Meet with constituents
As reported in the BDN on Feb. 22, Sen. Susan Collins stated at her meeting with the Mainers for Accountable Leadership that the calls to her office requesting her to hold a town meeting are interfering with constituents who need assistance getting through to her staff.
She is confusing cause and effect. She is the one who is clogging her phone lines by not holding town meetings and the calls requesting such meetings are both legitimate and should be encouraged.
In a representative democracy people have a right to meet with their representative. The town hall meeting is part of the DNA of the New England democratic tradition. Without such meetings, personal access for people to express their views to their representatives will be limited to those people who have the money and influence to get through the office door or who can by a place at the fundraising event.
Jeffrey Lovit
Addison
Consolidation failure
Thomas Desjardin hit the nail on the head in his Feb. 18 BDN column about the schools in the Katahdin region. It has been a source of incredible frustration for folks in Millinocket that consolidation was never allowed to happen. It still is not.
Many years ago, after the mills went down, the Schenck High School students came up to Millinocket for orientation and meetings. My daughter came home so excited and said all the kids were so excited. New school, new name, new colors, new mascot, better sports, theater and academics. They got it.
A day later, East Millinocket got word the mill was going to reopen and that was it. The whole idea was shut down and never considered again.
This is such a tragedy for the students of this area that adult agendas prevail.
Hope MacDonald
Millinocket
Trumpcare is the solution
The president has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to come up with a better plan. He and Republicans in Congress are finding the Affordable Care Act will be difficult to replace because of certain provisions of the act, including those that prevent insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums for those who have pre-existing conditions. It will be a huge task to replace the Affordable Care Act with something better for less cost.
But there is a solution: Change the name of the Affordable care Act from Obamacare to Trumpcare.
Richard Rand
Presque Isle
Don’t defund Planned Parenthood
I, like many women today, am afraid. Republican-led initiatives to defund Planned Parenthood and limit women’s access to affordable reproductive health care have me afraid that I will soon lose the ability to make responsible decisions about my body and my family.
In many cases, Planned Parenthood is the only accessible means to reproductive care and family planning. Planned Parenthood was a saving grace for me as an underemployed 20-something straight out of college with no health insurance and a hefty student loan payment. Without insurance, I relied on Planned Parenthood to receive my yearly pelvic exams and Pap tests as well as gain access to birth control. On one occasion it was the only place I could go to be treated for a recurring urinary tract infection.
Rep. Bruce Poliquin has said that his constituents do not care about the defunding of Planned Parenthood because there are no Planned Parenthood health centers in his district. He is mistaken. I live in Poliquin’s district and am very concerned about the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. I would like to tell Poliquin that Planned Parenthood directly affected my life and is an organization that I wholeheartedly support. If anything, Planned Parenthood should be expanded in the state so that more of us have access to the critical care it provides, and I think Poliquin will find that most people in his district feel the same.
Lauren Eddy
Old Town
Who will pay the piper?
The stock market is on a tear recently with investors salivating about a big tax cut with no spending offsets, a giant infrastructure spending bill funded by deficit spending, and the “rebuilding” of the military funded with even more government borrowing. There is no way the federal government can mathematically meet the promises they have made and continue to make.
State and city governments, which for the most part must balance their budgets, are cutting back on services and infrastructure spending in order to pay the legacy costs of generous benefit packages for retirees coming due as tax revenues are dropping. States and large cities are looking for their U.S. senators and representatives to increase cash bailouts from the magic U.S. money tree.
Clearly the number of voting Americans concerned about this is much smaller than those who believe in the “I’ll gladly pay you Thursday for a hamburger today” governing strategy we’ve employed for years. The legalization of marijuana, abortion rights, and bathrooms for the LGBT community are worthy of discussion, but Generation X and Millennials need to turn the attention to what their and their children’s futures are going to look like with “their” debt.
Richard Ginn
Bucksport
Value public education
I read with interest the two recent articles about the pros and cons of school choice. Those who advocate for voucher systems and charter schools do so in the name of providing a variety of opportunities for students whose families may not be able to afford a private school, and private schools are assumed to be “better” than public schools.
The reality is that the push for “school choice” is a push for privatization, a way to line the pockets of entrepreneurs with public money drained from a stronghold of our society. At the same time that more accountability and other mandates have been imposed on public school educators and students, reducing teachers’ opportunities to innovate and students’ opportunities to learn, charter schools have been exempted from those mandates, allowing their educators the time and freedom to be innovative in teaching, and students the time and freedom to learn, with no mandates, indeed few regulations, and funneling money away from public schools.
As a public school teacher and the daughter of a public school administrator, I urge our legislators and anyone interested in education to read John Dewey. Public education is the bedrock of our society, and should be fully supported. Privatization of public education undermines our foundation.
Jessica Gower
Winterport