Simpson’s Point juts (a little) into Middle Bay’s north end. There, at the road’s end, a thin ramp drops to the water and a hand-carry launch, where we — the public — can gain admission to the water world. On a calm, late February day, the sun’s short crawl west along Mere Point is nearly […]

When Isabella Mastroianni was a young girl, she’d often spend summers with her grandmother who had a cottage on Granite Lake in New Hampshire. Her grandmother Dot was an amazing cook, famous for her buttermilk donuts, crullers, cookies, brownies and pies. “I’d go along with her when she’d drive around the lake in her boat […]

Behind almost every action by government lurks a single question. How do we pay for it? The answer seems easy: either by taxes or debt. But taxes must pay off the debt, making the real question not “how” but “when” we ante up. At the federal level, the answer is often “later.” These days, the […]

It is universally acknowledged that the 9/11 Commission is the gold standard for after event investigatory panels, an example of what can be accomplished when partisan political considerations are cast aside and the search for truth is an actual search for truth. As the debate intensifies in Congress over creating a commission to examine the […]

In the first big test of the Biden presidency on Feb. 27, just two House Democrats voted against the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill that’s expected to clear the Senate and become law by mid-March. One of them was Jared Golden, the second term representative of Maine’s increasingly tricky 2nd District. The northern and eastern […]

Get this: A study by McGill University has found that more money does not necessarily make people in low-income countries happier. I like more money as much as the next guy, but that does not surprise me. People in some developing countries may not have high incomes and own lots of nice material things, but they do […]

Gordon Weil in his commentary “Political parties today: Democrats and Anti-Democrats,” (The Times Record, Feb. 26) stated: “Driven by intense personal ambition, Trump did not have much of a policy of his own… .” I would further suggest that Trump had no policy at all and was driven by something way more sinister, imbedded deep […]

Gov. Janet Mills is facing many challenges, with a surging pandemic and its economic devastation at the top of the list. The arduous process of choosing hundreds of appointees to staff state agencies to manage these crises, is on-going. As president of the Maine Association of Nurse Anesthetists, I would entreat Gov. Mills to consider […]