The Pew Charitable Trust may want to start studying how Maine manages tooth decay in children. Our level of untreated tooth decay for third graders was 14.6 percent in 2011 — the second lowest in the nation.

It’s time to give teachers a pep talk. Last Thursday, I was the luncheon speaker at the retired teachers annual convention. They wanted to hear about Maine travel, but before I could get to that, it seemed important to let them know they are appreciated.

Although horse slaughter plants in the United States were closed in 2007, more than 160,000 horses were sent from the U.S. to cruel deaths in Mexico and Canada last year.

I said at the beginning of this session that one of my top priorities would be protecting Public Law 90, the sweeping health insurance reforms that were passed by the Maine Legislature in 2011.

A bipartisan group of 11 leading Maine Republicans and Democrats have devised “An Act to Modernize and Simplify the Tax Code.”

Fate is fickle, power cyclical, and nothing is new under the sun. Especially in Washington, where after every election the losing party is sagely instructed to confess sin, rend garments and rethink its principles lest it go the way of the Whigs. And where the victor is hailed as the new Caesar, facing an open road to domination.

In my wife’s craft room, if the TV is turned on, something British is playing — either “Downton Abbey,” reruns of “Upstairs/Downstairs,” or a mystery.

Why has the Congress recently found it so hard to accomplish anything? And what can be done about it?

It’s as hard to talk your 20-somethings about money as it is talk to them about sex. Maybe harder.

In the December 1954 Sportsmen’s Guide, Commissioner Roland Cobb outlined the desperate financial situation of his Department of Fisheries and Game. He reported that his agency “must curtail our services … go backward instead of forward in our planned program of fish and game management, or else find new sources of revenue to pick up the slack.”