Whether in celebrity culture or in our Facebook-mediated interactions, we live in the age of the human being as a public brand. So there's nothing surprising about the reaction to the recent disclosures about the National Security Agency's unprecedented surveillance program. In our cult-of-person...

Last week, the Maine Legislature voted to raise taxes on struggling Maine families and small businesses to pay for increased government spending.  Rather than right-size unsustainable programs, most Democrat and some Republican legislators decided that state government still isn’t big ...

I cannot write this the way I want. Doing so would invade the privacy of too many people. But I can’t be silent, either. Recently, you see, President Obama spoke before a conference of mental health advocates at the White House. It is necessary, he said, to remove the stigma of menta...

Ever since President Clinton "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," whatever remains of standards seem to have fallen even lower among people who hold offices and positions once thought to require good behavior and strong moral character. Last year, several Secret ...

In a humiliating example of self-inflicted electronic bugging, last week a live broadcast television microphone in Egyptian President Muhammed Morsi's Cairo office caught the president and Egypt's most senior political leaders plotting sneak attacks on the upstream Nile's biggest dam builder, Eth...

Without the slightest hint of irony, President Obama said last week, "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have s...

When Barack Obama announced his presidential campaign back in February 2007, he did it in front of the old Springfield, Ill., Statehouse in a speech full of references to Abraham Lincoln. He has clothed himself in the mantle of our 16th president in ways large and small throughout his pres...

Maine has the sordid distinction as the last place in the country that allows a trifecta of cruel methods of killing bears. We let people — the majority of whom are from out of state — hound, bait and trap bears. Hounding is the cruel practice of training packs of dogs to haras...

Everyone likes art, whether it is as simple as a comic book, or as subtle as a Monet or Mona Lisa. Most of our buildings are pieces of art; some simpler, some more complex. Church buildings in particular tend to be artfully conceived, as they are meant both literally and figuratively to inspire u...