There he goes again. Gov. Paul LePage, must be trying to seal his reputation as the governor who passed on the opportunity to make the largest change in Maine’s direction, just so he can vent his spleen at people who disagree with him. LePage is nothing if not dogged. This week, he said he would […]

The songwriter Jason Isbell is getting his due, with two Grammies this year. In one of his most popular songs, he wrote: “I sobered up and I swore off that stuff/Forever this time.” Audiences who know his story of drug and alcohol use always applaud that line. And now, I, too am gonna sober up […]

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, George Will, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, wrote that Reagan had won because Republicans had ideas and Democrats had none. That column was a dope slap. I had thought of Republicans as stick-in-the-mud do-littles and Democrats as people who thought up ideas, workable and not. […]

Will Rogers, the 20th century sage from Oklahoma, famously said, “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat.” That was at least 83 years ago. If I were a Democrat, I would be mad as hell at the people running my party. Or, to be correct, I would be angry as hell. And […]

As budding journalists, we were taught to be as exact as possible in our stories. Nothing appears as exact as numbers, I reasoned, so I often sought numbers to help tell the story. How much more precise is it to write, for example, “The train carrying the Republican legislators had seven coaches,” than to say, […]

My late wife often said that our family’s motto should be, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing the hard way.” Marilyn was correct. I do complicate things. I prefer, though, to frame it as “playing for the long run.” While the long run is almost always the hard way, it is more permanent, or […]

Most of us are judgmental and base decision on our judgments. As age has crept up, I have been working to be less judgmental. But, the news that Charles Manson had died set me to judging my own judgmentalism yet again. Probably not many people shed tears at the news that Manson had died. His […]