On any given day, everything from cyanide to acetone, infectious waste to radioactive materials, munitions to mercury, rolls along our nation’s highways. The U.S. government lists more than 60,000 materials as hazardous and trucks carry 94 percent of the 800,000 daily shipments of these materials.Is there a problem here?Newsweek and Landline magazines report that captured […]

Tax reform was supposed to be the top priority for the 121st Legislature, but no reform emerged at the close of the session. In fact, legislators dissolved pieces of the governor’s reform package they didn’t believe voters could stomach.Lawmakers are now getting serious because the Maine Municipal Association’s seemingly popular tax reform proposal will be […]

Maine law does not require government bodies to record meeting minutes.Surprised?You should be.How, we wonder, can any board recall what it decides year to year, decade after decade, without making note of official actions?No board can but many do, relying on imperfect memory of those sitting around the table to guide future actions.We don’t have […]

So about those weapons of mass destruction …I’d love to tee off on the failure, two months after the fall of Baghdad, to find Iraq’s supposed arsenal. But with my luck, a cache of weapons bigger than Ruben Studdard would turn up right as the newspaper was landing in people’s bushes.That’s the problem with the […]

David Brinkley, who died last week at age 82, was the greatest broadcast journalist who ever lived. There are many reasons for that. One is that he had a gift for stating complicated things simply. If there was ever a cliche in his writing (and he wrote all of his own stuff, unlike many in […]

Why do high schools require algebra?What’s the point of diagramming a sentence?Does anyone ever speak Latin outside the classroom?How can physics help anyone find a job?For students to really appreciate why they go to school they must see relevance in the instruction. Not every student does because not every school is able to draw a […]

A benefitthat willbring painA Medicare-paid prescription drug benefit is a humane thing to do for seniors struggling to buy essential medicine.But it is estimated to cost taxpayers as little as $400 billion or as much as $2.2 trillion over the next decade – and it’s that absence of a meaningful price tag that should worry […]

The great thing about history is that it reminds us how little is new under the sun. If you’re aghast that the Bush administration could enact tax cuts that leave out low-income taxpayers and then compound the injustice by pretending that they hadn’t done just that, glance back to The Age of Jackson.In his magisterial […]

TUWAITHA, Iraq – On a dusty road, just outside of Baghdad, lies one of the great mysteries of the Iraq war.Just off the road behind fences and berms sits the 23-acre complex of Tuwaitha, Iraq’s main nuclear facility. It’s now defunct, but it’s still a storage area for 3,000 barrels of low-grade uranium and other […]

The Middle East is a cauldron of mistrust, violence and hate. President Bush has joined the fray and, despite the predictable clashes mid-week as zealots sabotaged meaningful progress, limited new hope has followed.Two thousand years of history conspire against peace in the Middle East. The facts have been aligned in a way that makes resolution […]