometimes it takes a tragedy to meet your neighbors.On Friday, fire in a Pierce Street apartment building in downtown Lewiston brought out scores of onlookers, firefighters and media types. In the commotion, the stories of heroes emerged, such as Terry Powell, who rushed across the street during the fire to pull children from the building.Too […]

Maine has tax incremental financing. It has Pine Tree Zones. It also has community block grants, seed grants and WIRED grants. All these economic development tools, however, are weak in comparision to pure common sense.This week, outdoor retailer Cabela’s dropped its request for a waiver on sales tax collection on catalog and Internet sales inside […]

Sen. Olympia Snowe tells about chatting with a Maine teenager about Net Neutrality, controversial legislation to prevent Internet providers from charging premiums for faster connectivity to the World Wide Web.Snowe is the lone GOP voice supporting Net Neutrality in the Senate. The issue is uncomplicated, she said, but not easy to explain, and admitted it […]

Debra Perkins’ grandkids aren’t crying anymore.The beaming grandmother said Tuesday that her grandchildren’s school backpacks have been found. The backpacks, one picturing characters from the animated movie “Cars” and the other sprite Tinker Bell from “Peter Pan,” were stolen Friday night from an unlocked car on Marston Street in Auburn.Whomever perpetrated the crime likely also […]

During Friday night’s downpour, Debra Perkins’ daughter neglected to lock her car on Marston Street in Auburn. So, an opportunistic thief stole her kids’ school backpacks; one was emblazoned with characters from the new cartoon movie Cars, the other with Tinker Bell, the precocious pixie from the classic Peter Pan.Nothing else was taken. In their […]

Question: What do you do if lost in the woods? Answer: Anything but what two lost hikers on Old Speck mountain in Grafton Township did Thursday.Two buddies found themselves marooned in the Western Maine forest at 4 p.m., without rain gear or food, and were found in Ketchum on Friday, a literal “country mile” from […]

To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill, never has so much attention been paid to milestones that mean so little.Last week, American number 300,000,000 was – according to whomever speaks loudest – born in Atlanta, landed at LaGuardia Airport in New York, jumped the U.S.-Mexico border or, maybe, breezed across the Straits of Florida from Cuba in […]