Stand firm, Harold Brooks. The Hebron man is braced for an Olympic-sized fight over his use of the word “Olympics.” Brooks hosted 2,000 visitors to his property for Maine’s original Redneck Olympics last weekend. It was a northern-style hootenanny of bobbing for pigs’ feet, toilet-seat horseshoes, pie eatin’, lawnmower racin’ and mechanical bull ridin’. It […]
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Fairness should not fall victim to partisan bickering
Let’s say you have operated a small widget company on Main Street for many years. Then a large national company comes to town selling the same line of widgets for 5 to 10 percent less. Why? Not because they are more efficient or have a better product, but because they have a special arrangement with […]
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Annual Maine festival season benefits us all
The late summer festival season is in full swing, bringing color, entertainment and tourist dollars to Western Maine. While we’re not the overcrowded coast of Maine, the three-county region — particularly Oxford and Franklin counties — draws hundreds of thousands of seasonal visitors. Many come for a week or two. Some for the entire summer, […]
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Stuck inside of Newark with immobile blues again
Isn’t there a song about that? If not, there should be. If you fly in New England, you’ve probably found yourself stuck in the most depressing airport in America. And now it’s official. Of the top 100 most habitually late flights in America, 40 of them take off or land in Newark, according to the […]
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Theater space rescued by deal
The Auburn City Council took a sticky problem and guess what? They solved it. Politely. Logically. Cooperatively. Key Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” please. This has happened so rarely over the past two years that it’s worth taking time to recognize the feat. When councilors first voted in November to tear down the Great Falls School, we […]
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Voters will see sharp differences in 2012 elections
It was Alabama Gov. George Wallace who declared that there wasn’t a “dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties. That was in 1968. The four-time candidate for president, who died in 1998, would be surprised to see that the differences today are measured in billions of dollars rather than stacks of dimes. […]
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P&G adds jobs here, including for disabled
Our favorite headline to write? That’s easy: “More jobs coming to (fill in the name of a town in our three-county circulation area). We had that pleasure Tuesday, when a mainstay of our local economy announced that it was expanding again. Procter & Gamble, which makes Tampax brand tampons on a 60-acre site in Auburn, […]
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Maine leads in banning smoking in public housing
The Auburn Housing Authority made a radical decision in 2004: new residents moving into its buildings would not be allowed to smoke indoors. While that doesn’t seem like a novel idea today, it was then, and Auburn became the first housing authority in the state, and only the fifth in the U.S., to do so. […]
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We haven’t heard the end of the debt crisis
The good news is that Congress has settled on a debt deal. The bad news is that it took so much anguish to accomplish so little. Any deal is better than none at all, of course, but the numbers show what a minor impact this proposal will have on our long-term debt problem. The Congressional […]
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Job security for fed workers nearly guaranteed
If the debt reduction deal does nothing else, at least it will put pressure on federal agencies to weed out their least productive employees. That weeding will be long overdue. USA Today recently crunched the numbers and found that federal workers are more likely to die during a given year than be laid off or […]