Lewiston Sun Journal

The desire not to offend has stripped “the reason for the season” of all meaning. Advertisers and store employees have substituted the joyful and heartfelt wishes of “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Hanukkah” with the diluted and mushy greeting “Happy Holidays. “The stripping away of America’s heritage continues as certain legal and cultural relativists pursue their […]

Last Wednesday, an afternoon seminar was held in Portland to consider biotechnology in the global marketplace. It was free and, of the 73 attendees, only one person was from Lewiston and one from western Maine.If businesses don’t show active interest in learning about global opportunities, how can they possibly expect to expand their markets?Of those […]

As Democratic presidential aspirants clear their throats and seek their voices, the lesson they need to take from the 2002 election isn’t that America needs a better left; it’s that it needs a better center. When “new” Democratic positioning can be blurred by a president whose “compassion” masks a deeply conservative agenda, it is the […]

Joyce D’Augustine made a mistake.She admits it.The Edward Little High School teacher provided students with alcohol and allowed them to drink at her house.It’s difficult to believe that an upstanding role model for young adults could make such a bad judgment call. Teenagers need to know where the line is drawn – and sanctioned drinking […]

WASHINGTON – It’s 10 p.m. – do you know what your government is up to? It seems that Iraq is not the only “regime change” that the Bush administration is working on.The U.S. government apparently has decided that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela must go, one way or another. True, Saddam Hussein is a brutal […]

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, recalls his childhood epiphany, the exhilarating and terrifying moment when he first recognized himself as “a separate self,” with independent thoughts. It was his first sense of personal responsibility.His telling of it, in an essay in Harper’s magazine titled “The […]

Call it serendipity.On Monday, our president gravely intoned that inspections for weapons in Iraq aren’t going so well, and that same day, our transatlantic brethren, the British, released a report detailing the many evil deeds of Saddam Hussein.It might be coincidence, but who would believe that? It isn’t too far-fetched to say the timing of […]

Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Look at Chester Greenwood, the man credited with inventing earmuffs when he was a lad of just 15 years.He built a contraption out of beaver fur, cloth and wire to keep his ears warm. The concept was immediately embraced because no one likes the discomfort of […]

Unfunded mandates.We hear the term and immediately cringe. We don’t like the federal government imposing policies and programs without a plan to pay for them, because the assumption has always been that state and local governments then must raise the revenue and foot the bill.Unfunded mandates are most commonly connected with public education, with federal […]

There are days I think religion is the best advertisement for atheism. This, unfortunately, is one of them.If you’re wondering where the pessimism’s coming from, look to Nigeria, which has been recently rocked by street fighting between Muslims and Christians.As you may be aware, the trouble grows out of a beauty pageant. Nigerian business and […]