Auburn City Councilor Bob Mennealy is unconventional in his approach, perhaps even a pariah among his elected colleagues. He can be terse and does not hold to “protocols” and “procedures.”Mennealy is angry with City Manager Pat Finnigan and has accused her, in a complaint to the state attorney general, of fiscal mismanagement, violations of information […]

Paul Hill died happily last Wednesday night.He went into the afterlife with taxpayer-supplied poisons leaking into his veins. In the hours before his execution, he told reporters he expected to receive a grand reward upon arrival in Heaven because he had done what God told him to.I am a religious man, and it is pretty […]

Once one understands government and the managerial elite that runs it, nearly every utterance from every prattling politician sounds patently preposterous.The politicians and their hirelings, the bureaucrats, claim special knowledge of the answer to this woe or that affliction. Only they can provide the palliative. Both cannot be right, and indeed both are always wrong.So […]

Now that the Bush administration has come clean on the costs of rebuilding a shattered Iraq, it’s time to reconcile the federal budget with the new reality.The country was presented with an $87 billion bill Sunday night that will pay for the troops and humanitarian efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan next year. Still woefully short […]

Two days of congressional hearings uncovered something we all found out – dramatically – almost a month ago. The country’s electrical transmission grid is in need of a technological and regulatory overhaul.There’s a great deal of support in Congress and the country as a whole to address this issue and short-circuit future blackouts like the […]

As the presidential debate season heats up, and Democrats hone in on the best case to oust President Bush, there’s no shortage of promising fodder – from the sluggish economy to the mess in Iraq. But there’s one clinching argument that no Democrat has yet made, but which captures all this and more:George Bush is […]

It’s time for Congress to derail the gravy train for unscrupulous lawyers who are profiting from the country’s broken class action legal system.In June, the House of Representatives passed legislation that will begin to rein in this abusive system. As early as this week, the U.S. Senate could vote on tort reform legislation.Class action lawsuits […]

Bangor Daily News, Aug. 29The final report from the board investigating the Columbia accident makes it clear that although a piece of foam striking the space shuttle was the technical reason for its disintegration in the skies over Texas on Feb. 1, the spacecraft was really doomed by overconfident management and inattention to safety at […]

There will be a conference this month to celebrate the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.It will be held in London, exact date unknown. The sponsor is Al-Muhajiroun, a Muslim extremist group that, for the record, disputes reports characterizing the gathering as a celebration.Also for the record: Posters promoting the conference depict the Sept. 11 […]

Wouldn’t you know it?Iraq probably didn’t have “weapons of mass destruction,” which may have been the figment of Saddam Hussein’s propaganda. How ironic his lies may have led to his undoing, that the WMD may only be so much Arab braggadocio.So says the Los Angeles Times about the furtively stockpiled globe-threatening missiles, chemicals and germs, […]