Author: Ed Thelander

It took COVID-19 for many Americans to start paying closer attention to public education in America, and a growing number have been troubled by what they’ve seen. Whether it’s a video telling kindergarteners that “sometimes doctors make mistakes” about gender assignments at birth, or simply whether the curricula are really preparing our children for the challenges – and jobs – of tomorrow, questions about how we teach our children have rightfully taken center stage. The need for reform is urgent. In one middle school in Gorham, instances of disruptive behavior went up an eye-popping 33% last year. Angry parents are getting involved like never before. And…

If you’ve ever been to the state of Oregon – home of the “other” Portland – you only need to drive south of the big city to see the human impact of overzealous conservationism. This is the habitat of the Spotted Owl, whose inclusion to the endangered species list in 1990 shut down the timber industry there, eliminating 32,000 jobs in the process. Something eerily similar is about to happen to iconic Maine lobstermen in an effort to save the Right Whale. In Maine, we are more attuned to the importance of living in balance with nature than most because it is…

Tax Day is a fitting day to revisit where our tax-and-spend ways have gotten us. When the president’s own stimulus-spending coordinator, economist Gene Sperling, says we’re looking at “immense fraud” in how some of the $6 trillion we borrowed and doled out since COVID-19’s onset in 2020, it means the problem is so big they can no longer ignore it. The government has literally become so large and bloated that it can no longer regulate itself. That, in a nutshell, is exactly what is wrong with the American economy right now. Wasteful spending extends right up to the horizon line…

Weakness is a contagion. Years in the future, when the historians are done analyzing our present moment, they may well find it was more harmful to us than COVID-19. This past weekend, Iranians fired missiles towards the U.S. consulate in Erbil, Iraq. In first calculating whether this was a good move, they surely considered our lack of military response to Russia’s vicious and unprovoked war on Ukraine. Leaders in both Russia and Iran remember a time not so long ago when America sought to bend the world to our will. Now it seems those days are over, and the world’s…

On February 2nd, the 2022 Walk-for-Vets kicked off in Augusta. People are walking 2.2 miles in 22 states for a 22 day-long “Buddy March”, culminating in Indiana on February 24, to bring awareness to the alarming fact that each day, 22 veterans of America’s military commit suicide. I’ve seen firsthand how sparsely-attended the funerals of fellow Navy SEALs who committed suicide can be. But they’re less sparsely attended today than they were in the ’90s, before a big increase in the numbers forced us to take a second look at how despair steals more lives of some of the bravest Americans every…