Russell for governor
Diane Russell is the kind of bold progressive leader this state needs. My father is a Republican, as I have been. The label does not stand for what I was raised and educated to believe it meant. As happens from time to time, words change meanings.
I feel the word Republican is one of those words. Margaret Chase Smith was a hero in my family. Let’s not forget she crossed party lines and voted for President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and co-sponsored the Equal Rights Amendment of the 1940s. The progressives today share more with Smith and Republicans of her day than the present Republican leadership.
All moments in time require leadership, require a vision of the future that others may not see or want to see as a reality. Russell has a track record of bold accomplishments and a vision for the future. From marijuana legalization to ranked-choice voting to Medicare for all, to the Maine State Public Bank, to compassionate community mobilization against the drug epidemic, Russell is fighting for a future that will allow all Maine residents to thrive. To achieve these goals we must tax the most wealthy.
Maine has a strong record of electing women yet none has ever served as our governor. The 2018 race gives us a strong possibility to achieve this milestone, but in order to do so, Democrats must choose the right candidate. Maine requires a young bold visionary to correct our course. Russell is the right choice to be Maine’s next governor.
John Graham
Topsham
Republican Party is strong
Lance Dutson’s Aug. 22 BDN column on the GOP is a stereotype, identity politics rant from an establishment swamp dweller, conveniently ignoring that Republicans are at their strongest numbers at the federal level since 1928 and at their strongest numbers at the state level since Reconstruction in 1866.
John Shaw
Caribou
Trump shows neo-Nazi sympathies
There is little doubt left that we have a racist and neo-Nazi sympathizer as president. Incredible. I am glad my father, a naval officer who served in the Pacific during World War II, and my mother, a training program coordinator at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, during the war, aren’t alive to see this. They would be outraged.
It is easy to imagine that members of their generation would want to put Trump on trial for treason, as an apparent neo-Nazi sympathizer on the one hand, and as a possible Russian collaborator on the other. What will it take for Republicans to make checks and balances work? Expressing dismay isn’t enough.
Jim Owen
Belfast
Countermanding Gen. MacArthur
Dudley Gray’s Aug. 19 BDN letter to the editor contains a serious error. There was no appeasement in President Harry S. Truman’s decision to countermand Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War.
Truman wisely recognized a major defeat of U.N. forces was occurring and decided not to use atomic weapons and start World War III. He followed the urgent unanimous advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in firing MacArthur. He protected the Constitutional requirement that the president is commander in chief. MacArthur violated repeated orders.
Americans were not willing to start an all-out major war with China and the USSR.
Albert Myers
Castine
DHHS fails disabled adults
As someone living with a disability, I was very angry and frustrated when I read recent articles that the Maine Department of Health and Human Services failed to properly investigate (or not investigate) thousands of allegations of abuse and neglect involving people with disabilities.
Why aren’t people doing their jobs? The fact is that around 2,600 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities were potentially suffering abuse or other serious problems, and they weren’t being reported or investigated properly. That makes me sick to my stomach.
There are things I’m not able to do myself, for which I need help, but I still hang out with my friends, do lots of walking, go to the gym. My disability is a part of me, but it’s not all of me. People need to realize that we all have the same value and the same rights, no matter what type of body we have.
I know that we can do better. But if Medicaid money is taken from the state as a way to change how things are done, that would be a big mistake because as people with disabilities, we want and need more choices and control over our lives, not less.
As human beings, we need to stop looking the other way when we see abuse and other horrible things happening to people (or even if we suspect it) because to do otherwise is to say that someone like me is “less than.” I’m not, and we’re not.
Tucker Conley
Chair-elect
Speaking Up For Us
Portland
TV drugs ads
It is time to bring back the booze and cigarette ads to our TVs to replace the torrent of obnoxious pharmaceutical ads for drugs that can’t be purchased without a doctor’s prescription. The drug ads are followed by law firm ads promoting class-action suits and soliciting clients that “have suffered from (you name the abnormality including death) if you took this, or that, drug.
I wonder: How much of these ad costs go into the cost of drugs? How many dead clients called the law firm? No wonder drug prices are out of control.
William Mahoney
Southwest Harbor
MaineCare is insurance
Maine Republicans claim MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, is welfare, not insurance. Per Medicare.gov: “Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people who are 65 or older, certain younger people with disabilities, and people with End-Stage Renal Disease (permanent kidney failure requiring dialysis or a transplant, sometimes called ESRD).”
Jim Alciere
East Machias
LePage foolish Confederate statues statement
Gov. Paul LePage compared the movement to remove Confederate statues to a hypothetical call to take down memorials to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The governor’s statement might be somewhat less than completely foolish if Sept. 11 memorials included monuments to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. Both bin Laden and Confederate leaders are among those who attacked the United States.
David Mahoney
Hebron