All the fuss about Tim Tebow sent me to YouTube to watch the “pro-life” commercial he and his mother did for the 2010 Super Bowl.

All children’s deaths are tragic, but some are absurdly so.

Over the past few years, I’ve pored over, discussed and even reviewed volumes of letters of such diverse luminaries as Harry Truman, H.L. Mencken, E.B. White, Bertolt Brecht, S.J. Perelman, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Robert Frost, Voltaire, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt and the veritable, indefatigable master of the genre, Madame de Sevigne.

I am a victim of socialized medicine. When I turned 65 two years ago, I became eligible for Medicare, having weathered three years without any insurance at all. About the same time, I learned that I was eligible for Veterans Health Care, having been a Vietnam-era draftee.

Just before the holidays, two amazing young bloggers for the SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge) movement, Stephanie Cole and Bailey Shoemaker Richards, joined Powered By Girl, the girl activist arm of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, to initiate a protest of Lego’s new Friends line for little girls.

Good things are happening on two controversial and important environmental issues before the Maine Legislature this session. One concerns waterfowl nesting habitat; the other is all about governance of the North Woods by the Land Use Regulation Commission.

In March, I returned from Afghanistan’s Helmand province after handing about 12 square miles of villages and farmlands to the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, the unit that is allegedly responsible for recording a video of Marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban insurgents.

Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services is in crisis, and it has been proposed that health care coverage be cut to some 65,000 people in Maine.

The video that emerged last week appearing to show four U.S. Marines urinating on several dead Taliban fighters has outraged many people in this country.