For much of the 2018 campaign, Democrats ran hard on the issue of health care, determined to hold Republicans accountable for their efforts to take coverage away from millions of Americans. Republicans, reading the tea leaves and the polls, had a death-bed conversion, particularly when it comes to protecting people with pre-existing conditions and ensuring that they are still able to get health care coverage.

Bruce Poliquin will, and must, continue his challenge to the Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) system and the constitutionality of the results. He will, because it is his choice as a citizen of this Republic and he has the freedom to do so. He must, because he is a Representative of the voters in the 2nd Congressional District (CD2) who, 20,000 strong, voted against the RCV and feel disenfranchised by the results of the new voting system.

Have I told you how Eileen met Santa Claus? December 9, 2016 (Was it that long ago?) Eileen and I were in Augusta, Maine shopping, browsing, and visiting her parents’ gravesite at Central Maine Veterans Cemetery. The day was overcast, sunshine breaking through the clouds now and then, but not enough to mitigate the chilly mid-20s temperature, 12 mph wind combination.

The more I read about the relationship of the White House press corps with recent US Presidents, the more I appreciate President Trump’s use of Tweets to communicate with Americans.

At what point in your life are you most likely to spend extravagantly? When are you most likely to waste? When are you most likely to purchase the thing you don't need, or indulge yourself on the thing that you want, or eat out more often, at more expensive restaurants?

From time to time, all of us should take a look at ourselves and the things that we do, say and care about and re-evaluate them. Traditions, heritage, ideas and images that mattered to us in the past are all important. They help to form who we are as people. But that doesn’t mean that these things are free from challenge or that we shouldn’t be willing to look at them with new eyes.

We've come some distance from where we started. The destination has none of the trappings advertised and, it seems, we are nowhere near the place we were promised to be. This was not in the brochure.

I was primarily working in politics throughout the 1990s. In the early ‘90s, with the introduction of email, a growing internet, internet accessibility, and affordable computers, I saw potential for the legislators I worked with to have communications networks with their constituents. Actually, I envisioned legislators’ email communication networks branching in all directions: legislator to constituent; constituent to legislator, and all the networking variations therein.

In the past several days, you have heard many things about George Herbert Walker Bush. His decency and goodness. His commitment to service. His dignity. Yet, the former president's most enduring gift to the American people is not only his demeanor. Rather it is in something that never actually even happened. And the legacy of that gift is so tremendous, and his leadership so central to it, that each and every one of us should give thanks for his presence.

In his Dec. 5 column, Matthew Gagnon makes a flawed argument against ranked choice voting. He claims that with ranked choice voting we cannot evaluate the top two candidates for round two of against one another because we do not know in advance who they will be. However, with ranked-choice voting, we have effectively evaluated the top two against one another for a possible second round, no matter who they are, precisely because we’ve already evaluated and ranked all the candidates, including the final top two, in round one.

US Rep. Bruce Poliquin lost his bid for re-election to Congress. He was defeated by former Marine and Maine legislative leader Jared Golden in an election decided by ranked-choice voting.

Political irony is on full display in Maine. The staple of many a politician, hypocrisy has now been foisted upon the voting process. Ranked Choice Voting, toddling mere months into its infancy, was found unconstitutional by the Maine Supreme Court for use in state elections, has now mired the state into the muck of necessary legal challenges into its Federal constitutionality, and media punditry has circled the wagons around their collective talking point that challenging Ranked Choice Voting at the federal level erodes the people’s confidence in the “institution” of voting, seemingly oblivious to the millions of dollars, and years of political spin, spent on ads, campaign mailings, and signature drives, all in a effort to erode the voters' confidence in Maine's already constitutionally established voting system.

The holiday season is underway and soon families will gather for meals and gift giving. With many relatives under one roof, this is a great time for genealogists to ask questions about holiday traditions practiced in the past or to try to learn more about the family.

Maneuvering has begun in Washington among the Democrats to choose the next speaker of the House. I am not a big fan of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and neither is our Rep.-elect Jared Golden. He indicated during the campaign his intention to try to vote for an alternative candidate for speaker.

Looking back almost 40 years I can’t imagine not crossing paths with Ron Spagnardi, founder and publisher of Modern Drummer magazine. We were both drummers, entrepreneurs. Ron in New Jersey, me in New York. At about age 34, Spagnardi saw the success of a 10-year-old magazine devoted to guitarists, "Guitar Player," and wondered, why not publish a magazine devoted to drummers?

Earlier in the month, on the day we all went to the polls, Mississipians held a special election for the seat left vacated by the resignation of U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran. Four candidates ran for the seat, each running on a nonpartisan ticket line, with two main competitors -- Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy -- taking up the lion's share of votes. The other two were minor candidates with no realistic chance of winning.

Maine’s attorney general straddles two worlds. Elected by the Legislature, the attorney general performs executive branch duties. The attorney general is the state’s top law enforcement officer, but also acts as the lawyer for state government’s departments and agencies.

After the Thanksgiving weekend and having just returned from a more urban environment, I feel grateful for my community and the people and organizations that I depend on every day.