Sep 3 2014

What He Said

Sometimes it’s just nice to get an “atta boy” when you’ve been working hard at something, isn’t it? Moments of affirmation have a way of easing the toil required for accomplishments to materialize. I’m sure it was a special moment for Governor LePage when Eliot Cutler issued a press release this past week just to show his approval of all the hard work the Governor has put in to reforming the welfare system.

Ah, the proverbial olive branch. Heartwarming, ‘tis true, but a little surprising, you say, to give up positive endorsements of your opponent’s policies while trying to oust him from the Blaine House? Yes, it does seem like a fruitless endeavor, or does it?

You see, Eliot Cutler, in the heat and desperation of battle, is reverting to one of the basic mantras of the Democrat Party, which is, “Make a mess of things, Blame the Republicans, Wait for the Republicans to clean it up, Then take the credit for it”. This should not be confused with the better-known Democrat mantra, “Lie like a thick shag rug.” So this week, in revealing his plan on reforming welfare, Cutler announced, in so many words, that everything Governor LePage has done, he will do, and everything Governor LePage wanted to do, he will do, and if you elect him as Governor he will take the credit for everything that Governor LePage has done to reform welfare, because, well, they’re just plain good ideas. And we wouldn’t want a Republican to get credit for that, would we?

He’s such a good little Democrat and stealthy, too! No, Eliot is no independent. He is the stealth Democrat to be sure.

Ohh, some of you are fuming! You are so cynical, you Maine Conservative Voice….guy. Well, let’s take a closer look at Eliot Cutler’s “Plan”. Oh, you wonder what Mike Michaud’s plan is? Well…he…doesn’t have….one. He’s been too distracted asking the CBO for ways to slash veterans health benefits and too confused wondering whether it’s Nancy Pelosi or John Martin who’s supposed to tell him what to say on this issue.

So here is some of the LePage/Cutler welfare reform plan, or the “What He Said” Plan.

Prohibit Purchases of Alcohol, Tobacco, Lottery Tickets, and Posting Bail.   Yes, Governor LePage introduced this first (LD 1822), but Democrats opposed it. Governor LePage also prohibited the use of EBT cards at liquor stores, gambling facilities, and adult venues. He’s such a grumpy killjoy!

Promote a Tiered Reduction in Welfare. If this sounds familiar, you are right. Paul LePage campaigned on this his first time around. Eliot heard so much of it on the campaign trail; it must have grown on him. This was one major point of the Governor’s campaign and was also introduced as bills by two Republicans, Ken Fredette and Mel Newendyke. The Democrats killed both bills.

TurboCharge TANF Assessments. The Lepage Administration has already been issuing assessments to TANF, moving recipients into the workforce, much to the chagrin of Democrats.

Make Education Pay. LePage made Maine the 44th State to put a 5-year cap on TANF. This cut the TANF rolls in half and a portion of the savings was used to increase funding for the Departments of Labor and Education.

Link Public Assistance to Family Responsibility. In 2011, Republican lawmakers and the Governor imposed strict sanctions for rule violations. This included loss of adult benefits for a first offense, and full family sanction for a second. Recently, the Governor has required that able-bodied recipients volunteer, work, or go to school as a condition for benefits, as well as drug testing.

Improve Accountability at DHHS. The Governor has already cut unnecessary staff positions and hired eight new welfare fraud investigators. He has implemented a new policy that insures private insurance is used before Medicaid, consolidated offices within the Department, and made welfare fraud a Class D crime. Maine now conforms to the Federal law in suspension of payments to MaineCare providers who commit fraud, and the list goes on.

Recent polling shows that an overwhelming number of Maine residents are demanding welfare reform, which is probably the reason for Eliot Cutler’s “Plan”. While he must be commended for copying and pasting many of the Governor’s ideas, he is a little late to the party. Perhaps, we’d better let the man who is already fixing the problem continue his work, not a Johnny Come Lately.

Aug 27 2014

Busy as a Beaver?

The beaver holds great significance in the lore of the Torbett family. No animal has had more impact and remains more spoken of, with a wry grin, in the dwellings of Grandpa Torbett’s descendants, for it was the beavers that started the war. Yes, the great beaver war of Lisbon, Connecticut.

 It was not a war that caused much of a stir for the rest of Lisbon, other than when officers arrived to inform my grandfather, while trying to suppress their laughter, that he could not fire his shotgun at the taunting rodents within the city limits. Still, it was the beavers that fired the first volley. It was a small, but very personal war between Grandpa and a band of marauding beavers, which had crept up from the marsh behind the house to invade Grandpa’s gardens.

 Yes, the garden was the battlefield. The beavers had dammed the slow moving bog, and the marshy waters had begun to encroach upon the fertile bank where Grandpa had his garden. The beavers also developed a taste for cultivated vegetables and they wreaked havoc on everything in their path as they searched for their preferred leafy delectable.

 Since local authorities had quickly eliminated firearms and, due to some intuitive premonition, had firmly excluded the use of explosives, Grandpa entered this battleground disadvantaged and outnumbered. His first foray was to rip holes in their dam in hopes of lowering the water level away from his garden and somehow encouraging the beavers to move into a more accepting neighborhood. His several attempts at this merely triggered the sense of industry within the little furry bundles of indomitability. He also succeeded in angering them. They retaliated.

 Grandpa soon began to see pieces of his woodpile appearing in the beaver dam to stop up the breaches. The beavers had not only invaded his garden by the marsh, but had now crossed the brook and invaded his home. This was intolerable! It was now open war!

 For months, Grandpa’s daily war with the beavers waged on (the family staunchly contends to this day that Grandpa enjoyed every minute of it), with no visible result save the precipitous depletion of Grandpa’s wood stores. But the beavers got too greedy and sealed their own doom. One late night, the flat-tailed, aquatic bandits made off with a recently purchased 4×8 sheet of half-inch plywood. Grandpa awoke the next morning to see it stuffed defiantly in their dam, blocking the latest Grandpa-induced breached, and mocking him in the glare of the morning sunrise.

 This was the last straw, or sheet. They had crossed the line. Grandpa succumbed to reality, and the advice of children and grandchildren, and called the game wardens to live-trap the beavers and move them to a more hospitable location. (I would suspect that some of you are thinking they moved them in right next door to you.)

 Sadly, we see this humorous, but true story played out here in the politics of Maine. The policies of our Governor have begun to tear breaches in the dam of the river of revenue built by zealous Democrats over some forty years. The flow of prosperity and industry has slowly started to move again and the stagnate waters of government bureaucracy have begun to recede away from the gardens, which contain the fruits of the labors of the people of Maine. Mike Michaud is determined to stop this and bring us back to the days when he and his master, John Martin, were taking from the hard earned wages of Mainers, chasing business from the borders of our fair State, and stealing the benefits from senior citizens in order to shore up the dam he and fellow Democrats had built to fill the tax-marsh of wages for big government.

 Not content even to raid our gardens filled with the fruit of our labor; our income, Michaud has crossed the brook into our homes and raided veterans’ benefits, senior citizen funding, and the very basic traditions that we pass down from generation to generation in our families. While the beaver is an amazing creature of industry that sometimes comes in conflict with another amazing creature of industry; humans, the corrupt politician, such as Mike Michaud, that wants your garden of finance and the stores of your homes, is nothing more than a shadowy enemy of the people of Maine.

Aug 4 2014

Crude or Crud

 

 

Some weeks ago, I had a rather pointed conversation with an individual who could no longer abide by what he characterized was the “crude” behavior of the Governor and, as a consequence, was determined to vote a straight Democrat Party line. While I was not convinced that this bluster was necessarily a true deviation from past behavior, it provided a study in contrasts that demands a public exposition across our fair State. So, just in case there are any more individuals who are more than a little flummoxed by the juxtaposition of the, at times, grouchy Governor, who figures if he has the title, he might as well govern and fix some things, against the quiet, pliable and placid forklift-driving doormat, who has spent most of his time in Washington in the shadow of Nancy Pelosi, pinned beneath the sharp point of her high heel, let’s compare the two, shall we?

 

Governor LePage has been criticized by the media and the Democrats for being pushy and demanding. He wants things accomplished. He says so in no uncertain terms. His forward ways may offend some, but the accomplishments speak for themselves.

 

The Governor demanded that the hospitals be paid and, after a long, bitter fight with Democrats, he was able to pay the hospitals. There may be some other organizations that would like some of that uncouth behavior in their ledger books. Yet, the Democrats, with their delicate constitutions in tow, would like to send our hospitals back to the days of trying to administer care under a mountain of mandated debt.

 

In his rough and caustic way, the Governor has ordered that the welfare system of Maine be reformed so that our seniors and most needy will not be left vulnerable. His quiet congenial opponent, Mike Michaud, once voted in the Maine State Senate for a bill that would have raised taxes on seniors’ social security benefits to fund tax breaks for State employees. The bill was so egregious that even liberal Governor Angus King vetoed it. When asked why he voted for such a thing, the pasty politician just walked back into the shadows and ineffectively mumbled that he basically didn’t know why.

 

In 2003, Michaud voted against Medicare Part D, voting, again, against Maine seniors who have used that benefit to afford costly medications. In 2009, he voted for ObamaCare, which has cost seniors $716 billion of Medicare funding in order to fund able-bodied adults. What does Mike Michaud have against senior citizens? At least he speaks quietly and kindly, while he takes benefits from them.

 

While we are on the subject of crude, Mike Michaud has on his staff a man who specializes in crude tweets about women and talks repeatedly about the elimination of Christians. Yet, Mike Michaud has not found the intestinal fortitude within his meek and placid persona to fire this vile person. Hmmm, I wonder how the Governor would handle that? He might just say something crude to him while he was kicking his perverted behind out the door.

 

The contrast goes on. The brash temperament of the Governor stands alongside his passion to reform the State of Maine to a prosperous economy once again. Maine continues to add jobs, in spite of the obstruction of the Democrats, because of the Governor’s tenacity. Do you want strong leaders with the boldness to stand for change, or puppets clothed in temerity; willing to sacrifice brave men in Benghazi, secretly spying on you, and who leave our brave veterans to die in waiting rooms? If you are willing to embrace such failures in leadership simply because the Governor’s rough exterior offends, then there is no nice way to say it; that’s just plain crud!

Jul 21 2014
Image

The Last Beachhead Insurmountable

We have all watched with awe the old war footage of our great American heroes.  Our hearts have broken, yet swelled again with pride, at the courage displayed by our veterans, who charged beachheads straight into withering gunfire, forging through jungles with an enemy lurking behind every frond and tree, surviving the stifling desert heat in the midst of great tank battles, and sloughing through rain and mud to liberate millions around the world.  What has made our military the greatest in the world is the ability of its soldiers to adapt in the field of war to every obstacle, terrain, and tactic the enemy presents, then overcome and move on to victory 

These stories are the legacy of our greatest generation, such as the taking of metal barricades off the beaches of Normandy and welding them to the front of tanks to plow through the giant hedges of France or the Red Ball Express, which became the lifeline to our troops who were pushing into Germany.  Soldiers from sleepy Midwest towns, who probably never dreamed of a jungle, found themselves deep inside the jungle islands of the South Pacific.  No matter the situation, these brave men and women found a way to adapt, survive, and win.

Oftentimes, when fighting on foreign soil in a terrain familiar only to their enemy, the challenge was compounded by the miscalculations of their commanding officers.  Yet, they did not quit. They never gave up.  They found a way to win. There was no challenge, no beachhead, no cliff, and no bulwark that they could not scale and defeat.

The great pride in which we speak of their feats of courage is now shadowed by the grief and knowledge that these veterans of indomitable fortitude have met an obstacle they cannot overcome, a beachhead insurmountable.  This wall impenetrable is the very government they fought to defend.  This jungle of deafening silence is the very Administration that was formed to provide for their quality of life; the Veterans Administration.

The ranking Democrat on the VA is Mike Michaud.  Yes, the Mike Michaud that wants to be Governor of this great State.  He somehow wants us to ignore the deaths of these stalwart veterans, who have died in waiting rooms waiting for a doctor.  This happened on his watch.  He did nothing. 

Mike Michaud expects us to accept his weak explanation of the incompetence of his leadership in the VA and then hand him the reins to our State, which is just beginning to show signs of economic recovery, due to the strong leadership of Governor LePage.  A man voted the most obscure politician in the United States, whose mute leadership in the one bureaucracy to which he was given authority resulting in the deaths and mistreatment of so many of our Country’s finest, is flaunting his negligence in the face of the Maine people, demanding that we somehow turn a blind eye.  This is at best preposterous and at worst reprehensible.

These men and women that we revere sacrificed and overcame so much under such duress only to come home and face that beachhead insurmountable, a bureaucracy under Mike Michaud’s leadership, that no amount of adaptability, bravery, and tenacity could overcome.  They gave so much to defend our freedom that we enjoy.  I think it’s time we defend our veterans and utilize that freedom by voting against Mike Michaud. Let’s make him keenly aware that you can’t treat our veterans in such a deplorable manner and hope to get away with it.  Maine needs a strong, principled leader.  Maine needs Paul LePage!