Are these people lying to us or are they lying to themselves? For years, that’s been the great imponderable of American politics, the question the rest of us asked as we watched nominal “conservatives” sink ever deeper into a morass of conspiracy, lies and alternative facts. Were they yanking our collective chain, working some deep […]

For at least two decades, U.S. military strategists and planners have pondered this complex question: how to lower the physical risks to ships and crews a U.S. Navy carrier battle group and other surface forces face as they approach a hostile Chinese coast. In 1996, as Beijing threatened Taiwan with a rain of missiles, a […]

I just lost a dear elderly friend to cancer. Home hospice workers kept him comfortable. He spent his final weeks watching spring unfold in the outdoor Eden he had nurtured for decades. He died peacefully at night with me present. My friend’s death had little to do with COVID-19. One can say that he was […]

In the pantheon of great lines suitable for induction into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2010 comment about Obamacare: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” While that seemed outrageous and even comical to many at the time it has become an all-too familiar […]

For his critics, Dr. Anthony Fauci cemented his status as the Rasputin of public health with his Senate testimony the other day. The National Institutes of Health official gently, but unmistakably struck a different tone than President Donald Trump, earning rebukes from radio talk show hosts and Fox News anchors, as well as fueling the […]

Dear Mitch McConnell: Why don’t you just go ahead and call Barack Obama the n-word? You know you want to. It’d probably do wonders for your blood pressure. And it would free you from the tiresome charade of using coded language to say the same thing. It would also free the rest of us from […]

Maine’s bear population is exploding at the rate of between 2% and 4% annually. Recent incidents in southern and central Maine are evidence that Maine’s bear range now includes virtually the entire state. This is largely a human-caused phenomenon, thanks to the State of Maine’s bear feeding program that permits the dumping of tons of […]