Casco Bay rose 5 inches in 2009-2010

Press Herald - Using tidal data from 2009 and 2010, researchers found that the waters of Casco Bay rose by 5 inches, compared with an overall rise of 3.9 inches for the Northeast – an average of 14 locations from New York to Atlantic Canada. Paul Goddard, a doctoral candidate at the University of Arizona, and a team of researchers reviewed tide records going back to the early 1900s and found that no other two-year period had such a big inc...

The great New England winter of 1717

New England Historical Society -  [In 1717] historians report that New England had probably the roughest winter it ever recorded. So much snow fell that year, capped off by a series of storms that started in late February, that the Puritans in Boston held no church services for two successive weeks, reported Cotton Mather.

Throughout the region snow totals from the back-to-back storms were recorded of four, five and six feet, with drifts as high as 25 feet. Entire houses were covered over, identifiable only by a thin curl of smoke coming out of a hole in the snow. In Hampton, N.H., search parties went out after the storms hunting for widows and elderly people at risk of freezing to death. It wasn't uncommon for them to lose their bearings and not be able to find the houses. Sometimes they were found burning their furniture because they couldn't get to the woodshed.

Countless numbers of livestock perished in the storms, and many stories recounted farmers spending weeks digging out cows, sheep, chickens and pigs, often reporting that they had miraculously found animals alive under the snow and restored them to health. A couple of pigs worked their way out of a snowbank 27 days after the storm ended, having survived on some tansy. Hens lasted as long as a week under the snow, turkeys as long as 20 days.

The deer population was reduced tremendously, some estimated 90 percent of it was lost. Some towns made clearings where the animals could seek shelter to avoid the wolves and other predators.

Though life slowed to a crawl, it did not stop. The mails were delayed, but they were delivered by post boys who got around on snowshoe throughout New England, still using them late into March. People maintained tunnels and paths through the snow from house to house.

Joshua Coffin’s history of Newbury, Mass. recounts the charming tale of Abraham Adams who managed to escape through a window of his house and walk three miles on snowshoe to visit Abigail, his new wife since December of 1716. The newlyweds were apparently separated by the storm and she was holed up with her family. He managed to enter their house via a second-story window. They had their first child, if you’re curious, on Nov. 25, 1717, almost nine months to the day after the great snow.

Federal judge wrecks drug importation law in gift to pharmas

Sun Journal, ME- A federal judge has overturned Maine’s first-in-the-nation law allowing residents to purchase medication by mail from other countries.

U.S. Chief District Judge Nancy Torresen’s ruling comes more than a year after several Maine pharmacy groups filed suit against the state over the 2013 law, arguing it jeopardizes the safety of the nation’s prescription drug supply and opens the door to counterfeit and tainted medications.

Federal law strictly limits the importing of prescription drugs from foreign countries for personal use. Torresen ruled that Maine infringed on the federal government’s established regulatory authority by allowing drug importation at the state level. Her decision nullifies the law, pending a potential appeal by the state.

Co-op leads the way in Maine's health care insurance

Sun Journal, ME - Over 66,000 Mainers have signed up for health insurance with Maine Community Health Options, an increase of 65 percent for the state's only health insurance co-op.

Of those people, 57,600 got insurance through the federal marketplace established by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. That means for the second year in a row, MCHO will insure the majority of Mainers on the marketplace.

There are 23 [health insurance] co-ops throughout the country. Rating company A.M. Best has said that, as of last fall, Lewiston-based MCHO is the only one making money.

As of Feb. 18, nearly 75,000 Mainers had signed up for insurance through the marketplace, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. About 57,600 of those Mainers chose one of MCHO's insurance plans, according to preliminary numbers released by the co-op Tuesday. However, MCHO's figures include only people who have paid their first bill.

With several days left for consumers to pay for March 1 coverage, he expects that MCHO will ultimately be responsible for about 80 percent of the marketplace.

Down East Notes

Bangor Daily News - Officials from the Maine Education Association, which has 24,000 members, gathered teachers from across the state in Augusta to argue that LePage’s laser focus on cutting the state’s income tax will come at the expense of Maine’s public schools “We want you to know that we believe the tax changes will devastate our schools, our teachers and the future of our state,” said Maine Education Association President Lois Kilby-Chesley.

Bangor Daily News - Maine has the lowest adult incarceration rate per capita in the nation. In 2011, Maine’s rate of 147 inmates per 100,000 adult residents was the lowest in the country and more than three times lower than the national average of 492 per 100,000 residents. However, while the crime rate has fallen substantially, the number of offenders held in Maine’s county jails more than doubled from 1993 to 2011, driven by mandatory sentences and an increase in offenders choosing jail time to lessen their fines, which are often a mixture of court fees and financial penalties for breaking the law. Both have been on the increase in recent years to fill state coffers. Arrests for drug crimes rose by more than 8 percent between 2003 and 2012, according to the 2014 Maine Crime and Justice Databook. Most of the increase was attributable to drug possession. Arrests for sales and manufacturing declined during that time. About half the possession arrests in 2012 involved marijuana. Arrests for possession of synthetic narcotics are on the rise.

Press Herald - Standard & Poor’s downgraded its long-term outlook for the University of Maine System from stable to negative, citing declining enrollment and high turnover among leadership at the seven campuses.

Polar dip postponed by polar conditions - The eighth annual Portland Polar Dip has been rescheduled to 2 p.m., Saturday, March 14, at East End Beach. The annual event was postponed Feb. 21 because of ice in Casco Bay.

How LePage's tax plan will hurrt non-profits

Press Herald - More than 40 organizations urged state lawmakers to reject Gov. Paul LePage’s plan to require municipalities to tax nonprofits, including land trusts, museums, summer camps, hospitals, private schools and food pantries.

Representatives from those organizations told lawmakers on the Legislature’s budget and taxation committees that the governor’s proposal could devastate some nonprofits, some of which are already working on thin financial margins. Others argued that their organizations provide services so that government agencies don’t have to...

Administration officials have said that the proposal is designed to compensate localities for providing infrastructure and services that nonprofits use but don’t pay for because they are not subject to property taxes. The proposal has also been presented as a way for cities and towns to offset another provision in the LePage budget that would eliminate municipal revenue sharing.

The property tax proposal would eliminate exemptions for nonprofit organizations that own property with an assessed value of $500,000 or more. The proposal would not apply to churches or nonprofits with less valuable properties....

South Portland Finance Director Greg L’Heureux told lawmakers that at least 12 property owners in the city would be taxed under the governor’s plan, including the American Legion Post, the local Girl Scouts chapter and The Spring Point Ledge Light Trust, a nonprofit that oversees and maintains the lighthouse in South Portland.

Clare Whitney, with the Good Shepherd Food Bank in Auburn, said that paying property taxes wouldn’t sink the organization, but would likely mean that 100,000 free meals wouldn’t be distributed to hungry clients.

Harris, of Maine Health, along with Jeff Austin, the lobbyist for the Maine Hospital Association, argued that hospitals provide millions of dollars in free care to patients who can’t afford it while subsidizing Maine Care, the state’s Medicaid program.

Austin estimated that the governor’s plan would cost hospitals $10 million to $20 million.

Other nonprofits also forecast dire consequences. Officials for Shalom House, a nonprofit that provides mental health services, estimated that the organization would face a property tax bill of $90,000 and be forced to cut services.

Subscription problem of the day

 

Sun Journal, ME - Dozens of our readers have called us about this morning’s front page, which featured the word “Cancelled” prominently printed in red on top of our storm story. Not to worry.

 No Sun Journal subscriptions were canceled. The word referred to the canceled blizzard. Whew, right?

The word was used as a graphic element to "cancel" the underlying headline "Blizzard on the way," indicating as boldly as possible that the much-unwelcome storm never materialized in our primary readership area of Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties.
We apologize for the confusion, and assure you — our readers — that we were not stamping you out. Just the snow.

Down East Notes

Press Herald - Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap says that of the about 80,000 of the nearly 86,000 signatures that were submitted by Maine Citizens for Clean Elections were found to be valid. That’s about 18,000 more valid signatures than the group needed. Its proposal aims to provide Clean Election candidates with access to more cash on the campaign trail so they can better compete with their privately financed opponents.

Update on crude oil fight

Maine and the local

Sam Smith - In an interesting column on Maine’s strong tradition of decentralized governance, Colin Woodard of the Portland Press Herald concludes:

So strong local control has many merits, but it’s still in need of retrofitting. The central problem is that, unlike the 1690s or 1890s, we no longer live at the municipal level. Many of us sleep in one town, work in another, send the kids to school in a third and shop in a fourth. We live regionally, which means that we need to be able to plan and govern on a regional scale. One example: When Wal-Mart builds a supercenter, they’re thinking about a market of 50,000 people. Its effects will be felt over an entire county, and yet only the people of the town it happens to locate in have any say over where and how it is built. That’s the antithesis of local control.

There’s a strong case to be made to keep local control and home rule, but for citizens to frankly consider what “local” and “home” really mean. Clusters of towns … are in it together; they ought to keep planning together, building trust, sharing services, revenue and administrators. But it’s got to be a voluntary, bottom-up movement…

In a state with strong local identities and civic traditions, local people really know best what partnerships will work and with whom. Forcing communities together from on high is unlikely to reduce costs, but is certain to spark resistance.

While Woodard is quite right about local people knowing best which partnerships will work best, he still implicitly suggests that the standard should be cost reduction rather than community construction.

At one point he quotes an Envision Maine study: “Regionalizing services can’t be done simply because it intuitively make sense, or for its own sake. Absent that neutral, trusted data (on where consolidation will brings savings), it’s hard for anyone to move forward, and we end up with little more than competing anecdotes and strongly-held opinions.”

The assumption that we must judge the worth of our communities primarily on their economic efficiency is one more example of how the values of corporate America and its business schools have skewed our thinking of how we should best live with others. After all, if economic efficiency was truly the most important determinant we would all living dormitories and eating our meals in huge dining halls.

We have come to accept what G. K. Chesterton called the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

Nationally, there has been a noticeable drift away from a healthy parochialism in the political class to a growing dominance of those whose skills and values come not from their communities but from the graduate schools they attended, their powerful friends, and the national sources of their campaign funding. In over fifty years during which I covered Washington, one of the biggest changes was the loss of the power of place and its replacement with the increasing power of a professional class that made its decisions based on what they had learned from their specialties.

Further, it didn’t have to be, as it sadly became, a struggle between Washington and the rest of the country. A century earlier, Catholic theologians and Pope Leo XIII had laid it out in the principle of subsidiarity, which, Wikipedia describes this way:

Functions of government, business, and other secular activities should be as local as possible. If a complex function is carried out at a local level just as effectively as on the national level, the local level should be the one to carry out the specified function. The principle is based upon the autonomy and dignity of the human individual, and holds that all other forms of society, from the family to the state and the international order, should be in the service of the human person. Subsidiarity assumes that these human persons are by their nature social beings, and emphasizes the importance of small and intermediate-sized communities or institutions, like the family, the church, labor unions and other voluntary associations, as mediating structures which empower individual action and link the individual to society as a whole. "Positive subsidiarity", which is the ethical imperative for communal, institutional or governmental action to create the social conditions necessary to the full development of the individual, such as the right to work, decent housing, health care, etc., is another important aspect of the subsidiarity principle.

Note the lack of mention of economic factors.

As an advocate of subsidiarity, it was easy for me to move full time five years ago from the capital to Maine, which still valued the power of the local and the individual despite increasing pressures to the contrary.

The rationality of subsequent debates over a couple of local issues have reinforced my impression. At one meeting, I turned to the guy next to me and said, “We should send everyone in this room to Washington.” Even when there wasn’t a clear resolution – as in the case of our town’s dispute over ending its school district consolidation – it was the rationality of the conflicting arguments, not their excess, that made it difficult to choose.

At one meeting over the planned destruction of a historic boatyard building, the old and new America confronted each other. The boatyard had sent a vice president of its corporate owner up from Connecticut who clearly failed to impress a 30 something home builder who told him, “You don’t understand how we work here. When I build a house I not only have to worry about what the owner will think but I have to worry about what people say about it to my parents.”

It is this blending of the personal and the profitable that makes Maine so different, all the way from that home builder to the oft cited consumer attention of LL Bean. It has deep roots in trades like farming and fishing where cooperation and competition co-exist.

It is not that you don’t look ahead and don’t make new plans. But a good place to start is not with budgets but with a look at cultural values and behaviors that have helped make your community what it is. These are not likely to come from planners and other experts from away. In my time in Washington, for example, I only came across one city planning project that didn’t tacitly or openly depend on the replacement of existing businesses and citizens with what was considered a better alternative.

Yes, there are many changes Maine can and should make but dissin’ the value of its faith in the local is a bad place to start. Lately, we’ve been learning that it doesn’t work well for food. And it won’t work for people either.

Down East Notes

Press Herald - A group pushing to legalize recreational marijuana in Maine has submitted a citizens initiative to the Secretary of State to start the process of getting the issue on the November 2016 ballot. Legalize Maine, a political action committee formed last year, proposes to legalize and tax marijuana, with an emphasis on supporting local agriculture.

2014 was safest on Maine's highways since 1944

Gays for guns update

In 2012 we suggested that Maine gays strengthen their appeal by aligning themselves with Maine hunters. It didn't happen, but things are moving ahead in Nebraska

 Jesse Walker, Hit & Run - A heartwarming story from Nebraska:

In Nebraska, where same-sex marriage has been illegal since 2000, legislators did something surprisingly pro-gay Tuesday.

Lawmakers were voting on a bill that would make it easier for military spouses to get concealed-carry permits. But the language, as introduced, was vague. After all, who counts as a spouse under Nebraska law? The federal government recognizes gay marriages, but Nebraska doesn't.

This seemed to rankle state Sen. Paul Schumacher (R), who argued that we should not allow gay love to get in the way of one's gun rights.

Joe Duggan, a reporter with the Omaha World-Herald, has the killer quote from the hearing: "Is not the Second Amendment sex blind? Color blind?" Schumacher said. "What great evil would come from saying a partner of somebody in the military...is entitled to exercise their Second Amendment rights to carry a concealed weapon in this state?"

Schumacher proposed an amendment that would extend the bill's privileges to gay spouses, speeding up the process of obtaining a concealed carry permit....The amendment passed 38 to 0, and the bill passed the first round of voting 37 to 4.

After the amendment passed, a legislator who abstained from the vote said, "I think we just recognized gay marriage."

Sam Smith, Coastal Packet, ME, 2012 - Now that the gay marriage issue is back on the ballot in my state of Maine, it is perhaps time to revive my suggestion I made the last time: form a group called Gays for Guns, dedicated to breaking down the barriers between homosexuals and hunters - both groups well represented Down East.

The mere suggestion is alien to those liberals who have come to think of their cause as a gated community rather than as something to spread among those who don't look and act like themselves. But the history of successful American politics is filled with examples of just such cross cultural efforts. It's why, for example, the right is still afraid of Saul Alinsky, who believed in building alliances issue by issue. Louisiana's Earl Long built his political base in the deeply segregated south in part by registering large numbers of blacks and removing voting restrictions while pursuing a populist approach that also appealed to lower income whites.

Perhaps the most amazing example were the socialists in early 20th century America. This from the party's own history:

"From the beginning the Socialist Party was the ecumenical organization for American radicals. Its membership included Marxists of various kinds, Christian socialists, Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish socialists, foreign-language speaking sections, single-taxers and virtually every variety of American radical. On the divisive issue of "reform vs. revolution," the Socialist Party from the beginning adopted a compromise formula, producing platforms calling for revolutionary change but also making "immediate demands" of a reformist nature. A perennially unresolved issue was whether revolutionary change could come about without violence; there were always pacifists and evolutionists in the Party as well as those opposed to both those views. The Socialist Party historically stressed cooperatives as much as labor unions, and included the concepts of revolution by education and of 'building the new society within the shell of the old.'"

By World War I it had elected 70 mayors, two members of Congress, and numerous state and local officials. Milwaukee alone had three Socialist mayors in the last century, including Frank Zeidler who held office for 12 years ending in 1960. And the  Karen Kubby, Socialist councilwoman, won her re-election bid in 1992 with the highest vote total in Iowa City history.

So Gays for Guns is not as strange as it sounds. My working principle on this issue is that if you run across an abortion-hating, gun toting nun who wants to save your forest, put her on the committee. 

 

Emendation Author and Journalist Dan Baum writes to point out that our proposal for a Maine group, Gays for Guns, to help win the state's gay marriage referendum is a little behind the times: "Gays for Guns exists. It's called Pink Pistols ('armed gays don't get bashed'). Run by a grand niece of Gen. Patton." Nevertheless, we think Gays for Guns would be a more successful moniker in the forthcoming Maine election.

 

Living in a tent all winter

Bangor Daily News - [Ed] Warden is the volunteer camp host at Bradbury Mountain State Park. He doesn’t get paid to live in a tent. He does it because the camping lifestyle is something he’s been in love with for 45 years.

Warden lives in a heavy-duty 12 x 20-foot outfitter’s tent with 8-foot vestibules attached at either end. At the peak the ceiling is 9-feet high. A small wood stove keeps it comfortably warm inside, consuming about one cord of wood per month.

His site is the only one at the campground that has electricity. He uses it to power a small refrigerator and an old TV someone recently brought him. Warden hasn’t been able to find a digital converter so only uses the television to watch DVDs.

“I try to keep a balance between the old and the new,” said Warden. “I like modern conveniences but I also like my wood stove.”

The camping lifestyle has taught him to simplify things and learn to make do with what he has and get by with what he doesn’t have – like running water.

Down East Notes

Press Herald - Treatened by the possibility that Maine cities and towns may build their own high-speed broadband networks because they are frustrated with corporate providers, the largest provider went on the offensive last month. Just as the legislative session was starting in January, Time Warner invited Maine lawmakers to an overnight “Winter Policy Conference” at a resort in Cape Elizabeth, where the company tried to convince legislators that government owned-broadband is a bad idea. The guests were served steak dinners and some were put up for the night in rooms that retail for $205 to $355 per night. Maine ranks near the bottom of all 50 states in Internet speeds, which frustrates consumers and puts a damper on business

Bangor Daily News - Seventy-six inches and counting. That’s how much snow has fallen in Eastport since Jan. 25, which is a new 10-day record for documented snowfall anywhere in Maine. The previous record of 71 inches for a 10-day period was set more than 50 years ago at Ripogenus Dam, just west of Baxter State Park in Piscataquis County, from late December 1962 to early January 1963, according to the National Weather Service.

Maine has 15.5 million out of state overnight visitors who spend about $5 billion each year

If LePage's abuse of the hungry goes national

Off the Charts - Maine cut several thousand people off SNAP (food stamps) this month after re-imposing a time limit on benefits for childless adults who aren’t working at least 20 hours per week — regardless of how hard they’re looking for a job. The move foreshadows tough times for very poor unemployed workers across the country who can’t find work as the time limit returns in more areas. Up to 1 million low-income unemployed adults risk losing SNAP benefits over the course of 2016.

The 1996 welfare law, which established the three-month limit, allowed states to waive it temporarily in areas with high unemployment. Most governors have used this flexibility in recent years to suspend the time limit in response to the severe impact of the recession. As the economy recovers and unemployment falls, though, more people will face the time limit.

Maine Governor Paul LePage chose to re-impose the time limit even though Maine’s unemployment was high enough to continue waiving it. Some areas, like Piscataquis County, still struggle with unemployment rates over 8 percent.

The loss of SNAP benefits can have a serious impact. People subject to the three-month limit have average monthly income of about 19 percent of the poverty line (about $2,200 per year for a household of one in 2014) and typically don’t qualify for other income support.

The time limit is especially harsh because state and local agencies don’t need to help the affected people find jobs or provide a place in a job training program that would allow them to keep benefits.

Unfortunately, the President’s 2016 budget doesn’t propose modifying the time limit to make it fairer, such as by requiring state SNAP agencies or local workforce programs to offer a work or training slot to people facing the loss of food benefits. The budget boosts SNAP job training funds by $25 million per year, but that’s only enough, at best, to provide a place for one in ten people at risk of losing assistance.

The problems a split legislature cause the Democrats

Gerald Weinand, Dirigo Blue - In 2010, Republicans swept into office, winning the Governor’s office and both chambers of the 125th Legislature. Yet despite this complete control of the legislative process, Republicans were unable to enact many long sought goals of the far right To be sure, the far right did score some victories, but much of their agenda proved to be unpalatable to some of the less radical members of their party.

Oddly, the split nature of the incoming 127th Legislature will enable even moderate Republicans to vote for every extreme piece of legislation put forth by their far right colleagues. Moderates know that Democratic Party members of the House will vote to block the most egregious bills put forth – centrist Republicans can rely on their Democratic brethren to vote the way that they dare not.

Gov. LePage and his advisers understand this calculus. They will blame Democrats at every opportunity for blocking legislation that Republicans were unwilling to jam through when they had complete control four years ago. House Speaker Mark Eves will be sensitive to his party being labeled as the “Party of No,” and will want to only fight selected battles.

This is a mistake.

Democrats would be wise to publicly challenge every far right measure put forth by Gov. LePage and Republican legislative leaders....

It’s not like this is some new idea. US House Speaker John Boehner has used this tactic for the last four years. And it worked.

Down East Notes

Non profits are Maine's largest employer

 

Maine worst state for broadband 

Press Herald -  Democrats, who hold the majority in the House, have focused most of their opposition to the governor’s budget on a proposal to eliminate a 42-year-old revenue sharing program used by municipalities to pay for services such as police, fire and road repairs. Early analysis suggests that the proposal and a corresponding plan to remove property tax exemptions for large nonprofits will benefit service center communities, while rural towns with no taxable nonprofits could need to increase property tax rates.

Maine Green Party response to LePage's speech

Forecaster -  Getting the top score on an Advanced Placement exam is cool enough. But even better? Being told you're the only high school student in the world to have done so on that particular test.  Balt von Huene of Arrowsic, a senior at Morse High School, did just that last spring. Of about 4 million AP exams that 1.5 million public high school juniors and seniors took last year, just 285 scored every possible point on an exam, according to a Morse press release last week. Huene was the world's only student to earn every possible point on the AP Environmental Science Exam, the school said. He earned the top score of 5, equivalent to an A on a corresponding college class, according to Morse.

Why liberals have to be smarter about picking their issues

Mike Tipping, Bangor Daily News - Emily Shaw, formerly a Maine-based political scientist and now national policy manager at the Sunlight Foundation, recently took a look at the results of the [Maine] 2014 election and came up with an answer to a persistent political question about what role a citizen-initiated referendum banning the use of bait, traps and dogs in the hunting of bears in Maine had on the state’s gubernatorial race.

“So what was the effect of the highly contentious ballot measure on turnout and support for LePage? Was it a game-changer?” asks Shaw in a post on her personal blog.

“It totally was,” she concludes.

Shaw’s analysis indicates that the referendum drove turnout, especially for voters favoring the re-election of Maine governor Paul LePage.

“Controlling for people in the town who voted for LePage in 2010 and the power of median municipal household income, every four votes against Question 1 predicted an increase of 1 vote in support of Gov. LePage,” writes Shaw.

High levels of opposition to the referendum (and in favor of keeping bear baiting legal) were predictive of 17% additional turnout in municipal totals.

Shaw hasn’t yet done the math on whether the referendum alone could have tipped the election in LePage’s favor (LePage won by about five percentage points over Democratic Congressman Mike Michaud), and other factors certainly affected the race, but referendum-inspired turnout certainly seems to have had a measurable, positive impact on his vote totals.

Where Maine's political independence comes from

Maine Public Boadcasting - Maine is unusually independent. And that independent tradition goes deeper than just a couple gubernatorial races: The state has more unenrolled voters than it does voters registered with either of the major parties and is also one of the most reliably "purple" states, which means in both statewide and presidential elections, Mainers may vote for a member of either party. (This wasn't always true, by the way: For a long time, Maine was strongly associated with moderate Republicanism. That ended in 1955 when Mainers elected Democrat Edmund Muskie governor.)

Kenneth Palmer, professor emeritus in political science at the University of Maine and the author of several books on Maine politics, says there are a few reasons.

Palmer says that what political scientists call "communitarianism" is key to understanding why Mainers don't tend to be as closely affiliated with parties, and why they often vote for independent candidates.

Basically, Mainers expect their community to be involved in politics, and for politics to serve them, not a political class or party machine. "A lot of this goes back to our town meeting tradition, in which the citizens of a community would come together once a year ... and basically set the policies for the town. Eventually of course we had to have more elected officials, but the emphasis on citizen involvement is very strong."

Palmer says this also goes back to Maine's frontier tradition, which he says really made participation an important part of the culture.

Politicians have personal relationships with their constituents. Again, this likely goes back to the state's town meeting tradition, and interestingly, it's pretty exceptional for a largely rural state. "Some of the demographics that tend to explain high participation in other states, such as high levels of income [and] education ... aren't really true in Maine, yet nonetheless we still have very high turnout."

Party machines like the kind you see in some big American cities — where you have a political class whose job is doing politics — affect political and social life in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is that they entrench party divisions.

In Maine, those kinds of organizations didn't develop, in part because Maine's population, scattered across 450 often-tiny communities, can't support them. In contrast, Palmer says, "political machines tend to thrive most generally in large, densely populated areas, mainly large cities." In Maine, which the census found to be the most rural state in the nation in 2010, conditions just aren't right for it.

Politics in Maine is much more of an "amateur operation," says Palmer. And, since people aren't as often part of entrenched party system, they tend to be more moderate in their politics, and to simply vote for candidates they feel can best serve them. And lawmakers tend to work better with members of other parties in the Legislature.

Maine communities — and legislative districts — are small, and spending from outside, ideologically driven organizations tends to go to TV advertising, usually negative ads. Palmer says in Maine, this doesn't really make a lot of sense: "Most legislative candidates don't advertise, certainly widely, on television, because the TV market is so much greater than their particular legislative district, which may be about 9,000 people for the house, that it's not cost-effective in any way to pour all that money in."

Also, Mainers like to know their candidates: "you can't sell somebody on TV as easily as perhaps in some states because Mainers like to see their candidate in person."

Down East Notes

Bill Nemitz: late stage cancer

Some of the things wrong with LePage's tax plan

Dave Epstein ‏  There is precedence for all the snow. 4 storms, Feb 27-March 7th 1717. 36" on ground in Boston. 2-3 story drifts, 95% of deer died.

Tough life of an artist in Portland

Chris Busby, Bangor Daily News -  Imagine for a moment that you’re an artist living in Portland, Maine. Imagine further that you have an imagination, or at least enough creativity and originality to make work that isn’t stereotypical schlock: landscapes with old barns, seascapes with lighthouses, portraits of noble, sober lobstermen, etc.

Now try to find an art gallery in Portland to show and sell your work. And when I say “art gallery,” I mean an actual art gallery. Not a coffee shop or a restaurant. Not a non-profit institution like the library or MECA or SPACE. I’m talking about a business dedicated to displaying your work, with a gallery owner who knows how to sell it.

The good news: there are galleries in town that fit this description.

The bad news: there are only two of them, and getting a show at either one is far from easy...