Hospitals are odd places. Not everything that happens within a hospital’s walls is bad, certainly; people get well, they receive visits from Uncle Wally, they regain strength and motor function and they give birth to their children, a joyous occasion I’m told. Sometimes someone drives to the hospital for no other reason than to visit […]

As an entrepreneur who built a business right here in Maine, helping others do the same has been a top priority for me in my work at the State House.   I believe that if we want to help Maine families who are struggling to get by, our best bet is to focus on giving our […]

Don’t get me wrong. Churches are much more than just social clubs. Yet the evidence suggests that our churches need to be social clubs. One of our concerns as Christian leaders and role models is the secularization of America. We hear that surveys show a growing number of Americans are identifying themselves as atheists. This […]

In a recent television interview, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, head of one of America’s largest health insurers, commented that selling insurance across state lines is “an outdated concept” in the discussion of healthcare reform. Bertolini went on to explain the rationale for his statement: “Insurance products are now tightly aligned with networks, so buying an […]

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is considered a moderate Republican. That can make life difficult. First, the “moderate” part. She comes from a Maine Republican tradition that, while supporting the business community, also has focused on good but limited government. Often in the past, Maine Republicans were associated with environmental protection. A moderate Republican has become […]

Last November, Maine voters approved Question 2 on the ballot as a means to allocate more funding to our public schools. As someone who spent his entire professional career in the classroom, I fully support increased education funding, and I believe it is a travesty that the State of Maine has never met its obligation […]

In “Pleading Guilty,” best-selling novelist Scott Turow wrote, “What kind of ethical social system takes as its fundamental precepts the words ‘I’ ‘me’ and ‘mine’? Our 2-year-olds start like that and we spend the next twenty years trying to teach them there’s more than that to life.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his novel, “The Possessed,” built […]

My parents used to take me to the circus when I was a kid, which probably explains many things, from my love of elephants to my near-crippling cotton candy addiction. (If it had any nutritional value at all, I’d eat nothing but.) I used to love these experiences. A few of my friends? Not so […]

President Donald Trump has selected the best possible person to serve as his national security advisor. Army Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster epitomizes the warrior-scholar in the tradition of Carl von Clausewitz. The U.S. Army was out of Vietnam for 11 years when, in 1984, McMaster took his oath as a second lieutenant at West Point. […]