On Monday, Gov. Janet Mills announced that the bars in Maine would not be allowed to resume indoor service on July 1, as originally planned. The announcement wasn’t surprising — at least to me — given that last week Dr. Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control, announced that the state […]
On Tuesday, the Mills administration announced that gyms, fitness centers and (for some reason) nail salons would not be able to open up on June 1, as had been the plan, but would instead need to wait longer before they could reopen their indoor facilities to customers. The reason? Science, of course. Science is every […]
It never ends. Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled her vision for the next round of congressional action to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is a vision of mountains of cash. Pelosi’s plan would spent $3 trillion, which would make it far and away the largest coronavirus relief spending package to date from […]
It has all the makings of a good scandal. A powerful governor on a private conference call that was not open to the public. A surreptitious recording of the call by a participant, leaked to the media. An admission that actions being taken by that governor will make something worse. And, of course, the subject […]
When a crisis happens, I think most of us try our best to band together and be on the same team. In the year 2000, this country lived through one of the most bitter and miserable elections in American history. In the end, after a month of legal battles and uncertainty, George W. Bush became […]
This past weekend, something broke in my house that needed fixing. Sunday, I decided to venture out into the vast unknown hellscape now known as “reality” to venture to one of our illustrious essential businesses — a home improvement store — in order to acquire the necessary handful of items that I needed to repair […]
Congratulations, dear reader. Using my reality bending power to create alternative universes, I have now conjured a world in which you are reading this column in the Blaine House, and you are the governor of Maine. Everything else is the same. Same history. Same first year in office. Same COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the globe. The […]
In any crisis, we triage the issues we are facing, and our reactions proceed in relatively predictable ways. The COVID-19 pandemic is no different. In the short term, we respond to the most urgent problems before we do anything else. That means that virtually all of our mental energy is poured into the need to […]
Here’s a fun fact you might not know. Your “freedom of association” is not guaranteed specifically by name in the First Amendment. Don’t believe me? Read it again. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or […]
I don’t typically write follow up columns to things I wrote, but in this case I’m going to have to make an exception. A couple weeks ago, the column I wrote in these very pages declared in rather concrete terms that I was not worried about the coronavirus. What I was more worried about than […]
