Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Opinion pieces in this series try to answer this question by examining critical parts of our day-to-day lives. There is nothing more integral to feeling better off than having timely access to medical care when your family needs it. Small wonder that health care […]
Op-Eds
Opinion columns from the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel.
Commentary: How we might better navigate the culture wars
Earlier this year, Escambia County, Florida, received national attention for banning over 1,600 books, the most by any single county in the entire country. If you’ve been following book banning efforts, many titles on the list won’t surprise you. But these might: multiple editions of the dictionary, various encyclopedias, and “The Guinness Book of World […]
Opinion: The demonization of immigrants must stop
We need to stop being afraid of those who are different.
Commentary: Finding innovators in an unlikely place — Congress
One of the last places you’d expect to see innovation in the workplace is in the halls of Congress. One lawmaker described the institution this way: Congress is “a 19th-century institution often using 20th-century technology to solve 21st-century problems.” That is one of the reasons the Congressional Management Foundation sought to create competition among members […]
Douglas Rooks: ‘Fighting Joe’ the answer to our Biden woes
Biden has a path to political recovery, paved by none other than Harry Truman in 1948, the columnist writes.
Opinion: Maine should be able to protect self-government from foreign influence
Maine voters are well within their right to prohibit spending by corporations influenced by foreign government owners.
Opinion: A Trump victory will be a climate catastrophe
Only by defeating Trump and Trumpism can we improve our chances at sustained climate progress.
Commentary: There’s only one right response to the Trump shooting
I was boarding a plane from Los Angeles back home to Philadelphia when the news hit that former President Donald Trump had been injured during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The details were sketchy, but the responses online and on the plane were already wild — and entirely predictable. This is precisely the kind of […]
Commentary: How Congress can quickly make Ozempic, Wegovy affordable
A whopping one in eight U.S. adults have taken GLP-1 drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic for weight loss and related conditions. Their popularity and efficacy have sparked a prescription-writing frenzy in recent years, leaving both medications on the Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortage list since May 2023. But even when the supply rebounds, access […]
Hilary Koch: From Rome to Waterville … with love
A trip through central Maine is full of everyday wonder.