In “Columbus did more than sail the ocean blue,” columnist Julie McDonald-Smith’s history is shoddy and circumstantial. She does get some things right: Columbus sailed in the same year that the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella forced Jews to either convert, die, or leave Spain. And Columbus’s voyages opened the door for Spanish Jews to […]

The feigned media outrage over William Beardsley’s appointment as acting education commissioner was predictable, but it doesn’t make it any less outrageous or pathetic. Like a cat on a hot tin roof, the media being reactionary based on partisan politics is nothing new. However, if the horror surrounding concern for the state of education in […]

The Right View column “Columbus did more than sail the ocean blue” makes the claim that what we have been told of Christopher Columbus is a “lie” and “hogwash.” While not addressing just what of the current Columbus narrative are lies and hogwash, Julie McDonald-Smith thinly speculates that Columbus was a defender of Spanish Jewry, […]

“Selling hope to the hopeless” was a headline from a three-part series of articles published about the Maine State Lottery last week by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. The series provided a detailed analysis about – really, more an indictment of – the lottery and the state, and how it targets and exploits our […]

This may well be the last year I climb down into the well to turn off the water at the camp. Not only am I almost 40 pounds heavier than I was 30 years ago, when I first started lowering myself through the two-foot square opening atop the cement well casing, but I’ve got cranky […]