The Governor cut taxes by 200+ million dollars, primarily benefitting higher income people, and proposes cutting benefits that keep 6000 elderly people in assisted living. Where do these people go? Many are ill, many have dementia, many have no relatives, many with relatives don't have capacity to care for them.
There is a solid core of 40% of the population that does not care when he lies (quoting Forbes Magazine wildly inaccurately), insults people and groups (Kiss my butt), threatens and bullies (countless examples). But to throw grandma into the street? Is there no limit to your collective tolerance for this venal man?
You are known by who you hang out with. Ron Paul was endorsed by David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as by a whole range of right wing nutbag militia groups. When asked to disavow his followers in these camps, he refused. The man has some positions that make sense (like his isolationist views), but he is also a dnagerous crank.
Mr. MacDonald is on the horns of a dilemma. He has run for office on a crusade against welfare cheats. Either Mr MacDonald has cynically manipulated the people of Lewiston by crusading while knowing that welfare rules come out of Augusta, not Lewiston, or he does not know this. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and am calling him uninformed instead of a liar. But it is a close call, and neither label is particularly attractive.
His campaign was in the ignoble tradition of southern rednecks who used code words (welfare) for race (in this case african immigrants). Wink wink. Sure you can get yourself elected, Mr Mayor, by fanning the flames of racism, but what is the second act? Now that you have done your best to set the working class white people against Somali immigrants how does the community live together? Are you going to drive the Somalis out? Will you write anotehr letter that brings the scorn and derision of the world on Lewiston? You chose as your role model a man who is now the Governor, someone who is rude, small, loutish, ignorant, and also a redneck. Good luck with that.
Mr MacDonald is an I'll-tempered, ignorant bully, in the cast of the Governor. If you are delighted with Lepage, you'll love MacDonald. What happened to higher aspirations?
It was the dismantling of watchdog agencies that permitted Wall Street to indulge in the orgy of money making that precipitated the financial collapse that is still reverberating throughout the economy. Senator Snoew once again shows that she is beholden to the 1%. Why do we keep her in office?
Mr McDonald's words are plenty of proof that his politics are the politics of blaming, of fingerpointing, of resentment, with the Somalis front and center inhis complaints. I have not heard him repeating the wild and crazy comments about Somalis all getting free cars from the government, but his words have the same effect. Hey folks, we have someone to blame for our woes. It's them!!! To folks who understand racism, and recognize it, this guy is steeped in it.
The recent mayoral debate reminds me of Lewiston's (The Letter) and Maine's (the KKK in the 20's) moments of shame and infamy. The KKK found Maine to be a bastion of strength, as they scapegoated people of French and Irish heritage, and Catholics in Maine, and black people elsewhere. There is always someone out there who needs to scapegoat immigrants and poor people. They need to find someone they can feel superior to, and point the accusing finger toward. In time, though, people of good will realize how awful that is, and do the right thing, which is to reject that mean and inhumane worldview.
My take is that if you don't know what you are voting on, the act of abstaining has integrity. It is curious that Mr. Kurtz is both so insistent on Mr Lorrain casting an ill-informed vote, and so angry that he abstained.
The writer may not know it, but by using the term "Sexual preference" he is weighing in on one of the issues that people have about homosexuality. Is it a situation in ife that one is born into, or is it a choice? Most gay and lesbian people feel they were born that way. The more neutral term would be sexual orientation.
It is so disappointing to read about politicians who run for office by scapgoating a group of people. In this case, according to Robert Macdonald, it is people on welfare. No matter that unemployment is over 10%, and that every available job has multiple applicants. Let's just blame welfare recipients for their poverty, and do what we can to drive them from our midst. When MacDonald and others take that position, they can feel holy (we're better than "them"), but from where I sit, it it is self centered, mean, and not particularly ennobling.
It is curious to hear you say that a fireworks ban is unworkable, because before the legislation was passed allowing people to hgave such fireworks (and it was just a few months ago), it DID work. Prosecutions were infrequent, because people understood that they were illegal. And prosecutions were also infrequent because sensible people noticed that people who were getting illegal fireworks were blowing their fingers off and hurting themseleves and others. This is a law that can be enforced. Moreover, it is a sensible one. And I find your argument that costs of prosecution would be more than the fines generated to be silly. We don't prosecute crimes to generate revenue. We do it to preserve the public order, and in this case to keep people safe from morons who use explosives irresponsibly.
Agreed, but with one caveat. According to T.R. Reid, who has written an astonishing book comparing health care systems around the world, the percentage of GDP that health care currently consumes is 17%. And what people derisively call "Obamacare" has already impacted insurance markets. People who deal in health insurance will tell you that major insurers are passing on increases of a couple of percentage points less than they would have if the Patient Care and Affordability Act had not passed.
But I don't blame the corporations about this. They'll make money taking care of the 45 million people who are not currently insured, and in fact backed key parts of health care reform (granted, they were a powerful foe of a single payer system) I blame people who don't give a damn about anybody else. The palpable selfishness of people who already have health insurance refusing to care about those who don't is galling. And I believe that is the core of the issue. If you've got yours, why care about anyone else?
The republicans have achieved one thing in their resistance to health care reform; they gutted the elements of proposed legislation most likely to be effective, and can in turn trumpet how ineffective the legislation is, which was due, of course, to their hysterical machinations.
Greed and selfishness. That is what it is all about. Republicans ought to be ashamed.
I am interested in the Facebook Group referred to in the text above (Stop the stealing of local dogs), but there is none listed on Facebook. I wonder if the reporter can follow up and get the actual name of the group.
And yes, I do like the idea of wind power, so long as it is located in places where people are not hurt by them. By hurt, I mean, it cannot be noisy. It might make the scenic vista different, but in my book that does not count as hurt. We have oil, or we have alternatives. You cannot say no to all of the alternatives without keeping us in preposterously perilous circumstances relying on oil. Printing a long list of names means nothing, nor does a rhetorical question asserting that someobody nobody knows has their property value impacted by a proposed development.
And yes, I do like the idea of wind power, so long as it is located in places where people are not hurt by them. By hurt, I mean, it cannot be noisy. It might make the scenic vista different, but in my book that does not count as hurt. We have oil, or we have alternatives. You cannot say no to all of the alternatives without keeping us in preposterously perilous circumstances relying on oil. Printing a long list of names means nothing, nor does a rhetorical question asserting that someobody nobody knows has their property value impacted by a proposed development.
It is broadly acknowledged that we are in a time of peak oil. That is to say, we have located most of the earth's oil, and we are sucking it dry. We have seen oil costs double in the past few years, and it is gonna double again in the next few years.
80% of maine's transportation and heating comes from oil. There is a world of hurt around the corner for all of us. Folks who oppose wind energy enjoy the pretense that energy supplies are inexhaustible, and are willing to bet their children's futures on it. I am not. In the same way that I hate the reality that we are putting 40% of the US budget on a creddit card for our children to pay. Let's act like mature adults, folks, and start paying our own way, and stop saying no to projects like wind power that can help us to avoid worsening our national economic nightmare.
Wind and solar won't solve the energy problem. No one claims they can.
But they, in combination with other strategies like conservation, can mitigate the impact. Like any technology in its infancy, it currently requires subsidy. It won't get to maturity without investment and public support. The economic arguments against wind power disappear when you take into account the inexorable increase in the cost of fossil fuel energy, which have to increase as supply diminishes.
Further, arguments against the economic viability about wind power fly in the face of the reality that folks who are funding it think otherwise, and they are the ones who are putting down the cash to make it work.
From where I sit, most of the real objection to wind power is nimbyism. We don't want it in our back yard.
We don't want it for aesthetic reasons, and we don't want it because there is wild scaremongering that suggests something evil is going on, that someone out there is making money on this (as if that is a bad thing),and that there are health effects that are not avoidable. And at some level, there is opposition based on the feeling that saying "no" makes powerful.
I personally have no objection to the aesthetics of a windmill or wind farm. And there is one proposed for my back yard. From an ecological perspective, and from a practical, resource based planning perspective, it makes sense to support wind power in places wheere it is viable, and where it won't otehrwise impact peoples lives.
There is an active plan, right now, to build wind farms off the coast of Maine that could generate as much as half of the state's energy needs in 20 years. Cianbro and BIW are currently, right now, building the turbines and blades for a pilot project(there are thousands of jobs here). The learning that we get as this project moves up to scale over the next couple of decades will help us to learn year after year how to both do this better, and also how to wean ourselves off unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels.
A city clerk here or there might say that they want same day registration to stop, but the city clerks association voted overwhelmingly to continue the practice. And that is because as a group they believe that putting up barriers to voting is wrong. So the Secretary Of State should change his professed rationale (protect the clerks, who don't want the protection) to the real one, which is that disenfranchising voters favors Republicans.
Given the corruption and inefficiencies in the aid distribution process, asking how we can be sure that aid gets to intended recipients seems prudent. It would be a shame if aid stopped because of reeports of corruption. So it is a good question to ask.
It is always disheartening to me to hear people refuse to share from their resources because "there are poor people here." We have no idea in this country of how much worse off most of the world is, and that is before some disaster strikes. And when folks say that, it makes me wonder whether they help the poor here, either.
By katmbailey, unverified — Tue, 11/24/2009 - 06:10
We need to rise as a community and let perpetrators know that we are outraged at this kind of awful behavior. We ought to note that those who post here saying anything even faintly sympathetic to the attackers are the people who legitmize violence and victimization.
By katmbailey, unverified — Wed, 11/04/2009 - 21:17
The primary reason we fail to recognize it is because until gay marriage was put on the table, the Yes folks fought tooth and nail against every tiny scrid of equality for gay and lesbian people. There will come a time when the yes folks have clearer vision, and come to understand that gay people getting married has not one thing to do with them.
By katmbailey, unverified — Wed, 11/04/2009 - 21:12
It is so disappointing to hear people who have privileges, like the privilege of being protected against discrimination, complain that those lacking those protecting them are requesting "special" privileges, that is to say, privileges no different than what they have. It took a while for the electorate to cut through the "special rights" crap, but they did, and whomped your butts in 2006. Similarly, the privilege that all us heterosexuals have to marry is no less special than the privilege sought by gay and lesbian people. And the electorate will see that sooner or later. Get used to it, bud. We are not going away. And you will lose. Again.
By katmbailey, unverified — Wed, 11/04/2009 - 21:02
Gil, You seem to forget that after two victories, those who loathe gay and lesbian people were beaten soundly at the polls in 2006 by a 10 point margin. You know, I wouldn't mind losing this election if it were a matter of conscience by the electorate. It was not, however. The Yes On One campaign was almost entirely about convincing people that letting gay people marry would lead to teaching gay sex in schools, which is preposterous and outrageous on its face. But enough people believed it so that you got by. This time, anyway. This was a campaign of lies, and the Catholic Church, in leading this campaign, has won a victory, to be sure. What it has given up, though, is its moral authority. You cannot lead by lies and keep your moral authority. It has also lost a generation of young people who might have found the church relevant, but who look in disgust at what the church is doing to gay and lesbian people in the name of morality. We will be back, Gil, and the next time, we will figure out how to keep people from believing the ridiculous lies of the church. Remember, you slowed down the process of getting legal protection against discrimination for gay and lesbian people, but in the end, we won. It may take two years, it may take four years, but you are on the losing side of history, and we will win this one, too. .
By katmbailey, unverified — Thu, 10/29/2009 - 06:43
Why are we giving ink to a guy who foams at the mouth with fear, loathing, and hatred of others? We have an ugly history of oppressive behavior toward Catholics and French Canadians right here in Maine, and we had in Maine one of the strongest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. These have been ignoble chapters in our history. Much of what Mr Madore says about gay marriage people also said- and with the same hysterical fervor- about interracial marriage. We are better than that.
Recent Comments
How do people stand for this?
The Governor cut taxes by 200+ million dollars, primarily benefitting higher income people, and proposes cutting benefits that keep 6000 elderly people in assisted living. Where do these people go? Many are ill, many have dementia, many have no relatives, many with relatives don't have capacity to care for them.
There is a solid core of 40% of the population that does not care when he lies (quoting Forbes Magazine wildly inaccurately), insults people and groups (Kiss my butt), threatens and bullies (countless examples). But to throw grandma into the street? Is there no limit to your collective tolerance for this venal man?
David Duke Endorsed Ron Paul
You are known by who you hang out with. Ron Paul was endorsed by David Duke, former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as by a whole range of right wing nutbag militia groups. When asked to disavow his followers in these camps, he refused. The man has some positions that make sense (like his isolationist views), but he is also a dnagerous crank.
Mr. MacDonald
Mr. MacDonald is on the horns of a dilemma. He has run for office on a crusade against welfare cheats. Either Mr MacDonald has cynically manipulated the people of Lewiston by crusading while knowing that welfare rules come out of Augusta, not Lewiston, or he does not know this. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and am calling him uninformed instead of a liar. But it is a close call, and neither label is particularly attractive.
His campaign was in the ignoble tradition of southern rednecks who used code words (welfare) for race (in this case african immigrants). Wink wink. Sure you can get yourself elected, Mr Mayor, by fanning the flames of racism, but what is the second act? Now that you have done your best to set the working class white people against Somali immigrants how does the community live together? Are you going to drive the Somalis out? Will you write anotehr letter that brings the scorn and derision of the world on Lewiston? You chose as your role model a man who is now the Governor, someone who is rude, small, loutish, ignorant, and also a redneck. Good luck with that.
MacDonald
Mr MacDonald is an I'll-tempered, ignorant bully, in the cast of the Governor. If you are delighted with Lepage, you'll love MacDonald. What happened to higher aspirations?
Senator Snowe is a moderate?
It was the dismantling of watchdog agencies that permitted Wall Street to indulge in the orgy of money making that precipitated the financial collapse that is still reverberating throughout the economy. Senator Snoew once again shows that she is beholden to the 1%. Why do we keep her in office?
Disgusted
It is beyond my comprehension why people do things like this.
Rebuttals are astonishing
Mr McDonald's words are plenty of proof that his politics are the politics of blaming, of fingerpointing, of resentment, with the Somalis front and center inhis complaints. I have not heard him repeating the wild and crazy comments about Somalis all getting free cars from the government, but his words have the same effect. Hey folks, we have someone to blame for our woes. It's them!!! To folks who understand racism, and recognize it, this guy is steeped in it.
Those immigrants
The recent mayoral debate reminds me of Lewiston's (The Letter) and Maine's (the KKK in the 20's) moments of shame and infamy. The KKK found Maine to be a bastion of strength, as they scapegoated people of French and Irish heritage, and Catholics in Maine, and black people elsewhere. There is always someone out there who needs to scapegoat immigrants and poor people. They need to find someone they can feel superior to, and point the accusing finger toward. In time, though, people of good will realize how awful that is, and do the right thing, which is to reject that mean and inhumane worldview.
Abstaining.
My take is that if you don't know what you are voting on, the act of abstaining has integrity. It is curious that Mr. Kurtz is both so insistent on Mr Lorrain casting an ill-informed vote, and so angry that he abstained.
Language
The writer may not know it, but by using the term "Sexual preference" he is weighing in on one of the issues that people have about homosexuality. Is it a situation in ife that one is born into, or is it a choice? Most gay and lesbian people feel they were born that way. The more neutral term would be sexual orientation.
Scapegoating
It is so disappointing to read about politicians who run for office by scapgoating a group of people. In this case, according to Robert Macdonald, it is people on welfare. No matter that unemployment is over 10%, and that every available job has multiple applicants. Let's just blame welfare recipients for their poverty, and do what we can to drive them from our midst. When MacDonald and others take that position, they can feel holy (we're better than "them"), but from where I sit, it it is self centered, mean, and not particularly ennobling.
Reply to David Marsters
It is curious to hear you say that a fireworks ban is unworkable, because before the legislation was passed allowing people to hgave such fireworks (and it was just a few months ago), it DID work. Prosecutions were infrequent, because people understood that they were illegal. And prosecutions were also infrequent because sensible people noticed that people who were getting illegal fireworks were blowing their fingers off and hurting themseleves and others. This is a law that can be enforced. Moreover, it is a sensible one. And I find your argument that costs of prosecution would be more than the fines generated to be silly. We don't prosecute crimes to generate revenue. We do it to preserve the public order, and in this case to keep people safe from morons who use explosives irresponsibly.
GDP
Agreed, but with one caveat. According to T.R. Reid, who has written an astonishing book comparing health care systems around the world, the percentage of GDP that health care currently consumes is 17%. And what people derisively call "Obamacare" has already impacted insurance markets. People who deal in health insurance will tell you that major insurers are passing on increases of a couple of percentage points less than they would have if the Patient Care and Affordability Act had not passed.
But I don't blame the corporations about this. They'll make money taking care of the 45 million people who are not currently insured, and in fact backed key parts of health care reform (granted, they were a powerful foe of a single payer system) I blame people who don't give a damn about anybody else. The palpable selfishness of people who already have health insurance refusing to care about those who don't is galling. And I believe that is the core of the issue. If you've got yours, why care about anyone else?
The republicans have achieved one thing in their resistance to health care reform; they gutted the elements of proposed legislation most likely to be effective, and can in turn trumpet how ineffective the legislation is, which was due, of course, to their hysterical machinations.
Greed and selfishness. That is what it is all about. Republicans ought to be ashamed.
Facebook group?
I am interested in the Facebook Group referred to in the text above (Stop the stealing of local dogs), but there is none listed on Facebook. I wonder if the reporter can follow up and get the actual name of the group.
In fact I do own land near a proposed wind farm
And yes, I do like the idea of wind power, so long as it is located in places where people are not hurt by them. By hurt, I mean, it cannot be noisy. It might make the scenic vista different, but in my book that does not count as hurt. We have oil, or we have alternatives. You cannot say no to all of the alternatives without keeping us in preposterously perilous circumstances relying on oil. Printing a long list of names means nothing, nor does a rhetorical question asserting that someobody nobody knows has their property value impacted by a proposed development.
In fact I do own land near a proposed wind farm
And yes, I do like the idea of wind power, so long as it is located in places where people are not hurt by them. By hurt, I mean, it cannot be noisy. It might make the scenic vista different, but in my book that does not count as hurt. We have oil, or we have alternatives. You cannot say no to all of the alternatives without keeping us in preposterously perilous circumstances relying on oil. Printing a long list of names means nothing, nor does a rhetorical question asserting that someobody nobody knows has their property value impacted by a proposed development.
So you love oil, eh?
It is broadly acknowledged that we are in a time of peak oil. That is to say, we have located most of the earth's oil, and we are sucking it dry. We have seen oil costs double in the past few years, and it is gonna double again in the next few years.
80% of maine's transportation and heating comes from oil. There is a world of hurt around the corner for all of us. Folks who oppose wind energy enjoy the pretense that energy supplies are inexhaustible, and are willing to bet their children's futures on it. I am not. In the same way that I hate the reality that we are putting 40% of the US budget on a creddit card for our children to pay. Let's act like mature adults, folks, and start paying our own way, and stop saying no to projects like wind power that can help us to avoid worsening our national economic nightmare.
Wind and solar won't solve the energy problem. No one claims they can.
But they, in combination with other strategies like conservation, can mitigate the impact. Like any technology in its infancy, it currently requires subsidy. It won't get to maturity without investment and public support. The economic arguments against wind power disappear when you take into account the inexorable increase in the cost of fossil fuel energy, which have to increase as supply diminishes.
Further, arguments against the economic viability about wind power fly in the face of the reality that folks who are funding it think otherwise, and they are the ones who are putting down the cash to make it work.
From where I sit, most of the real objection to wind power is nimbyism. We don't want it in our back yard.
We don't want it for aesthetic reasons, and we don't want it because there is wild scaremongering that suggests something evil is going on, that someone out there is making money on this (as if that is a bad thing),and that there are health effects that are not avoidable. And at some level, there is opposition based on the feeling that saying "no" makes powerful.
I personally have no objection to the aesthetics of a windmill or wind farm. And there is one proposed for my back yard. From an ecological perspective, and from a practical, resource based planning perspective, it makes sense to support wind power in places wheere it is viable, and where it won't otehrwise impact peoples lives.
There is an active plan, right now, to build wind farms off the coast of Maine that could generate as much as half of the state's energy needs in 20 years. Cianbro and BIW are currently, right now, building the turbines and blades for a pilot project(there are thousands of jobs here). The learning that we get as this project moves up to scale over the next couple of decades will help us to learn year after year how to both do this better, and also how to wean ourselves off unhealthy reliance on fossil fuels.
A city clerk here or there
A city clerk here or there might say that they want same day registration to stop, but the city clerks association voted overwhelmingly to continue the practice. And that is because as a group they believe that putting up barriers to voting is wrong. So the Secretary Of State should change his professed rationale (protect the clerks, who don't want the protection) to the real one, which is that disenfranchising voters favors Republicans.
Too bad.
Given the corruption and inefficiencies in the aid distribution process, asking how we can be sure that aid gets to intended recipients seems prudent. It would be a shame if aid stopped because of reeports of corruption. So it is a good question to ask.
It is always disheartening to me to hear people refuse to share from their resources because "there are poor people here." We have no idea in this country of how much worse off most of the world is, and that is before some disaster strikes. And when folks say that, it makes me wonder whether they help the poor here, either.
Voisine
Well said, Voisine!!
We need to rise as a
We need to rise as a community and let perpetrators know that we are outraged at this kind of awful behavior. We ought to note that those who post here saying anything even faintly sympathetic to the attackers are the people who legitmize violence and victimization.
The primary reason we fail
The primary reason we fail to recognize it is because until gay marriage was put on the table, the Yes folks fought tooth and nail against every tiny scrid of equality for gay and lesbian people. There will come a time when the yes folks have clearer vision, and come to understand that gay people getting married has not one thing to do with them.
It is so disappointing to
It is so disappointing to hear people who have privileges, like the privilege of being protected against discrimination, complain that those lacking those protecting them are requesting "special" privileges, that is to say, privileges no different than what they have. It took a while for the electorate to cut through the "special rights" crap, but they did, and whomped your butts in 2006. Similarly, the privilege that all us heterosexuals have to marry is no less special than the privilege sought by gay and lesbian people. And the electorate will see that sooner or later. Get used to it, bud. We are not going away. And you will lose. Again.
Gil, You seem to forget that
Gil, You seem to forget that after two victories, those who loathe gay and lesbian people were beaten soundly at the polls in 2006 by a 10 point margin. You know, I wouldn't mind losing this election if it were a matter of conscience by the electorate. It was not, however. The Yes On One campaign was almost entirely about convincing people that letting gay people marry would lead to teaching gay sex in schools, which is preposterous and outrageous on its face. But enough people believed it so that you got by. This time, anyway. This was a campaign of lies, and the Catholic Church, in leading this campaign, has won a victory, to be sure. What it has given up, though, is its moral authority. You cannot lead by lies and keep your moral authority. It has also lost a generation of young people who might have found the church relevant, but who look in disgust at what the church is doing to gay and lesbian people in the name of morality. We will be back, Gil, and the next time, we will figure out how to keep people from believing the ridiculous lies of the church. Remember, you slowed down the process of getting legal protection against discrimination for gay and lesbian people, but in the end, we won. It may take two years, it may take four years, but you are on the losing side of history, and we will win this one, too. .
Why are we giving ink to a
Why are we giving ink to a guy who foams at the mouth with fear, loathing, and hatred of others? We have an ugly history of oppressive behavior toward Catholics and French Canadians right here in Maine, and we had in Maine one of the strongest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. These have been ignoble chapters in our history. Much of what Mr Madore says about gay marriage people also said- and with the same hysterical fervor- about interracial marriage. We are better than that.