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Happy Wednesday!

Sometimes after a long day at work, you want to grab a seat where everyone knows your name and get a cold one — and let the stress of the day melt away.

Whether you can depends on your ZIP code.

Penobscot is one of the last towns in Hancock County to ban bars and pubs. Voters only in the last decade allowed the sale of alcohol containers at its only store, Northern Bay Market.

Now owner Jamie MacNair wants voters to cast off the last vestige of prohibition so she can open a cozy English-style pub behind the market.

But some voters see the choice as whether to usher in the modern age or to preserve Penobscot’s traditional way of life.

MacNair encountered the same opposition back in 2019 when Penobscot voted whether to allow alcohol container sales, and she feels confident the market’s record since then speaks for itself.

“I just want people to know I’m here, and this is my community, and I would never do anything to hurt or change it in a negative way,” she said.

Troy Jackson’s logger brand rests on a career that ended years ago

In this Aug. 6, 2009, file photo, Troy Jackson of Allagash (left), a Maine senator and logging equipment operator, and Carney McBreairty (right), a logging contractor, are pictured at a time when loggers were contemplating a border blockade in order to draw attention to the plight of Maine workers who they claimed had unfairly lost jobs to Canadians. Credit: Gabor Degre / BDN

If you do a certain amount of logging, can you say you’re a logger from then on? What if you didn’t meet the strictest definition of a “logger”?

In his campaign to oust Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, Troy Jackson routinely introduces himself as “a fifth-generation logger,” including in an opinion piece published today in the Bangor Daily News. But it’s been more than a decade since the Democrat from Allagash has been employed by northern Maine logging contractors, and far longer since he was what you might picture a logger to be.

Even going back to 2000, when he first ran for the Maine Legislature as a Republican, a BDN profile described the then-32-year-old as a “former logger.”

It wasn’t far off then. Two years earlier, he’d helped lead Maine loggers in a blockade at the Canadian border, protesting the hiring of Canadian crews, an event he would later say drove him to run for office.

In the Legislature, he stood by the same loggers and was an advocate for the working class broadly. But his own money in recent years has come from consulting for labor groups and trade unions, not cutting down trees.

Jackson’s campaign said calling himself a logger “speaks to his background and identity,” and he doesn’t claim to be employed as one.

Certain loggers, meanwhile, are quick to say that Jackson operated a delimbing machine back in the day and wasn’t actually a “logger.” But maybe he can be forgiven for not calling himself a “delimber” on the campaign trail.

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From the Opinion Page

In this 2022 file photo, then-Senate President Troy Jackson, D- Aroostook, conducts business at the State House in Augusta. Credit: Robert F. Bukaty / AP

“Maine families can’t spend money they don’t have and send the bill to someone else. The people they send to Washington shouldn’t either.”

Opinion: Maine can’t afford Troy Jackson in Washington