LePage: Can He Possibly Be Any Worse?

The headline in the Bangor Daily News served up endless inspiration: “LePage Slow to Fill Cabinet.”

Easy pickings for a smart-alecky pundit.

“Maybe he ran out of relatives” - Hmm... too obvious.

“That’s not what his wife said!” - Ugh... better not.

I think I’ll go with: “That’s because no sensible human being would want to have to clean up the colossal pile of bat guano the Baldacci administration is leaving behind.”

Yeah, that should do it.

In its Dec. 31 editorial, the BDN struggled to not gush with admiration over the Italian Scallion. It praised him for everything from school consolidation to shrinking state government, pushing weatherization, and having pellet furnaces installed in state buildings.

Grasping at straws much?

“The hard job of fine-tuning and improving those initiatives falls to the next administration.” Yes, no wonder nobody wants to work for Mr. LePage; he has to deal with those pellet furnaces.

In its adolescent crush-like fawning, the BDN found fault only in Baldacci’s failure to advocate more strongly for all his super-dreamy ideas.

Ahem. Yes, well... while the state’s largest newspaper basks in Baldacci afterglow, allow me to point out that virtually everything he attempted either set us back 30 years or fizzled into a giant waste of time.

Consolidation? No need to beat that horse any more. If you have any doubt, go ask your local school board if they’ve saved any money from consolidation. I dare you.

Meanwhile, high schools across the state continue to waste millions of hours in productivity trying to wrench their curricula into the confines of the PSAT and SAT. While The College Board collects a tidy $50 a year for every 10th and 11th grader in Maine, kids who would rather not go to college, or who lack the skills for college, are left to wonder, even more than they already did, if anybody really cares about them.

Baldacci’s “principled stand” on gay marriage didn’t amount to much after he made virtually no effort to help the new law survive a referendum. He bought the law a nice ring, but then left it at the altar.

Then there’s the Department of Human Services, a steady source of debacles for the last ten years. Time and again he has cut funding for outpatient mental health services, which adds strain to exponentially more expensive jails, psychiatric hospitals, and emergency rooms.

Pennywise and pound foolish, yet again. You can take your car in for regular brake maintenance, or you can wait and let the wrecking company, police, ambulance, insurance companies, newspaper photographers, coroners, and impound lot deal with it later. Time and again, our bald-headed Mr. Nice Guy chose the latter.

Dirigo Health, once championed as an innovative compromise, languishes in near-irrelevance due to underfunding. Baldacci was not able to combat corporate interests to prevent soda tax foes and insurance companies from all but scuttling the program.

Mix it all together and you can start to see why the state still faces a budget crisis even after shedding 1000 employees in the last eight years.

So, no high-priced captains of industry will ever take a pay cut to deal with any of that mess. Who could blame them?

While I wait for my call to become the next Secretary of Innuendo, I’ll be watching closely to see what kind of Marden’s Special-type candidates he can find to salvage some respectability in the state government.

Balls and Strikes

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it has come to this.

We live in an age when the electorate struggles to keep up with an increasingly complex world, flushing democracy into a perilous vortex of bloated bureaucracy.  The politician and voter alike make decisions based on oversimplified and stereotyped caricatures of complex systems and issues.

Delivering a fair, nuanced, and digestible picture of the world so that our political ideals may survive is the task bestowed upon the news media, a news media which, increasingly, is saying, "the hell with it," and instead obsessing over which members of the Red Sox infield wear cups.

On March 3, barely into Major League Baseball's exhibition season, I clicked open the home page of The Boston Globe to find a prominently-displayed article called "Getting Into a Sensitive Area," by Dan Shaughnessy.

"Cup or no cup?" reads the first line, "That is the question."

Okay. Dan Shaughnessy is a highly-paid, nationally renowned sports columnist. Can he do no better than a trite bastardization of the oldest Shakespeare cliche in human history?

Secondly, why is he being paid so much money to write about baseball players' undergarments?

The article, as it turns out, focuses on the testicular trauma of one Adrian Beltre, Boston's new third baseman. Beltre does not wear a cup, and he paid the price last summer when a ground ball took a bad hop and crushed -- that's right, I said "crushed" -- one of the family jewels.

I know what you're thinking:  If this would happen to John Baldacci a little more often, maybe it wouldn't be such a struggle to get the mainstream media to offer complete coverage of political issues now and then.

Hell, I'd drive to Augusta myself for that.

Anyway, Beltre becomes the second consecutive Red Sox third baseman who has overcome catastrophe in the cajones (Mike Lowell conquered cancer down there several years ago).  Get in touch with the Elias Sports Bureau; that has to be some kind of record.

But the really amazing thing is that Beltre, even after eviscerating his vitals, still does not wear a cup. 

"I should," he told Shaughnessy, "but it just isn't comfortable."

His stones swelling to the size of a grapefruit, on the other hand, must have felt wonderful.

Now, if you're thinking that this is an issue that should really only concern Mr. Beltre, then you obviously know nothing about baseball or capitalism. Millions of fans have invested time and money into this guy already, hoping he will find a way to resurrect his drooping career and become one of the more potent bats in a lineup that has the potential to be rather anemic.

In other words, if he gets tagged in the testimonials one more time, millions of dollars will have been shriveled away, and the hopes and dreams of an entire region will remain, uh, undescended.

So it's safe to say that no balls will be watched more closely this summer than the ones hit toward Adrian Beltre.

Meanwhile, some dazed and doped-up version of a health care bill plods through Congress, and people who haven't set foot inside a classroom in decades decide how to divide up resources for our kids, based on the latest formula or test scores that are supposed to tell us everything we need to know about education so we don't have to think about what's really going on.

Let's get our priorities in order, folks, so tomorrow's leaders won't have to struggle to save our rights, provide decent opportunities, and remember all those euphemisms they used to know in middle school.

The Unkindest Cuts

As a commie pinko leftist hippie, whenever I speak of snooze-inducing moderate Governor John Baldacci, I have to borrow a quote from Marx: 

I've never liked term limits, but in his case I'll make an exception.

Is he the ideal person to get us out of this state budget crisis, since he's the one who got us into it? Early indications are not promising.

Teacher salary freezes? Seriously? The legislature would have to pass a law nullifying all the contracts in each district. The education lobby is plenty powerful enough to keep that from happening.

Baldacci knows this. And he knows that Maine teachers rank 43rd in the nation in pay. He's just setting up the teachers to look like the bad guys for trying to thwart his benevolent belt-tightening. As class sizes balloon and positions get slashed, teachers will take their share of punishment, believe me.

The proposed 10% cut to Mainecare services has been getting a lot of press, but no one is paying attention to the more troublesome proposal to limit outpatient therapy services to 18 sessions, no extensions or exceptions.

At one hour each, 18 sessions is not really long enough to fix a facial tick, let alone develop coping skills for a debilitating mental illness. Why even bother?

More importantly: counseling pays for itself. A wrist-slitting teenager who goes to counseling can save the state money by not ending up in Acadia Hospital. Every adult who goes to counseling to overcome depression or addiction saves money on law enforcement resources.

As Cumberland County Sheriff Mark Dion told the Bangor Daily News, "These cuts are just going to shift costs; they are not going away.”

All right, wise guy, I can hear you saying. Where should we cut, then? The money has to come from somewhere.

I say, let's raise the hell out of some taxes - particularly on wealthy tourists, whom we don't like anyway. 

The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting recently detailed how Baldacci nixed tax increases on mansions and ski trips, both typically purchased by wealthy flatlanders, apparently because he has friends who work in those industries.

If that doesn't tick you off during a budget crisis, you don't have a pulse.

Why not chisel away at Martha Stewart's fortune, and maybe force John Travolta to sell one of his planes, before we go after social workers and teachers?

Anyone who fears that rich people from out of state will stop coming to Maine if we raise taxes on them does not understand how rich people think.  Higher taxes make Maine more attractive, not less.  We become more exclusive that way.

"Honey, I'm bored with touring Europe and staying in hotels where the bellhops receive their tips in combination-lock briefcases. Do we have any other vacation options?" 

"Well, the Joneses are going to Maine this year."

"Oh, I'm so jealous! Can we go, too?"

Do you really think an extra $5 per night on their hotel bill will keep a family from Massachusetts from spending a week in Bar Harbor? If so, let them eat cake in New Hampshire.

Let's squeeze every penny we can out of hotels and gas stations, along with Mountain Dew, Doritos, Land Rovers, hunting and fishing licenses, lobster dinners, and inappropriate tee shirts sold at Old Orchard Beach.

And hope Baldacci doesn't do too much more damage before the next tourist season.

Blaine House = Bland House

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, rejected federal stimulus money, saying Texas could stand on its own. He said his state could secede from the union.

That was just before he complained the feds weren’t doing enough to help him fight swine flu.
Then he fell off a mountain bike and broke his collarbone.

The limousine belonging to Governor Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania was caught careening down the Interstate at 99 mph.

The Las Vegas Sun investigated the work habits of Nevada Governor Les Gibbons, and found that he doesn’t have any. He takes large amounts of vacation time, working a total of five days during a recent nine-week stretch.

Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana were both caught breaking ethics rules by giving gifts to legislators, not long after they had campaigned against giving gifts to legislators.

Mike Easley of North Carolina, who apparently fell off the political turnip truck about five minutes ago, said it’s the press’s job to “be nice to [him],” and whined that they weren’t doing their job when they exposed failures in the state’s parole system.

And I haven’t even gotten to Blagojevich (sold senate seat), Spitzer (prostitutes), Palin (more wardrobe scandals than brain cells), or Sanford (Venezuelan mistress).

Our governor? He has been AWOL in his Year of Gubernatorial Scandal.

Compared with these people, Baldacci is about as interesting as C-SPAN at 3 AM. I can’t imagine him traveling to Vermont for maple syrup, let alone to Venezuela for an extra-marital tryst.

Can you picture what it must be like at those national governor’s conferences they have every year? You’ve got all these Schwarzeneggers and Palins and other larger-than-life characters, and then over in the corner is Baldacci, looking like a Certified Public Accountant hired for the occasion to make everyone else feel cool and hip.

Never mind Baldacci’s wasteful, pointless education initiatives, his budget bungling, or his inefficient use of federal stimulus money, or his apparent decision to banish the sun.

No, the biggest problem with John Baldacci, and the one thing we can truly fix if we play our cards right, is that he is hideously, remorselessly, painfully boring.

We can do better than this, Maine! In the 2010 election, we can reverse the doldrums that have left us irrelevant, and get ourselves on The Daily Show for once.

We need to change our image.

Some of the early candidates have potential. Start with Les Otten, former part-owner of the Red Sox, whose campaign logo (copied from Obama) and hairstyle (coiffed salt-and-pepper) smack of the slick and sleazy Hollywood politics we can only dream of.

Plus, can you imagine the fun headlines if he ever delivers a first-class scandal? “Guess We Otten-Not Have Voted for The Rich Guy.”

Independent Alex Hammer also has a cool name, one that evokes the power and seductive, quiet confidence of an ‘80s TV detective.

But he looks like a geriatric basset hound, only droopier, and he speaks knowledgeably and in detail about economic issues.

Not good.

Still, he has headline potential (“Hammer to the Slammer”) so let’s all donate $100 to his campaign.

Meanwhile, let’s see if we can get a statewide referendum going on this weather situation.

Pot o' Bold

Once again, it’s time for me to solve all the problems for our state government.

The last time I undertook this project, I suggested that schools close in the winter and stay open in the summer to save on heating expenses.

Since then, heating oil prices plummeted by something like $2 a gallon. Yay me.

Now, then, on to new business. It has come to my attention that Augusta is hard up for cash.

“Maine lawmakers … are pinning their hopes on Washington to help address a looming $800 million-plus shortfall,” writes Francis X. Quinn of the Associated Press.

Okay, first of all, how can you go wrong as a reporter with a name like “Francis X. Quinn”? I picture a svelte, dignified gentleman in a fedora and necktie, oozing integrity.

Or maybe he’s a leprechaun. Either way, I’m ready to believe anything this man says.

“Reflective of State House anxiety and uncertainty,” says Quinn, is “Gov. John Baldacci’s decision to put off a State of the State address until later this month.”

It seems Baldacci can’t summon the gonads to stand up in front of the entire state and say, “We’re broke, so I am about to sell your children to the Church of Scientology.”

He’d rather wait to see if Uncle Sam is willing to be our sugar daddy.

Yeah, get in line.

Our governor has built a reputation for being willing to make the “tough” decisions. By “tough,” of course, I mean “stupidly wrong and destructive.”

Remember all that money we were supposed to save from consolidation? Yeah, it’s a funny story…

Let’s try something more substantive: legalize marijuana, then tax it like crazy.

I can’t figure out why we’re devoting law enforcement resources to control a plant that is less harmful than alcohol, cigars, and most public drinking water.

There are more than 500,000 alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. every year, according to the Washington Post.

I tried to look up statistics for marijuana-related deaths, but I couldn’t find any. That’s because they don’t exist. It would be like scouring the Internet for “toothbrush impalement-related deaths;” sure, it probably happens now and then, but not enough for anyone to bother keeping track.

More compelling is the fact that 42% of Americans have tried pot, according to a survey by the World Health Organization. I’m sorry, but any law that makes almost half the population (including at least two or three presidents and a 14-time gold medalist) criminals is some kind of wicked bogus law.

Let’s face it: the only reason cannabis is still illegal is because hippies like it. Hippies seem to annoy the government.

But with my proposal, we can still stick it to the hippies with outrageous taxes.

If we still haven’t made up the shortfall after that, Baldacci should nominate several of the state’s wealthiest summer residents to positions in his cabinet.

That might be the only way we’ll be able to collect back taxes from them.

You have to admit, this is one bold plan. And, if our stimulus-happy congress has taught us anything, it’s that bold = right.

If only the state government would heed my words. You can do your part: clip this column and send it to your state representative.

Be sure to put “Francis X. Quinn” in your return address.

Embrace the Chaos

My father, despite being a successful businessman and owner of the complete set of Clint Eastwood movies, is not the first person I look to for political insight.

Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit. His latest zany scheme would save the state umpteen millions of dollars with no more chaos than would result from a herd of paranoid elk stampeding through an MPBN membership drive:

Invert school vacation. Shut down classes for three months in the winter, and keep them going through the summer.

As heating oil prices soar to $19 a gallon by 2012, this unlikely idea will look more and more appealing. Still, the powerful summer camp/Little League baseball lobby will never let it happen.

But conventional wisdom has the Maine taxpayer reaching his or her breaking point relatively soon. Actual relief will probably require radical changes:

“... in other news, the legislature has passed an emergency supplemental heating bill that requires all cremation to occur in the state house lobby...”

Is Baldacci the man to turn things upside down? True, he's not afraid to be just a teeny bit unpopular. According to a recent poll of likely voters in my area (my area is the living room), the governor's approval rating is close to 50%, but his annoying little pipsqueak rating has skyrocketed to almost 90%.

In short, it's hard to imagine him with a menacing grimace, pointing his .44 magnum at the legislature, and asking, “Do you feel lucky, punk?”

He's more likely to do things the general population finds moderately irritating (SAT initiative, Sunday hunting, consolidation, telling that restaurant story again), but not bothersome enough to divert attention and resources.

Switching school vacation to the wintertime is a move too gutsy for the likes of our current governor. It would cause severe problems for huge numbers of Mainers, the most obvious of which is that summer jobs would have to become winter jobs.

Teenagers who save up for college (“college” is a popular euphemism for “first car”) by landscaping or by serving ice cream would have to start doing apprenticeships or job shadowing for the actual careers they might have some day.

The many teachers who earn second incomes by prostituting their dignity to the tourism industry would be especially put out. The would have to (ouch) get paid more from their regular jobs.

And it's hard to motivate students as they bake in the 90-degree heat, staring wistfully out the window at the beckoning sunshine, wishing they could burst outside and run home to their air-conditioned rooms to play video games.

Meanwhile, families who like to spend their summers “up to camp” would instead have to vacation “down to Florida,” or maybe even (gasp!) “over to Europe.”

Obviously, these circumstances are intolerable. Therefore, the $44 zillion it costs to keep our drafty old schools open while our end of the Earth tilts away from the sun is clearly well spent.

Never mind that the CEO of the second largest oil company in the world (Shell) has now admitted that in seven years, global oil supply will no longer be able to meet demand.

No big deal. We'll just install wood stoves in all our classrooms.

See, regardless about what the environmentalists say or what happens to your tax bill, we can keep our society running pretty much exactly the way it is forever and ever.

Or at least until the next election.

Message to Gov. Baldacci:

Go ahead. Make my day.

SAT Ire

The first thing you learn when you go to college to become a teacher is any test you give should cover the material you've been teaching. In other words, if your students just got done studying Shakespeare, do not give them a test that includes questions about the mating habits of the Asian cockroach (Blattella asahinai).

This may seem like a simple concept, but for some reason Gov. John Baldacci and his education sidekick, Susan Gendron, don't get it. By forcing all high school juniors to take the SAT once again this year, they're repeating widespread, coordinated educational malpractice.

Maine school systems have built their curricula off the Learning Results, a big purple book of standards in reading, writing, math, social studies, science, arts, basket-weaving, and gravel pit partying.

The SAT is not built off those standards. The SAT is built by an out-of-state company called The College Board, which is making a slew of cash off Maine taxpayers despite the fact that they've never heard of The Learning Results. (The College Board is mainly concerned with figuring out who is fit to attend - and pay for - college, which is why their reading questions derive from topics like ballet instead of topics like fly-tying or rap music.)

When Baldacci and Gendron pushed the SAT initiative through a partisan legislature, they assured everyone that the SAT, by pure coincidence, matched the Learning Results perfectly, even though it contains only English and math questions (I guess we no longer need the other subjects).

As it turns out, the federal government says, sorry, no match, and has fined Maine for non-compliance with the No Child Left Behind Act.

Our leaders have decided the best way to measure student learning is to force them to sit under fluorescent lights for three hours in some of the least-comfortable chairs ever invented and plow through volley after volley of questions derived from 1950s pedagogy until their brains turn into cottage cheese.

I have a lot of students who work hard in school, but who will not go to college, either because learning disabilities have held them back or because their vocational interests lie elsewhere (i.e. truck driving, auto repair, video games, drug trafficking). Expose these kids to 20 minutes of SAT material and you get a lot of groans, fidgeting, sleeping, etc. Imagine putting them through three hours of it! The classroom would become either a zoo or a morgue.

Are there benefits to having all high school juniors take the SAT? Sure.

• Many were going to take it anyway, now they don't have to pay for it.

• Students can get in touch with their “inner artists” by making some neat designs while they fill in all those bubble sheet ovals.

• Baldacci gets to manufacture sound bytes about getting all Maine kids ready for college.

The last one is probably the most important. Sound educational practice is not nearly as important as getting re-elected.

No wonder we chose a test that doesn't have any social studies questions.

Creepy Weather Alert

Here is another reason to be glad you live in Maine, especially if you have regained any of the feeling in your fingers and toes after going out to get the mail.

A 66-year-old man in Brazil had to beat a 16-foot anaconda snake with rocks a couple of weeks ago in order to save his eight-year-old grandson. Anacondas don't normally attack humans, according to an Associated Press report, but it does happen once in a while.

In case you're not sure, a 16-foot snake is considered “heavy-duty.” The anaconda kills its prey like a boa constrictor, gradually squeezing until you can’t breathe.

As you know, we don't have such creatures in Maine. The closest thing we have matching this description is Wal-Mart, which has proven immune to all wildlife management efforts and can adapt itself to any environment.

But the fierce anaconda could not survive our winter, at least not without one of those remote car starters. To live in Maine, you have to take the weather in stride.

That’s why it perplexed me last week to see Governor Baldacci declare a “State of Emergency” before it even started snowing.

Does that inspire a lot of confidence in your state leadership? That the Governor himself would roll out of bed and start screeching spasms of panic before he even looks out the window? Maybe he just can’t get that creepy “StormCenter” music out of his head.

Anyway, it turns out that “State of Emergency” is a legal term that allows the government and certain businesses to ignore some laws (like behind-the-wheel time limits for truck drivers, or 55 percent state funding for education) for a specific period of time (years on end, apparently).

So a “State of Emergency” may or may not reflect what a non-government person would consider an “emergency.” We need some extra terms to let the public know the governor’s approximate armpit humidity level.

Here's what I propose:

State of Paxil-Induced Relaxation: Default setting.

State of Mild Nervous Twitches: Some troublesome weather which might cause inconvenience for tourists and other people who have no idea how to drive.

State of Genuine Concern: A storm of some kind that might require certain people to work for 154 hours straight and later require therapy. Maybe a few power outages.

State of Severe Anxiety: We might need the National Guard for a while, but things should return to normal before the next election.

State of Underwear-Staining Alarm: Extreme loss of life and property. Good luck finding anything from your previous life among the piles of rubble But things will still return to normal by the next election, at least as far as the national media are concerned.

State of Massachusetts: Complete apocalyptic chaos.

My system sure beats the terms we have now. Does anyone know the difference between a “winter storm watch” and a “winter storm warning?” We also have the “winter weather advisory,” “wintry wonderland watch,” “advisory on watchful weather warning,” and “wicked-high-wind wariness of doom.”

I’m just waiting for there to be a “snake advisory.” I want to see how the governor reacts to that one.

Consolidate This!

By Chuck McKay

If anyone thinks the Baldacci Administration’s plan to consolidate school districts will actually save money in the long run, please insert the following information into your brain and press “liquefy.”

Sure, they predict a savings of $250 million or so right off. But it won’t take long for the savings to become extinct (or, as we say in the education business, “to go the way of the lottery-proceeds-for-schools idea”).

The consolidation plan assumes that reducing the number of superintendents to 26 will mean 125 or so former superintendents wandering around looking for other work, rather than continuing to be relatively highly paid educators.

Right. Can you imagine your local superintendent of schools, sitting on a bench downtown, playing a guitar in hopes of passers-by dropping spare change into his cap, temporarily boosting his otherwise crushed spirit? That would be fantastic! I am suddenly 100 per cent in favor of consolidation!

Except that’s not what will happen. Instead, current school administrators will assume new, re-named assistant positions making almost the same amount of money. You’ll have giant school districts full of Assistant Curricular Coordinating Directive Superintendents and Administrative Special Education Director Liaisons for Coordinating the Curriculum, each with at least one secretary.

In ten years, these 26 districts will have engorged themselves in a gluttonous fit of hiring that will make each of them larger and more powerful than the entire state government. Or they will, God forbid, go on an uncontrollable binge of spending on resources for the actual children.

What stops them from doing this now is the angry mob that shows up at annual town meetings, fueled by rumors started by guys with no teeth named Bob or Earl who walked into the school one day and counted a few too many suits or newfangled computers for their liking. These periodic, indiscriminate tax revolts, more common in the smaller towns of Eastern Maine, keep local school boards honest (read: petrified) and frugal.

But once school districts consolidate, suddenly the angry mob may have to travel a ways to have its voice heard. Who wants to carry a torch and a pitchfork 30 miles? Sure, each town may have a local representative, who will have to limp his or her burned and bruised body to a meeting in some other town, where his or her vote may be one of dozens.

Adding a buffer between citizen and government action reduces accountability. (Augusta ought to be proof enough of that; people pay about as much attention to Augusta as they do to the new season of Survivor.) Less accountability means less incentive to keep taxes down and more incentive to hire a personal masseuse and budget it under “central office supplies.”

Meanwhile, Baldacci claims to be targeting the fat cat administrators; he’s less vocal about the fact that his plan calls for reducing the number of teachers in Maine. He wants to increase the statewide average student-teacher ratio to the national average of about 17:1. So instead of Sandy Ervin performing on the park bench, you’ll have a chance to hear the acoustical stylings of Little Johnny’s Favorite Science Teacher and his Quartet of Ed-Techs.

Another reason to feel great about the future of public education in Maine.

-30-