Maine
updated
9:01 a.m.
Ezra Klein : Olympia Snowe is arguably the most independent Republican in the Senate--and she's stuck with her party on 67.3 percent of votes in this Congress. That is to say, if you knew nothing about Snowe save that she was a Republican, you could predict her vote about 70 percent of the time. And Snowe is actually uncommonly willing to vote with the other side. Ben Nelson is in Snowe territo...
Collins Watch - Tue 8:22 a.m. - 8 clicks 
In today's edition of PPH, Rebekah Metzler looks back at the 111th Congress and Sen. Collins' role within it. On the one hand, the piece isn't Nemitz or Wickenheiser -style hagiography--it's not a gushing, completely one-sided take on the last two years. Critical voices are included and a couple of embarrassing facts even get mentioned. So in the context of PPH's recent history, it counts a...
Collins Watch - Sun 10:22 a.m. - 7 clicks
Am I wrong, or is this the first we've heard of this? BDN : An Illinois man was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court to five months in prison followed by five months of community confinement for threatening to shoot U.S. Sen. Susan Collins and assault a staffer in her Augusta office during a phone call on Feb. 10, 2009. John P. O'Neill, 47, of Arlington Heights, Ill., also was sentenced t...
Collins Watch - Thu 5:09 p.m. - 9 clicks
Go read Jeff Inglis' piece on the condition of the Maine state email system, then despair. ...
Maine Politics - Aug 26 - 11 clicks
CD2 Republican candidate Jason Levesque is on the air with the first TV ad of the race. According to his Facebook wall, the ad will be "running all week in some very key areas of the state," which likely means a short run, possibly just on cable. Also, I think he's trying to hypnotize me with his eyes. In case you're wondering, he didn't make up those headlines at the beginning of th...
Maine Politics - Aug 26 - 2 clicks
Cross posted at Dirigo Blue If only reports like this were the norm: GOP Teabagger candidate for governor Paul LePage broke onto the statewide scene less than a year ago, and already he has amassed a long list of exaggerations and gaffes. And when LePage uncorked another one Monday night, attacking the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, Maine Public Radio 's Susan Sharon didn'...
DailyKos (Maine) - Aug 25 - 6 clicks
Cross posted at Dirigo Blue It began innocently enough, as such things tend to do. And it was also well meaning, again, as such things often are. But the guide posted at Maine Refounders , a tea party forum, that intended to help those coming to the 8/28 Glenn Beck March (aka Beckapalooza) on Washington has gone viral. And it isn't pretty. First to notice the guide was DCist , w...
DailyKos (Maine) - Aug 24 - 3 clicks
Sen. Snowe, last Thursday : Snowe expressed frustration at the fate of the contentious small business bill that she helped to draft. The bill, which would create a $30 billion lending fund for small businesses, has recently been opposed by Republican lawmakers, including Snowe, who have asked for amendments to the bill. And four days later : Sen. Olympia Snowe says a package of tax breaks aim...
Collins Watch - Aug 17
Thanks to political scientist Jim Melcher for getting the " Crazy Train " formulation into print . ...
Maine Politics - Aug 17
As Al Diamon noted in a post last week, Portland Press Herald columnist Leigh Donaldson recently parted ways with the paper due to his commission of plagiarism. Despite Donaldson's claim that "this has never happened before. I’m usually very careful about attributing," Anneli Rufus, the author at AlterNet from whom Donaldson copied, says his intellectual dishonesty is part of a pattern....
Maine Politics - Aug 16
Village Soup : Snowe expressed frustration at the fate of the contentious small business bill that she helped to draft. The bill, which would create a $30 billion lending fund for small businesses, has recently been opposed by Republican lawmakers, including Snowe, who have asked for amendments to the bill. ...
Collins Watch - Aug 16
Former Maine Republican Party Vice Chairman Scott Kauffman : The Maine GOP would like me to support a candidate who has openly called global warming a "hoax"... Environmental protection is absolutely vital for Maine. And yet the GOP asks for my unity behind a candidate who has called for the closing of the Department of Environmental Protection. Despite the ongoing disaster in the Gulf Coast, ...
Collins Watch - Aug 13 - 3 clicks
Somehow I missed this : One national polling outfit believes Senator Olympia Snowe will have a hard time winning a Republican primary next year. "If Snowe wants to be elected, she needs to run as an independent," says Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling in Raleigh, N.C., which in November found 59 percent of likely primary voters would prefer a more conservative candidate. "Maine Republicans ar...
Collins Watch - Aug 12 - 3 clicks
The League of Young Voters has succeeded in placing a referendum on the ballot on whether to allow legal, non-citizen immigrants to vote in Portland's municipal elections. This is a big accomplishment for The League, and the time and effort that went into gathering more than 4,500 verified signatures is impressive. For the fall campaign, the main factors they'll be working against are g...
Maine Politics - Aug 12
Members of the Toxics Action Center gathered in Portland this morning to release a report on the scientific evidence supporting a statewide ban on the chemical Bisphenol A or BPA. A ban is being considered by the Maine Board of Environmental Protection under the auspices of Maine's new toxic chemical control law, the Kids-Safe Products Act. The law gives the BEP the ability to identify an...
Maine Politics - Aug 11 - 2 clicks
The AP has now confirmed rumors that Rep. Sean Flaherty of Scarborough is being charged with driving under the influence after a rollover on I-295 on Sunday in which he sustained minor injuries. Flaherty, a Democrat, is in his first term after unseating Republican Rep. John McDonough with 56% of the vote in 2008. He is slated to face Republican Amy Volk in November. Flaherty was, coinci...
Maine Politics - Aug 10
At Down East this morning, I described the beginnings of the fascinating implosion of the Maine Tea Party. This afternoon the drama continues as we hear from the other side of last night's strange parking lot encounter. In a long post on Maine Refounders, Tea Party member Jeff Cucci lists the reasons why he and a group on unnamed accomplices carried out their coup against Maine Patriots fo...
Maine Politics - Aug 4 - 2 clicks
The Hill : The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last night estimated that the latest version of the Democrats' plan to extend emergency Medicaid benefits will reduce the federal deficit by almost $1.4 billion over the next decade. The $16.1 billion Medicaid provision [is] part of a $26.1 billion package that also provides education funding to prevent teacher layoffs... Maine Sen. Susan Collin...
Collins Watch - Aug 4 - 5 clicks
Via Politico : With a Senate vote slated for Monday evening, the White House shows signs of a late-breaking push behind a $26.1 billion aid package to help state and local governments cope with revenue shortfalls due to the continuing housing crisis and slow economic recovery... Cash-strapped governors are promised $16.1 billion to pay Medicaid bills next year and ease their budget situation; a...
Collins Watch - Aug 2
You wouldn't know it from reading the Maine press, but Sen. Collins has had a pretty abysmal record on abortion-related issues over the last eight years or so. She cast a critical vote for Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, and backed the nominations of other activist, anti-choice judges like Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. But that's not all. Collins also took the anti-choi...
Collins Watch - Aug 2 - 4 clicks
That seems to be where this is headed : Sen. Susan Collins of Maine may have delivered a fatal blow to the bill Monday, announcing that she would not support cloture, which would break a filibuster. ...
Collins Watch - Jul 27 - 4 clicks
Via bluemir at Dirigo Blue , here's state Rep. Alex Cornell du Houx on the DISCLOSE Act. (Published before Sen. Collins admitted that she'll help block the law from an up-or-down vote) We can't know exactly how corporations will use their new [post- Citizens United ] influence in the 2010 elections. But we can make sure that their campaign expenditures are as limited, and as transparent, as ...
Collins Watch - Jul 27 - 4 clicks
Why would an above-the-fray centrist vote to block even the consideration of a bill that restores just a subset of the rules that she's previously supported and even voted for ? ...
Collins Watch - Jul 27
From Meredith McGehee, policy director at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. (The organization's president happens to be a Republican.) The bill introduced by Sen. Schumer and being voted on today is a fair, appropriate and critically needed...Claims that the measure favors unions over corporations are not accurate. Without this bill, the American people will not have the information they ne...
Collins Watch - Jul 27 - 5 clicks
The junior senator, who pretends to be a champion of clean and transparent elections, tells Fox News she'll vote against the bill meant to prevent anonymous special-interests from coming to dominate federal political campaigns. Seems like a good time to reach out to the roughly one-third of Democrats who voted for the junior senator last time around: If you know anyone in that category, why n...
Collins Watch - Jul 27 - 6 clicks
Trevor Potter, former Republican FEC commissioner and Campaign Legal Center president: "For years the opponents of campaign finance reform said all we needed was disclosure," said former Federal Election Commission chairman Trevor Potter, now president and general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, during a conference call with other DISCLOSE backers last week. "And now that that's all we're...
Collins Watch - Jul 26
The Sun Journal seems to be the only Maine daily that's willing, now and then, to write about the state's senators as if they were mere mortals rather than sainted celebrities . Just saying. Former Poland music teacher Lee Libby is one of many Maine teachers who lost their jobs this year due to budget cuts. On Wednesday, she did something about it. She went to Washington, D.C., and met with U....
Collins Watch - Jul 25 - 2 clicks
Now what? Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has filed a new version of a campaign-finance bill aimed at winning the support of Maine’s key GOP centrist senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. The new version strips out several provisions included in the House-passed bill that conservative groups, as well as Collins, had said provides an unfair advantage to unions over corporations and other gro...
Collins Watch - Jul 22 - 3 clicks
From Sen. Collins' eNewsletter: U.S. Senator Susan Collins, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, announced her support for a bipartisan proposal to limit federal discretionary spending for Fiscal Year 2011. [...] "I have joined my Republican colleagues...in supporting...[t]his bipartisan proposal...because it essentially freezes...discretionary spending at last year's levels. Seven...
Collins Watch - Jul 22 - 3 clicks
Sen. Collins' old friend Karl Rove is benefiting from the junior senator's lack of urgency when it comes to the campaign finance-related DISCLOSE Act: A new political operation conceived by Republican operatives Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie formed a spinoff group last month that--thanks in part to its ability to promise donors anonymity--has brought in more money in its first month than the pa...
Collins Watch - Jul 21 - 2 clicks
--1. Embrace progressive priorities. (E.g. health care reform, pro-environment policies, campaign funding transparency.) --2. When Republicans are in power, lament (quietly and infrequently) the paucity of opportunities to advance these progressive goals. Then vote the Republican position down the line , even when it moves the country in the opposite direction. --3. When Democrats ar...
Collins Watch - Jul 21 - 3 clicks
It's important to keep in mind that the discussion of Sen. Collins' disingenuousness and bad faith about campaign finance reform isn't academic. Collins is actually in a very good position to call the shots here. Specifically: If Collins works to block the reform bill from coming to the floor, it's hard to see how it passes either now or anytime soon--since there will likely be more Republican ...
Collins Watch - Jul 20 - 3 clicks
During her 2008 race, Sen. Collins often lamented the duration and expense of modern political campaigns. She bemoaned the influence of interest groups and third-party advertising . She even pledged to shun support from outside attack groups. So, in the wake of the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United decision, which opened the door to a limitless flood of outside money in elections, it ma...
Collins Watch - Jul 20 - 2 clicks
Al Diamon explores some forbidden truths: Maine news organizations rely on interviews with [Maine congressional] delegation members to determine what they're up to. This method has several obvious drawbacks, the most glaring being that our elected officials in the nation's capital aren't likely to tell us anything they don't want us to know... In fact, doing thorough checking on whatever senat...
Collins Watch - Jul 19 - 2 clicks
Via Paul Krugman, here's Rep. David Obey (D-WI) with his account of the early-2009 stimulus debate : When Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said "Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion." We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started get...
Collins Watch - Jul 19
