So it’s parents’ night at school and I’m there on behalf of my youngest son. I look at him sometimes and see a toddler with a gap in his grin and a penchant for gnawing his toes.But that’s just a memory lie. The toddler is a teen-ager 2 inches taller than I am, a youngster […]

“If we don’t … reaffirm our commitment to fiscal responsibility, years of hard work could be squandered,” Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently told Congress. Considering the ever-climbing spending levels on Capitol Hill these days, his warning makes perfect sense.It didn’t used to be this way. In the mid-1990s, politicians began cutting wasteful government spending […]

No one who travels to Lewiston’s Central Maine Civic Center will marvel at the parking surface. It’s dirt and it takes a pounding from rain, frost and occasional yahoos who zoom around in cars and scar the surface.Owner Roger Theriault has battled the elements and vandals for years, and the rough surface is generally fine […]

Howard Phillips, the Constitution Party presidential candidate, once averred a compelling metaphor for American politics. It involves a locomotive heading for a cliff.With the Democrats, he says, you’re chugging for the cliff at 80 mph. With the Republicans, you’re chugging along at 50. Either way, you’re going off the cliff.That is why conservatives such as […]

For decades adults have warned children not to talk to strangers because we fear kidnappers.Today’s warning are much more complicated because sexual attacks are part of the conversation.In Wilton, educating children about “good strangers” and “bad strangers” has been a longtime project of the police department. For nearly a decade, long before the department instituted […]

It would be fair to say that a committee that cannot choose a chairman, establish a budget or decide how to defend itself in the face of a lawsuit is failing.The Workers’ Compensation Board is such a committee.Twice in the past two years the board has been sued because it failed to make a decision […]

Brace yourself. We will be subjected today to a final barrage of campaign commercials and phone calls.Today is the last day candidates have to convince us to cast our ballots in their favor.This is the day each year that is most representative of democracy because it is the people themselves, not elected officials, who have […]

Peter CianchetteMaine can be a great state, but we have to be able to pay for it.If gubernatorial candidates heard nothing else from voters, they heard that.Maine’s budget is excessive, as are taxes. Our current economic uncertainty makes it tough to turn that around.We need backbone. We need someone who isn’t afraid to bristle legislators […]

I’ll bet you can’t remember the word candidate George W. Bush used to describe the foreign policy he would pursue as president. Give it a shot, I’ll wait. I’ll even give you a clue. He said it during the second presidential debate. Begins with “h.”Give up? The word is, “humble.”I remember thinking it a strange […]

The Lewiston High School Blue Devils learned a painful lesson in honesty last week.Several days after Lewiston bested Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School 32-7, the school’s athletic director, Paul Amnott, discovered that one of the players on the Lewiston roster was academically ineligible to play and should not have been on the field during that […]