His work to reduce the number of deaths of young drivers will not be forgotten.

The Texas governor has a chance to change what has been a lackluster contest.

If Maine’s delegation can’t support this budget cut, what will they be able to get behind?

Dysfunction in the capital has already caused enough damage. Now is the time to listen.

Portland’s new city manager, Mark Rees, has a lot to do as he starts work this summer, but there’s one item he can knock off his list right away.

A national search is not needed to find the right person to run the Police Department.

Chalk it up as another opportunity not taken, another moment not seized, another chance for leadership allowed to slip away. Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the United States’ credit rating last Friday was unnecessary and unjustified but certainly not unexpected.

America’s leaders could have been and should have been ready for it, prepared to respond in a way that would have reassured the nation and the world, calmed the financial markets and refuted S&P’s fatuous suggestion that the greatest country on earth is so dysfunctional it can’t be trusted to pay its debts.

The country’s political system is dysfunctional, without a doubt – so dysfunctional that long-serving and devoted practitioners of the system, like U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, have declared it broken. Snowe said last week that “the art of governing and legislating has been virtually lost.”

If you believed some of the commentary taking place over Standard & Poor’s decision to reduce the U.S. bond rating from AAA to AA+, you would think that astronomers had just detected a killer asteroid that would destroy all life on Earth.

In truth, the decision by one rating agency (which the two other major rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have declined to join) has changed nothing about the nation’s underlying ability to pay its debts on time.

That ability remains as strong as ever. Even assuming a worst-case scenario, in which Congress failed to come up with a proposal last week to raise the debt limit, federal revenues remain sufficient to pay all the interest on our debt as well as fully fund programs such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.

The tension between state and federal law prevents Maine from fulfilling its vision.