Dec 14 2011

Hot Potato Couch Potato

 

Hot potato, couch potato

 

Imagine if you will, the following scenario.  Joe Mainer is in the process of trying to support a family.  Joe and his wife have three dependents living at home, one healthy child, one with a debilitating handicap and Joe’s crippled mother, who is confined to a wheelchair.  Despite some financial assistance, the family’s budget is stretched to the maximum with very little room for the unexpected.  I would daresay that this scenario is not fiction for some who read this column.

But the unexpected does happen.  Joe’s 18-year-old son inexplicably drops out of college and moves back home.  Joe Jr. now spends his days on the couch eating, watching TV and railing against the establishment that doesn’t “understand” him.  Mom and Dad love their son.  Stung by his criticism that their dysfunctional parenting has led him to his emotionally crippled state, they try to do his every bidding to “help” him.  But his demands begin to pull funds away from the dependents, which have life threatening needs.

Mr. and Mrs. Mainer are in full crises mode.  In desperation, they use their credit card to bridge the financial gap.  Soon the payments are due.  They don’t have the money and, with mortgage payments and healthcare bills pending or in arrears, they now face a calamity of their own making.  Their friends and neighbors are willing to make a portion of the payments, but the Mainers have to come up with the balance with money they don’t have.  Joe Sr. is faced with a tough decision.  He now can better understand the tough parenting of his parents.

Joe the elder’s parents didn’t care if they were called dysfunctional.  They didn’t care whether their children liked them or not.  Their primary goal in parenting Joe was that he be a responsible hardworking adult. Now the father, Joe must make a very, very difficult decision.

Joe Sr. orders his son out of the house.  He demands that his son get his own job and support himself.  The father understands that, if the healthy adult son isn’t kicked out of the nest, he risks losing the whole nest.

The Governor of Maine faces this very situation with this great State.  For over forty years, Maine’s operating budgets were stretched very thin.  Instead of balancing the budgets, Democrats enabled the debt increasing tactics of the left by creating more pathways to entitlements for all who wished to indulge.  Soon droves of seekers came to bathe in Maine’s entitlement utopia.

The payments have come due.  The Governor is asking the couch potatoes to get off the couch and work before the whole system comes crashing down.  If it does, only the most vulnerable will lose.  The couch potatoes will simply move to a different couch.

As expected, the Democrats are in full uproar as Governor LePage works to balance the books.  These obstructionists have a vested interest in keeping things in crisis mode.  A crisis usually spawns another government bureaucracy. So they are in full attack and no dishonesty is too low.

The Governor wants all healthy childless adults off the dole, from middle aged and no lower than 19.  But Democrats now have redefined middle-aged as “elders” and children as 19-20 year olds.  The State has no money but Democrats rant that if we implement reform we will lose Federal matching funds, which make up 65% of the costs.  It seems the left is comfortable with defaulting on 35% of the DHHS budget.  There is no money to cover the extravagant entitlement spending.  We must stay within our means if we want to continue to protect our State’s most vulnerable.  We must get the couch potatoes out of the nest if we want to save the nest.  Let’s Set Maine Free!

Dec 8 2011

The Stuff of Tyranny

 

The stuff of tyrants

 

The pressure is on.  The intensity is rising and anxiety is mounting.  The sacred golden calf of environmentalists is beginning to creak and groan under the beat of the march of the “villagers”.  Yes, the “villagers”, those scabby little things that dare to own land in the far reaches of eastern and northern Maine.  Those scalawags who rape mother earth with tools that plant gardens, chainsaws that cut down trees and, worst of all, produce offspring that run like little vermin in and out of the pristine lakes and streams of the goddess’ green earth.  Eh gads, the fiends!  Who knows what bodily fluids those little monsters are emitting into the mother’s pools of purity. Ah….weeeell, all I can say is when this guy was a little guy there was no getting me out of the water….okay…..just saying.

While this sarcasm is a little over the top (hard to believe, I know), there is an underlying motive behind many of the left’s passionate arguments in defense of LURC, the Land Use Regulatory Commission.  Many of the more liberal persuasion simply do not believe in landowner rights or perhaps other landowners’ rights.  Amazingly, liberals always find a waiver for their own property, but I digress.  The Founding Father’s unwavering belief that a man’s land was his own to do with as he pleases flies directly in the face of the socialist belief that there are a certain select few who know what is best for everybody else.

A Mr. Ron Joseph recently penned an opinion article for the Bangor Daily.  In this piece, Mr. Joseph bemoans the fact that the hearings to review the effect of LURC on rural areas are being held in the rural areas that are affected by LURC.  Of course, to most of us, that would be common sense, but the retired State and Federal biologist fails to see the obvious here.

Mr. Joseph, in his defense of LURC, reveals the prevailing thought process that was the genesis of LURC. That is, landowners of the North and East wild lands are a danger to the land and cannot be trusted with the stewardship of their own lands; therefore, in order to protect the land at risk from these less than worthy landowners a government bureaucracy most be established that can super-impose the will of more earth-minded people upon the rights of those who own the land.  Mr. Joseph clearly states in his editorial that former members of LURC should be the ones deciding its fate.  He never once acknowledges that these are the very members who ignored the will of landowners in years past.  He refuses to admit that there is a reason that rural Maine has such a negative feeling towards this organization.  Rural Maine has suffered immeasurably under the tyranny of this organization.  The political establishment for years has ignored their cries for help.

Now comes a Governor who is determined to see that rural Maine has a voice.  Now the sacred environmental cow begins to feel the tremble of revolt.  But there is danger in this for the Governor.  If the obstructionist moderates within his own party block the abolishment of this hated commission, he and his party may feel backlash from the very ones who voted him in.

Mr. Joseph started his piece with a quote from Earnest Benn.  “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”  I can’t think of a better description for formation of LURC.  A danger to the earth was created that never was.  LURC was formed to govern that which need not and should not be governed.  Now this behemoth of “government gone bad’ has done immense damage to the towns and villages of rural Maine and allows the persnickety, pompous and prudish elitist the power to dictate to landowners what they can and cannot do with their own property.  This is the stuff of tyranny and is why we cry “Abolish LURC and Set Maine Free”!