Maine echo to Senator Susan Collins

By Gail Marshall- An echo opinion published in the Mount Desert Islander newspaper.

Many times Senator Susan Collins has gushed her adoration of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who, in 1950, stood in the Senate to speak her “Declaration of Conscience.”

U.S. Senator from 1967-1973/ B. 1897 D. 1995 in Maine

It was the act of one woman who found the courage to challenge Senator Joseph McCarthy’s long running, mendacious campaign of hatred that had rendered her colleagues politically paralyzed in fear and silence. It broke the logjam and eventually ended his reign of terror.

Recently, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and former National Security Council member Fiona Hill showed themselves to be Sen. Smith’s true heirs. They put their years of non-partisan public service on the line and strode to the Capitol over the objections of the Trump State Department and White House. They each sat for ten hours before the House Intelligence Committee. They each outlined facts amounting to a blistering condemnation of the corruption and self-dealing of Donald Trump, his State Department and his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, undertaken at the expense of national interest and security.

Senator Susan Collins was wrong to support the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

In contrast, as years of Trump’s corruption, chronic dissembling and threatening, and destructive actions and policies continue to cheapen the office of the Presidency and endanger our nation, Senator Collins repeatedly issues anodyne statements of “disappointment” and “disagreement.” She has never taken any action or definitive step that will draw even the faintest line in the sand.

Where exactly is her line? When will enough be enough?

It wasn’t enough when:

Trump actively obstructed the investigation of the Russian interference in the last election to his advantage. We now know it was likely a prelude to what he is trying to orchestrate for 2020.

He staffed the Office of the President with his completely unqualified children, overriding security clearance assessments on their behalf.

He met alone with Vladimir Putin and seized the notes of the talks, freezing out our own national intelligence agencies.

He withdrew us from the Paris Climate accord and subsequently took a wrecking ball to clean air, water, and land protections as the nation increasingly floods or burns, freezes or broils.

He and his children enrich themselves as foreign leaders, businessmen, state officials, the Defense Department and Cabinet members fork over cash at Trump properties.

He engages in and encourages racist, hateful demagoguery that has lead directly to an explosion of right wing extremism, including threats and violence.

When was the last time Senator Colins listened to the entirety of a Trump rally with his often alarmingly incoherent, coarse incitement to violence and hatred? She should. (You should too.) And then explain to us how a “moderate” Senator can fail to take meaningful action for the good of the nation.

He willy-nilly started trade wars, costing us billions of dollars. The cost of tariffs comes directly out of our pockets, as does the cost of billions in farm subsidies to partially offset their Trump-made losses. Or at least it will eventually. Right now they are just throwing it on to their exploding deficit.

He operated intentionally and unnecessarily cruel border and immigration programs, including forcibly separating from their parents thousands of young children.

He openly trashes our painstakingly built strategic alliances the world over, favoring and empowering anti-democratic tyrants instead.

He runs much of the government with “acting” Cabinet Secretaries and others who, per the Constitution, are supposed to be confirmed by the Senate. When he does send nominees to the Senate, the Senator votes to confirm people like William Barr and Michael Pompeo, both of whom operate their respective Departments like they are personal and private subsidiaries of Trump, Inc.

How about Syria, where he’s suddenly abandoned our allies, the Kurds, offering a preposterous excuse that that they didn’t help us at Normandy? Turkey, home to one of Trump’s large hotels, promptly began slaughtering Kurdish men, women and children, and deliberately bombing all around US military positions, as ISIS fighters escaped from Kurdish captivity. Russia and Syria have moved in quickly to fill the void he created, with Russia now occupying one of our former bases. The Senator said Trump’s move is “terribly unwise” and would favor sanctions if things get out of hand. The horse is out of the barn, Senator, so do bar the door, won’t you?

Senator Collins argues that if Articles of Impeachment are referred to the Senate, she will serve as a “judge” of the charges against Trump, so she can’t express any opinions in advance. How very typical and convenient. And also not true. It’s just another tree to hide behind. She’s had plenty of power and tools at her disposal all along and she’d done nothing. Instead, like the rest of the Republican Senate, she has fully enabled a narcissistic bully to turn far too much of the nation into a cauldron of fear and loathing, hollow out our international capacity to credibly represent and protect ourselves, weaken and degrade our fundamental democratic standards and safeguards, and imperil our children’s future.

If Senator Collins were truly the “moderate” she claims to be, she would take a page from Ambassador Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill and Senator Smith. She would draw a line right now. She would risk her Senate career for the good of the nation. She would act in a bold way to help stop the increasingly radical damage done by Donald Trump to this nation before we are beyond the point of no return.

From Gail Marshall, a resident of Mount Desert, Maine

Echo opinion in support of vaccines from Mount Desert Island Maine

An echo opinion published in the Maine "Mount Desert Islander" newspaper, by former State Senator Jill Goldthwait, in support of vaccines and the Maine Session 129, legislation LD 798, to remove philosophical exemptions that allows people to opt out without a medical reason for doing so.

Anti-vaxxers who oppose this public health bill are spreading outrageous lies about vaccines via Facebook. Outrageously, they are negatively impacting on the health of Maine people by spreading lies.  Read the story here.  "....spread of misinformation about immunizations has potentially fatal repercussions"

A bill before the Maine Legislature is embroiled in two classic arguments. How do we use science to support political decisions, and how do we balance our individual rights versus those of society? 

The preponderance of evidence supports protecting the public's health.

(MaineWriter - yes and I was among them....) 

AUGUSTA- Hundreds of Mainers showed up in Augusta last week to testify on LD 798, An Act to Protect Maine Children from Preventable Diseases by Repealing Certain Exemptions from the Laws Governing Immunization Requirements. The exemptions the bill would repeal are those based on “religious or philosophical beliefs.” The bill does continue to provide exemptions for those with medical conditions that make vaccination contraindicated.

The impetus behind the bill is outbreaks of childhood diseases thought to be eradicated, or nearly so, in the United States.

In 2000, measles was considered eliminated in the United States, but in 2019 in Washington state, more than 60 cases of measles were identified, more than the average number of cases reported in the entire country in a year. Fifty-four of those affected had not been immunized.

At one time, fewer than 20 cases of mumps were reported each year in the United States. In 2006, more than 6,000 cases were reported. A chicken pox outbreak occurred in 2012 in Indiana, sourced to an unvaccinated child. Here in Maine, we have the dubious distinction of the worst pertussis (whooping cough) rate in the nation. Reported cases more than doubled in month-to-month comparisons from last year to this. The greatest number of cases so far this year were in Hancock County.

An article in 1998 linked vaccinations to autism. Even though later discredited, it is still cited as the rationale for significant numbers of parents to opt out of vaccinations for their children, despite a study through the National Institute of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health finding no “causal association between MMR vaccine, or any other vaccine or vaccine constituent, and autism.”

The link between vaccinations and autism, particularly with the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, is labeled “critically flawed” by Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (CHOP).

In a vaccine safety publication, CHOP distinguishes between the terms “safe” and “harmless.” The latter, taken literally, is a test few life activities could pass. “Having been preserved from a real danger” is the safety definition CHOP finds most applicable, in that “a vaccine’s benefits must clearly and definitively outweigh its risks.”

Vaccines cannot be called 100 percent harmless, as there are certainly documented, untoward effects for some of those vaccinated. However, most are mild and innocuous, especially as compared to the effects of the diseases they prevent. Risks inherent in those diseases are far greater.

The other part of the vaccination debate is whether government has a right to intervene in a parent’s decision not to vaccinate his child. Parental rights are among the most protected in our society, but what about the rights of the rest of our kids to attend a school where the students are least likely to transmit childhood diseases by virtue of having been vaccinated?

Does a child with a known communicable disease have the “right” to go to school, putting all the other students at risk? Most often, symptoms become obvious only after a child has actually contracted the disease. They are exposing their friends, babysitters and schoolmates in the early days, already contagious but without the cough, fever or spots to make it apparent.

For the public hearing last week, 527 items were filed in testimony. All the testimony is posted online. There were pleas to require broad vaccination to protect those who, for medical reasons, cannot receive certain vaccines, as well as parents who felt that vaccination would adversely affect their children and opposed the bill.

Most Maine medical leaders were fully supportive. They are worth naming: The Maine Hospital Association, the public health director for the city of Portland, the Maine Children’s Alliance, the pediatric hospitalist at Maine Medical Center, the Maine Nurse Practitioner Association, the Maine Primary Care Association, the American Nurses Association, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Maine Medical Association and other medical, educational and civic organizations.

Several health care providers, including a few physicians, did oppose the bill. Some opined that it is the pharmaceutical companies and the health care industry that promote vaccinations to enhance their bottom lines. The Maine Pharmacy Association was among those testifying in support.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for the average citizen to follow the detailed arguments and statistics presented by both sides. Most parents want nothing but what is best for their children, and most have decided that the benefits of immunization outweigh the risks. Unvaccinated children are also protected by those children who are vaccinated. The weight of the argument is in favor of vaccinating our kids for a healthier society.

jillgold@gwi.net  

Former Maine State Senator Jill Goldthwait is a registered nurse.

Senator Susan Collins - a Bar Harbor perspective

"..how well her (Senator Collins') efforts succeeded in serving the best interest of the state of Maine and the United States of America." ~ opinion of Kenneth Paigen in The Islander

Excellent point of view from Kenneth Paigen, a professor at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor.

The letter echoed in this blog was published in the Mount Desert Islander, a Maine newspaper.

In the letter, the author reinforces exactly what I surmised in my blog (here) and a letter to the editor I sent to The Forecaster newspaper.

Senator Susan Collins - wrong position on tax cuts for the rich

Collins Defense of Tax Cut vote ignores deficit

BAR HARBOR, ME- 
In the last issue of the Islander, State Sen. Langley penned a vigorous defense of Sen. Collins for her vote for the recent tax bill, criticizing the impassioned criticism of her vote by many constituents. Langley described Collins as “standing up for what she thinks is good public policy regardless of which side of the aisle proposed or sponsored the legislation” and “Collins does her homework, clearly understands the issues and votes in the best interest of the state of Maine and the United States of America.”

I have no reason to question Langley’s personal assessment; he knows Collins much better than the rest of us, who know her only by her actions. But the question is not how conscientious Collins was in evaluating the tax bill, but how well her efforts succeeded in serving the best interest of the state of Maine and the United States of America.

How well did she serve her constituents? Unhappily, the answer is not well at all if we are to trust the bipartisan, nonprofit Tax Policy Center, an organization established jointly by Republicans and Democrats.

Collins was clear that she only voted for the tax bill after receiving assurances that remedial legislation would soon follow to repair some of the damage the bill inflicts on the health care system. 

But there was a far more effective way to prevent such damage: vote against the bill in the first place.

So we can only conclude that Collins was willing to accept some damage in order to achieve the tax goals of the bill. The Tax Policy Center’s analysis, which is easily available at their website, concluded that the bill was highly regressive, strongly favoring the wealthy over the rest of the country. The immediate tax benefits steadily increase in value from the poorest to the wealthiest, and this in a country already suffering from increasing income inequality.

The benefit for the wealthiest 1 percent is 2-1/2 times as great as that for those at the bottom, percentage-wise, and vastly greater dollar-wise. And by 10 years out, the time span of this bill, virtually all of the tax benefit goes to the top 1 percent. Does that serve the best interests of our state and country?

The other half of the tax benefit goes to corporations, whose tax rate will drop from 35 percent to 21 percent. The theory is that corporations will now use these additional profits to invest and expand, creating new jobs and economic growth. But there already is more than enough money available for corporations to expand if they want to. Corporate profits are at record highs, and investment money is readily available at record low interest rates.

What holds them back now is the lack of additional demand for their products. If we truly wanted to stimulate the economy, the tax bill would have provided the bulk of tax relief to lower- and middle-income families. Spending that money would create additional demand for economic expansion. Trickle up is far more effective that trickle down. If we can believe the historical record of the multiple tax cuts over the last half-century, the bulk of the increased corporate profits will be distributed as stock dividends, creating another benefit that will flow to the wealthiest among us.

The tax bill achieves all this by adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt. If we had decided to borrow that much money for the benefit of our country, imagine what it could buy in terms of education, health care, care for the elderly, investments in research to create new economic opportunities, providing cleaner air, water and renewable energy, and repairing our failing infrastructure, all of which would create new jobs and new opportunities.

So what are we to think of Collins’ vote for the tax bill? We can only conclude that despite her best efforts, she failed to understand the larger implications of the bill. Either that, or she did understand and chose to vote in favor of the very wealthy over the rest of us.

Langley does not think it appropriate for us to criticize Collins so vociferously. He is wrong. Not only do we have the right to voice our objections, we have an obligation, a responsibility, to do so. Beyond the dollars involved, this tax bill is a callous attack on our democratic values. It is borrowing an immense amount of money to gift to the wealthiest among us money that the rest of us eventually will have to pay back. We can only hope our good senator listens to our voices.

Kenneth Paigen is a professor at The Jackson Laboratory. He lives in Bar Harbor.