Remember Question 1 on Maine’s November ballot, which wanted us to give one guy – Shawn Scott – the exclusive license to operate a York County casino so he could get richer? That’s what the Republican tax overhaul plan coming out of Washington looks like – except instead of one guy getting all the money, it’s 1 percent of the population.
Read MoreThe federal lawsuit brought by Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap demanding prompt communication from and meaningful participation on the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity – which is studying nothing, in order to give advice to President Trump, who will ignore it – expends a lot of taxpayer money and judicial resources, but at least it’s deductible.
Read MoreThe 11 deaths in New York and Colorado last week in random acts of violence were both dizzying and a slap in the face. My son recently started a job not far from the site of the terrorist attack in lower Manhattan, and my daughter goes to school near Thornton, Colorado, where a gunman shot three people in Walmart. The unrelenting and unabashed look at how our fleeting and fragile lives are at the mercy of madmen has had a small and surprising effect on my psyche. The imminence of death by sociopath is not reassuring, but it has adjusted my focus on life.
Read MoreSure, we could have a people’s veto of the law overturning the ranked-choice voting referendum, but that seems like a lot of work. If the goal of ranked-choice voting is to shake up a system that keeps sending guys to the Blaine House who can’t muster a majority of the vote, maybe there’s a simpler solution. Maybe the 370,000 so-called independents could show up and vote in the primaries so the people elected to govern the masses are better qualified and committed to doing so.
Read MoreDemocrats should feel no remorse egging on President Trump’s taunting of Kim Jong Un. It was a Republican senator who said in 1947 that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” and the trigger-happy North Korean bully terrorizing the world deserves to be publicly dressed down. In the current bizarre and banal war of words, we have a champion. Public shaming is in Mr. Trump’s wheelhouse.
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