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.

Playing Chicken with Needles

It's nice to know the government is always right.

The Maine legislature has killed a bill that would have made it illegal for the government to require vaccination for all citizens, according to the Bangor Daily News.

“If we don’t have the right to control our own bodies, what gets injected into our bodies, what rights do we have?” asks Rep. Doug Thomas (R-Ripley).

Well, for starters, you have the right to put blind faith in scientists and politicians.

A Nov. 12 BDN editorial argues, incredibly, that the government "must retain the power to protect people" if some horrendous virus starts killing off vast chunks of the population.

"It is hard to imagine any scenario," so sayeth the BDN, "setting aside any Big Brother-inspired paranoia, that would have [government] tapping this power with reckless or bad intent."

Yes, politicians are such nice people.  And it's not like there's any money involved in the manufacture and distribution of vaccines, so the whole process is bound to remain pure and innocent as kittens selling Girl Scout cookies.

First of all, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have a healthy skepticism about vaccine, or anything else you are asked (told) to put into your body. And those who choose not to protect themselves would only be harming themselves.

Secondly, there is no reason to believe the government is capable of making enough vaccine to protect millions of people at a time from some horrible new bug, so protecting its authority to make vaccines compulsory seems a bit peculiar. It's sort of like insisting I should have the right to bring my gerbil with me when I vacation on the moon.

Vaccines are still grown in chicken eggs, a method widely criticized as being not just a little creepy, but also way too slow.  What, is there a shortage of eggs?

Maybe I could help.

Back in July I wrote about how my wife and daughter brought home six fuzzy chicks in a cardboard box. Two of them were "broilers," which meant that eight weeks later they had grown too large to support their own weight, barely able to move from the feeder to the water pan.  Sort of like General Motors.

At that point, we were left with only one logical option, which was to put the broilers out by the road with a "free" sign on them, and hope a hungry person with experience in humane slaughtering and evisceration happened by.

Unfortunately, that is not what we did. Instead, I absorbed the responsibility for giving two fat fowl a dignified finish.  I'll spare you the details.

But we still have four hens who need a home (my wife and daughter will insist that they already have a home, since I managed to nail some pieces of wood together until they formed a chicken coop, but pay no attention to them).

So, on second thought, let's make vaccination against any and all flu viruses mandatory for all Americans. The demand for chickens and eggs will go through the roof, and I'll be able to make some quick cash.

The owners of the Bangor Daily News will be happy, too, since they can always count on their editorial writers to lay an egg once in a while.

I Miss Information

I would like to apologize for using this blog/column (blogumn?) to recklessly and shamelessly promote the sport of badminton.

If you have been a regular reader of my work, you might be a little confused, since I have written more than 60 of these things and have never once mentioned badminton by name.

Bear with me. I'm following the logic of Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, a conservative activist group that opposes a new gay rights law in California.

According to the Sacramento Bee, a daily newspaper with a tremendous reputation in spite of its absurd name, the law prohibits public school personnel from “demeaning gay, bisexual or transgender orientation.”

The law is intended to prevent teachers from telling students that homosexuality is immoral.

Thomasson's take: "If you can't say anything negative (about homosexuality) … that means you have to promote it."

So, again, I must apologize for not saying anything negative about badminton. I hope my fervent support of this lawn game has not offended those of you who prefer croquet.

While I'm at it, I should also apologize for constantly pressuring my readers to love and accept carpet mold, swordfish, Sweet-n-Low, brothels, Idaho, and the St. Louis Blues.

I am ashamed of myself.

My regret would not be so intense if it weren't for something I read in a recent Bangor Daily News column by Pastor Lee Witting.

Witting wrote about this law, telling his readers that it prohibits the use of the term “mom and dad” in public schools so as not to offend kids with homosexual parents. He also said a similar regulation had been instituted in Britain against the the terms “mum and dad.”

As someone with more than three functioning brain cells, I immediately suspected this was complete hogwash; such a bill would never be signed into law by a Republican governor, not even a steroid-crazed one from California.

I emailed Witting and asked him to tell me where he got this info. He was kind enough to reply with a link to a website called WorldNet Daily, a pseudo-news organization with an obvious conservative agenda (the giant Ronald Regan T-shirt ad was my first clue).

A quick Google search turns up other sites, some of which repeat WorldNet Daily's claims about the law, and some of which identify them as products of a false “e-rumor.”

Whom to believe?

Eventually I hacked my way into the California legislature's public database and read (gasp!) the actual law itself. It says: “No teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons because of their race or ethnicity, gender, disability, nationality, sexual orientation, or religion.”

As the Sacramento Bee points out, the law “does not specify what kinds of statements or activities would 'reflect adversely' upon gays.”

So it turns out Pastor Witting and WorldNet Daily were spreading lies.

At least, that's how it looks until you read between the lines.

Just like if you've been reading between the lines of this column, you would realize I'm actually trying to convince you to convert your children to a diet of monkey entrails.

You have to be careful where you get your information these days.

A Poor Example

Congratulations to the Bangor Daily News for showing us the human face of poverty.

Sure, it may have been a cartoon caricature face, but at least it was a face.

Reporter Diana Bowley described one family's courageous struggle to afford heating oil along with medical expenses, food, home repairs, pet food, cigarettes, lottery tickets, exotic dancers, and fine imported ales.

The article, titled “Milo Family Struggles to Keep Warm,” appeared on the BDN website January 15.

“When Darlene Cook and her daughter, Renee Baillargeon, are not busy working to support their pornography addictions,” Bowley writes, “they roam the neighborhood looking for swarthy men to have sex with so they can get wealthy off the state by having as many children as possible.”

Okay, actually, the article did not say any of those things. I made them up.

The folks at the BDN would have no problem with this. Their “reader comments” section on this article is filled with malicious, unverified information.

“Give up the cigarettes!” writes one “Be from Milo,” even though the article does not mention if anyone in the house smokes. “Renee, stop having children, the state doesn't assist people so they can get rich!”

This informed citizen apparently “knows the family,” which could mean anything from:

1)“is in the family,” to

2)“saw them once at the grocery store, I think, on the same day I noticed the Virgin Mary's face on an Alpo label.”

A photo of the family's house showed a shingle that had fallen from the roof. “Be” suggested picking it up because “God helps those who help themselves.”

Cool beans! I had no idea that if I only neatened up my yard, God would send me 100 free gallons of heating oil! Thanks for the tip!

I wish I could say this was one isolated lunatic, but many of the “reader comments” featured similar themes.

“Get a wood stove, cut some wood,” said another person who is apparently lucky enough to own both a chainsaw and a forested lot. “How in the world has mankind survived for thousands of years without LIHEAP?”

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if, over the vast expanse of human history, some members of mankind did, in fact, freeze to death. Some may have shivered like wet chihuahuas for weeks at a time before the advent of federal heating assistance.

“George of Lagrange” advises the young lady featured in the article to “close her legs.” She has two children.

All of you out there with more than one child who are having trouble paying your heating bills should be ashamed of yourselves.

This is why most newspapers don't print anonymous letters to the editor. Why the same standard does not apply on the Web is beyond me.

BDN Managing Editor Mike Dowd says the paper screens comments for profanity and libel. “Basically, we eliminate those that accuse someone of illegal activity.”

But they don't edit the comments or try to ascertain how much truth is in them.

So I can use their site to call someone a promiscuous, midget-wrestling transvestite, even if it's not true.

Dowd points out that lots of other newspapers around the world and in Maine provide this type of forum.

In other words, it's legal, and all the other sleazeballs are doing it, too, so it must be okay.

And why not? Jerry Springer-style spewing probably generates more reader traffic and more ad revenue.

Newspapers were once considered gatekeepers who would publish only reliable information.

Now, the gate is a revolving door, and the press is doing its best to transform itself into an overpaid bellhop.