Monthly Archives: September 2017

How not to lobby Susan Collins

If you want to influence Susan Collins on a key vote, the last person you’d enlist to help is Gov. Paul LePage. But that’s exactly what the Trump administration did when they flew Maine’s governor to Washington for a press conference on Friday. Looking like a nervous kid waiting in the principal’s office after spray […]

Poverty isn’t eliminated by threatening the poor

In his book Madness and Civilization, the French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the historical arc of social integration of those considered insane. At times, humans have driven the “mad,” as Foucault described them, into hidden institutional recesses. At other times, cultures kept the “mad” in plain sight, not accepting their actions or mental states as […]

Think Trump is bad? Meet Kid Rock

  If you’re one of those cultural Luddites who still yearns for dignity in American politics, the Trump era has been a nightmare. Our 45th president ran and won as a lewd demagogue with an out-of-control inferiority complex, and his tenure as chief executive continues to lower the bar for public discourse, week after painful […]

Poliquin wrong to denigrate veteran’s experience, age

Imagine if someone ran a campaign against our Second District congressman by calling him “Old Bruce Poliquin.” Stating that, at 64, he’s too old to make rational decisions. Stumbling around Washington, unable to distinguish the men’s room from the ladies’ room, it’s gotten pretty obvious that his advanced age has become a real obstacle, and […]