How long do you figure it would take you to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?Not trying to set a land speed record, mind you. Just working at a normal pace, slapping jelly on one slice of bread, peanut butter on the other. How long do you figure it would take, start to finish? […]

Bangor Daily News, Nov. 15A proposal to move the University of Maine System offices to downtown Bangor is great news for the city and local businesses. Having 120 additional people working downtown and their visitors coming to the UMS offices for meetings will be a boon to businesses that could sorely use more foot traffic. […]

Auburn City Manager Pat Finnigan has issued a blistering indictment of the police department and its handling of the Aug. 4 arrest of Mayor Norm Guay on charges of drunken driving.In August, the city hired a Portland law firm to investigate Guay’s arrest and related police actions. Finnigan refused to release the entire report this […]

Inattentive voters listening to the Democrats’ anti-Bush rhetoric could be forgiven for thinking that the Depression-era Republican had returned from the grave to occupy the White House once again. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says President Bush has “the worst record on jobs since Herbert Hoover,” a charge echoed by every Democrat in the country […]

AUSTIN, Texas – Sins of omission, sins of omission, so often so much more grave than our sins of commission. And we rarely pay for them in a timely fashion – it is usually further on down the road that the gravity of whatever it was we should have done and failed to do becomes […]

State control of the liquor distribution is a holdover from Prohibition. It’s time for the state to get out of the business, and Gov. John Baldacci’s plan to sell the monopoly rights is solid.Ideally, the government would not be involved in a private enterprise, such as selling alcohol. That is best left to the market.At […]

The only good thing to say about the energy bill that emerged from behind closed-doors this week is that it could have been worse.Even so, it’s still lousy legislation that should be rejected.Our objections begin with the way the bill was crafted and continue right down to the details.Touted now as economic stimulus and a […]

So I guess this counts as a really big oops.Seventeen people dead, 122 injured in a bombing Nov. 8 in a residential neighborhood in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The attack is said to be the all-too familiar handiwork of al-Qaeda. However, most of the people hurt and killed were not Americans, as apparently was intended, but […]

The detainees held at Guantanamo Bay shouldn’t hire Alan Dershowitz quite yet. News accounts have played the Supreme Court’s decision to consider whether U.S. courts have jurisdiction over Guantanamo as a setback to the Bush administration’s position that the courts have nothing to do with it. “An unmistakable rebuff,” according to The New York Times.This […]

A trap has been set for politicians who would oppose legislation that could forever change the nature of Medicare.Offering a prescription drug benefit and hard cash for rural hospitals and doctors as bait, the legislation has, at its core, the purpose of unraveling the universal nature of Medicare and pushing senior citizens toward HMOs.A bipartisan […]