Emergency! Where are mothers to go? Birthing Centers are closing. Women and babies will die.

You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.

Echo opinion report published in The New York Times by Jessica Grose:

When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014, she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.

If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.

As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.

Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago.

Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.

The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024, report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” 

This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.

I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.

The existential pain of losing birth services

While reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon.

They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.

Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.

Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.

I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.

Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. 

Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.

Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”

Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, California, and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour-and-a-half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.

Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.

“What does it mean to live a good life in a place❓” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”

Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements

The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural women’s getting quality care.

“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high-quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.

Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.

There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.

Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.

There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.

The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. 

There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.

Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.

This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. Exactly❗ And I couldn’t agree more.

Senator Susan Collins truth serum: As a senior Senate Republican she could have supported health insurance premiums. But guess what?

Republicans Are Trying to Hide These Health Care Cuts

Echo editorial opinion published in The New York Times.

One of the federal government’s great achievements this century was making health insurance affordable to millions more Americans. In 2010, nearly 18 percent of people under 65 lacked insurance. 

By 2024, the rate had fallen below 10 percent, thanks to the Affordable Care Act and later legislation that built on it.

Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are working to dismantle that achievement. They have effectively cut subsidies for the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, making it harder for people who do not receive insurance through work to afford a plan. This year, the subsidy cuts led three million people to lose their health insurance. In Ohio, nearly a third of previous marketplace enrollees lost their insurance.

The situation stands to worsen next year. In addition to reducing the marketplace subsidies, Trump and congressional Republicans enacted sweeping cuts to Medicaid, which expanded under the Affordable Care Act. They will take effect after this year’s midterm elections. (Yes, that timing is deliberate.) By 2034, the combined cuts will most likely erase about half of the gains from the Affordable Care Act, causing 14 million Americans to lose insurance.

Politicians from both parties have talked up affordability in the run-up to this year’s elections. Republicans, however, are taking deliberate steps to make health care less affordable. Many middle-class and poor Americans will struggle — even more — to afford important medical care as a result.

Americans have good reasons to be disappointed in their government. Progress on health care, imperfect though it was, represented a positive counterexample of the government working to genuinely improve people’s lives. Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are trying to ruin that success story. (Including Senator Susan Collins.)

Those health insurance cuts caused premiums and deductibles to spike this year. As an example, a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could see their premiums more than double, costing an additional 💲3,500 a year.

In the more direct approach to cutting health care coverage, Republicans targeted Medicaid, the program focused on the poor and disabled. Last year, the federal government enacted what Republicans call a work requirement. In reality, it is a paperwork requirement — one that forces Medicaid enrollees, most of whom are working or have a valid reason for not working, to file repeated documents proving they have a job or a valid exemption. Americans lead busy lives, and many of them may not know of the new requirement. 

About two in three enrollees who will lose health insurance should, in fact, be eligible for it, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated.

Arkansas enacted a version of this policy before the federal law passed, and it was a failure: Work force participation did not rise, and eligible people lost their insurance because of paperwork problems.

The Affordable Care Act was a triumph of government, and it is justifiably popular. Mr. Trump and other Republicans once promised to repeal the law, but they have largely stopped making such statements. Instead, they have sought to weaken the law — partly out of an ideological aversion to government, partly to finance tax cuts for the wealthy — and hope that voters do not notice.

Democrats should not let Donald Trump and Senator Susan Collins get away with this subterfuge. They should make the health insurance cuts a central piece of their midterm campaign and, as important, offer voters a vision that includes other improvements to the nation’s costly, rickety health care system, both to continue expanding access and to reduce costs. The Affordable Care Act also happens to be a model on costs; it meaningfully slowed growth in health care prices over the past decade.

Republicans in the Congress should be looking for next steps, not moving backward. The Affordable Care Act demonstrated that progress is possible.

Senator Susan Collins 😢🤥🤥 lies. She is paying millions in false campaign political ads with claims about how she supports healthcare. She lies❗ What's more, she is paying former Maine hospital association CEO Steven Michaud to lie on her behalf.  He lies 🤥 about how Senator Collins somehow magically bought money into Maine to help pay for health care services. Truth is, only people who have health insurance can access the technologies described in the fake ads and Senator Collins voted to cut insurance subsidies.  

Donald Trump lives in Mar-A-Lago luxury while homeless people cannot afford food, shelter and basic necessities

Social media message by Honorable Bonnie Titcomb Lewis:

Absolutely no reason to worry about the 😰😥homeless, the uninsured sick, the hungry, the afraid, the uneducated, the “lost and not found”, the addicted, the victims of racial violence, and the people who turn and find no one there. 

No need to worry about cut food benefits and the future for any of those kids out there.

No reason to worry and no reason to see beyond the need for more..and more…and more. 

After all, it’s not relevant for some.

Like Donald Trump, who has a net worth estimated at approximately 💲6.5 billion, featuring iconic properties like Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and a custom Boeing 757. Key Assets and Properties:

• Mar-a-Lago Estate
• Palm Beach, Florida private club and residence valued over 💲320 million.
• Trump Tower: Fifth Avenue, New York commercial and retail space.
• Trump Force One: Custom-branded Boeing 757 luxury private jet.
• Multiple international golf courses and clubs across the US, Scotland, Ireland, and the UAE.
• Financial Valuation Net Worth: Tracked at around 💲6.5 billion (according to estimates by Forbes Profile).

Revenue Sources: Traditional real estate holdings alongside expanding digital media and cryptocurrency-related assets

Why worry❓ No need. Just keep the gaudy gold filigree decorations and ugly signature logos flowing.

Post Script message to Senator Susan Collins: In expensive political ads, Senator Collins asks voters to say, "Thank You Susan". But, Senator Collins was born and raised a Roman Catholic in Aroostook County, Maine. 

The Roman Catholic Church teaches that safe and affordable housing is a basic human right. Rooted in the preferential option for the poor and the belief that every person has inherent dignity made in God's image,

Nevertheless, Collins supports Donald Trump 96 percent of the time in her wrong-minded votes in the U.S. Senate.  "NO thank you, Senator Collins".  #Hypocrite (Matthew: 23)

Senator Susan Collins bought and paid for with plenty of out of state dark money traced to millionaires and billionaires

Echo social media report by the Honorable Bonnie Titcomb Lewis, in Standish, Maine.  

An out of state group of 💰💸💲💲millionaires and billionaires named their political action committee after the Maine Pine Tree😡💢 ❗Apparently they were hoping that we Mainers will see their constant negative campaign ads as some kind of local thing! But its funding certainly is not❗The Pine Tree Results PAC is totally from away❗

It is a federal super PAC formed to support only U.S. Senator Susan Collins but it is funded by prominent conservative dark-money nonprofits, out-of-state corporate interests, and wealthy billionaire donors. No matter which candidates one might support in any race, it is important to look at who is paying their campaign ads and ask yourselves why.  Almost without exception, these particular Pine Tree ads are a constant flow of millions of dollars of negativity.

The single largest contributor to this PAC is Stronger America, Inc. (a Virginia-based 501(c)(4) that does not disclose its specific donors), which gave 💲3 million. 

Other dark-money groups include the Lexington Fund (tied to conservative activist Leonard Leo) with 💲1 million, and the Condorcet Initiative Corp.
Billionaire Donors:  Major individual contributions of 💲1 million to 💲2.5 million include Citadel LLC CEO Ken Griffin, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, New Balance Chairman Jim Davis, and Liberty Media Corp. Chairman Emeritus John Malone.Corporate Contributors: Companies like Altria Client Services and Newsmax Media have also provided funding for what is obviously an endless supply of campaign cash.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans are creating a fascist state with ICE as the 21st century Gestaopo

Gestapo was the official secret state police of Nazi Germany, founded in April 1933, by Hermann Göring, and later led by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. 👿

With ICE, America is becoming the country we created in Iraq
The tactics the United States used in Iraq are migrating home.

Opinion published in the Boston Globe:

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of two books about the Iraq War, “Fiasco” and “The Gamble.” His most recent work is “Big Money, Small Town,” a novel set in Maine.

Every time an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent kills a person in our streets, I think back to something that a Middle Easterner said just before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003: “You Americans think you are going to change us to be more like you,” he predicted, “but I think the Middle East is going to change you to be more like us.”

I didn’t really believe it at the time. Frankly, I thought America was too resilient for that, with a good track record of observing human rights and bolstering democracy. 

But that prescient observation still haunts me more than two decades later. Unfortunately, that passing voice was right.

Over the past two years, the way the US Army often mistreated Iraqis has come home to roost — ICE personnel have invaded our cities, acting just as reckless and lawless as our troops abroad once did. There are armed men in the streets, outfitted in goggles, masks, helmets, and body armor, ill-prepared for the tasks at hand but possessing an overwhelming arrogance about how to perform those tasks. They point their weapons at unarmed people and shout obscenities at them. They answer to no one that we can see, and they shroud their actions in an overarching excuse: They can shoot if they feel threatened.

In some ways, they behave worse than did the American troops who blundered around the streets of Baghdad. Those soldiers had little other ways to communicate than gestures, because very few of them spoke Arabic. By contrast, ICE agents often speak the same language as the people they victimize. 

But, having a common tongue is not always de-escalatory. In Minneapolis last January, after ICE agent

Jonathan Ross killed Renee Good with three shots, he called her a profane slur.

Another difference in Iraq is that when American troops acted brutally, they were investigated by their own superiors. In November 2005, for example, when Marines killed 25 unarmed civilians in the western Iraqi town of Haditha, one of them a baby, officers in the chain of command began to ask questions.

Those Marines were acquitted, but the Haditha incident came to mark a turning point in the war. It forced top American commanders in Iraq to reexamine their tactics and strategy and begin to focus on protecting the civilian population.

This in turn led to changes on the ground that eventually permitted the United States to withdraw from Iraq, not quite claiming a victory but neither leaving in a pell-mell retreat.

And that change in Iraq, overdue and difficult, may be the biggest difference between then and now. 

There is no evidence that Trump administration officials are going to step back, recalculate, and reform. 

Indeed, they show no impulse even to investigate why unarmed people are being killed in our streets by government agents.

Rather, the president and his subordinates seem quite satisfied with having masked men terrorize the population, especially in cities that don’t support him politically. In some cases, these men are the same veterans who served abroad: ICE agent Ross, the Minneapolis shooter, was a machine gunner in Iraq, while David Brouillette, the trigger puller in Biddeford, Maine, served in Afghanistan in a military intelligence unit. One can only wonder just what lessons those men brought home from their combat tours — and how many more ICE agents are like them.

This bleak conclusion leads me to one more parallel with the Iraq war: It is indeed time for regime change here. Just as Iraq needed to move on from living under an authoritarian, law-breaking ruler and his corrupt circle, so do we.

A final thought: Every war, even bad ones, has its heroes. The people who stand out to me now are the volunteers who monitor the actions of ICE agents and sometimes have guns and tasers brandished at them in return. These are the people who truly are fighting for our freedoms. We are in their debt.

A personal message from Mr. Graham Platner and my response to his thank you letter

Thank you Mr. Graham Platner and to your beautiful wife Amy, for the enthusiasm you brought to our Democratic party. We must continue this momentum.

Your victory in the Maine June primary was impressive, driven magnificently by a huge ground swell of social media support.  I have never seen anything like it in Maine.  I hope you will both continue to bring enthusiasm to our important work ahead to defeat Senator Susan Collins.   

To Juliana,  I believed – and still believe – in the people of Maine and the vision we have been fighting for. I believe in all of you.

For the first time, in a very long time, our campaign gave people hope. Hope that there is a light at the end of this very dark tunnel. You did that. Thank you.

To those of you who believed in me, I want to make clear: You’re the reason I believed.

I always said this race was not about me. It never was. It was about us.

On June 9th, 150,000 Mainers didn’t just reject a broken politics; they voted for something. And they made their voices louder than ever before in the history of our great state. We won, and we did so spectacularly.

I feel a deep sense of gratitude and also a deep obligation to all of you. To ensure that the voices of 150,000 people who voted for me, and our 15,000 volunteers, are heard. The past few days have been tough, but the weight I have felt was not about me. It was out of a responsibility to you.

Almost exactly a year ago, Amy and I sat down and looked each other in the eyes and decided that entering this race was a sacrifice we had to make if we really believed in what we thought we believed in. And this week, Amy and I sat down and looked at each other again, and we decided that exiting this race is the sacrifice we must make again to best steward the movement we have been honored to help build.

Today, I notified the Secretary of State to remove my name from the ballot. My name might have been on the ballot, but that ballot line belongs to the people of Maine.

Our sole goal from the beginning was defeating Susan Collins and building a working class movement in the state of Maine. We have already brought half of that to fruition together. I am confident the remainder will be accomplished on November 3rd.

All we were asking for is health care. For an end to genocide. An end to corruption. To get money out of our politics. For real democracy. And I remain hopeful and optimistic that we will see that future one day.

I am proud of what we did and how we did it. We organized. We fundraised with grassroots money, not corporate PACs or AIPAC. We built far more than just a political campaign. Even as the entire system pushed back against us.

This is not the end for our movement. Continue to build relationships with your neighbors and have real conversations. Go join a union or organize your workplace. Join a local community organization. Volunteer at a food bank. Just do not give up.

I love you. I love all of you. I love this state. I love what we have built. This has been the honor of my lifetime.

Thank you – from the bottom of my heart – for everything. Your time, your energy, your money, your voice. You made this possible.

Solidarity forever,

Graham Platner

Unfortunately, news media were quick to report negative stories about Mr. Graham Platner, but somebody must speak to his friends too.

‘They don’t know Maine’

Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his Primary Election event on Tuesday in Blue Hill, Maine.

Maine Writer opinion: Regardless of how voters will respond to Mr. Graham Platner as a US senate candidate from Maine, the facts about how his wife's friend went to The Wall Street Journal to betray a confidence shared by Amy Gertner, who is Mr. Platner's wife, was a terrible betrayal. The informant had no business invading the couple's privacy with her "probably a paid for" interview.  Of course, The New York Times was not to be outdone, so somehow the editors decided to interview a few girls who said they dated Mr. Platner when he was single, but they did not provide proof about the unusual behavior they reported in the Times. Meanwhile, of course, Donald Trump sits and sleeps in the White House as a 34 times convicted felon, a philanderer, an enabler of child sex trafficking with Jeffrey Epstein and as a military draft dodger who claimed to have "bone spurs" during the Vietnam war.  

Mr. Graham Platner/A friends view published on social media

by Larry Hayden 

This is updated, I posted a while ago - which I just sent via email to the two women who wrote the hit piece, I mean the article about the ex-girlfriends of Graham Platner in the New York Times - one of whom, Fifield, may or may not have been an old girlfriend of Graham, but does seem to have been an old Republican operative for a while. It is strange how that seems to have been overlooked…
Subject: My friend Graham. Regarding your recent piece on my friend: “This is nonsense…”- to the New York Times

My friend Graham a year ago was sitting on his dive boat about to fix my mooring chain. He may not walk on water but he can walk and work under water - so there is that ability he has, which is considerably more useful around here than what most of the politicians, pundits, and journalists can do that I know of.
I am a School Board Director in RSU24, which recently voted to violate the Maine Human Rights Act and to require the staff, teachers, nurses, counselors etc, to discriminate against gay & trans students. As a result of this and subsequent votes, my school district is now being sued by the State of Maine for violating the laws of this state.
I voted against these measures, with the numerical majority. As it was a weighted vote, based on the population of each the nine towns in the district, a weighted minority could outvote the numerical majority on the Board and they did.

Anyway, a year ago last May, Mr. Platner, who is from Sullivan, ME, one of the towns in our district, came to the School Board meeting on May 6th 2025, when the anti-trans/anti-gay policy was first proposed by a School Board Director. During the public comment time Graham spoke out strongly against the anti-LGBTQ policy that members of the Board were proposing.

“This is nonsense,” he began in his gruff voice.

He went on to point out to the Board and to the public in attendance that we had no trans athletes in our sports program, that the kind of discrimination the Board was considering was in violation of State and Federal law and that Executive Orders are not in fact law, that this proposal was not about protecting girls but about persecuting gay and trans kids.

There were many in the audience that strongly disagreed with him but he made it clear where he stood on this matter. His point was that instituting this policy would hurt all children, regardless of their gender identity.

This was months before he declared his campaign for Senate. He has continued to defend communities of color, women, trans and gay kids, and stand up for old and young people of this state during literally hundreds of public meetings he has attended. His candor about his past and his own failings is simply uncompromising.

Mr. Graham Platner is my neighbor and my friend. I know his mother who runs a local restaurant. His father was my lawyer and represented many of my neighbors until he retired, handling our title searches, divorces, bankruptcies, and wills. He was the closest thing to Atticus Finch we had in Ellsworth.

When I needed new top chain on my mooring last spring Graham simply said “No problem.” He drove his dive boat over from Sullivan to our harbor, suited up, dove down fixed things up
for me. That is the kind of neighbor he is.

We in Maine know a good man when we meet him. Thousands have now had that honor, although Mr. Graham would insist that the honor his, to be able to meet, to speak with, and listen to so many good people in these troubled times.

As for Graham’s friends old and new, we will stay the course we have embarked on. We will hold fast & do our best to elect this good man to do his best for all of us.

Oh yes, I saw that tattoo when he put on his wet suit - I saw a crude cartoon skull and bones. I saw a pirate tattoo. It looked nothing like the SS Nazi Totenkopf. The skull and bones is a symbol that appears on grave stones in every old graveyard in New England, often with “Momento Mori” written below it, or “Remember Death,” - not a bad thing for a soldier, or any of us, to remember.

Skull and Bones is also the name of the most famous secret society at Yale, whose symbol is: a skull & bones. It is or was for sale in the gift shop embroidered on neck ties. I do not recall hearing talk about their members being Nazis, nor the Knights Templar, nor the Free Masons, nor the numerous college fraternities that use that symbol.
The powers that be want desperately to discredit my friend Graham. They will have to do a lot better. I am sure they will do their best or their worst but we who know him and his wife will hold fast, like the new mooring chain Graham fixed for me.

Written by Newbold Noyes in Sorrento, Maine

Senator Susan Collins clutching her pearls in "concern" about Mr. Graham Platner but her voting record is dangerous maga

I must make a post about Mr. Graham Platner. Democrats are ☘lucky to have Mr. Platner in the Senate race running against maga Senator Susan Collins.

Echo Facebook essay by Joel Johnson: 

First of all, that stupid tattoo. I have made three films about the holocaust, looked at more than 5,000 still photographs of the Holocaust in the German national archive in Koblinz, spent two weeks in the photo archive at Yad Vashem in Israel looking at thousands of photographs, did a 90 minute PBS special about the French resistance against the Nazis, and I have an entire book about German military uniforms and I did not recognize his tattoo as an SS Totenkopf insignia when I first saw it. The actual Totenkopf insignias are small and silver, and when I saw the large black version on Platner’s chest I did not recognize it. I wish I had a dollar for every tattoo I ever saw that was a bad choice.

But really, and most important, what this guy is about is challenging the very foundations of American politics and economics, which favor the corporations and the rich and leave the working Americans behind. The same message as Bernie Sanders and AOC. This message is very threatening, not just to republicans, but to many main stream democrats as well. His genuine talent as a retail politician is truly remarkable and if American politics is going to change we need guys like this. People love him and Maine voters are going to make him their nominee, and he will probably beat Susan Collins.

As for the piece in the New York Times, whose shocking reveal is that ex-girlfriends are not always the best character references—especially if they are republican operatives—I just think it is shabby journalism. Not a word about his policies, which are the entire reason the guy is running and why Mainers are supporting him, no matter what bullshit is thrown at him. If you got about a thousand men together in a stadium somewhere and asked them “Have any of you ever been an asshole in your life?” I am afraid, everybody who was honest would say “yes”.

So let’s just keep our eye on the ball. If you are a liberal democrat, or better yet, a progressive democrat, you should be grateful that this guy and his long suffering wife are willing to stand out in the force 10 shitstorm being directed at them in order to make America a better place for working people.

And for all the “liberals” clutching their pearls in horror over this guy’s behavior or background, just ask yourself whether you want to have a democratic senator in Maine (and maybe a democratic senate) and a new force in American politics that is less worried about what Yale graduates think and more worried about what the majority of Americans thinks. We are lucky ☘to have this guy in the race.

Senator Susan Collins has 28 years seniority in the senate but refuses to show courage against Donald Trump

Senator Susan Collins is facing sharp criticism for her recent votes to increase health care costs in Maine. News Center Maine reports that “more than 60,000 Mainers … are seeing their health care costs rise drastically” after Susan Collins voted with Donald Trump to take away health care tax credits. In Maine, the average premium increase is 💲886, according to a recent study by CAP. Mainers say they are already struggling to afford housing, groceries, gas and health care – and Susan Collins is making life even more expensive.

Susan Collins no longer represents Maine | Echo Letter published in CentralMaine.com

Why is Sen. Susan Collins so silent❓ Donald Trump established an unconstitutional💲 slush fund to pay his criminally convicted supporters; he takes gifts from Qataris and others; he has enriched himself by $4 billion; he enables his sons and son-in-law to profit on government contracts; he obstructs the release of the full Epstein file trove as required by law; he pardons drug lords and embezzlers who then pay his PACs; and the list goes on. But Sen. Collins has said nothing about most of these actions.

All while Mainers are losing their healthcare, paying high prices at the pump and facing growing inflation — all perpetrated by an immoral president, and Collins is silent. Senator Collins accepted a 💲6.2 million donation from the Senate Political Leadership Pac, in other words, "hush money". 

She no longer represents the hard working people of Maine.

From Paul Josephson in Vinalhaven, Maine