Tag Archives: Sara Gideon

The 2019 Conifer Awards

Call me conservative, but I love tradition. And there is no finer tradition on these pages than the month of December, when I get to make predictions for the coming year, and — as I’m about to do now — I hand out superlatives for the year that was. 2019 came and went all too […]

20 bold predictions for 2020

I will begin this annual tradition of mine by acknowledging a failure of my final prediction of 2019. You see, in last year’s column, I told you that this year I would simply do a top 10 list of my predictions, as the number of required predictions each year was getting unwieldy. Alas, there is […]

Mainers are finding out they voted for tax and spend

Spend spend spend. Tax tax tax. You heard a lot of flowery talk about responsibly leading Maine. You heard about discipline and “investments” that would make the state better. “No, we won’t raise your taxes,” they said, “we’ll just re-prioritize state government and we’ll use money we already have to do a few things responsibly.” […]

The 2018 Conifer Awards

I don’t think there is anything better than Christmas traditions. Christmas mass. Gift giving. Music. Family. Dinner. Taking six hours to put together over-engineered and insanely designed larger items for the kids, forcing you to go to bed at 3:30 in the morning. The usual. Along with my yearly predictions, I have also traditionally given […]

LePage and House Republicans win the shutdown showdown

It is hard to argue that this government shutdown didn’t yield positive results. The last budget approved by Maine lawmakers over the governor’s veto in 2015, contained $6.7 billion in spending, which, if you recall, was a bloated “compromise” budget that spent hundreds of millions of dollars more than its predecessor. LePage’s proposal for this budget […]