Raise your hand if you want to have a town. Not just an address, but a town where you feel like you belong. A town with good schools, good restaurants, good neighbors, maybe a library. A town where people will leave you alone until you need something, then they’ll be there for you.
Much of the political turmoil surrounding us has to do with candidate elections. In order to fix what ails us, the focus should be not on who’s running but on the electoral process itself. Unfortunately, current “reform” efforts often have more to do with limiting voter access than with making voting simpler and more secure.
Welcome to a legislative rabbit hole—the concept draft. It is a way of submitting legislation that is much abused, though it had merit as originally designed. What if this newspaper’s editor accepted “concept columns”? Title: “Concept Drafts.” Column, in its entirety: “Concept drafts may be good or bad.” It states a point of view but doesn’t give readers their money’s worth.
This year, Democrats own the Blaine House and both chambers of the Maine Legislature. With that ace in hand, they are moving at speed to try to quickly pass a majority budget, a feat that has not occurred since 2005.
Four days before the first anniversary of Gov. Janet Mills’ first COVID emergency proclamation, the Maine Senate defeated a legislative attempt to “terminate the state of emergency first proclaimed by Governor Janet T. Mills on March 15, 2020.” The resolution that would have ended the Governor’s emergency authority was introduced by Sen. Rick Bennett of Oxford and fended off in the Maine Senate by a 19-15 vote.
Once upon a time, state elections in Maine were Everyman’s game. Anyone could jump right in. The parties would scare up a driver to get the candidates going door-to-door, and with a good dose of elbow grease a candidate would rise or fall on his or her own merits.
Like a Maine crocus, “open primaries” poke their head above ground in Augusta almost every winter only to freeze to death in a late winter snowfall or wither and die in the spring. What’s up with that?
Last week, Maine Republican Party chair Demi Kouzounas announced a special meeting for March 13 to ponder Senator Susan Collins’s vote to convict former president Donald Trump and consider “possible action from this committee.”
Margaret Chase Smith, we don’t need no stinkin’ declaration of conscience! As the chairman of a Republican Party committee in Pennsylvania said of Sen. Pat Toomey, “We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing… We sent him there to represent us.”
Well, friends and neighbors, how is the signup going for your COVID vaccination? The geezers among us, not mentioning any names here, are being identified as part of the problem, simply not computer literate enough to get themselves signed up. “Oh yeah?” say we geezers. Get a load of this.
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