From Midcoast Democratic State House Member Bruce MacDonald:

Dear Fellow Lincoln County Dems: 

I need your support and help! I am asking you to come to Boothbay High School Auditorium for a public meeting, 7-9 pm, next Wednesday evening, May the 4th to discuss the Governor's proposed budget, and the process we are going through to respond to his extreme proposals. I need you to be there to counter a possible turn-out of the Tea Party Republicans who may try to hijack the meeting. Since the press will be there, it's important we counter any such possibility. 

I would not be at all suprised to have Sen. Trahan and Rep. McKane show up to this. I will in fact invite Sen. Trahan since he is the Senator for our district. I will do this even though Sen Trahan didn't even let me know about a similar meeting on tax issues he held in Boothbay last week. 

Lincoln County has some of the most hard core Tea Party Republicans with lots of time on their hands so I assume they might try to flood this even though they aren't necessarily from my district. They are pushing the local R's hard to support the Governor's budget and tax shifts. Thanks for whatever you can do. 

Meeting will be at Boothbay Region High School auditorium on Wed., May 4 at 7 p.m.
Here's the text of a press release we sent out today to announce this:
Rep. MacDonald invites constituents to discuss the proposed State budget
Meeting will be at Boothbay Region High School auditorium on Wed., May 4 at 7 p.m. 

BOOTHBAY— Rep. Bruce MacDonald, D-Boothbay, announced that he is hosting a public meeting for community members to discuss Governor LePage's proposed biennial budget. The meeting will take place at the Boothbay Region High School auditorium on Wednesday, May 4 at 7:00 pm.
“This budget has far reaching implications for every citizen of the state,” said MacDonald. “I want people to take this opportunity to ask me about the budget process and to make sure their voices are heard and Maine’s values are truly represented in the final state budget and state public policy.”
The proposed budget would cut take home pay for tens of thousands of retirees and Maine families who work in schools and for the state and would raise property taxes for most, if not all, property owners through cuts to municipal revenue sharing, the property tax and rent rebate program and school funding. It also includes new state spending of over $500 million according to the legislature’s Office of Fiscal and Policy Analysis. This spending will be added to the over $800 million revenue shortfall and subsequent cuts or tax shifts will be needed to balance Maine’s biennial budget as required by law.
“People have been contacting me at home and when they run into me around town to express their concerns about many issues including job losses, the cuts to Mainers' income and seniors' prescription drug coverage as proposed in the governor's budget,” said MacDonald. “As state elected officials we need our constituents to give us their input.”
As always you can email Rep. MacDonald with any questions at bmacdon@roadrunner.com , or call at 633-0570.

I plan to be there with bells on.

Rep. Jon McKane signs on to mural burning

This is a biggish local story and our local paper turned it into a massage the legislator exercise.

Wish I'd taken more time to devote to this story. My quick and dirty contribution on AsMaineGoeslolz is here.

Maine Chamber Misstates Kid-Safe Law

No surprises here. From the Maine Small Business Coalition today:

 AUGUSTA – Opponents of the Kid-Safe Products Act (KSPA), and the Maine Chamber of Commerce in particular, are spreading myths and misinformation to encourage the Legislature to roll back the law.  The Maine Legislature’s Joint Standing Committee on Natural Resources heard testimony today for and against a 2008 law aimed at helping parents and business owners protect children and consumers from toxic chemicals.  

The Kid-Safe Products Act, passed unanimously in the Maine Senate in 2008 and with an overwhelming majority in the Maine House, allows the Board of Environmental Protection to hear proposals to restrict hazardous chemicals from use in products to be used by and in frequent contact with children.  The Board of Environmental Protection and the Maine Center for Disease Control then make recommendations to the Legislature for consideration of hazardous chemicals to ban. 

In an email, the Chamber claimed that, under the current chemical law, medicines like aspirin will be targeted; chemicals banned by other countries will be automatically banned in Maine; chemical bans are based on unsupported claims by  special interests, not sound science; and that the law is unlike virtually any in the country.* 

Under KSPA, medicine is exempt, as are pesticides, industrial products, forest products, transportation, food and beverage packaging, retailers, telecommunication, etc.  KSPA makes no mention of an automatic chemical ban due to any other country’s ban.  New proposals for chemical bans come from a master list of known toxic agents, which are then evaluated by the state’s top chemical toxicity scientists at the State Toxicologist’s Office at CDC and Program Staff at the Department of Environmental Protection.  California, Minnesota and Washington join Maine in having similar toxic assessment programs to inform and protect consumers.** 

“The fact is, the Chamber is spreading lies and misinformation in order to roll back a law that is forward-thinking, based in science, and helps reduce exposure to toxic chemicals in children,” said Nate Libby, Maine Small Business Coalition director.  “Rather than fighting a law that protects children and consumers from toxic chemicals in everyday products, the Chamber should be advocating for measures to lower health care costs, lower energy prices and invest in infrastructure - what we really need to stimulate small business growth.” 

“The first chemical banned under the law was Bisphenol A.  Banning BPA from baby bottles doesn’t hurt Maine businesses,” said Bettyann Sheats, an Auburn business owner. “In fact, KPSA encourages innovation and as the market shifts to healthier products, there are all kinds of opportunities for new Maine-made products.  As a business owner, I know that KPSA is good for our children, good for business, and good for Maine.”

"Unpacking" My Mother's Blue Cheese Dressing

This post is for a graduate class in American and New England Studies at USM called Food, Politics and Culture with Professor Ardis Cameron.

In recent weeks I have begun to realize my mother, a straight-laced, educated Republican, was a subversive. As far back as I can remember, Mom seemed ahead of her time and possibly a contrarian, but I figured her votes for Nixon and Reagan (for governor and president) as well as membership in the Ojai Country Club, Symphony and Tennis Auxiliary told the bulk of her political story. Seems I was wrong.

Born in 1920--weeks before American women got the right to vote--she died 78 years later after running a gauntlet separate from most of her age-mates. Graduate class readings designed to help me explore the world of American food, politics and culture have lately convinced me that not only did she choose a path apart, she worked to undermine the dominant culture and lay groundwork for a local, whole food revolution she would not live to see bear fruit. The shelf on our refrigerator door might have held a clue had I known how to see it.

The only child of an intrepid Midwestern woman with Puritan New England roots and her second generation German-American husband who worked as an inventor and engineer for Bell Labs, Alice Elizabeth Siegmund bucked her between-the-World-Wars generation. Most of her peers, even those with similar education, married with abandon before during and especially after WW II, giving rise to the biggest population bubble in history. During those years Mom earned a B.S. in chemistry and a master's degree in home economics, developed a lucrative career, worked overseas and postponed marriage and her paltry two children until well past the female sell-by date determined by her peers.

Just days before WW II's official end, she began to travel the world with the Red Cross, first zigzagging across the Pacific on a troopship burgeoning with American soldiers destined for Perth, Australia, then on to India with a handful of Red Cross coworkers or "girls." As a photography teacher she honed her skills on the Taj Mahal in moonlight and fell in love with a tall married OSS officer who shared her image capturing vocation. With the Red Cross, Mom also worked in Japan and Germany before returning to the states in 1949. A slide from that era depicts her in an Audrey Hepburn-esque scarf, sunglasses and swing coat parked at a hairpin-turn overlooking some snowy alpine scene. She stands between a teeny sports car and a handsome dark-haired man, an Italian painter named Salvatore who became a lifelong friend.

After the war, she used her image-making skills as a food photographer and editor for Family Circle magazine. Started in 1932 Family Circle is one of the Seven Sisters of American women's magazines and her work as food editor and food photographer in the early-50s helped inform ideas of American food and cooking for her readers with kitchens full of children and Tupperware. (In a cynical moment decades later, as one of our bed and breakfast guests fairly swooned over a tragically simple dish, my mother described the American palette: "Americans really only like food that is either hot and salty or cold and sweet.") When the OSS officer cum international oil executive broke her heart, my mother left New York for sunnier climes. Sunkist, then a growers' cooperative, not today's multi-national corporation, hired her as a recipe developer to promote the use of California's citrus fruit, now available in more places across the country thanks to the growing Interstate Highway system.

Some of her work at Sunkist can be found in a long index-card box full of recipes. This box and its predecessors have held recipes, handwritten or typed, from my mother, her mother, Leola Meachum Siegmund, and her Aunt Pauline Kunkel, her father's sister, as well as those cut from magazines, newspapers, flour bags and tortilla wrappings, given by friends and copied from books. With its 250-odd recipes, this box sits at my house between another smaller one and a gaggle of vitamin bottles atop my microwave, an appliance my mother helped develop and market some 40 years ago.

Examples of my mother's apparently anachronistic focus on real food fills her recipe box. Though Mom failed the uber-foodie tests of today in that she bought our tortillas, pasta and peanut butter, and her coffee came in a vacuum packed Chock Full o’ Nuts can, most of the recipes in this box require discreet food items and only a handful originated on a printed package. Always suspicious of margarine, she never brought anything approaching convenience food into our home, and, except for a brush with liquid protein meals and anorexia, I have inherited her disdain for food fads and pretty much anything advertised on television.

That said, I remember vividly the chill in her voice in 1970 when, while shopping at the local Safeway, I suggested we buy a box of Hamburger Helper. The commercials made it look beyond delicious to my pre-teen eyes and I had whined. Mother said we were not a family that bought that "kind of food," food from a box, prepared food, convenience food. Needless to say we never bought Hamburger Helper. The only time I ever ate it was when I was left to my own cooking devices on babysitting jobs. Mother was right. It was salty and riddled with clots of a tangy, onion-y substance that was supposed to pass for cheese.

The irony of my mother's stance struck me as I read Sherrie Inness' estimation of the 1950s and 1960s domestic science movement's attempt to disguise and hide food and dissociate what went on in the modern kitchen from the messy, antiquated process of preparing healthy meals throughout history. While my mother worked for magazines and companies that seemed to have modernization and commodification as goals, at home she moved us in what I understand now to be an antithetical direction. One of my most vivid memories is my mother pulverizing leftover meat in a hand cranked grinder attached to the counter by a two-inch wingnut that might have come from a furniture-making workshop. If she was going to eat processed meat, she would process it herself, seemed to be the message. Maybe it was her work in the food production industry, her chemistry undergraduate degree, her own Minnesota farmer's-granddaughter mother, her stern, skeptical, yet techie father or some combination of the four that made her hold processed food at arm's length.

The best examples of my mother's rejection of prepared food were her salads. Though we lived in California and ate our body weight in salads every week, the closest thing to a prepared dressing in our house was the occasional envelope of herbs and spices developed by my mother's home economist friends working for spice companies like Lawry's to be mixed with oil, vinegar and water. We had salads created by my mother and her Sunkist colleagues that mixed weird (to my sister and me, anyway) ingredients like citrus, onions and olives. My mother put nuts (!) in salads back in the early 1970s, and she was no hippie.

Until my sister and I learned how, Mom made all our salad dressings. None of my friends' mothers made their own salad dressings, and in that young, dumb way of children I envied the insides of their fridge door shelves, lined with phalanxes of bottles of all label and hue. These homes seemed more modern, more in touch with the television-imbued scene I thought ought to be our touchstone. It seemed to me other foods could be associated with families that used bottled dressing and I could make assumptions about what might be in the cupboard based on what I saw on the refrigerator door. Though I never actually liked to eat Kraft's burnt orange-colored “French” dressing, our next door neighbors served it and there I learned that houses with this concoction in the fridge were more likely to also have Coca-Cola and potato chips on hand, neither of which ever crossed our Formica counter tops. Well, never is too strong a word. Every Fourth of July, cousins, my father's brother's family from Anaheim, brought all manner of junk food and my sister and I would cheer, then chow down.

The recipe I want to explore, or unpack, is a blue cheese dressing my mother developed for Sunkist, the California Fruit Growers Exchange.

Blue Cheese Dressing
2 c. sour cream
½ c. mayonnaise
⅓  to ⅓ c. blue, Roquefort or Gorgonzola cheese
¼ c. lemon juice
1 garlic clove
⅛ to ¼  c. olive oil
½ t. salt
ground pepper to taste

Developed about 1956, this recipe seems emblematic of the upwardly mobile post-war 50s. Blue cheese, though ubiquitous and varied these days, then seemed exotic. At the Ojai, California Safeway--our local market--there was a single brand of blue cheese available by the time I was shopping with my mother in the late 60s and early 70s. We lived for a couple of years in England during this time while my father attempted a PhD, and my mother reveled in the access to European food, especially cheeses. In her case, this represented a return to food she had learned to love as a young proto-jetsetter in the late 1940s.

Mom’s 1971 glee in response to the cheese section of London’s Harrods Food Court makes me wonder whether the rise in popularity and sales of other smelly foreign cheeses like brie, Camembert, even Limburger through the 50s, 60s and 70s might be linked to soldiers’ experiences in Europe during WW II. British war brides and bachelor soldiers who frequented pubs in the UK must have brought a tolerance for what Americans would have considered exotic cheeses. Today I can find Roquefort, Saga Blue, Gorgonzola and at least one or two other blue-mold cheeses in such humble markets as the Waldoboro Hannaford.

In any case, my mother and others like her helped blaze blue cheese’s path from tony cocktail parties to American steak houses and on to sports bars as a de rigeur chicken wing condiment. Blogger Chris Padgett, who claims to be blogging about the “simple things in life,” insists, “All orders of hot wings should include blue cheese dressing.” He includes a comprehensive list of fast food chains that do just that. Sadly most blue cheese dressings bear little resemblance to the tart rich mix I grew up with. Too often they are an oily mix of second rate mayonnaise, vinegar and a little cheese.
My mother’s recipe includes raw, fresh, crushed garlic in this dressing. This might have seemed daring in the 1950s, but now garlic is nearly ubiquitous in American kitchens.

There may be many ways to measure garlic’s rise in American cuisine, from the availability of bottled dried garlic in supermarkets throughout the country in the 50s to the popularity of roasted fresh garlic heads in the 90s to the sales of alarmingly cheap bags of Chinese garlic at bulk box-stores today. One measure that comes to mind is the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, the self-proclaimed center of the American garlic industry. In the 32 years this festival has run visitor numbers jumped from a few thousand in 1979 to 25,000 in 1981, the first year I attended, and on to over 100,000 in 2010. Will Rogers is said to have described Gilroy, as “the only town in America where you can marinate a steak by hanging it on the clothesline.” Garlic has moved, in my mother’s and my lifetime from merely a marinade ingredient to a condiment in itself. At John’s Pizza on Bleeker Street in New York City, waiters ask every pizza patron whether he or she wants garlic as an extra topping.

Another ingredient, olive oil, like garlic, for most of American history has been relegated to the Italian food aisle. Like garlic, olive oil can now be found in most kitchens and its uptown cousin, the green, fruity extra-virgin olive oil has been raised in some circles to lofty enough heights to garner contests, tastings and medals. Its perceived nutritional value received a boost with the media’s promotion of the Mediterranean Diet as a guard against heart disease.
However, its Silver Bullet status has been sullied by stricter interpretations of what actually makes the Mediterranean Diet protective. Researcher Jeff Novick, who works for the famously abstemious Pritikin Center, argues that olive oil is far from the critical part of the healthy part of the way Greeks and Italians eat. He says it is the volume of fresh vegetables, not the volume or type of oil that makes the difference.

In either case blue cheese dressing, with most of its calories from fat, cheese, sour cream and mayonnaise, could hardly be called healthy. This may explain its popularity as part of the stereotypical anti-health food menu found at sports bars. I would argue that my mother’s version, nevertheless, is rich, whole food, and in these early days of what some of us hope is a local food boom, could, except for the lemons, be made from local ingredients almost anywhere in the country. As for the lemons, we had two lemon trees and a grapefruit tree in the back yard of our Ojai home. My mother, a New Jersey native, marveled that she could step past the clothesline and pick such an exotic fruit. Citrus was strictly seasonal and infrequent at that for most of her life. When she moved to California, she fell in love with the state and cherished her work at Sunkist. I am lucky to have creations contained in her recipe box to tie me to her across miles and years.

And a child will lead them...

Do you remember the night our president asked us to treat each other in a way that would make a nine year-old child proud of us? I do. He said it to a sports stadium full of emotional Tuscon students and residents still coming to grips with their town's part in the current national tragedy. He said it to those of us undone enough by the act itself and the ensuing palaver that we wanted to hear a reasoned voice, an adult, tell us we were all going to be o.k. He did. Most of us were proud and grateful to have President Barack Obama as grown-up in chief.

This national exhalation took place about 24 hours before I read a news story that made our governor's comparative level of maturity startlingly clear. It was about 24 hours before I had settled in a comfy chair and opened my my laptop to check on the political news of the day. It was about 24 hours before my own nine year-old walked behind my chair as he headed to the bathroom to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. It was about 24 hours before I had to quickly shut my laptop screen, worried that my nine year-old might see it. It was about 24 hours before I was so ashamed of our state's governor's immature language that I couldn't read a news story on my computer within my son's eye-shot.

Gov. Paul LePage's remark that members of a prestigious civil rights group could “kiss [his] butt” if they didn't like his choice of Martin Luther King Day activities did not surprise me. His earlier witticism, “I'd tell him to go to hell,” describing what he would say if he had the chance to speak to President Obama, convinced me that the 30 odd percent of the Maine voters had provided the rest of us with a rude rube for a governor and his tenure would be long and painful. It was the proximity to the President's eloquent requests that surprised me. Our state's blowhard in chief could not wait even 24 hours before adding to his already unsavory reputation for thuggish speech.

Can we assume that Gov. LePage did not hear President Obama's words? Probably. Is it clear he is someone who most needs to take them to heart? Definitely. Trouble is unless something fundamental changes about the way this man operates, he is unlikely to listen to anyone aside from his insiders, his family, his election-hardened supporters, the Maine Refounders and Tea Partiers. To say he has a tin ear is to insult those who cannot hear a note.

Side note: In a new piece, the NYer's Hendrik Hertzberg asks some questions about our political atmosphere and puts to rest the we're-all-guilty-meme.

Cross-posted at DirigoBlue.

The Road Forks

These are my (probably) my last words to the googlegroup formed for Maine State House candidates. I loved campaigning and wanted another outcome. That said, the State House might be difficult territory in the foreseeable future for a Lefty McLenin like myself.

All:

From dog avoidance strategy to campaign advice and encouragement, to Terry's stark words and Matt's sweet farewell, this googlegroup has been a touchstone for a newbie candidate. Though I was one who, for personal mini-drama-esque reasons, failed to run the campaign I would have liked, I found the sense of support, camaraderie and high jinx here to be fine fodder.


In the last hours of our email group's existence, I stand and salute you all. I salute your engagement, belief in the common good, kindness, humor, focus, intelligence and sense of social justice. Thank you for including me in the effort to move Maine's people toward a higher standard of education, health and egalitarianism. That any one of your number might find my words and work of high enough quality to stand alongside yours still makes me swoon a little.


The realities of Tuesday's party shift have only just begun to sink in with me. As one of the uninitiated, I can only guess at the devastation some must be feeling. For instance, it hardly seems possibly that another AG could begin to do a comparable job, regardless of party affiliation.


The candidates' experience of wearing our hearts and minds on our sleeves for all to see, cannot be duplicated any other way and, win or lose, I would not have missed it for the world. 


Regardless of what political work I do next, whether writing and carping from the riverbanks, or wading again into the rapids, my understanding of those rapids has been exponentially increased by floating a small section and landing safely on a District #53 sandbar. Those of you still in your rafts and kayaks head to Class 5, rock-strewn State House halls with my admiration, gratitude and support. I trust you all have your helmets strapped on tightly.


If you need a paddle, let me know. I have long arms and am a good swimmer.


Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.


Lee Roberts


Former candidate for Dist. #53, Alna, Dresden, Pittston and Wiscasset.

Journalism, real live journalism

Though I often bemoan the quality of our local newspapers, the Lincoln County News and the Wiscasset Newspaper, both of whom I once worked for, today I was twice reminded that journalism is far from dead. The not-for-profit, pure public interest, news organization ProPublica is doing the work of the angels promoting investigative journalism and paying real money for investigative reporting.
As a responsible State House candidate, I decided to stanch the flow of misinformation I hear at some of the doors while campaigning and went looking for real figures about where Recovery Act money is being spent. I found it at ProPublica. Not only is it there, it is accessible, searchable and organized. Here is Maine's page. Have a look and take it on the road.
This was on top of NPR and ProPublica's efforts to expose links between sketchy doctors and the promotion of pharmaceuticals.

No Beginning No End

Spiral Galaxy M100 hubblesite.org

Beginning with a three-week stay in the local hospital, this summer, despite maddeningly perfect weather, has been horrible. Sparing the details for another day, suffice to say I have embraced the suck and up is the only direction that remains.

While being buffeted by the winds of ick, drama and heartache, a Tweet came over the Twitterbox a week and a half ago that buoyed me in a surprising weightless way. One of my science-centric Twitter pals put up a link to an article about a theory gaining traction in the astrophysics world--did you know I moonlight as an astrophysicist? No?--that describes the Universe as never having a beginning. This mathematical--I'm assuming it's mathematical, probably some other stuff, too--theory says the Universe has always been here.

Now, I don't know about you, but that little piece of information changes everything. Always is a long time, like forever, right? Considering that the Universe has always been here takes some pressure off. I suspect that I'm not going to articulate this the way I would like. Nevertheless, it seems the subatomic particles that make up everything were always here and by some logic will always be here.

Maybe love, forgiveness and beauty are immeasurable representations of the immeasurability of the universe. Maybe the Classical beginning-middle-and-end manner of seeing everything from careers to relationships to lives to screenplays is handy, but not essential to the cosmos. Maybe the fact that my refrigerator is full and it becomes increasingly challenging to see the back of it really doesn't matter in this scheme of things.

Anyway, if you want to read more about this theory--not such a new one it turns out--head to the Technology Review Blog over at MIT. Be sure to read the comments--those that you can understand--too.

Running and Dancing

Update: For now this blog will double as campaign central. The newest news is we have a bank account and can deposit seed money donations made out to "Lee Roberts for Maine State House" c/o The First, P.O. Box 431, Wiscasset, ME 04578. Many thanks in advance.

This weekend we collected our first signatures toward my campaign to gain the District 53 seat in the State House of Representatives. Pretty darned fun. People even wrote $5 checks to the Maine Clean Election Fund in my name. Anyone in District 53, Wiscasset, Alna, Dresden and Pittston, can make a $5 clean election donation online by clicking here. We have to collect 60 from district members before April.

Initially, I had been volunteered to convene the Alna caucus, a smallish job mostly making sure our town has representation in the Democratic Party. Almost simultaneously, House Speaker Hannah Pingree sent an e-mail asking if I would consider running for my local House seat, currently held by my Alna neighbor, Republican Les Fossel, a biggish job with an intellectually and aerobically challenging preamble called a campaign that I must win. I am guessing I came to her attention through my work with Change that Works and the commercial CTW made with me asking Senator Snowe for real health care reform.

Tuesday, while visiting the State House and observing the House in action, from Pingree's consummate leadership to an old friend's unabashed support, I made the final decision to run.

Speaker Pingree, whom I first met when she was about eight as I wrote a story about her mother Chellie's North Haven yarn business, cuts a brainy and efficient figure. If she represents modern Maine politics, despite all appearances to the contrary, things are looking up for us. Pingree welcomed me and checked in more than once during a busy day of work and pomp. She has the ineffable skill of a consummate hostess that gave me the sense that my comfort was a primary part of her day's agenda, and went on to demonstrate an executive's ability to run meetings and the whole freaking House agenda with vigor, focus and humor. You haven't lived 'til you've seen, and heard, her wield a gavel.

Phippsburg native, singer and former waitress at the elegant Elliot House--now defunct--in Bath, Leila Percy put her long arms around me and gave me wonderful advice about how to keep straight the zillions of welcoming Democrats. Handing me a pen and a register of the legislature, replete with pictures and committee assignments, she said, "Whenever you meet a member, write down where and when next to their picture."

Since my brief career with Leila at the Eliott House, I have worked in other restaurants, marine science, hospitality, retail clothing and international airlines, and all that before reporting for the Courier-Gazette, then teaching at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle for 11 years. Later I worked as MPBN's Station Operations Manager and a subeditor at the Lincoln County News. For the last two academic years I have worked at Thomaston's Georges Valley High School as an English teacher or ed tech. The virtual hiring freeze at Maine's high schools has taken its toll on experienced teachers like me looking for work. Lately, my state of underemployment is enabling me to finish my long dormant master's degree in American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

For those who want my whole CV, I'll attach a copy in the near future. Suffice to say I've had a broad and varied work life with wonderful jobs and co-workers throughout the Midcoast and beyond. I look forward to using my experience in the interest of the people of Wiscasset, Alna, Dresden and Pittston.

So much for the running. Well, almost. I also run on local roads and the occasional treadmill. Whether I will have time to train for and finish the Maine Sport Triathlon as I did last year remains to be seen. A successful State House campaign will certainly require the best of my dance skills, modern and social, literal and figurative.

Cross-posted at Dirigo Blue.

Health Care Reform Fantods

Remember when Holden Caulfield got the fantods? Or did he accuse others of having them? Anyway, I'm pretty sure I had a case yesterday morning when Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake sent me an e-mail urging me to phone Congress asking that they scuttle the Senate Health Care bill.

I admire Jane Hamsher. Writer, film producer, breast cancer survivor and burr under the status quo's saddle, she has ridden health care hard. Her blog Firedoglake is reliably smart and irreverent and often hilarious. She makes me want to do her bidding. This morning I couldn't, ergo the fantods.

Thank heaven for Twitter. Within half an hour a handful more smart people posted charts and links that calmed the roiling sea in my head. One of the few Twitter friends I have whom I've met in real life, Bumblebums, called Hamsher "a gadfly" and reminded me that less shrill voices are out there.

Some of those include Jon Cohn, senior editor at the National Review, and Dan Roam of BackoftheNapkin.com fame. May the gods and goddesses of political discourse bless Chris Bowers, too. His consistently thoughtful voice over at OpenLeft.com is like kryptonite to politically engendered anxiety.

All of these writers kept me from fretting. They made my work for SEIU and Change That Works seem right minded and good, not the naive waste of time my lesser angels had begun to hiss in my ear.

So, we traded health care reform for health insurance reform. So, it's only a modicum of reform. Click on Jon Cohn's piece and look carefully at his chart. He makes it clear that this reform is significantly better than the scalpel in the eye we have been experiencing for decades.

Update, 0940 23.Dec.09: Apparently other lefty liberals are feeling the same about Hamsher.