Search query: maine

For the last several years, I’ve been spending time in rural Wisconsin in a small farmhouse set on 130 heavily-wooded acres on County Road T, Polk County. This is the northwestern Wisconsin of hardscrabble dairy farming, bitter winters and luminous springs. I’ve come here because my companion — a Minnesota-born outdoorsman of Swedish extraction who lived much of his adult life in Alaska and wears a thin fleece jacket in the cold while I layer up in Canadian Goose — inherited this property from

On Page D1, April 14, in the Portland Press Herald, the headline on Jim Fossel’s column states: “Simplification of tax code would achieve bipartisan goals.” The other, on Brian Klaas’ commentary, reads: “Can America survive scandal overload?” First, may We the People have a tax code that meets America’s goals, not bipartisan ones. Second, we live in the Age of Nixon-Like Scandals, but the 2020 election is not, in Klaas’ words, “our last” or first “line of defense.” It’s a party-directed offens

San Diego, Calif.- San Diego City Councilman Mark Kersey announced on his Twitter page he is shifting political parties from Republican to Independent. Kersey wrote the highly partisan state of both major political parties dissuaded him from identifying with either one. He also said the decision is one he has been “wrestling with” for a while. “Make no mistake: both parties have plenty of good and decent members,” Kersey said. “But today’s political climate rewards ideologues, not problem-solv

They say it’s impossible to predict the future, but we all know that history has a way of repeating itself, and the pre-determined outcome of the 2020 race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination is crystal clear to anyone who wants to be honest with themselves. ALSO READ: DNC to Court: We Are a Private Corporation With No Obligation to Follow Our Rules The Democratic Party has designed ways to keep Sanders from securing the nomination. Their plan consists of four interrelated st

Everyday, we hear from another candidate that if only we elect them, they will unite the country and solve our problems. But there’s a bigger reason why only 9% have confidence in Congress. It is because our election system incentivizes partisanship by making candidates, regardless of party, accountable to the voters in their party, not to the electorate in general. So, unless a candidate is going to unrig the system, calls for unity are just empty rhetoric. That’s one reason why the Indepen

An Update on the Lindbergh Intermodal Transportation Center (ITC) Option By Carl Nettleton The San Diego Association of Government’s (SANDAG) leadership in developing a proposed Grand Central Station to link San Diego International Airport with regional ground transportation modes is an important initiative whose time is long overdue. The options for the Grand Central Station concept have been reduced to the Navy’s SPAWAR facility and a location called the Intermodal Transportation Center, bot

On Monday, the South lawn of the White House will host the 141st version of the egg roll that began in 1878 under the Administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes. Easter Egg Roll 2018 That's the official year the egg roll began but historians say informal festivities began with egg-rolling parties under President Abraham Lincoln. The egg roll became so popular that President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill that banned the rolling of eggs on Capitol grounds, citing landscape concerns. War

San Diego, Calif.- By a vote of 5-4, the San Diego City Council is moving forward with efforts to place the convention center expansion measure on the 2020 March primary ballot, moving it from the 2020 November General ballot. The next step is for an ordinance to be drafted and then voted on by the council at an upcoming meeting. The decision blows a hole in the 2016 voter approved Measure L, which stipulated all citizens initiatives should be placed on November General election ballots. Meas

San Diego, Calif.- It's exceedingly difficult to get 66% of voters to agree that the sun rises in the east, which makes it all the more impressive that in November 2016, 65.79% of voters approved Measure L, the law that puts all initiatives on November ballots by default to ensure they’re decided in elections where the most voters participate. San Diego voters agreed that the core ideas of Measure L, that San Diego's biggest civic decisions are made when the most voters are participating, in th

Seven score and sixteen years ago, President Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most memorable speeches in all of human history in his Gettysburg Address, though he wrongly presumed the world would not “long remember what we say here.” His triumph was to clarify just what was at stake in such a devastating internal war that killed around 750,000 Americans. “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and