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.

I’ve voted every Election Day for 49 years. This year was the first time my vote didn't count.

Want to hear an interesting fact about the 2018 election? Shawn Moody received the fourth-most votes for governor in the nearly 200 years of Maine history.

Charity is no replacement for sound policy, especially if you’re the governor of the state. In his radio address this week, Gov. Paul LePage touts the success of an annual food drive organized through the Blaine House that helps people in need around the holidays.

I recently came across a chart of major epidemics in the United States starting in 1794 and ending in 1918. The author was emphasizing that many people thought to have “disappeared” from records were actually victims of diseases.

Grafton, who turns five mid-December, visited Eileen and I this Veterans Day. We had not seen each other in weeks. Our weekly day to babysit each other ended months ago when Grafton and his mom moved to Brunswick, and he started pre-K school.

In a surprise to exactly no one, Bruce Poliquin filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday, challenging Maine's ranked-choice voting system. Poliquin has a duty to his campaign, the plurality of his constituents that voted for him, and to the country to file this suit, and file it exactly when he did.

There can be no question that Maine saw a blue wave on Election Day. Voters elected Democrat Janet Mills as governor, flipped the state Senate from Republican to Democratic control and expanded the Democratic majority in the state House of Representatives.

The holiday season is upon us again, which means here in the Moosehead Region we do our best to spread holiday cheer all around! To do this, the Moosehead Lake Kiwanis Club will be placing wish trees out in our community very soon.