Sister city history - Bath Maine and Tsugaru Japan

The Cheseborough was a 19th-century American ship which wrecked off the coast of Japan in 1889.On October 30, 1889, driven by a typhoon, she ran aground off the coast of Shariki, Aomori Prefecture, Japan. In a courageous rescue, the villagers saved a number of the crew and nursed them back to health.
Forecaster The Coastal Journal Edition- byAlex Lear 

Sister City history - Bath Maine with Tsugaru Japan

BATH, Maine — The story of the Bath-Tsugaru sister city relationship is one of tragedy turned to friendship. The bond was forged by unlikely circumstances, creating common bonds among people from two greatly diverse societies, separated by more than 6,000 miles.

The tale began in 1889, when a typhoon caused the Bath-built ship Cheseborough to crash on a shoal a mile offshore of Skariki, Japan. Residents of that northern Japanese town cared for the handful of survivors, whose grateful families kept in touch with the benefactors via letters for years to come.

A century later, in 1989, a delegation of officials from Shariki – which later merged with four other villages to form Tsugaru City – traveled to Bath to propose a formal sister-city relationship. 

Since 1990, students from the Bath and Tsugaru regions have taken part annually in an overseas exchange program, and a declaration of the relationship was signed in 1993.

The Bath-Tsugaru Student Exchange Program is marking the 30th anniversary of the delegation’s arrival in two ways.

1.  An April 1, dinner at the Henry and Marty Restaurant in Brunswick will raise money for student travel scholarships. The program’s board hopes to raise at least $3,000 toward trip scholarships. 

About half of the dinner’s 50 seats were sold as of last week.

2.  The milestone anniversary will also be commemorated through the installation on the city’s planned Riverwalk of a memorial to the longtime friendship – a bright red torii gate like those often encountered in Japan.

“There are a lot of places where you go through these gates, and it’s just so welcoming,” said Aaron Park, a city councilor who owns Henry and Marty. He was one of the adult chaperones on last year’s trip to Tsugaru, along with exchange program coordinator Jen Jones.

Imbued with the value the sister city hosts placed on the friendship’s milestone, “I came back with this idea that we need to celebrate something on our side, and do our part, because they are definitely attaching significance to this,” Park said March 21, in an interview alongside Jones, program President Will Laliberte, and Lindsey Goudreau, the city’s marketing and communications specialist.

Park, a program board member along with Goudreau, seeks ways to boost the organization’s profile and renew its message of amity across the miles, with Japan.

Maine Medicaid expansion - Governor Paul LePage must comply

Echo "letter to the editor" from Maine's Forecaster newspaper

Refusing to fund Maine’s Medicaid expansion is fiscal madness

By Orlando Delogu  (letter to the editor)

Orlando Delugu is emeritus professor of law, at the University of Maine School of Law, and a public policy consultant to federal, state, and local government agencies and officials. orlandodelogu@maine.rr.com.

If a wealthy uncle offered to contribute $10 for every dollar you contributed to repair your house, who among us would turn down the offer? 

Only a fool.

That’s the deal the Affordable Care Act has put on the table: 

$525 million federal dollars will be provided to the state of Maine annually to expand health insurance coverage to an additional 80,000 Mainers, if the state commits to bearing not more than 10 percent of the ACA Medicaid expansion costs (estimated at $50-60 million annually). 

In fact, the deal extends to fiscal years 2019 and 2020, and every year thereafter, as long as these Affordable Care Act (ACA) funding provisions remain in place.

This money would filter into hospitals and individual health-care providers in every corner of Maine. 

Medicaid expansion would sustain and expand needed health-care jobs. Moreover, it would obviate the need for the poor and uninsured to turn to high-cost emergency-room care when faced with medical emergencies.

It would allow low-income Mainers to have the benefit of meaningful health insurance coverage; routine and preventative health care that improves the quality of life and extends the life expectancy of these individuals.

But Governor Paul LePage has the wrong idea.

For five years, LePage blocked legislatively adopted ACA Medicaid health insurance for low-income Mainers. 

Ideologically driven Republicans in the Legislature have sustained five vetoes of legislation, authorizing participation in this program. 

Maine has foolishly foregone hundreds of millions of federal dollars

Thirty-one other states have participated in this program, but LePage and Republicans in the Legislature were unmoved, despite the fact that during the first three years of the ACA, the federal government would bear the full cost of expanded Medicaid health insurance.

Maine has lost these federal dollars forever, along with the economic and health-care benefits (and the multiplier effect) that these dollars would have created; the elderly, poor, and rural hospitals suffer most.

Facing this political stalemate in Augusta and the accompanying economic malfeasance and human harms produced, a citizen initiative to expand Medicaid insurance in Maine (similar in substance to the vetoed legislation) was passed overwhelming by voters in November.

But the governor threatens not to implement this constitutionally authorized enactment by requiring the Legislature to fund (up front) the state’s share of first-year ACA insurance expansion costs, which he estimates to be $60 million. 

Moreover, LePage provides no data indicating that $60 million is an accurate first-year state cost.

Further, he charges the state's Legislature to find this sum without raising taxes; without reaching into the state’s surplus account; without cutting state appropriations for schools, and without reducing any budgeted expenditures linked to social services or Maine’s economy.

These actions by the governor are impermissible; he has no constitutional authority to indirectly veto an approved initiative, or to impose implementation limitations and duties on the Legislature.

On the contrary, Maine’s Constitution explicitly states that “the Governor shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”; that “any measure referred to the people and approved by a majority of the votes given thereon shall … become a law …,” and that “the veto power of the Governor shall not extend to any measure approved by vote of the people.”

Moreover, Maine’s highest court in dealing with voter-approved initiatives has repeatedly made clear that they “… must be liberally construed to facilitate, rather than to handicap, the people’s exercise of their sovereign power to legislate,” and that “the right of the people … to enact legislation … is an absolute one and cannot be abridged directly or indirectly.”

The governor is free to work with the Legislature to raise taxes, allocate rainy day funds, reduce any or all present expenditure commitments (or a combination of these measures) to meet the state’s actual annual share of participation in ACA Medicaid expansion growing out of the initiated law.

But, Governor LePage has no back-door veto power of this law. 

His sole duty at this point is to “facilitate, rather than to handicap,” the initiated law.  In fact, LePage must be held to this duty by the attorney general (AG) or by the Legislature.

The governor's fool’s errand, imposed on the state – foregoing hundreds of millions of federal dollars annually, – has been ended by the people.

Good opinion lesson about Frederick Douglass

A local Maine opinion writer teaches an excellent history lesson for @realDonaldTrump  Obviously, Donald Trump needs Black History Month training and Abby Diaz is a knowledgeable teacher. 

Mid-Coast Forecaster- Maine:

As President Donald Trump noted in a speech on Feb. 1, “during this month, we honor the tremendous history of African-Americans throughout our country.” (Black History Month 2017)

Frederick Doublass (1818-1895)

• "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
• "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."

Donald Trump identified Frederick Douglass as someone who has “done an amazing job” and “is being recognized more and more.”

Here’s a primer on Douglass, for those who might not know about the job he has done or the recognition he deserves.

Douglass was born a slave in Talbot County Maryland around 1818. His father may have been a plantation owner. His mother died when he was 10.

During his childhood, there was a ban on teaching slaves to read and write. A woman defied the ban and taught Douglass the alphabet when he was 12. He began reading avidly, and credits newspapers with clarifying his views on human rights.

As a teenager, he began sharing what he learned with other slaves. He read to them, but also taught them to read. His lessons were cut short when a slave owner, known as a “slave-breaker,” physically abused Douglass in an effort to break him psychologically.

When Douglass was 20 years old, he escaped from slavery to New York, and then settled in Massachusetts. He began regularly giving anti-slavery lectures. During a lecture tour in 1843, he was chased and beaten by an angry mob.

He started his published writing career with an autobiography that was released in 1845. His fame increased, and his book became a bestseller. Critics questioned how a former slave with no formal education could have written what he did.

He had to escape to Ireland and England after his autobiography was published, as he was threatened with recapture into slavery. British supporters raised money to purchase his freedom. Two years later, he returned to the United States.

His career expanded. He began publishing abolitionist newspapers, and became a vocal supporter of women’s rights. He was the only African-American to attend the Seneca Falls, N.Y., women’s rights convention in 1848, when he argued strongly in favor of women having the right to vote. He reasoned that he could not accept the right to vote as a black man if all women did not have the same right.

His political life expanded, too. He counseled President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and President Andrew Johnson on black suffrage. He held various political posts, and was also nominated for vice president of the United States. That made him the first African-American to appear on a presidential ballot.

On the day of his death in February 1895, Douglass had appeared at a Women’s National Council meeting. He spent the meeting sitting next to Susan B. Anthony, a lifelong friend. He died later that evening after falling to his knees, with his hands clasped.

Here are some of Douglass’ most famous words:

“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one sixth of the population of democratic America is denied its privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its Christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?”

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. … This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Maine Writer: Donald Trump spoke about Frederick Douglass without understanding whether or not the American abolitionist, writer and diplomat ever lived or died.  Although Trump didn't honor the life of the American Civil Rights pioneer, he did allow us to  take advantage of yet another "Trump teachable moment".