Death by a thousand small cuts is still a death, but it doesn’t send the message that an old-fashioned guillotining in the town square does. Nor is it as crowd-pleasing, as nothing enthralls more than an overfed bourgeoisie getting the chop in a populist uprising.

Thankfully, we live in more civilized times. But the thirst for bloodletting remains around the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee, which heard Thursday about $11 million in budget cuts assembled by Gov. John Baldacci’s office.

The governor nibbled: cutting custodial staffers, reshuffling duties within several agencies, streamlining aircraft maintenance, standardizing lottery commissions, consolidating Career Centers, etc.

But no more than 10 low-level jobs were cut, in total.

Gov. Baldacci hit his mark – mandated to assemble $10.1 million in savings, he produced $11.3 million to satisfy legislation from a “certain” Democratic senator from Leeds, who pushed and pulled a government efficiency bill through the last legislative session’s contentious budget negotiations.

This certain senator, John Nutting, had to leave Thursday’s Appropriations review because he was having a cow – literally, and figuratively. The dairy farmer had obligations to a new calf at home, but still found time to criticize the governor’s proposal as disappointing.

While the state can tell schools to purge their administration, Nutting says, the governor “needs every single one of his supervisors.” In other words, Nutting wants the executive to lop heads, not clip fingernails.

That is not what his legislation intended, the senator says.

Sen. Nutting has a point. The language specifically states “major sources of administrative excess” as a target.

There are others, however, and Gov. Baldacci did hold up his end of the bargain. Taxpayers benefit either way, and it’s not the governor’s responsibility to satisfy an individual senator’s bloodlust.

Many administrative positions can be chopped, the senator maintains, and professes to be compiling a list with the state’s Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability (OPEGA), the nonpartisan legislative watchdog of public dollars and cents.

We’ve been listening to Sen. Nutting talk about trimming state administration for some time. He maintains that allowing the governor’s office to propose its cuts was a “courtesy” to the executive, and it only returned middling results.

We’re more concerned with ends than means – and there’s $11 million on the table, which is a good thing for taxpayers. Sen. Nutting doesn’t like it. That’s to be expected, as it appears anything less than the wholesale removal of positions was going to disappoint him.

So it’s his turn. If Sen. Nutting knows where the ax should swing, he needs to say so. Taxpayers will listen. If additional savings are apparent, as the senator says, there’s no reason to wait to reveal them.

From the executive, Sen. Nutting wanted to be told for whom the bell tolls. Now he knows.

It tolls for thee, senator.