Last week I was so exercised that I wrote three entire Universal Notebook columns and could have written six. So to get a few things off my chest and clear my desktop, I have decided to combine them into one concentrated gripe session. Gripe 1: While watching the PyeongChang Olympics I saw an interview with […]

“For every complex problem,” H.L. Mencken wrote, “there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” Take property taxes. They’re too high because the state has never adequately addressed education funding, because homeowners must bear most of the cost of county government, and because, since the current administration took office in Augusta, municipal revenue […]

Gone are the days when the biggest worry a school kid had was getting beat up by a big, bad school bully. Today’s kids face worse than a black eye or sucker punch; they face death at the hands of a school shooter. Attackers, usually students themselves, are the ultimate school bully. And it’s not […]

Gov. Paul LePage’s effort to tax electric cars is just another of his ways to avoid real issues and pin hurt on a gleaming industry. It is an extreme agenda that does little to solve issues and causes greater divide of a fractured government. I reduced my toll on the earth by 40 percent by […]

At a time when caring for the environment is becoming more crucial, we are seeing the deliberate deconstruction of laws by the part of the government that had the most potential. Scott Pruitt, famous for fighting against the EPA before becoming its leader, has worked vigorously to dismantle some of the most important progress we’ve made in […]

Columnist John Balentine has a point (“Here’s Something: LePage is right: No free ride for owners of electric vehicles”), but he misses “the point.” It costs money to maintain and improve our transportation system. The federal fuel tax has not increased since 1993 (who opposes higher taxes?). The state tax has been frozen for seven […]