Donald Trump thumbs his nose at conflicts of interest

Echo opinion letter to the editor, published in the Victoria Advocate, in Victoria Texas:

Is anyone surprised that Trump commuted the prison sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich? After all, they’re two of a kind. Blagojevich was convicted of trying to sell the senate seat vacated by Barack Obama when Obama was elected president. Trump shamelessly uses the nation’s highest office for personal gain.

Trump uses his golf resort in Florida as an unofficial White House, giving the phrase “pay to play” a sinister new meaning. He and his family rake in millions when foreign officials stay at Trump hotels and when foreign governments approve Trump projects or grant trademarks for his products.

He even pressured Vice President Pence to stay at his resort in Ireland, although it was far from Pence’s planned meeting with the Irish prime minister. And, sinking to new lows, he has even charged rent for the Secret Service agents who provide protection for himself and his family.

Trump is the first president in over 50 years to refuse to release his tax returns, despite promising several times to make such a release.

He has so many conflicts of interest that the director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics resigned in protest when he was unable to persuade Trump to divest from his business interests to avoid such conflicts.

No U.S. president in history has so blatantly thumbed his nose at the Constitution’s protections against conflict of interest.

Jim Ford, Victoria

Donald Trump has no experience with spreading trust

Donald Trump and Mike Pence are completely incapable of building the trust needed to prepare Americans about preventing the spread of the coronavirus.

An echo editorial opinion published in the Christian Science Monitor.

Antidote to coronavirus fears: Trust in leaders

The global outbreak puts a useful spotlight on governments that have built up credibility, transparency, and other traits of trustworthy leadership.

February 24, 2020  By the Monitor's Editorial Board

In South Korea, the first democracy to cope with a massive outbreak of the coronavirus, President Moon Jae-in is scrambling to be seen as a trusted leader against harsh public criticism of his response. “This is an unusual emergency situation,” Mr. Moon had to explain Monday. “Instead of limiting our imagination with regard to policy, we have to make bold decisions and implement them quickly.”

In Singapore, by contrast, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has largely kept the trust of citizens in his highly centralized island state. The government, for example, helped prevent panic on social media by setting up its own WeChat platform to provide accurate information. By being transparent and instructive, it maintained credibility.

Meanwhile in China, health officials admitted Friday they had created mistrust by constantly altering the “criteria” for what is a “confirmed case” of the virus. The confession may have been an attempt to regain trust and, with it, public cooperation.
With reports of more outbreaks beyond China, leaders in many countries are desperate to keep or restore trust in order to cope with both the virus and the viral fear that has come with it. The range of responses puts a favorable spotlight on those governments that already had built up competent health systems and honest communications to meet such a challenge.

In general, examples of trusted leadership are getting harder to find, according to the latest “Trust Barometer” from communications firm Edelman.

In its latest survey of 28 countries, it found two-thirds of people do not have confidence that “our current leaders will be able to successfully address our country’s challenges.” A similar number “worry technology will make it impossible to know if what people are seeing or hearing is real.” And 57% said news media is “contaminated with untrustworthy information.”

Edelman recommends all leaders try to be ethical as they also try to be competent in solving problems. Government, for example, must reduce partisanship, address problems at the community level, and partner with the private sector. Trust “is no longer only a matter of what you do – it’s also how you do it,” the report states.

Trust in leaders and their expertise to handle a health crisis is an essential “vaccine” in controlling public fears. Governments need the traits of trust – integrity, transparency, accountability, and compassion – long before a crisis hits. Or, as China and other countries are finding, they must scramble to build up trust. As they do, fears will lessen and help end this global outbreak.

Labor must unite to defeat Donald Trump- a nationwide campaign is underway

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/labor-union-seiu-campaign-against/2020/02/27/id/955971/?ns_mail_uid=28842e36-b3f0-46b7-ba17-8a42c5356a85&ns_mail_job=DM93763_2272020&s=acs&dkt_nbr=010102j2fuax

Labor Union Launches $150M Campaign Against Trump

In my opinion, labor - unions and organized employee associations, must take a strongly unified stand to prevent Donald Trump's campaign from gaining traction with the middle class. I recall so vividly the 2016 interviews with blue collar workers in West Virginia and Ohio who somehow were delusional enough to believe that, just because Trump was wealthy, his plan for the economy would magically make them prosperous.  Well, many of those same people are still waiting and nothing at all has happened to improve their human condition.  American must vote Democrats into political offices and remove Donald Trump from the horror he has created in our nation and around the world. 

Reported by NewsMax in "People and Event", Feb. 27, 2020

One of the nation’s largest labor unions is unveiling plans to invest $150 million in a nationwide campaign to help defeat President Donald Trump, a sweeping effort focused on eight battleground states and voters of color who typically don’t vote.

The investment marks the largest voter engagement and turnout operation in the history of the Service Employees International Union, which claims nearly 2 million members. The scope of the campaign, which quietly launched last month and will run through November’s general election, reflects the urgency of what union president Mary Kay Henry calls “a make-or-break” moment for working people in America under Trump’s leadership.

“He’s systematically unwinding and attacking unions. Federal workers rights have been totally eviscerated under his watch,” Henry said in an interview. “We are on fire about the rules being rigged against us and needing to elect people that are going to stand with workers.”

The union's campaign will span 40 states and target 6 million voters focused largely in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to details of the plan shared with The Associated Press. The union and its local members will pay particular attention to two key urban battlegrounds they believe will play a defining role in the 2020 general election: Detroit and Milwaukee. There may be some television advertising, but the investment will focus primarily on direct contact and online advertising targeting minority men and women who typically don't vote.

"After campaigning for a higher minimum wage, Trump has done little to raise the federal minimum wage..."

Few groups of voters will be more important in the 2020 general election. Trump won the presidency four years ago largely because of his popularity with working-class whites and a drop-off in turnout from minority voters.

The union's political director, Maria Peralta, noted that Trump’s campaign has been working effectively in recent months to win over some minority voters, particularly men, who have traditionally voted Democratic.

“He’s going after our communities in ways that are pervasive. We’re deeply aware of that,” Peralta said. “They’re talking about the strength of the economy.”

The Service Employees International Union, like the Democratic Party and its allies across the nation, faces significant headwinds in its fight to deny Trump a second term. Voters who may dislike his overall job performance are generally pleased with his leadership on the economy, and unemployment for black Americans has hit record lows in recent months.

At the same time, Trump’s campaign is far ahead of where it was four years ago, when it had little national organization.

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign announced plans to open 15 “Black Voices for Trump Community Centers” in battleground states and major cities, including Michigan and Wisconsin. The offices will feature a line of campaign swag adopting the “woke” label, and videos of prominent Trump surrogates like online stars Diamond and Silk explaining their support for the president and pamphlets outlining the president's record.

SEIU is the most diverse union in the United States. The union’s membership features those who work in health care, food service, janitorial services and state and local government workers, among others. Half its members are people of color, and more than half make less than $15 an hour.

The 2020 investment is designed to benefit Democrats up and down the ballot this fall, though defeating Trump stands as a primary goal.

That said, SEIU’s political team has determined that a message simply attacking Trump isn’t effective with its target audience, which includes a significant number of conservatives.

“We don’t want to get too caught up in the Trump bashing,” Peralta said. “Data shows people care about wages, and they care about health care across the board.”

The union also determined that it’s particularly effective to highlight Trump’s work to weaken labor unions and conditions for working-class Americans.

After campaigning for a higher minimum wage, Trump has done little to raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 for more than a decade. His administration has also taken steps to make it harder for new groups of workers to form unions. And labor officials have decried his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board and the Supreme Court, which dealt a huge blow to labor in 2018 by ruling that government workers no longer could be required to pay union fees.

When asked, Henry had little to say about the specific Democratic presidential contenders fighting for the chance to take on Trump. SEIU may endorse a candidate in the coming months, she said, but it has decided to stay out of the messy nomination fight for now.

“We’re trying to figure out, inside our union as we walk through Super Tuesday and through March, what do working people and our members think about the choice in the field,” Henry said.

Donald Trump had no stamina to enlist in the military #bonespurs

Vietnam veteran doesn’t think highly of Trump

My husband Richard in Chu Lai Vietnam 1967 MCB 71

#bonespurs tRump did not serve!

Trump doesn’t deserve the credit given to him after avoiding military service.



I too am a Vietnam veteran. (Also, Maine Writer- my husband is a Vietnam War veteran....and we agree with this opinion letter) an echo published in GoErie.com

Once I read the recent letter from Joe Kupniewski, it lit a fire in my soul. He (wrongminded!) said Donald Trump “praises our troops, military, police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” 

Well,  this is typical tRumpzi cult reasoning.

You do know how he got out of going to Vietnam with so-called “heel spurs” from a doctor whom he rented from Trump’s dad? 

Now I want you to think about 911 and two Americans, one of whom was born to money and was 24 years old and the other a NFL football player who left a lucrative sports career to enlist in the U.S. Army while Trump’s son, Jr., did not. 

He could have, but chose to earn money. Google Don Jr.’s image with an AR-15. He is a wannabe, but not a doer.

What an amazing insight on immigration. What if Trump was around during Herod’s time but was an Egyptian leader and closed the border so that a particular family and their newborn were denied entry? Think about that!

Just remember that immigrants, legal and illegal (hired by farmers and ranchers), made this country great, even when we sent the Chinese railroad laborers home and rounded up Japanese Americans in the 1940s to lose their businesses and homes.

So when you see Trump hug a flag, remember he had no stamina to enlist and serve like you and me.

– Louis Cioccio, Erie

Trump fired experts who are trained to protect Americans from a coronavirus epedemic

Volunteers in protective suits are disinfected in Wuhan, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak, in Hubei province, China. (China/Daily Reuters photo)

But.....Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
Echo opinion published in Foriegn Policy news. 

By Laurie Garrett*

As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.

When Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), declared the Wuhan coronavirus a public health emergency of international concern on Thursday, he praised China for taking “unprecedented” steps to control the deadly virus. “I have never seen for myself this kind of mobilization,” he noted. “China is actually setting a new standard for outbreak response.”

The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is - not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.

When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014, President Barack Obama recognized that responding to the outbreak overseas, while also protecting Americans at home, involved multiple U.S. government departments and agencies, none of which were speaking to one another. 

Basically, the U.S. pandemic infrastructure was an enormous orchestra full of talented, egotistical players, each jockeying for solos and fame, refusing to rehearse, and demanding higher salaries—all without a conductor. To bring order and harmony to the chaos, rein in the agency egos, and create a coherent multiagency response overseas and on the homefront, Obama anointed a former vice presidential staffer, Ronald Klain, as a sort of “epidemic czar” inside the White House, clearly stipulated the roles and budgets of various agencies, and placed incident commanders in charge in each Ebola-hit country and inside the United States. The orchestra may have still had its off-key instruments, but it played the same tune.

Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.

On the domestic front, the real business of assuring public health and safety is a local matter, executed by state, county, and city departments that operate under a mosaic of laws and regulations that vary jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Some massive cities, such as New York City or Boston, have large budgets, clear regulations, and epidemic experiences that have left deep benches of medical and public health talent. But much of the United States is less fortunate on the local level, struggling with underfunded agencies, understaffing, and no genuine epidemic experience. Large and small, America’s localities rely in times of public health crisis on the federal government.

Bureaucracy matters. Without it, there’s nothing to coherently manage an alphabet soup of agencies housed in departments ranging from Defense to Commerce, Homeland Security to Health and Human Services (HHS).

But that’s all gone now.

In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.

Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic. On Jan. 29, Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, an all-male group of a dozen advisors, five from the White House staff. Chaired by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the task force includes men from the CDC, State Department, DHS, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Transportation Department. It’s not clear how this task force will function or when it will even convene.

In the absence of a formal structure, the government has resorted to improvisation. In practical terms, the U.S. government’s public health effort is led by Daniel Jernigan, the incident commander for the Wuhan coronavirus response at the CDC. 

Jernigan is responsible for convening meetings of the nation’s state health commissioners and briefing CDC Director Robert Redfield and his boss, Azar. Meanwhile, state-level health leaders told me that they have been sharing information with one another and deciding how best to prepare their medical and public health workers without waiting for instructions from federal leadership. The most important federal program for local medical worker and hospital epidemic training, however, will run out of money in May, as Congress has failed to vote on its funding. The HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is the bulwark between hospitals and health departments versus pandemic threats; last year HHS requested $2.58 billion, but Congress did not act.

On Thursday, the CDC confirmed the first human-to-human spread of the Wuhan coronavirus inside the United States, between a husband and wife in Chicago. While the wife acquired her infection traveling in China, she passed the virus to her husband on return to the United States. Though only six Wuhan coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the United States, with no deaths, Nancy Messonnier of the CDC told reporters on Thursday: “Moving forward, we can expect to see more cases, and more cases mean the potential for more person-to-person spread.”

As the number of coronavirus cases increases, Americans are growing more fearful, which is which is creating new problems that the government is leaving unaddressed.Surveying the largest drug store chains in New York City on Wednesday, I found that all were sold out of medical face masks and latex gloves, as is Amazon. Searching online for protective masks reveals that dozens of products intended for use to block dust and particles far larger than viruses are garnering brisk sales—and none available that can actually prevent viral exposure. The surge in mask and glove sales to worried citizens all over the world needs refereeing. Bona fide anti-viral masks should be prioritized to front-line medical and public health staff, and the populace shouldn’t be misled into purchasing and wearing products that offer no genuine protection.

Countering misinformation, conspiracy theories, rumormongering, and discriminatory behavior against people believed to be disease spreaders requires thoughtful communication from leadership at the highest levels of government. None is in evidence. Instead, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared on Fox Business on Thursday to fan the flames of fear for the sake of hypothetical business opportunities. “It does give businesses yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain,” Ross said. “It’s another risk factor that people need to take into account. So, I think it will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America, some to the U.S., probably some to Mexico as well.” Meanwhile, Trump, asked at the recent World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland how he intended to respond to the epidemic, said the situation was under control and a world away from the United States.

In a statement released this week, Pompeo sought to calm Americans, saying, “People should know that there are enormous efforts underway by the United States government to make sure that we do everything we can to protect the American people and to reduce the risk all around the globe.” But late Thursday night, the secretary—in clear defiance of WHO’s admonishment against restricting travel to and from China—issued an advisory saying, “Those currently in China should consider departing.”

In recent days, a handful of policy leaders have been shifted from government positions focused on weapons of mass destruction and bioterrorism to the slowly emerging epidemic response infrastructure, such as Matthew Pottinger, Philip Ferro, and David Wade on the NSC and the bioterrorism expert Anthony Ruggiero. It’s not at all clear how they would handle an explosion of coronavirus cases, were such a dreadful thing to occur in the United States. “The full weight of the US Government is working on this,” a senior administration official told CNN on Tuesday. “As with any interagency effort of this scale, the National Security Council works closely with the whole of government to ensure a coordinated and unified effort.”

The last time the U.S. government and its many local and state counterparts faced an explosive pandemic on American soil was 2009, with the spread of H1N1, or swine flu. The then-new Obama administration was still filling key positions across the executive branch when the epidemic emerged that spring, and it struggled to set the proper tone in reaction to what turned out to be an exceptionally contagious, but not unusually virulent, form of influenza. The challenge revealed enormous gaps in America’s ability to swiftly manufacture vaccines, stock-outs of face masks and vital hospital supplies, and serious difficulty in keeping ahead of outright lies, conspiracy theories, and rumormongering on cable TV and social media. The much more deadly pandemic test came in 1981, with the arrival of HIV: It did not go well, as history has well established, because homophobia was so pervasive in the country and within government that gay men, rather than the virus killing them, were treated as a national scourge.

Since the great influenza pandemic of 1918, the United States has been spared terrifying epidemics. Americans now are epidemic voyeurs. They watch YouTube videos of China’s struggles. They see the government attack its epidemic by building a 1,000-bed quarantine hospital in a single week, lock down cities larger than New York or Los Angeles, ramp up 24/7 manufacture of face masks and protective gear, deploy its armed forces medical corps to treat ailing citizens, send enormous convoys of food and supplies to anxious citizens of Wuhan, and release terrifying, growing tallies daily of its swelling patient populations. They look in horror at panicked lines of masked people waiting to learn if their fevers are caused by the deadly disease, at bodies lying on cold floors in overcrowded hospitals, and at people crying out from behind their masks for help. And they ask, “What would the United States do? What would the White House do?” 

The answers are not reassuring.

*Laurie Garrett is a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer.

The Republican party is ripped from its moorings!

Echo opinion letter published in The Post Star a New York newspaper:

What is it that makes people in the North Country (New York, Vermont, New Hampshire... or in any community (?) continue to support Donald Trump?

 "In spite of the overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Republicans chose to make fools of themselves..."

(In Maine Writer opinion....They are blindly and ineptly hypnotized, caught in a cult mentality), in spite of the evidence that tRumph is illegally enriching himself and eroding the institutions of democracy? 

The Republican Party has been ripped from its moorings. What is it they stand for? It’s certainly not the rule of law or fiscal responsibility. Squash the opposition at any cost? Well, the cost my friends is our democracy.

Socialism is bad? What about Medicare and Social Security? What about public schools, hospitals, National Parks, fire departments, roads and bridges? How about the FCC, CDC, FAA, EPA? Are these not necessary in our society? What about health insurance? Let families go broke and/or die? Those are the choices facing many residents in this area. They don’t go to the doctor, they don’t get medicine for fear it will bankrupt their families.

Trump’s behavior is that of a tyrant. The Senate acquittal of Impeachment charges has emboldened him to move faster in his quest for power. In spite of the overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Republicans chose to make fools of themselves with ridiculous arguments designed to please him. Our own representative, Elise Stefanik was among them. The Senate made a big mistake in acquitting without allowing witnesses and documents. Trump is now using the federal judiciary to punish his enemies and obtain leniency for his accomplices. He knows the Senate will not hold him accountable.

If Trump is reelected in 2020, there will likely be no off ramp. We will all be living in the Land of confusion. Authoritarian oligarchy. Profits for the rich, social program cuts and more work with lower pay for the poor. This is what American soldiers fought against in WWII. The 2020 elections will be pivotal.

Debra Parker, Hudson Falls, New York

Viruses are entities that infect cellular life- hand washing, hand washing, hand washing!

Editor’s Note*: You may sometimes have felt like you “have come down with a virus,” meaning that you became sick from being exposed to something that could have been a virus. In fact, you have a virus – actually, many – all the time. Some viruses cause the common cold, and some are crucial to human survival. New viruses can also emerge, and they typically create illness in humans when they have very recently jumped from another species to humans. As world health leaders try to determine how to respond to the new coronavirus, virus expert Marilyn J. Roossinck answers a few questions.

1. What is a virus?  Defining a virus has been a challenge, because every time we come up with a good definition someone discovers a virus that breaks the rules. Viruses are entities that infect cellular life. They are very diverse. The simplest just have a couple of genes made of RNA or DNA wrapped up in a protein coat. Others have hundreds of genes, more than some bacteria.

All viruses are ultimately parasites. They require a host for replication. They cannot generate their own energy like cells can.

2. Why does a virus make people sick?
When a new human virus disease appears, it is most often because the virus has jumped from a different species into humans. The worst viruses are often the ones that have very recently jumped into the species.

After jumping species, the virus goes through a process of adjustment to its new host. The real challenge, however, is to the host. As it tries to figure out how to adjust to an invasion from something completely new, the immune system overreacts. This is what makes the host sick. It usually isn’t an advantage for the virus to make people sick; it is an accident of the hosts’ immune system overreacting to something it doesn’t recognize.

Viruses that have been in a host for a long time are less likely to cause disease. For example, HIV jumped into humans from wild primates, in whose bodies it wasn’t causing any disease.

Every virus-host relationship is different. In most cases, viruses do not cause any disease, and many are beneficial. For example, in mice a herpes virus prevents infection from the plague bacteria.

3. Why is it so important to know the original source?

If the virus comes from an animal, knowing what that animal is can help break the chain of infection. Knowing the source also helps scientists understand mutations that might have occurred in the virus’ genome. That’s because host-jumping affects the variation in a virus genome. When a virus has been in its host for a long time, the genome is fine-tuned to that host, and mutations are not tolerated.

4. SARS was a formidable foe, and then seemed to disappear. Why?

Measures to contain SARS started early, and they were very successful. The key is to stop the chain of transmission by isolating infected individuals. SARS had a short incubation period; people generally showed symptoms in two to seven days. There were no documented cases of anyone being a source of SARS without showing symptoms.

Stopping the chain of transmission is much more difficult when the incubation time is much longer, or when some people don’t get symptoms at all. This may be the case with the virus causing CoVID-19, so stopping it may take more time.

5. What is the best way to treat viruses?

Viruses don’t respond to antibiotics, and in some cases taking antibiotics can make things worse, because the normal bacteria in the gut are an important part of the immune response. Antiviral drugs can work with some viruses, but the mutation rate of most viruses means that they become resistant to antivirals very quickly.

The best treatment is to give the patient the best tools to allow their own body to fight off the infection. This usually means rest and keeping hydrated. Virus infection can suppress the immune system, so patients should be monitored for secondary infections that might require other treatments. Prevention is important. Sick people need to be isolated, and healthy people need to take precautions.

Most respiratory viruses are not transmitted just by breathing them in from sick people, but by getting them on your hands from tiny droplets that sick people distribute by coughing or sneezing, and then touching your face. Good hand-washing is important!

*Echo opinion by Marilyn J. Roossinick, Professor of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology, Pennsylvania State University, published in The Conversation.

Vaccines save lives echo

Echo opinion published in NJPenn.com a newsletter published by the Camden New Jersey Haddonfield Friends School:

I was shocked as an educator, mother, and elected official to hear about the bogus debate in regard to vaccines on the heels of the measles outbreak in California.  

(Also, measles in Maine- U.S. measles outbreak spreads to Maine, 25th state to report case. Reuters Reports - Maine became the 25th U.S. state to confirm a case of measles amid the country's worst outbreak of the disease in a quarter century, as state medical officials on Wednesday reported that a child was infected but is now fully recovered.)

Let’s be clear–first, there is no debate. Vaccines save lives!

Second, the science is strong and indisputable: there is absolutely no link to the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism or brain damage.

Furthermore, you can make no mistake about it: the public’s health is compromised every time someone opts to not vaccinate their child.

Measles itself is one of the most contagious airborne diseases on the planet. In fact, according to the Center for Disease Control, if one person has it, 90 percent of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected. Measles is a disease that can reap horrific consequences on children and anyone else that is infected by it.

Taking a step back into history, prior to the creation of a vaccine, measles would kill 6,000 people a year. Even after the vaccine was developed, the disease still was responsible for hospitalizing 48,000 a year and killing 400 to 500 individuals on an annual basis.

This was until the federal government made a push to completely eradicate the disease through nationwide inoculation. This was achieved 15-years-ago in 2000, but fast-forward to 2013, and, according to the World Health Organization, our MMR vaccination rate has fallen to 91 percent.

To put this in perspective: there are several third-world nations with a better rate of vaccination than our country, which is striking, and should be reversed.

Did you know that 59 percent of the patients with measles in California are adults? I say this to stress that you are never too old to get vaccinated; in fact, the federal government did not start requiring two doses of MMR until 1989, so if you only had one shot, you should consult with your doctor to see if another dose of the vaccine is necessary.

In addition, as a nation, we have access to a safe alternative to stop devastating diseases, unlike other countries where healthcare workers are killed for vaccinating members of their society–my point being that the luxury of keeping yourself healthy and safe from diseases like measles is not afforded to all global citizens.

As a society, we are dependent on herd immunity because there are segments of our population that are unable to be vaccinated. These are individuals who cannot be immunized, including infants; individuals who have medical conditions making them immunocompromised; and a small number of people who are allergic to the vaccine.

In the state of New Jersey we have had one reported case of the measles, but I believe, as a public health official, we need to have a constant dialogue about this issue to thoroughly discredit anyone who undermines our herd.

Here at the Camden County Health Department, we carry the MMR vaccine at our health clinics that are open to the public every day during the work week. Appointments can be made by going to our website at www.camdencounty.com/health or calling (856) 931-2700.

Please know this is not a debate and the science is clear in regards to vaccines. They are pertinent to our public health and critical to the health of our children.

Carmen Rodriguez is a Camden County freeholder and liaison to the Camden Department of Health & Human Services, Board of Social Services and Department of Children’s Services. She also serves as supervisor of Bilingual Education for the Camden City School District.

Republicans have ignored the symbolism in our American flag- an opinion echo

Echo- To the Editor of the Syracuse New York syracuse.com:https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2020/02/no-person-can-be-above-the-law-your-letters.html

"...all GOP representatives have to be replaced with more honest and fair-minded representatives."

I saw our flag the other day, our symbol for “truth, justice and the American way.” Where all people are supposed to be equal, where people have a voice in their own lives and where no one is above the law. This country is not perfect , but the idea behind the flag is a good one.

However, for the first time I saw the flag as dirty, being tainted with injustice and corruption. How can you have a country where everyone is equal, if the leader believes that he is above the law? This idea goes against everything this country stands for.

People need to speak up before we lose everything that our country has fought for. No one person can be above the law. We have legislators who represent us in our government. They need to hear from us to fight for fairness and equality. All government officials who do not actively support equality need to be voted out. Our guiding lights are the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, not believing in any cult leader who lies and corrupts those who believe him.

Look at our recent news: Donald Trump (tRumpzi!) is using his Attorney General (#DisBarBarr!) to legally justify whatever he wants. 

His Treasury Secretary is preventing his financial records from being seen. His Secretary of State is helping to corrupt the election. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (#MoscowMitch!) is only getting select judges. There are many more incidents of corruption that the GOP have completed, with minimal disclosure. They need to protect justice, not destroy it. Nearly all GOP representatives have to be replaced with more honest and fair-minded representatives.

Remember how our government is supposed to work: “Of the people, by the people and for the people.” We have to talk and listen to others, read more, listen to multiple media, call your representatives and, by all means, vote.

From Bob Keegan,  North Syracuse New York

Senator Susan Collins has entered a political twilight zone

Maine Writer - There was a time when Senator Collins seemed to take pride in being transparent about her ability to be a political centrist. Now, in the dangerous age of tRumpziim, when America desperately needs political leadership, she has wrongly chosen to be in lock step with right wing political voting. (Kavannaugh and IMpotus vote.)

In my opinion, the veneer has been removed from her political persona by Senator Angus King's common sense progressivism. Clearly, Senator Collins cannot compete with the limelight received by Senator King, who takes his positions directly to the people while Senator Collins has not taken Town Hall forum questions for many years. 

Senator Collins has entered a weird political twilight zone, 

by changing her brand from moderate to right wing while claiming she is somehow an independent.

The Immoderate Susan Collins - 

After a long career voting across the aisle, why did the Maine senator gamble her legacy on Trump.

An excellent in depth article published in The New York magazine The Intelligencer, by Rebecca Traister

Senator Susan Collins believes that Donald Trump learned a lesson by being impeached? (Ahhhhh, I don't think so!)

Last fall, Erik Mercer, a Maine social worker and psychotherapist, saw one of his senators, the Republican Susan Collins, while he was waiting for a plane in Washington, D.C. Mercer, a Democrat, had approached Collins on a plane once before, after the 2016 election, to thank her for a ferociously worded op-ed she had published before the election calling Donald Trump “unworthy of being our president” and declaring that she would not be voting for him. 

This time, he asked if he could sit next to her and then described the trouble he was having explaining to his children that the president was above the law, mentioning particularly the terrible things Trump says about women. Collins, he recalled, replied that she didn’t believe the president had said anything bad about women for a while, and that she couldn’t comment further because she was a potential juror in his Senate trial. The conversation was frustrating, and he called a friend immediately afterward to complain about what he perceived as Collins’s lack of courage.

Mercer soon found himself just behind Collins on the jet bridge and overheard her tell another passenger that a constituent had just been “very rude” to her. Mercer cut in: “You were the one who refused to answer my questions. I was trying to do the work of democracy, and you refused to participate.”

“He called me a coward,” Collins said to her companion.

When he got back to Maine, Mercer took out a full-page ad in the Portland Press Herald recounting their interaction. Soon, Collins’s spokesperson Annie Clark was telling Press Herald columnist Bill Nemitz that Mercer had been “aggressive, confrontational, and sanctimonious.” Those exact words later appeared in a letter to the editor sent by political consultant Larry McCarthy, best known as the mastermind behind George H.W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, who had been with Collins on the flight.

In the span of Trump’s administration, Collins has gone from being broadly beloved, understood as one of the more humane and thoughtful Republicans in her party, to finding herself in brawls like this, widely reviled, regarded by Democrats as a loyal foot soldier to her ever-more-extreme right-wing cohort and party leader and yet by some members of that cohort as an unreliable waffler.

In 2015, polling firm Morning Consult found Collins to have, at 78 percent, the highest approval ratings of any Republican senator, second only to Bernie Sanders in the whole body. But this January, the same survey found her approval at 42 percent and her disapproval at 52; she is now the most unpopular American senator, beating out even her caucus leader, Mitch McConnell.

And that survey was taken before Collins’s ineffectual vote to call witnesses in Trump’s impeachment trial, and then her vote to acquit him, choices likely to have endeared her to no one and that set her up in contrast to Utah senator Mitt Romney, who, in voting to convict the president and leader of his own party and giving a moving speech laying out his reasons for doing so, embodied the kind of politician Collins had long promised voters she was.

To many, even those most critical of her, Collins appears caught in a miserable position: the only remaining Republican senator in New England, torn between an unrelentingly disciplined caucus, Trump’s punitive base, and a liberalish Maine constituency, all during a period of enormously high stakes. But it’s not like Collins wound up in this bind by tragic happenstance.

In December, the 67-year-old senator — who, when she first ran for the Senate in 1996 vowed to serve only two terms, declaring, “Twelve years … long enough to be in public service” — announced officially that she would be seeking a fifth term in 2020.

Collins has always advertised herself as above partisan clannishness. “I want to continue the independent, moderate, and thoughtful tradition of Bill Cohen,” Collins said, during her first Senate race, in reference to the Republican senator whose seat she was running to fill. Collins had worked for Cohen, first as an undergraduate congressional intern during the year he famously broke with his party and voted to impeach Richard Nixon, then as a legislative aide for more than 12 years.

In ’96, Collins was sharply critical of Joe Brennan, her opponent for Cohen’s seat, noting that he “voted a straight party line” — with Democrats — “93 percent of the time” and arguing “I don’t think either party has all the answers, and I think we need someone who is going to take an independent approach.”

For many of the 23 years she’s since spent in the Senate, Collins did maintain a voting record more independent than your average bear’s. According to CQ Roll Call, she voted with Democratic presidents between 49 (Clinton in 1999) and 85 (Obama in 2009) percent of the time and with Republican presidents between 59 (Bush in 2008) and 88 (Bush in 2001 and 2002) percent of the time.

But according to the same publication, in 2017 and 2018, during the period of the Trump administration when Republicans had a narrow majority in the Senate and every vote counted, Collins voted with Trump 94 percent of the time. Since the Republican majority has grown, she’s gone back to casting some (largely decorative) votes in opposition, some of which work mostly to alienate her from hard-core Trump voters and look to liberals like little more than a fig leaf.

In short, Collins has gone from pleasing an unusually high number of people, at least some of the time, to pleasing vanishingly few people almost never.

Her choice to run again, against a backdrop of impeachment, ever-more partisan politics, and her own insistence that she is still the reasonable, freethinking politician she has always claimed to be, prompts questions about what has changed: Is it Susan Collins herself? Her party? Or is it simply that the Trump era has revealed something about Collins, that the moderation on which she built her Senate career was never quite as defining as she made it out to be? (Maine Writer observation: None of Senator Collins' 2020 political ads use the word "Republican". Rather, the ads identify her as being "independent". Nevertheless, the Maine media have been cowards by not calling her campaign out about this deliberate mislabeling.)

Trying to get Collins’s attention has become something of a weekend sport for some Mainers. Protesters regularly post videos of themselves staging sit-ins and vigils at her Maine offices. They bird-dog her flights in and out of the state and trail her to announced radio appearances and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, sometimes standing silent with signs, sometimes lobbing questions at her on the street. In early January, progressive organizations bought giant movable billboards urging eight Senate Republicans, Collins chief among them, to hold Trump accountable during impeachment. One of those billboards wound up in front of the Bangor home of Stephen King, a longtime critic of Collins, who lives on the same street as she does.

Dan Aibel, a New York playwright who for 13 years has maintained the CollinsWatch blog and now Twitter handle — dedicated to tracking the actions and coverage of Maine’s senior senator — tells me that for years, people wondered about his quixotic interest, but no longer. “It used to be this weird, curious thing,” he said. “ ‘Why are you so focused on Susan Collins?’ And now the very same people say, ‘Oh my God, tell me what’s going on with Susan Collins.’ ”

Multiple organizations that had previously endorsed or supported Collins have turned on her for the first time: NARAL. The League of Conservation Voters. Planned Parenthood, which gave the officially pro-choice Republican an award as recently as 2017, in January endorsed her leading Democratic opponent, Sara Gideon. In the final quarter of 2019, Gideon, the Speaker of the Maine House who has not even won the primary yet (she is running in a big field that includes Betsy Sweet, Bre Kidman, Tiffany Bond, and Ross LaJeunesse), raised $3.5 million — $1.2 million more than Collins. The race is expected to ultimately draw close to $50 million, the most expensive in the history of Maine.

Collins’s neutered vote for witnesses in the impeachment trial—which came only after it was clear there weren’t enough Republican votes to risk any actual witnesses being called — didn’t seem to enrage the most powerful Republicans. One White House official told me, on the day that she cast it, that no one in the administration “is surprised or angry,” and cpac, which sent Romney a huffy disinvitation from its annual conference even before he voted to convict Trump, made no such affronted gesture toward Collins.

But her efforts to present as a solemn defender of procedural norms—she said that witnesses would permit both sides to “fully and fairly make their case” — didn’t endear her to the Trump-loving masses, who online call her a RINO (“Republican in name only”) and imagine a hero who will arrive to primary her from the right, which remains a possibility until the state filing deadline of March 16. On Fox News, conservative radio host Howie Carr suggested that her witness vote made her “the most endangered” Republican senator up for reelection. Collins’s longtime friend and former Republican state senator Roger Katz told me that not too long ago, Collins’s PAC “sent a check to one of the county Republican committees to assist them in getting their local candidates elected. But the county Republican committee is so upset with her that they sent her check back.”

Maine is an extremely rural state, its 1.3 million residents spread among 495 towns. “Susan Collins has been to every single one of those 495 towns,” said Ben Gilman, who has been in Maine politics since the 1990s and now works for the state’s Chamber of Commerce. “I always thought that she embodies Maine’s spirit: independent with a fiscally conservative, socially liberal model.”

Indeed, with the exception of its bombastic, hard-right, two-term 74th governor, Paul LePage, who served until 2019 and liked to describe himself as a precursor of Donald Trump, Maine has a lengthy history of political independence. Forty percent of voters are not registered either as Democrats or Republicans, and almost to a number, Maine natives I talked to stressed that if they were affiliated with a party, they rarely voted a straight ticket. To wit: In 2008, Obama won Maine by 17 points, while Collins won reelection by 23 points.

In addition to Bill Cohen, other state leaders, including Democratic senators Ed Muskie and George Mitchell and former Republican governor John “Jock” McKernan, were regarded as moderates, well liked both inside and outside their parties. Their forerunner was Margaret Chase Smith, who was elected to her husband’s congressional seat after his death and then to the Senate in 1948, becoming the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress. Smith was a Republican hawk who supported the Vietnam War and pushed to use nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union. But she also famously broke with her party to stand up to Joe McCarthy and his anti-communist crusade and voted against judicial and Cabinet appointments made by Republican presidents. Collins has often cited Smith as her role model and told of how she first met her on a high-school trip to Washington: “What I remember most was her telling me always to stand tall for what I believed.”

Maine, like Texas, California, and other frontier states, has a comparatively rich history of women in politics, richer in many ways than traditionally blue states like Massachusetts and New York. Olympia Snowe, another in Maine’s tradition of moderate Republicans, was elected to the Senate in 1994, two years before Collins filled the other seat, making Maine the second state to field an all-female delegation. (Snowe and Collins had a famously frosty relationship: Joe Lieberman, a friend of Collins’s, once joked with a Washington Post reporter writing a dual profile about the pair that it should be spelled “d-u-e-l.”) So many women have been in Maine politics for so long that the state has become home to multiple matriarchal political dynasties, including the Collinses’. Her mother, Patricia, was the mayor of her hometown.

Collins is from Caribou, a town of just about 8,000 in Aroostook County, Maine’s northernmost region. Aroostook, where my mother grew up on a potato farm about 60 miles south of Collins’s hometown, is rural, wooded, wild, and remote; once you get to Bangor, you keep driving more than an hour to enter it from the south.

It’s also conservative; Maine’s liberal populations are clustered near Portland and on the coast, while everything north and west in the state is pretty red. When Collins was growing up, the County — as Aroostook is called in Maine — had a robust farming economy that has slowed, as well as military bases and a college that have since closed.

Collins’s family has run a lumber and hardware business based in Caribou for five generations, and it wasn’t just her mother who was mayor; her father, Donald, was too, before he served five terms as a Republican in the state legislature. (Collins’s uncle was on the Maine Supreme Court and in the state senate.) At her father’s funeral in 2018, Katz told me, he noticed that Collins, one of six siblings, did not give a eulogy. “It was clear to me that she didn’t want it to be about the passing of a U.S. senator’s father; she wanted it to be about the passing of her father.”

Collins’s mother is a particular influence on her daughter. As Katz said, “Susan was known as Patricia’s daughter before Patricia was known as Susan’s mother.” And Richard Guarasci, who was Collins’s progressive-leaning government professor at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, recalled that Collins once returned from a Thanksgiving break and told him, “I had to tell my parents I was in your class about 20th-century Marxism; it didn’t go over well.”

One former Collins Senate staffer said that in her early days in the Senate, Collins’s parents’ sense of how she was doing in Washington was a consideration at the office. “The senator heard about it if her mom was unhappy.” Several people mentioned Collins’s outsize sensitivity to her parents’ perception of her work and life, one noting that what Patricia thought weighed heavily on Collins even into her 40s and 50s.

After her brush with Marxism in college, Collins returned to working in Cohen’s congressional office, a job she was hired for by Cohen’s chief of staff, Tom Daffron, a respected Maine political operative who would become Collins’s mentor, close friend, and — nearly 40 years after they met — husband; the couple wed in 2012, when Collins was 59 and Daffron 73.

Guarasci remembered her as a talented, driven student who “had this old-­fashioned belief in public service; she saw it as a noble activity, the highest duty one can have.” Drawn to (half) of the family trade — politics — she would go on to work in McKernan’s gubernatorial administration during a controversial overhaul of Maine’s worker-compensation laws. Appointed by George H.W. Bush to be regional director of the Small Business Administration in Massachusetts, she left Maine for two years before coming back to run for governor, a race she lost to independent Angus King, now her fellow senator. She worked at Husson College before running and winning Cohen’s old Senate seat.

Collins remains very close to her family; her wedding was small and unfussy; she brings little of her Washington life back to rural Maine with her. Her brother Michael has spent time in jail on drug charges; he was arrested with 1,000 pounds of marijuana during her 1994 gubernatorial campaign, and her family has been open about his troubles. Her brothers Sam and Gregg now head up the other half of the family business — the lumber part — and are credited with its resurgence. When we are in Aroostook County, my family makes it a point to shop at the local hardware store rather than at the Walmart that has led to the closing of so many other businesses; that local hardware store is S.W. Collins.

The sharp memory and detailed niceties of retail politics come easily to Collins, especially with regard to the geography and industries of her home state. “When you get to the question of why the senator is so successful,” said one person whose family was close to hers in the County, “it’s that when I would see her on a plane from D.C. to Maine, she could always quote my parents’ Christmas letter.” Sarah Day, whose husband, Avery, interned in Collins’s Senate office as an undergraduate, recalled how Collins had made sure that Avery, who hails from a family of lobstermen on the island of Vinalhaven, got to staff the senator for the annual Fishermen’s Forum in Rockport, though he was just a college sophomore. And when I spoke on the phone to Collins in 2017 (she would answer questions only via email for this story) and told her that my family was from the County, within moments she was able to recall experiences she’d had on the road on which my mother grew up.

Understanding Collins as a “County girl” is key to some of her appeal to Maine voters, at least to some of those who feel a rugged affection for the area and are aware of its rural character and long history of economic decline.

Don Flannery, the head of the Maine Potato Board, who is a registered Republican (but has seldom voted a straight ticket), described his relationship with Collins as great, in part, because “she came from potato country, and grew up picking potatoes by hand, so she knew a lot about the industry.” Some years ago, when new science about low-carb diets, along with the nutritional advocacy of then–First Lady Michelle Obama, almost got potatoes kicked off school-hot-lunch and WIC programs, Flannery recalled, “Collins went to bat for the potato industry all across the U.S.”

Collins did not grow up on a potato farm herself, but until recently, most schools in Aroostook observed a harvest break during which students earned money by filling potato barrels. When Collins was young, that meant picking spuds out of the dirt where they’d been dug up, putting them in baskets, and dumping those heavy baskets into bigger barrels. It’s this experience that Democratic senator Harry Reid cited in 2015 when he congratulated Collins on casting her record-breaking 6,000th consecutive floor vote. “It’s no surprise to me that Susan Collins is such a hard worker,” Reid said in a statement that Collins has posted proudly on her web page. “She started this as a young woman digging potatoes for 30 cents a barrel at her neighbors’ farm.” (Collins has never missed a vote, and in July cast her 7,000th.)

Collins, said Katz, “takes everything in her life very seriously. Yes, her family is No. 1, and she has close friends, but other than that, this is her life. She’s working 70 hours a week.” Before marrying Daffron, staffers worried that she went home every night to a pile of briefing books, taking little vacation time. “I said to her one time, ‘I can’t imagine having to come to Maine from Washington every weekend, and then on a beautiful July day when you’d like to be at a lake, you have to do parades,’ ” said Bob Umphrey, an old ­Collins-family friend who runs a packing company in Presque Isle, “but she just laughed.”

Her reputation as a workhorse with a commitment to scrupulous study is one that Collins cultivates. During the impeachment hearings, she proudly showed a local reporter the 25 pages of notes on a legal pad that she had managed to take during opening statements.

Collins hates to be caught unprepared. Mary Small, a former Maine state senator who first met Collins in state government in the 1980s, later worked for a nonprofit that required her to meet with her as a senator. “You had to tell her everything you were going to be talking about,” said Small. “And woe if you didn’t give her the stuff you were going to be talking about, because she wanted to be able to converse intelligently about it all.”

Of course, one woman’s nose-to-the grindstone preparedness is another’s desire to maintain tight control of unpredictable situations. One activist who was granted a meeting with Collins in 2017 took contemporaneous notes on the preparatory phone call with a staffer, noting that the staffer “is handling the meeting so it is our ‘first’ meeting … and not our last. She wants it ‘civil.’ She wants ‘NO surprises.’ She wants NO interruptions. She wants this to NOT blow up in the senator’s face.”

Collins’s work ethic forces a very high bar for those staffers. “She is incredibly demanding,” one person who used to work for Collins told me. “She did not tolerate staff mistakes well.” This former staffer told me of being called to the carpet via “very sharp emails.”

Some swear that her reputation as a tough County girl is key to understanding why Collins is behaving the way she is now, politically. Speaking before impeachment proceedings, one former staffer, also raised in Aroostook, told me, “The way to get her to stand up to Trump is not to criticize her. She’s a kid from the County; she’s stubborn and she doesn’t like to be insulted. The thing to do would be to warmly tell her that standing up to Trump would be five times the courage of Margaret Chase Smith standing up to McCarthy; praise her backbone and challenge her to be great.”

But having all that County character can be a double-edged sword, especially if part of the suspicion about you is that you’re not being straightforward or available. This is something Collins’s detractors mention again and again: Although she has a reputation for excellent constituent services, including multiple satellite offices where people who are having trouble getting disability or Social Security payments can come to for help from her staff, critics agree that she herself remains determinedly inaccessible in contexts where people might speak plainly. (Collins’s office disputes this.)

But the perception of that inaccessibility leaves frustrated Mainers ready to pounce whenever and wherever they do see her — in stores and on airplanes — and Collins vulnerable to the kinds of impromptu encounters she seems to loathe and that tend to spiral even further out of her control.

In December, a video of another airplane interaction with the senator went briefly viral: In it, a woman asks Collins if she’ll return donations from Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical manufacturer widely blamed for inflating insulin prices, or from Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family, which has been widely blamed for its role in the opioid crisis that has ravaged Maine. Collins tells the woman that she has “never” accepted donations from the Sacklers (she did in fact receive contributions from them in 2007, 2010, and 2011). Collins later admitted that she might have taken money from Lilly, but said she would not return it.

The combustible interactions with constituents create a particularly strong contrast with King, Maine’s independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats and is famously gregarious and available; he asks his staff to call him “Angus” and talks to everyone all the time. When he got to the Senate in 2013, he and Collins communicated constantly. Toby McGrath, a political consultant who has worked for King, remembered Collins joking that “Angus texts me more than my niece.”

But communication between the two has slowed as King has gotten more outspoken on issues he and Collins disagree on, and the nature of their interactions with Mainers couldn’t be more different. The weekend before the impeachment vote, King held an emotional, 300-person town hall in Brunswick, joining constituents in the recitation of Abraham Lincoln quotations. Collins stayed in D.C. and worked.

Collins’s defenders suggest that many of those banging loudest on her door these days aren’t even from Maine, and point to her powerful roles on the Senate Appropriations Committee and on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee as being crucial to her state’s economic health; Collins also points to this, noting in an emailed statement that “a lot of people asked me to run again because of what my seniority would mean for the state” and that next term she’s in line to be chair of the Appropriations Committee. Collins’s fans credit her advocacy in the passage of a defense-spending bill that sought to boost jobs at Bath Iron Works, as well as at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery and Pratt & Whitney in North Berwick. In November, Collins announced, in her capacity as chair of the Housing Appropriations Subcommittee, that three programs in Maine would be getting more than $600,000 in money to support better housing options for those with disabilities. And recent ads cite almost $20 million in federal funding Collins secured to build a breakwater in the town of Lubec, part of an attempt to increase safe working conditions for fishermen there.

Collins probably has such good committee assignments because McConnell wants to keep her vote. In fact, that streak of independence and potential unpredictability is probably why so many of her Maine predecessors — including Mitchell, Cohen, Muskie, and Snowe — have enjoyed disproportionate power in the Senate. Independence is a way to exert leverage in a legislative body where your state might not otherwise have much.

For a while, Collins made use of that leverage to challenge her own party’s dogma. She was a proponent of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell”; she was one of only three Republicans to oppose the so-called partial-birth abortion ban; she voted to acquit Bill Clinton of impeachment charges in 1998. She ultimately supported Dodd-Frank legislation (though progressive critics note that she pushed to make it less effective).

You need to look at how the landscape of the Senate has changed,” said Susan Young, editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News. “She became well known nationally in an era of the gangs: the Gang of 14, the gangs formed over the avoidance of the nuclear option or the stimulus package. She was one of the people at the center of those debates, negotiating ways to resolve thorny issues. But now we’re in the era of Mitch McConnell, and he’s not interested in compromise. So when we talk about how Susan Collins is not so moderate anymore, that’s more of a view of how politics has changed, not how she has changed. We’re criticizing her for not doing something that just isn’t happening in the Senate anymore.”

Collins herself bemoans the shrinking of her moderate lane. Speaking to a No Labels group in 2017, she described Facebook comments from the right, calling her “clearly bought and paid for by the far left.” “That, my friends, is what it’s like to be in the middle these days … you are criticized, and in some cases despised, by both sides … It feels like the moderate middle is melting like late-winter snow in Maine.”

Collins’s friend Mary Small noted that when she was serving in the state senate, as a pro-choice Republican, “we used to have a pretty big umbrella under which everybody could fit. But not anymore. I think it was the tea party. ­LePage exacerbated it.” Still, she said, the fact that the party has moved right doesn’t mean that old-fashioned Republicans like her and Collins are the left.

“Just because she’s a moderate doesn’t mean she’s a Democrat,” said Small, noting that Collins’s Republican colleagues, who are expected to vote Republican, don’t “get the horrid, nasty stuff that she gets.” But, as Small says, “she’s still a Republican, and she became a Republican for reasons.”

Democrats who came to imagine Collins as a true ally perhaps didn’t pay close enough attention to her established friendships with the Bush family, with Karl Rove. Maybe it’s hard to remember, in an age in which the new, hard-right Republican Party has cast its elders in a flattering but distorting light, that differences — both ideological and tribal — are by degree. And that independence within that party has always had its limitations. “While Bush was president, she was for the line-item veto,” said one Collins critic. “Then a reporter asked her after Obama was elected, and she said, ‘Oh, I’m not for the line-item veto.’ ” None of this is atypical for a senator in this era; it is at odds with the vision of a woman who claims to put her independent beliefs above party loyalty.

Former senator Harry Reid recalled how during Obama’s first term, when he was majority leader, “one of the first things we had to do was get a stimulus bill passed.” Reid said he immediately went to Collins, who agreed to help. The stimulus bill that passed, Reid told me, “wasn’t as good as Obama wanted it to be” (in part because Collins worked to reduce its scope before she signed up), “but the reason I give you that example is to show you how she’s changed.”

Reid no longer sees her as a moderating force. “I think one of the reasons that Susan was moderate was because of Olympia Snowe, who was really moderate,” he said. “Susan votes 90 percent of the time with Trump. It’s hard to claim you’re a moderate when that happens.”

Reid particularly noted Collins’s role in the confirmation of Betsy DeVos, the Education secretary who has, among other things, cut funding for the Special Olympics. As a member of the Senate Education Committee, Collins could have voted to give DeVos a negative recommendation, but she didn’t. Yet once DeVos was in front of the whole Senate, and had enough votes to get through, Collins voted against her, an example of Collins not using her vote powerfully when she had the opportunity, a pattern even more evident when it comes to her votes on Trump’s judges.

Collins has said that she has voted for the judicial appointments of all the presidents she’s served under (98 percent for Clinton’s judges, 99 percent for Bush’s, 94 percent for Obama’s, and 95 percent for Trump’s). But the previous presidents Collins has worked under have not nominated the record number of young, unqualified, radical right-wing judges to lifetime appointments that Trump has, reshaping the federal judiciary for decades to come.

When Republicans held a narrow majority in the Senate in the first two years of Trump’s term, Collins voted the party line. She was a crucial vote to confirm Leonard Grasz, who had previously described what he sees as the “moral bankruptcy” of Roe v. Wade and suggested that the term “sexual orientation” could open the doors to bigamy and pedophilia. But since Republicans have increased their majority and gained more wiggle room, Collins has begun voting against some of Trump’s judicial appointments, citing, in several cases, anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ views that did not stop her vote when her party needed it. In other words, she’s only willing to go out on a limb when it’s easy to do so, not hard.




The vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh was a particular turning point. Collins supported the (half-baked) FBI investigation into what had happened. Women and men frantically met with the senator, advocating their side, telling her of their experiences. Some were Kavanaugh defenders, like Sarah Day, who wrote to both Collins and King (and published a public letter) vouching for Kavanaugh’s character, having worked with him in the White House.

Mindy Woerter, 35, is not registered with a political party, though the Maine native has consistently voted for Collins. In August 2018, Woerter was part of a group that traveled to Washington with Planned Parenthood in advance of the Kavanaugh confirmation, to tell Collins the story of her 2016 abortion, a procedure that, because her husband works for the federal government in shipbuilding, could not be paid for using his federal health insurance, thanks to the Hyde Amendment.

As the meeting started, Woerter recalled, Collins didn’t even address the storytellers. Instead, Woerter said, “she was very focused on her displeasure with the advocacy organization” and spoke only to the Planned Parenthood representatives, telling them that “she hadn’t appreciated the way people had treated her at an earlier event.” Collins was referring to having been commencement speaker at Colby College’s 2018 graduation, to which much of the graduating class had worn I STAND WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD stickers, not as an explicit protest but as an affirmative expression of their commitment to reproductive health. “I recall her saying something along the lines of ‘You should all be nicer to me,’ ” said Woerter. Eventually, Woerter and her companions got to tell their stories. “She did say a couple of times that she was really sorry, and that that must have been a hard time to go through.” But the meeting ended quickly, after Collins offered up some of the reasons she felt Kavanaugh would not overturn Roe. “It definitely gave the feeling, leaving,” said Woerter, “that there was no chance of persuading her.”

Collins announced her decision in a 45-minute speech on the Senate floor, in which she defended her decision to confirm Kavanaugh and excoriated activists and critics who had raised their voices in protest. In her speech, Collins decried the “gutter-level political campaign” waged against Kavanaugh by “dark money” and “special-interest groups” (groups that presumably included Planned Parenthood, the organization that had last given her an award just the previous year), portraying Kavanaugh as the real victim.

For many, it was a turning point. “That speech was just beyond the pale,” said Joann Inman, a retired teacher who has lived in Aroostook County for six decades, a registered Democrat who voted for Collins multiple times. “Fine, you took your vote. You don’t have to rub our faces in it.” Her vote for Kavanaugh led to a lining of Collins’s coffers; in the fall of 2018, Collins raised $1.8 million, most of it from out of state. It was the best fund-raising quarter of her career at the time. The previous quarter, by comparison, she had received $140,000 in contributions.


Ayear and a half later, Collins remains eager to advertise her credentials as a moderate, pointing out in an email that she’s “proud of the fact that year after year I’ve been named the No. 1 most bipartisan senator,” and citing relationships between Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich as evidence that “people of principles did find common ground.” Spokeswoman Annie Clark told me, as opening arguments got under way in the impeachment trial, about how a handful of handwritten changes to the procedural rules — changes that meant opening statements could extend over three days, not two — were shifts that her boss felt “were very significant.”

“She raised some concerns,” Clark told me, noting that Collins had been very satisfied with the outcome.

Collins’s “concern” about the overreach of her party or president has become a punch line. John Oliver has done a game-show bit called “Hope Susan Collins Flips and Be Disappointed When She Doesn’t,” while on Saturday Night Live, Cecily Strong’s Collins declares that presidential misbehavior “makes me want to shake my head vigorously and wag my finger once, perhaps twice” and “write a strongly worded email and send it straight to my drafts folder.”

But the political press continues to treat Collins as if she might vote in a manner completely contrary to everything we’ve learned about her in the past three years. When she was weighing the question of whether to vote for witnesses in the Senate trial, she earned breathless headlines trumpeting the possibility. It was a cycle that created the illusion of consequential independence without her ever having to cast a consequential vote.

For a long time, Collins has profited from collective fantasies about women in politics being inherently more reasonable, more naturally inclined toward collaboration and moderation. The mostly white women of the GOP have been imagined to be more practical and less ideologically driven than their male counterparts, more willing to work together toward functional, civilized compromise — especially with their female peers in the other party.

And indeed, Collins’s ties with other women in the Senate, from both parties, have been strong; she was credited with spearheading the bipartisan group of women that hammered out a budget deal in 2013 when the rest of the Senate was deadlocked. When Collins got engaged in 2012, Hillary Clinton threw her a shower with a guest list that included all 17 women then serving in the Senate. Kirsten Gillibrand told me once of Collins, “Susan’s worldview is similar to my worldview, which is that we’re here to help people, and if we’re not helping people, we should go the fuck home.” That was in 2017, a couple of months before Collins would indeed help people by casting her vote to block the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. (Gillibrand declined to comment for this story and has already announced her support of Sara Gideon.)

But the idealization of practical, cooperative women in politics, the no-nonsense gals who work well with others, has taken a hit in recent years. That’s in part thanks to a long-overdue reckoning, post-2016, with the more than half of white women who voted for Trump and, for decades before him, abetted the rise of his ever-more-punitive, patriarchal Republican Party: For what, with whom, and to whose benefit, have these women been willing to compromise?

When Collins says of the president she once deemed unfit that she believes he’s learned a “pretty big lesson” through his impeachment hearing, as she said to CBS when she cast her vote to acquit him, it’s not an accident that one of the first social-media responses was a joke from the Washington Post’s Alexandra Petri: “Let’s Not Do Any Further Harm to This Promising Young Man’s Career!” It’s a reference to the pattern, now familiar from the defenses of Kavanaugh, and convicted rapist Brock Turner and people who think Me Too is a witch hunt: the infantilizing invocation of maternal concern for the future and well-being of men who have abused their power, the kind of concern that is increasingly associated with a strain of reactionary white femininity.

Most everyone who talks about Susan Collins acknowledges her defensiveness and thin skin. In late December, Maine Momentum, the (c)(4) arm of a statewide progressive group, began airing an ad featuring brewery owners in Lubec, a small fishing town on Maine’s northern coast, who talk about how the tax bill hurt small-business owners while affording big corporations $100 billion in tax breaks. “I have always voted for Susan Collins,” says the woman in the ad. “And I have seen her voting record change.”
Within a few weeks, Collins’s campaign released a digital spot taking direct aim at the Lubec ad, calling it the product of “dark-money lies” put forth by “Sara Gideon’s extreme allies.” Soon came a longer ad, featuring shots of the tiny town of Lubec — population 1,300 — and ending with a woman holding Collins’s hands, thanking her tearfully for the $20 million breakwater built to protect the community’s fishermen.

Collins paints much of the criticism as seeded by dark-money groups. “I would support a bill to require all groups to disclose their donors,” Collins said in the fall. (In 2010, Collins voted against the Disclose Act, which would have required groups to disclose their donors, claiming that it offered too many exceptions.)

Her impulse to hit back against criticism, and to trumpet the degree to which she is being targeted, strikes many who know her as increasingly pronounced, probably because she’s being attacked more now than ever, something she’s anxious to let people know. In the fall of 2018, Collins told the New York Times all about how “not fun” it has been for her to receive death threats, to be crowded by protesters when she goes to vote. In January, she told a similar story to Jennifer Steinhauer at the Times, recalling how one staffer quit in response to the hostile calls that poured in post-Kavanaugh; how her husband had to wear a hazmat suit because of a threat of ricin in a letter sent to her home; how a man followed her home after she parked her car in the rain.

“It just made the whole time very unpleasant,” Collins told the Times. And yes! This whole period has been very unpleasant for lots of people, including those separated from their children at the border, a Trump policy Collins called “traumatizing [and] contrary to our values in this country” while later casting the deciding vote to confirm Kathleen Kraninger, who was instrumental in the family-separation policy, to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2018.

Collins’s complaints — for instance, grumbling about rude treatment at the hands of college students in front of constituents there to tell her harrowing stories of trying to obtain abortion care — are in line with a broader sense of victimhood among the powerful, who have recently come in for sharp criticism, protest, and pushback: It reflects the panic that in being harshly judged, they are being unjustly maligned, canceled, witch-hunted, lynched by ravening mobs of leftists.

The vindictiveness of Trump’s base is something that Collins is well aware of, especially in the weeks before the March 16 filing deadline for a primary competitor from the right. The day of her vote for witnesses, one GOP adviser called Collins a “dead woman walking”; the (laughable) view of her as “bought and paid for by the far left” could easily land her with a far-right opponent, including LePage himself (who has, in fact, endorsed Collins). He’s changed his residency to Florida, but some rumble about how easy it would be for him to drop back in and beat Collins in a primary. Then there is the young, charismatic, and ultra-right-wing mayor of Waterville, Nick Isgro.

But if crossing Trump is a risk, there’s not a lot of compelling evidence that standing by him will win her any prizes with his base. After all, even before Romney gave his speech, implicitly indicting the other moderates who had voted to shield the president from conviction, Trump himself had humiliated Collins and her stated belief that he had learned from his impeachment. Asked about her comments, he’d denied that he’d learned anything, forcing Collins to backtrack her already dubious assertion by calling her belief in his chastisement “aspirational.” By presenting markers that are so easily, observably blown through by her party, Collins either reveals herself to be a chump, or reveals her suspicion that voters are chumps.

Despite all this, Collins might well win in 2020. Sure, the money is pouring in for Gideon, and at least in southern Maine, home to liberal and left voters, bumpers are affixed with BYE-BYE, SUSAN stickers. Every time she makes a statement, the internet is awash with people posting donations to Gideon (or one of her Democratic rivals). Google analytics show that impeachment season had a huge spike in searches for “Collins’s opponent.” Control of the Senate rests on a couple of seats viewed as potentially flippable; it is possible that she will be running in the wake of a Supreme Court decision in June Medical Services v. Gee that will result in the closing of vast numbers of abortion clinics, with all eyes on the senators who installed Kavanaugh.

But it’s hard to beat incumbents. “Pundits always want to predict that Maine is much more competitive than it is,” said Gilman.

Toby McGrath said, “This is probably the most difficult race that she’s ever had. But one of the difficulties for Democrats is that there’s going to be the highest turnout we’ve ever had in Maine. With the presidential election, I think we could be at 75 or 80 percent, with a lot of low-information voters showing up to the polls. They’ve known Susan Collins’s name for five elections.”

Six years ago, said Katie Mae Simpson, who ran State Legislator Shenna Bellows’s campaign against Collins, “everyone thought Collins was untouchable, and it was essentially true. And we ran a strong race from the progressive left — no mistakes.” Back then, there was little outside interest; feminist groups didn’t want to target Collins, since she was perceived as far more benign than other Republican incumbents. Bellows got just over 30 percent of the vote.

Gilman observed that the very rural and spread-out nature of the state makes it tough for Collins’s opponent, who may well be Gideon, a Rhode Island native who moved to Freeport, Maine, in 2003 and was elected to the Maine House in 2012. Gideon’s launch video showed her in her expansive suburban kitchen, telling the story of her entrance into politics: She’d come home and heard a voice-message urging her husband to run for town council; she ran instead.

Gideon is young, smart, and has a lot of political backing and money behind her campaign. But she did not grow up picking potatoes; she hasn’t been to all 495 towns. And that could matter. “Running a campaign in the most rural state in America with someone who’s done it several times is always a benefit,” Gilman said. “I can’t think of a U.S. senator who was not successful in reelection in Maine.”

Except, of course, for Collins’s idol, Margaret Chase Smith, who in 1972 tried to extend her record as (then) the longest-serving woman in Congress by running for a fifth Senate term and was defeated. That loss was blamed on Smith’s failure to spend enough time campaigning in the state; she had rumored health problems by then, didn’t come back to Maine enough, and was criticized for not spending enough time communicating with her constituents. She lost to a Democrat who’d moved to the state less than 20 years before.

Back in the summer of 2017, when she cast her vote against the repeal of the ACA, in the dramatic session that concluded with John McCain’s thumbs-down, Collins was greeted at the airport in Bangor with a standing ovation. In photos taken of the moment, you can see her expression of delight. “It ­really was so extraordinary, heartwarming,” Collins would tell Jake Tapper of the reception she received that day. “It was just amazing … It was very encouraging and affirming, especially after arriving home after a very difficult time.”

Collins is so often portrayed as stuck, boxed in by mean Mitch McConnell on one side and disruptive activists on the other, as if she is the victim of timing and circumstance. Maybe it’s a projection of how so many Americans feel right now: powerless and trapped, fearful that our single votes have little chance of changing an outcome.

But Collins, unlike us, has taken single votes that have changed outcomes; she’s not trapped. In her fourth term, in her 60s, as a senior member of the Republican caucus and senior senator in her state, as a County girl with a straight backbone, she could have had enormous influence over the nation’s future. She could have been the hero Mitt Romney was, if only she had been willing to walk away: from her party, and likely from her seat.

So really: Why stay? If, as Collins often says, whatever she does will get half the state angry with her, and she doesn’t like people being angry with her, why choose this future over the July day on the lake with her husband? Collins’s former peer and rival, Olympia Snowe, the woman whom Reid called a “real moderate,” chose to leave, announcing her retirement in 2012 at age 64 and suggesting that there simply was no space for anyone like her in the party anymore.

It’s hard to see what Collins wants to go back to Washington to do, unless it is, simply, to continue to be in the U.S. Senate, which, as Adam Jentleson, the former deputy chief of staff to Harry Reid, commented to me, “is the world’s greatest retirement home, with a full schedule and a staff to tend to all your needs.”

Perhaps the least charitable but most quotidian answer to why Collins would want to stay comes from Reid himself. “It appears what we have now is people running for Senate,” said the former senator, “many of [whom] care more about the position than what the position’s about.”

Back in 1997, her first year in office, Collins gave an interview that showed how instinctively she understood the power of being a possible swing vote in a Senate that still sometimes worked on a bipartisan model. “I’m consistently sought out by both sides for co-­sponsorship of bills,” she told the New York Times. “I have a lot of power — I like that.”

Choosing between a party that now demands total fealty and a constituency she’s promised independence, Collins — a woman who has built her image around being a careful, thoughtful decision-maker — appears to have made no decision at all about the best way to keep her power. Instead, she is hoping that she can pretend to do both without anyone noticing.

It might work. But if I were her, I’d be deeply concerned.