The cost of construction materials has gone through the roof – if you can still afford a roof, which isn’t very affordable right now. All I wanted to do was build a modest roof over my modest deck at my modest house. But a year of government pandemic policies and the law of unintended consequences […]

“That’s all she wrote.” Explaining this familiar American sentence, a British authority wrote that it means, “it’s all over; there’s no more to be said.” That’s what we used to think about history. You found out what happened and wrote a big book about it. While that belief was never true, it is now strongly […]

During his Prairie Home Companion show, Garrison Keilor would talk about Powdermilk Biscuits made by Norwegian bachelor farmers. As he noted, these biscuits are made of, “the whole wheat that gives shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.” Well, members of the Midcoast Maine community can take a […]

I have watched with concern the plans to remove the historic Frank J. Wood Bridge over the Androscoggin between Brunswick and Topsham. Although not currently an engineer, I have degrees in Civil and Structural Engineering from the University of Maine and MIT and was in the Army Corps of Engineers. I am in a group […]

A recent episode of MSNBC’s Morning Joe included an interview with our Sen. Angus King. The subject of the piece was the infrastructure bill now being discussed-debated in the White House with a bipartisan group, including Sen. King. At the beginning of the interview, Sen. King singled out the importance of the broadband part of […]

One of the biggest lessons I have learned while serving in the Legislature is that when an issue seems completely straightforward at first, it is almost always more complicated. The latest example of this occurred this week in one of the two policy committees I serve on, the Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Committee, where we […]

In June 1991, a band of 13 Senate Republicans – just 37% of the members – decided to do what until that moment had seemed unthinkable. Under the guise of wringing legislation to cut worker’s compensation benefits from majority Democrats, the 13 Republicans, led by firebrand Charlie Webster, decided to shut down state government to […]