Author: M.D. Harmon

The Portland-based Press Herald newspaper, a publication majority-owned by Democratic Party mega-donor S. Donald Sussman, has refused to publish an unedited opinion editorial from the top Republican representative on the Legislature’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Committee. Press Herald Editor Greg Kesich’s handling of Rep. Deb Sanderson (R-Chelsea)’s opinion editorial is but the latest in a pattern of partisan treatment at the Democrat-owned newspaper, according to House Republican Communications Director David Sorensen, who assists GOP lawmakers in placing opinion pieces. Kesich’s initial decision not to publish an edited version of an opinion piece he disagrees with comes after he requested Sanderson update the…

What does a conservative writer read? While the half-dozen names (plus one) on this admittedly partial list may not be among the ones every reader pays attention to, they are on my regular reading schedule. If you don’t like the names I’ve listed, fine. Tastes differ (that’s what makes them tastes). But if you find one or two new ones whom you like, you have expanded your horizons a bit and gained a useful source. Two caveats: First, this list is not comprehensive. It names a few of those sources who inspire and inform me most regularly, and by no…

“This is most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” — David E. Sanger, New York Times staff reporter, who has worked in Washington for two decades. “It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.” — Quote in an article on the federal shutdown in the Washington Times. Is the Obama administration the meanest one on record? That question is now being raised by many observers, and they have good reason to ask it.…

Does it make a difference if the United States “adopts” an international treaty without the advice and consent of the Senate? Back in the days before we were governed by hard-left ideologues, when presidents and members of their administrations felt they were constrained by the actual wording of on-the-books statutes (so-called “black-letter law”) and the Constitution, the answer would have been “no.” Because the Constitution requires supermajority approval by the Senate to ratify treaties, it didn’t matter if the chief executive or a State Department minion signed one, it still wasn’t the law and didn’t bind anyone to any set…

One of the things that continues to irk me is how conservatives in general and Republicans in particular display a singularly high degree of incompetence when it comes to pushing their ideas in the public sphere. For all too many on the right, an “attitude of ineptitude” has marked their sales pitches. Even when they do a large number of commendable things, as the GOP accomplished in its short two years of legislative control in Maine, the movement and its political representatives have proven astoundingly hopeless on the “Look at what we accomplished” scale of effectiveness. Oh, there have been…

Vice President Joe Biden said in 2007 that President George W. Bush should be impeached if he bombed Iran without a vote of approval from Congress. Now, almost two dozen House Republicans have signed a letter to President Obama noting that the law requires he gain approval from Congress before taking military action in Syria — unless there is an immediate threat to the United States or its interests. Obama has promised a “briefing” for congressional leaders, but that hardly constitutes seeking their formal approval. In addition, there seems to be no chance he will comply with the former liberal…

One of the current political buzzwords is “LoFo voter,” a short way to describe “low-information” members of the electorate who either rarely pay attention to the news, or who get their information from sources that offer lopsided coverage that either distorts events and their meanings or only covers those items that feature one side of an issue. One-sided coverage is a hallmark of the ideological bias common on some cable news sites (and I do not always exclude Fox News from that statement, although, as one wit correctly quipped recently, “There are more liberals on Fox than there are conservatives…

Anti-gun groups in the culture at large, along with significant voices in the major media, were awfully quick to join in a single message after the criminal tragedy in Newtown, Conn. Most conservatives likely put down the uniformity of the demands for a reprise of the so-called “assault weapons” ban of 1994 (which was allowed to expire a decade later) and various other remedies (that would have had absolutely no effect on the murders at that community’s elementary school) to the collective hive-mindedness of left-wingers in general. But now we know that a group of three Democratic political operatives had…

“The bottom line is we’re not broke, there’s plenty of money, it’s just the government doesn’t have it. The government has a right, the government and the people of the United States have a right, to run the programs of the United States. Health, welfare, housing – all these things.” — U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn.  We are sometimes tempted to think that people on the left don’t really believe everything they say about the sources and ownership of wealth, but then a progressive lets the mask slip a little bit and their real ideology shines through. Such is the…

“I think every president in the intense media environment we have now, certainly every two-term president, gets to a point where the American people stop listening, stop leaning forward hungrily for information. I think this president got there earlier than most presidents. And I think he’s in that time now.” — Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan on ABC’s This Week Feb. 28 “In his economy speech President Obama said we’ve all been distracted by phony scandals. He prefers we be distracted by his phony recovery.” — Jay Leno, the Tonight Show, week of July 21 When progressive politicians say they…

“Detroit is the rotten fruit of uncontested progressive socialism.” — Editorial, Investor’s Business Daily, July 19 It didn’t take long after the announcement that Detroit was declaring bankruptcy for a captioned photo of Barack Obama to hit conservative websites and blogs showing a downcast president saying, “If I had a city, it would look like Detroit.” Unfair? Well, yes and no. It’s true the (former) Motor City’s problems began long before Obama entered the Oval Office, and the decisions that left it $18.5 billion in debt were made by other politicians and civic and business leaders. But those decisions –…

As many Americans contemplate the depressing fact that we are only six months into President Obama’s second term, with its remaining 42 months stretching to the horizon like a dry and dusty desert with no oasis in view (short of the 2014 congressional vote, which offers some opportunity for refreshment), there’s a new worry that no previous generation has had to confront: What is there the president might want to do to advance his political agenda that any law can prevent him from doing? That is, where are the boundaries around presidential power when the chief executive controls or sways…

How did the second-degree murder trial of so-called “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman for the killing of black teenager Trayvon Martin become national news that, some are saying, could result in riots if he is found not guilty? And who would be at fault if that happens? While the verdict remains unknown, at least as of this writing, there are a few things worth saying about it, some of which are independent of whatever verdict is handed down. (And assuming the jury isn’t deadlocked, which is always an option in any complex case.) But this case’s complexity, which is very real,…

Being a conservative in Maine, at least in my experience, has involved enduring a fraught relationship with the state Republican Party. If you’re a social conservative, voting for a typical GOP candidate has often been a matter of swallowing hard and saying to yourself, “It’s for the larger good.” It’s not there haven’t been socially conservative Republicans around, but they haven’t had much influence on legislation. For example, every bill dealing with abortion that Republican lawmakers submitted over the past three years — including in the legislative session controlled by GOP majorities in both the House and Senate — went…

Can the Obama administration rewrite the laws of physics? Of course it can’t, but it can pass laws and regulations under assumptions that, to achieve their promised results, will require such suspensions of natural law. And then it can force them on American consumers, along with propaganda that tells them it’s all being done for their own good. This time it’s being done through new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules that double the fuel economy standards imposed on auto manufacturers selling cars in the United States. According to people who understand physics and don’t have a leftist political agenda…

“I am not opposed to all wars. I am opposed to dumb wars.” — Barack Obama, in The New Yorker, 2004 “I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing (about Mideast conflicts in Arabic nations), I say let Allah sort it out.” — Sarah Palin, June 2013 The present question we now are asking ourselves, of course, is whether getting more involved in internal Middle East conflicts than we already are is smart or dumb. The cases now facing the United States and its president involve the allied nations of Iran and Syria. The latter, a junior…

“I’m a U.K. citizen hoping soon to become a U.S. citizen, a lifelong admirer of the American project and its founding principles. But after living here for eight years, I’ve started to wince when I hear the expression, ‘It’s a free country.’” — Clive Crook, Bloomberg News columnist, June 11 The news about the National Security Agency monitoring the sources, recipients and timing of U.S. cell phone calls by the millions and gathering details of a “gigantic” amount of other communications, including email and live communications, as well as Web searches and credit card transactions, was revealed earlier this month…

The Politico website has noted that there is a Republican governor giving Democrats fits who isn’t named Paul LePage. It’s Rick Perry of Texas, who joined the 2012 GOP presidential race late and left early, thanks to a mental lapse in a debate when he was asked which government departments he wanted to close down. The proper answer, of course, was, “The issue is which ones we should keep.” He also gained a bit of attention for shooting a marauding coyote with his own pistol when the varmint attacked his dog while they were out jogging. Now, he’s back on…

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia … could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln How many ways can a nation pick to destroy its future?…

All the flapping, squawking and screeching that greeted the LePage administration’s “letter-grade” ranks for Maine public schools was intensified earlier this month by the release of the details of Gov. LePage’s bill, L.D. 1529, supporting an increase in the number of charter schools and, much more controversially, the provision of tax-funded vouchers for private schools, including religious schools. Set aside for a moment political calculations about the chances of success for the latter programs given the current ideological makeup of the Legislature, which is controlled by a party heavily indebted to public school unions for support. Consider instead, if even…

“That the power to tax involves the power to destroy (is) not to be denied.” — Justice John Marshall, in McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819, slightly paraphrasing a statement made by Daniel Webster during arguments in the case. Members of the tea party movement have “acted like terrorists.” — Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by the Politico web site, agreeing with a statement to that effect by Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., at a closed-door Democratic caucus in 2011. ————- People keeping track of Obama administration scandals can’t be blamed for having a hard time staying current. As this is written, there…

When a proposed law is drafted for consideration by the Maine Legislature, it has to carry a “fiscal note” citing its estimated cost to taxpayers, if there is any financial impact at all. Well, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent Washington, D.C.-based conservative think tank (which has no formal affiliation with the Maine Heritage Policy Center) has issued a fiscal note of its own for the so-called “Gang of Ocho” immigration reform proposal, and it’s astounding. The report, entitled “The Fiscal Cost of Unlawful Immigrants and Amnesty to the U.S. Taxpayer,”pegs the total cost of “immigration reform” at a potential $6.3…

Somehow, it’s appropriate that a multibillion-dollar slam-bang government porkfest in which tens of thousands of undeserving claimants and their lawyers scooped up billions in taxpayer funds goes by the name of “Pigford.” This “criminal conspiracy,” in the words of one conservative publication that has reported on it for years, began under President Clinton, but was staved off for a time by President Bush (who was finally overridden in 2008 by Congress) — and then was rekindled at an even higher level under President Obama. Strangely enough, it was finally brought to national attention by the New York Times. Until the Times…

“Despite these relentless setbacks for the climate campaign, environmentalists are not going gentle into this well-lit night, nor will they abandon their decades-old crusade to kill off hydrocarbon energy. The movement is too well funded, and has established ample footholds in the policy machinery stretching down to the local level in the United States. Having a ‘climate action policy’ is de rigueur for just about every self-respecting city council and county commission in the country. — Steven Hayward, “The Climate Circus Leaves Town,” The Weekly Standard, April 29 On April 4, Maine newspapers carried a story headlined, “Will Maine revive…

We have just experienced Tax Day on April 15 – in this year that marks the 100th anniversary of the federal income tax – but on average, Americans didn’t reach national Tax Freedom Day until April 18, according to figures compiled by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan organization that researches tax rates. Tax Freedom Day is the date on which we stopped working for government (federal, state and local) and started working for ourselves. Up to this point each year, every dollar Americans earned went to government; from now on out, every dollar goes into our own piggy banks. Last…

This was “gun week” in Augusta, with lawmakers lined up to conduct hearings on more than two dozen bills to either restrict or, in a few cases, expand firearm owners’ rights. Few, if any, of the proposed restrictions would have prevented the mass murders of recent experience from happening. When people say they want to act for a particular purpose, but their actions don’t match their words, others are entitled to suspect – or even to conclude – that their real reasons for action are not the ones they say, but are being concealed for some undisclosed purpose. Of course,…

If America’s fiscal state is as bad as David Stockman thinks it is, then it is in very bad shape indeed. But what if it’s worse? I’m no economist, just a schlub who tries to make income and outgo more or less balance at the end of the month. And, yes, some months end up in the black and others in the red. Still, the long-range household debt trend is down, so I can usually feel a bit of satisfaction more months than not. That is, by the way, exactly the opposite of the way our country is heading. Indeed,…

Is the U.S. conservative movement (or, more precisely, the Republican Party, which is not exactly the same thing) facing an imminent split between its fiscal and social-issue wings? Possibly, but it would be a foolish thing to do in the face of a Democratic Party that controls both the White House and the U.S. Senate under the leadership of an activist president. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen, however, and if it does, it will make the GOP a minority party for the foreseeable future. Before we go on, however, let’s note that the Democrats are not all that unified…

Maine is an easy state in which to exercise your right as a parent to teach your kids at home. Nevertheless, there are threats on the federal level that, while not impinging on people’s rights at present, pose the possibility of doing so in a potentially very short period of time. The Homeschoolers of Maine website says, “In May 2003, Gov. John Baldacci signed into law a complete overhaul of Maine’s homeschool law. Since then, the law has provided great relief to homeschooling families throughout Maine. The process has been so easy that many of you have been wondering if you…

Before the 2012 presidential campaign got going in earnest, there was a boomlet in some circles for (of all people) loose-cannon entrepreneur Donald Trump, a strangely brighter-than-usual flash in the pan whose comb-over was ubiquitous on Fox News and conservative online sites for some weeks in the early going. He faded, of course – there’s not much staying power in populism without a person of genuine substance behind it – but in trying to figure out just what was going on, it finally occurred to me why he was getting all the attention. It’s not that he had any serious…

News reports told us of an odd and tragic circumstance recently when a man fell into a giant hole that suddenly opened up under his feet. There has been almost no sign of President Obama since. His predictions of huge impacts from sequestration’s “cuts” (which actually amounted to a 2.2 percent reduction in the projected increase in federal spending, which has continued to rise) left Americans looking around and saying, “Gee, we’re all still here. Guess the world didn’t end on Friday.” Of course, the administration is trying hard to show there’s a problem. However, older memes about a “Washington…

Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum — Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, c. 400 A.D. Back in the bad old days, when I was young and foolish (comments about only one of those conditions having changed may be appended below), I used to tell pacifists that I, too, was so committed to the cause of peace that I had joined the nation’s largest peace group. The group, I would continue, had more than a million activists ready to mobilize and march on a moment’s notice to carry its multicolored peace banner to the farthest corners of the globe. In fact, I…

Tuesday’s paper had some interesting headlines on the front page. To start with, we were told by the left-hand topper that “Blizzards (are) a big part of global warming.” True, I had joked with my neighbor after this month’s big storm that we now had 26 more inches of global warming to get out of our driveways, but no, these folks were serious, God bless their power-aggrandizing little hearts. Then, down toward the bottom of the page, we were informed that Obamacare is in a tad of difficulty, because the “Health law’s backers fear higher costs.” Remember the toddler in…

When President Obama traveled to Minnesota Feb. 4 to make a plea for gun control, the photos of him delivering his speech struck a note that had to be intentional on his part – but perhaps carried a second message that he didn’t intend. Behind Obama on the stage was a solid phalanx of uniforms, as dozens of police officers – and no one else – provided his backdrop. It seems obvious that the president intended to convey the message that the forces of law and order were solidly behind his drive to ban military-style semi-automatic weapons falsely called “assault…

President Obama has made his leftist goals explicit in a pair of major national addresses (his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention and his recent Inaugural Address). As John Fund said in a column on National Review Online Feb. 4, “The country may be catching on: Barack Obama is our first knee-jerk liberal president. And now that he will never face the voters again, he doesn’t mind showing it.” Fund quoted an Obama supporter: “‘There is a deep recognition that he has a short period of time to get a lot done,’ says Jennifer Psaki, Obama’s 2012 campaign spokeswoman.”…

There’s one thing about our immigration policy that is an absolute necessity for any progress to be made on the issue: securing our southern border against illegal trespass. And, of course, that’s why President Obama made it clear Tuesday in Las Vegas that his administration has no intention of creating an ironclad way of keeping people from crossing the Mexican border illegally. Why is it so important? Because no matter what we do about “approved residency permits” providing “legal work opportunities” that will progress to “paths to green card status” that will eventually offer “a track to citizenship” with a…

It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone to be told that when liberal politicians and green lobbying groups say they object to “tar sands oil,” no matter what they say about it, the part of that term that they object to the most is “oil.” The “tar sands” part is just a handy club that people such as Portland’s Mayor Michael Brennan, a number of his colleagues on the City Council and groups like Environment Maine and the Natural Resources Council of Maine use to further their efforts to keep Maine from ever being asked to help distribute…

Conan O’Brien said last week that the mayor of Washington, D.C., had asked the owner of the Washington Redskins football team to change the team’s name because it was offensive. Well, the owner has agreed, and the team will now be called the Maryland Redskins. So, letting that joke stand for continuing poll results showing people’s general disdain for Washington, let’s look at some state and national issues. In addition to my own thoughts, I want to express my debt to a few commentators on present-day events, including, among others, Yuval Levin, Hertog fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy…

Some ironies are just too delicious to ignore, and one of them is that Matt Damon’s new anti-fracking movie “Promised Land” is partially financed by a foreign country. But not just any foreign country. Instead, the financier in this case is Persian Gulf OPEC member Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Yes, Mideast oil barons are conspiring with Hollywood liberals in trying to scare Americans into rejecting a technology that would help liberate the United States from their conspiracy to keep oil prices as high as possible. While lagging box office figures show the film is “bombing,”…

When the going gets tough, the tough take their fun where they can find it. So, rather than dwell on the mess in Washington to no good effect, let’s look instead at a few things that happened over the past couple of weeks that show liberals are hitting at least a few speed bumps as they drag the nation deeper into darkness. While President Obama’s Lidless Eye may have pried the One Ring out of Frodo Romney’s fingers on the way to Mt. Doom, one sparkly bit remaining to conservatives is that the former information monopoly exercised by the major…

“If you don’t want to have a gun in your home or in your school, that’s your choice. But don’t be such a damn fool as to advertise to the whole world that you are in ‘a gun-free environment’ where you are a helpless target for any homicidal fiend who is armed. Is it worth a human life to be a politically correct moral exhibitionist?” — Thomas Sowell Normally, I would be the first one to rush into print with a column about “gun control” whenever the topic hit the news, but after Newtown I thought better about it. First,…

Numerous commentators, with Fox’s Bill O’Reilly chief among them, are busy this time of year building up the idea that contemporary American culture has been carrying on a “War on Christmas.” In support of this view, its proponents cite example after example of demands to remove crèche scenes from public property; officials canceling Christmas concerts in public schools (or renaming them Winter concerts, while limiting them to songs like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”); or leaders calling a Christmas tree a “Holiday Tree,” as the governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chaffee, was recently caught doing. One North Carolina elementary school even…

We’re all familiar with the way many high school and college football teams enter the field at the start of a game: Running in a pack from the sidelines, they crash through a big paper barrier inscribed with slogans such as “Go Termagants!” or “Smash the Wombats!” as cheerleaders and fans scream their support. Keep that paper barrier in mind, because it is a highly appropriate symbol of the kind of wafer-thin resistance to bust-the-budget liberalism that has now surfaced in some purportedly right-wing circles. As Rush Limbaugh said this week, we can apparently “no longer stand in the way…

It seems fair to say that, as recently as a month ago, you could have walked down any city street, rural road, back-country byway or meandering cowpath in the entire nation, asking everyone you encountered the highly newsworthy question, “Who is Grover Norquist?” and you would wear out many, many pairs of shoes before getting even one accurate answer. Now, however, this Grover (the activist who still has a job, unlike the unemployed Muppet formerly appearing on Sesame Street) is on everyone’s lips, the object of this month’s two-minute hate from liberals and the recipient of everything from staunch support…

Here’s a headline seen on forbes.com on Nov. 25: “Do You Live in a Death Spiral State?” Unfortunately for residents of the Pine Tree State, the answer is “yes.” Maine is on the magazine’s list of 11 states that are “danger spots for investors,” who can look forward to “a rising tax burden, deteriorating state finances and an exodus of employers,” according William Baldwin, who covers investment strategies for Forbes. It didn’t take long to find verification of that claim, as the proof was to be found in the lead headline on the front page of the Portland Press Herald on Nov.…

There’s a story told about the ancient, fabled Eastern European Jewish city of Chelm, in which the elders of the community hired a young and impecunious young man to sit at the main city gate and keep watch for the Messiah. The months went on and turned into years, and the seasons changed time after time, summer to autumn to winter to spring and then summer again, while the young man, now somewhat older, sat faithfully at the gate, watching down the road to announce the arrival of the Messiah when he came. After a considerable time had gone by,…

A new study says there are five specific warning signs for developing Alzheimer’s disease. The first one is going bald, but I can’t seem to recall the other four. MEANWHILE, IN THE world our leaders inhabit, people are wondering how different things might have been if CIA director and former four-star general David Petraeus hadn’t mistaken a topical underarm testosterone applicator for his deodorant stick. Most of us wouldn’t fall into the trap he did. I mean, how likely is it that the person writing our biographies will be a hero-worshipping fitness fanatic and West Point graduate who wants to…

Well, at least Big Bird is safe. OK, that wasn’t all that funny. But there isn’t much that is this week, whose glorious achievements found their fitting culmination when TV commentator Chris Matthews expressed gratitude for a storm that killed more than 100 people because Hurricane Sandy seemed to help put his favored candidate in a positive light and thus aided in his re-election. (Yes, he later apologized. One should not always tell people what one really believes, after all.) Beyond that, there are lots of things to say about Tuesday’s election, some of them unprintable, but one of the…

When Halloween is over, the masks come off, at least for trick-or-treaters. Thus, it’s also a good time to note that the masks have come off a substantial number of people on the left who want to restore the tax rates that were in place before they were cut under President George W. Bush. In addition, they don’t want to do anything about the “sequester” of federal programs, including huge defense cuts amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years, that will go into place unless they are blocked by lawmakers. This highly unpleasant eventuality, due…

Reading the encomiums to the late Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota in the paper and on the web this week, one would think that it were he, and not Teddy Kennedy, who deserved the title “Liberal Lion of the Senate.” But, as they described the former 1972 Democratic presidential candidate as having a mild and soft-spoken demeanor, quite the opposite of Kennedy’s blustering demagoguery, perhaps “Liberal Pussycat of the Senate” might have been more appropriate for McGovern. It’s not the intent of this column to violate the Latin maxim, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum,” which means “Say nothing but…

I was a bit surprised a few days ago to see that the national Democratic Party had spent some of its Senate-race boodle on an anti-Charlie Summers ad that calls him a “tea party candidate.” It was news to me, but I also know that if they thought they could smear a Republican by calling him a sympathizer of the “discredited Bull Moose Party” or a “recently-out-of-the-closet Whig,” they would have done it, no matter how ridiculous it sounded. In fact, I was wondering why they were saying something nice about the guy, until I realized that they actually did…

It was recently suggested that Mitt Romney go to California to hold another press event in front of a gas station sign advertising regular gas at $6 a gallon. He could then say, “This is the future of the entire United States if Obama is re-elected.” Actually, we would be lucky as to keep it at that level by the time 2016 rolled around. Such a move would echo the time when Romney held a news conference in front of the closed Solyndra headquarters to show the futility of governmental attempts to “pick winners and losers” without considering the realities of…

Sometimes, you hear a grand and glorious rant delivered by someone who’s had it up to his hairline with whatever situation is raising his blood pressure to boiling. At other times, you encounter somebody passionately offering a deadly serious warning about a situation that all those within range of his voice need to respond to for their own good. But what happens when both types of speech are a single commentary delivered by just one person? That’s what took place late last month, when former Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell told a conference sponsored by a conservative media-watch group, “We’re at…

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”           — Abraham Lincoln You’d think—or perhaps a better word would be “hope”—that executives in charge of the nation’s major media outlets would look over the latest surveys about the public’s lack of confidence in their job performance and then engage in some deep soul-searching about how to improve that poor evaluation. Unfortunately, that’s not a very likely outcome. If those executives were…

The problem a lot of conservatives have with Mitt Romney’s campaign to date—as opposed to problems with Mitt Romney as a conservative, which was the topic of a couple of previous columns—is that he seems to lack what is sometimes called “an instinct for the jugular.” And that judgment is rendered in the context of a nation in such terrible shape that there appears to be no real reason why he should not be ahead of President Obama by five or 10 points in the polls. And yet, even in those polls where Romney does lead, the gap between them…

By M.D. Harmon Maine Wire columnist Among the continual questions being asked of us squeeze-the-federal-government-until-its-beady-little-eyes-bug-out-fiscal-responsibility types is the big-spenders’ supposed clincher: “Well, tell us exactly where you’d start cutting all the valuable and important things that the Big Money Spigot in Washington showers down on us.” Okay, here’s one (but just one). There was an Associated Press story this week that gave us a good place to start chopping (right after repealing Obamacare, which has to be the utmost, highest, most immediate top priority for a Romney administration): Amtrak. If it weren’t for political influence, it’s hard to see…

The polls continue to find that voters’ attention remains focused on the economy—not so much in the sense of Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” as in, “It’s the stupid economy.” And that matters a great deal to the group most often viewed as the one most up for grabs in November, the so-called “50-plussers.” They are those either retired or close enough to retirement to be very aware of how their plans for the future are being wrenched out of shape by two powerful forces. The first one is what’s going on in the stock market, their employers’ retirement…

Imagine that, as you are contemplating the purchase of a new house, you are visited by your insurance agent. He asks about the details of your potential purchase and then says, “Here’s what I can offer you for a policy to protect your new home from fire, flood, theft and wind damage.” “No, thanks,” you say. “I can’t imagine I would ever need such a policy, so I’m not going to waste my money on one.” “Um,” says the agent, “do you understand that without such a policy, your new home will be at risk of damage, even total destruction,…

“Paul Ryan represents Obama’s most horrifying nightmare: Math!” — David Burge, blogging as “Iowahawk” By M.D. Harmon Conservative activists are starting to show up at rallies wearing T-shirts displaying a red-and-blue image of Rep. Paul Ryan in imitation of the famous Obama poster—but in this case, the word underneath the image isn’t “HOPE.” It’s “MATH.” That fits something else Burge had blogged recently, a simple, direct sentence that said, “You know what will kill Medicare as we know it? Medicare as we know it.” Which is the most direct way I’ve seen yet of expressing a truth that may be…

Are government subsidies to business a net benefit to the economy—or a net loss? A new study from a libertarian think tank sheds some light on that question. But, before we get to that, recall that one piece of evidence on the loss side I mentioned last week was that administration officials had said in sworn testimony that the Treasury Department had no role in denying pensions to 20,000 non-union members of Delphi Inc., a major parts supplier to General Motors, in the federal bailout of GM in 2009. Emails discovered two weeks ago contradicted that testimony, saying that the…

How corrupt is our federal government under Barack Obama? You can get a measure of that from the things politicians are willing to do that don’t violate the law (necessarily, at least — there are still some open questions) and yet serve to maintain or increase their personal power and influence. A full list would run to the length of a book, but let’s recall a few that have been in the news and then move on to things that happened just in the past couple of weeks. An administration that thinks it is a good idea to give guns…

“You may not be interested in war. But war is interested in you.” –Attributed to Leon Trotsky Sometimes falsely attributed “quotations,” such as the one above, take on a life of their own because they still resonate with a core of truth. After all, Edmund Burke never directly said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” but the self-evident reality of that statement has kept it alive and kicking for nearly two centuries. And both statements apply to what’s going on in the Middle East today. Sadly, only one of the…

Now that a week has passed since the murder of 12 people with firearms in the hands of a lunatic in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., there are some useful conclusions to be drawn. ~ The first set is (forgive me) philosophical, because what happened there is not a tragedy. A tragedy, in this context, is when a hurricane wipes out a city, or tornados flatten schools, homes and trailer parks all over the Midwest. The destruction, injuries and fatalities caused by earthquakes, volcano eruptions, floods and tsunamis are tragic in the applicable sense of the word: They involve…

I guess, if I had to stand in a crowd listening to President Obama brag about what he’s done so far and what he plans to do in the next four years if he’s reelected, I might faint too. News reports said that upwards of 20 people fainted at a speech he gave last week in hot, muggy weather in Roanoke, Va. Either the heat or the power of the president’s presence (your choice) apparently had members of the crowd toppling over like tenpins. So, the president told his prostrate partisans that if they needed help, “the paralegals” would come…

Gov. Paul LePage has said he was sorry for his comment likening the Internal Revenue Service to the “Gestapo” (in the IRS’ new role as the collector of taxes owed in lieu of buying health insurance under Obamacare). Since the history of the Geheime Staatspolizei (“Secret State Police”) is one of terror, blood and death using techniques of unspeakable horror in the service of a brutal tyranny, he had no choice but to backtrack on the specific reference. Too many people are still around who suffered, or whose forebears suffered, at the hands of Hitler’s evil minions. Such people did…

Now that the battle over the nationalization of U.S. health care is fully engaged, with the outcome to be determined by whether or not the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government after Jan. 20, 2013, it’s worth casting a look elsewhere to see what might be in store for us if the GOP’s effort fails. Progressives are more than fond of telling Americans how this nation’s health care system is a failure, with millions left uncovered by formal insurance and with the “poor and needy” continually left behind in the quest for a doctor’s attention outside…

The U.S. Supreme Court, as the apex of one of the three branches of government laid out in the Constitution, has had a history fraught with controversy. There never was, and never will be, any way for the court system to avoid that controversy, because it has a dual role that some critics fail to appreciate and others simply ignore. While in theory the appellate courts — and particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, called “Scotus” in journalistic parlance — rule on disputes over the meanings of laws (as opposed to the matters of fact that the lower…

Climate-change enthusiasts (aka “warmists”) are gathering this week in Brazil for the U.N.’s big “Rio+20” conference involving a reported 193 nations. They are seeking to upgrade their funding to replace the Kyoto Pact and fulfill the mostly unachieved goals of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro “Earth Summit,” some of which are listed in a document called “Agenda 21.” Under Kyoto, a number of governments (but not the United States) formally agreed to reduce their carbon emissions to levels not seen for most of the past 50 to 100 years. A Canadian paper, the Globe and Mail, reported Wednesday (Rio+20’s opening…

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride” In a June 4 article, The Associated Press took to task conservatives who use the word “socialist” to describe President Obama’s economic views. In what some view as a news analysis — and others might be tempted to think was a blatant attempt to protect Obama from political damage — AP staff writer David Crary cited references to the president as a socialist from various Republican contenders for the GOP’s presidential nomination (though Mitt Romney refused to use…

Mitt Romney told Wisconsin’s once-and-future governor, Scott Walker, that his seven-point win in the recall election that state employee unions forced on the voters there on Tuesday would have an impact “far beyond Wisconsin.” Even, one would hope, as far east as Maine. There are parallels between the political cultures of the Badger State and the Pine Tree State. Both have historically been dominated by liberals, Maine for decades and Wisconsin (the home of the Progressive movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries) for generations. Thus, both voted heavily for President Obama in the 2008 election, and were…

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of the Interior Department, is considering loosening regulations on the killing of bald eagles, the national bird of the United States, to accommodate the development of wind energy sources.” — The Heritage Foundation National Review columnist Jay Nordlinger was driven almost apoplectic this week by that quote, which for him showed just how much we are willing to sacrifice to please so-called “green energy” concerns — including making it easier to kill our national symbol, the bald eagle, a (presumably) protected species. Nordlinger’s right, of course, but the folly of spending untold…

As I read the news this week, I’m starting to get nostalgic for 1968: I see cops in Chicago trying to control protesters who are raging around the city destroying property and violating the public peace. In this case, it wasn’t a Democratic national convention plagued by anti-Vietnam protesters screaming “Dump the Hump!” in opposition to Hubert Horatio Humphrey’s nomination (Triple-H, a former Minnesota senator and Lyndon B. Johnson’s vice president, lost the election to Richard Nixon, in case you don’t recall, or, for that matter, don’t care). This time around, it’s a bunch of “peaceful, idealistic” Occupy rioters objecting…

For months now, we have been told in numerous ways that Mitt Romney is going to have to “tack back to the center” once he gets the Republican nomination nailed down. In this view, Romney is seen as having had to convince conservative primary voters that he was one of them. But now that all his opponents have choked in his dust (the last one, Rep. Ron Paul, stopped spending money on future primaries this week), he is free, as the GOP’s “presumptive nominee,” to reach out to independents and moderates. They presumably make up the largest group of voters…

People pondering the business-friendliness of Maine’s tax and regulatory policies should be paying attention to another pair of reports this week that didn’t have much good to say about the state’s ability to attract outside investment. The state-by-state reports, published Tuesday on the web site of the Institute for Justice (which calls itself “the nation’s only libertarian, non-profit, public-interest law firm,” online at www.ij.org), dealt with the impact of government regulations on a state’s friendliness to entrepreneurs wanting to begin or expand commercial activity. Unfortunately, as shown by other surveys, including recent ones on Maine’s overall business climate and its inability…

It’s difficult to understand many things about the ins and outs of politics if you’re not involved in it every day. People in Augusta and Washington do things that make many ordinary folks — especially taxpayers — scratch their heads and say, “Now, what were they thinking when they did that?” And few things hereabouts occasion that sort of bewilderment more than this state’s historic tax policies and practices — that is, the ones generally set by Democrats, or at least the “progressives” (read: liberals) among their number. Especially since the results of those policies are so self-evidently counterproductive at so…

Every time I write about polling data, I feel the need to point out that opinion polls are not prophecies, they are snapshots. As long as the questions are well-crafted to reveal specific opinions about the ostensible topic of the poll; the respondents are selected to represent a fair demographic breakdown of the target population; and the poll results are reported honestly (and any or all of these criteria are challenges for some widely reported surveys), then you can get a fairly reliable picture of what people were thinking at the time the poll was conducted. What you can’t do…

By now you’ve heard the story of Democrat Rep. Chuck Kruger and his tweet saying he would like to see former president Cheney meet, “the same final end he gave Sadaam.” The democrats in the legislature didn’t denounce the tweet, didn’t ask him to resign, and more or less pretended it never happened. Now, another democrat legislator is getting some attention for her “civility.” A couple days ago, The Bangor Daily News ran an opinion piece from Jill Saxby, the head of the Maine Council of Churches, a group that says it is an, “ecumenical community of nine denominations dedicated to the…

The current ginned-up controversy over “stand your ground” laws in Florida and elsewhere is actually a testament to the growing influence of that portion of the civil liberties movement that is focused on the Second Amendment. The chief, but certainly not the sole, agent of that growth in effectiveness is the National Rifle Association, of which I have been a member since 1967, when I took the proceeds of my first military paycheck and sent in the requisite $100 that a life membership then cost. (It was a fourth of my monthly gross pay, so it was a substantial amount.)…

The sad, wry joke that goes, “How can you tell a politician is lying? His lips are moving,” is a moldy oldie that persists in the public mind because it expresses Americans’ views about the quality of political discourse on all sides of the aisle. Politicians don’t always lie, but they quite commonly over-promise: Every campaign season begins with promises to slow the rise of the oceans, send enough people to the moon to make it a state or produce a balanced federal budget with a nip here and a tuck there that will produce fiscal reform without any pain.…

The worldview that says it’s a good idea to force others to contribute to private causes that they oppose appears to be more popular in Maine than in many other places. The current example is a bill submitted to the Legislature last year that was held over to the present session and came up for a public hearing April 4: LD 309, an anti-forced-unionism measure otherwise known as a “right-to-work” law. Such laws are hardly unique; they are found in 23 states, most of them in the Rockies, the Midwest and the South. The most recent state to pass an…

“I had a dream last night, About the comin’ fight. Somebody yelled ‘Attack!’ And there I stood With an arrow in my back!” — Larry Verne, “Please Mr. Custer (I Don’t Wanna Go)” I don’t know exactly why I got nervous hearing the president of the United States tell Dmitri Medvedev, the right-hand man to Russian President (and former KGB honcho) Vladimir Putin that if the Russkis would just be patient until he got past next November’s election, Obama would find it possible to do the things that accountability to the American people won’t let him do right now. Now…

Gov. Paul LePage, who just can’t keep his hand off “third-rail” issues, grabbed on to another one when he proposed to do away with the state’s contribution to the Maine Public Broadcasting Network in his proposed budget for the coming biennium. He even went so far as to call the spending “corporate welfare.” Like the chirping of the many birds now filling the trees around Chez Harmon, the cries of anguished liberals ascended to the heavens in terms that would make even angels weep. This is a symphony that has been played before, and the appropriate players filled their roles…

Those of us in the opinionating business are often accused (not always incorrectly) of overselling the usual twists and turns of politics by uniformly describing them as world-shaking events that will produce utterly shattering ill effects unless they are countered, rejected or overturned. Well, Obamacare, conservatives’ shorthand name for the administration’s massive rewrite of the U.S. health care system, really is one of those future-altering events, and people who pay attention to politics on all sides of the spectrum know it, even if those who favor it tend to downplay the changes it will bring. We’ve been finding out over…

It’s a cliché that Americans love their cars, but there’s a group of our fellow countrymen who don’t. They’re called liberal environmentalists, and everything they’ve done during those times when they have achieved political power shows they despise the internal combustion engine, which may be the most liberating and economically beneficial device ever invented. The issue of how people can best get from place to place is complex and multifaceted, but the free market is perfectly capable of resolving it. Or at least it has been, until the government decided that its preferences and priorities should overrule those of its citizens.…

An acquaintance and I have had a recurring conversation over the years on the wisdom of conservatives’ support for Sen. Olympia Snowe. We share the same basic worldview, so we both approached the question from the same general political and social positions. But we differed on whether voting for Olympia was something conservatives should do. My position was that I valued the times she supported conservative economic goals, but her opposition to some solid fiscal policies and nearly every conservative social goal made it impossible to vote for her in good conscience. Thus, while I voted for her the first…

I was drowned, I was washed up and left for dead I fell down to my feet and I saw they bled. I frowned at the crumbs of a crust of bread. I was crowned with a spike right through my head. But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas! I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas, gas, gas! — The Rolling Stones Americans really can’t be blamed if they think that “drowned, washed up and left for dead” and “crowned with a spike right through my head” are good ways to describe the impact of filling up…

Ever since horror director George Romero created “Night of the Living Dead” in 1968, brain-eating zombies have had a grip on the nation’s (fevered?) imagination. Along with vampires and werewolves, currently competing for teenagers’ attention in books and movies depicting monsters as romantic heroes, zombies (which so far haven’t reached heart-throb status — well, except that they regard throbbing hearts as snack food) lurch, creep and stagger through our movies and TVs daily. Productions like “The Walking Dead,” “28 Days” and “I Am Legend,” among many others, along with remakes of Romero’s iconic films, including a recent version of “Dawn…

A number of things are interesting about the recent (and unsuccessful, though apparently still continuing) campaign by the environmental Left to put a referendum question on the ballot this fall. The initiative would require that Maine’s electric power mix contain 20 percent more “renewable sources” by 2020 than the 35 percent it does now (and the 40 percent it will in a few more years). First, let’s say the obvious: Maine’s natural environment is a valuable resource, and it is cleaner than it used to be, thanks to initiatives dating back half a century. Antipollution efforts should be preserved and…

I had the oddest feeling watching TV as Gov. Paul LePage entered the well of the Maine House of Representatives for his State of the State address on Tuesday. It took me a while to identify it, it had been so long since I had felt something like that on previous occasions. Then I recognized it. I was proud of the guy. Yeah, I know. You read the papers, you listen to the news, you know how you are supposed to react. Well, I have never reacted the way I was told about him, from the time I first met…

Last week we looked at what gloomy liberals thought would happen if President Obama lost in November, and found considerable cause for joy in their pessimism. But now we turn right to see what conservatives think could occur if he wins. It’s a journey from sunshine into shadow, but it doesn’t have to play out that way. There are, however, lots of non-rosy scenarios, and plenty of facts to support them. With the Heritage Foundation saying the United States has dropped to 10th place in the world in overall economic freedom, our nation faces a new challenge to its liberty that…

People who write about politics often assume an aura of certainty about future events that they wouldn’t be claiming if they knew what was good for them. However, because those of us who write about politics seldom, if ever, know what’s good for us, we continue to pretend we have prognostic skills denied to ordinary mortals. But since we don’t know what is going to happen in this fall’s national election (and if we did, we wouldn’t be sitting here writing, we’d be mortgaging Chez Harmon to bet with anyone willing to go the other way), we have to couch…

“South of the Border, down Mexico way …” is a perfect song to lead into this column, if you understand the Mexico reference to be the town across the river from Rumford instead of the dysfunctional nation across the river from Brownsville. That’s because the border that’s been making the most interesting news recently isn’t the one on the Rio Grande. It’s the one over our heads, the “longest undefended border in the world,” as it was called when I was a kid and the World Trade Center had yet to be built, let alone destroyed. Crossing over has gotten…

With just a bit more than 10 months left before we choose a president and most of Congress, the 2012 campaign for the Oval Office and Capitol Hill is kicking off for real with Tuesday’s presidential caucuses in Iowa (terribly unrepresentative though they are). With Barack Obama stockpiling his millions upon millions, there’s no doubt about his running again. The interest is all on the Republican side, but the problem is that the interest is getting less and less interesting. For those few of you who haven’t figured it out yet, I am a conservative first and a Republican only…

What she wrote on Dec. 13 has become hugely controversial. She’s been accused of being a racist; she’s gotten five marriage proposals; Ann Coulter, her role model, tweeted her with an attagirl; her column got 2,686 comments as of Dec. 21 on a conservative website; the Bangor Daily News’ “Maine Debate” blog had 212 replies on the same date when it listed the column for comment; and she’s not the least bit apologetic about what she wrote. And all she did was report for a site called “The College Conservative,“ a project of Young Americans for Freedom (as a college…

At a time when books and films about vampires and werewolves are enjoying a renaissance, at least among teen readers, those of us who are more advanced in years may remember that monsters created by science once fascinated readers and viewers, too. The most famous, of course, was Frankenstein’s monster, brought to life from dead body parts with a stolen criminal’s brain guiding its depredations. One 1933 film, based on a 1897 story by Victorian science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells, starred the famous Claude Rains in a part he inhabited while (mostly) unseen. The movie was “The Invisible Man,” with…

When the talk at the corner bar turns to bias in the media, the conversation usually devolves very quickly to conservatives saying they never get a fair shake, and the liberals replying, “Oh, yeah? What about Fox News? Fox News! FOX NEWS!” This column will try to start out at a higher level than that, and what could be a more exalted entry in the you-and-the-equine-you-rode-in-on sweepstakes than this blog comment, which was posted on Al Diamon’s DownEast magazine site, Media Mutt, on Nov. 18. The author, who identified himself (or herself) only as “Midcoast Editor,” was commenting on Diamon’s…