“Kiss my toxic landfill” asks Edgar Allen Beem? No, kiss my toxic governor.

Paul LePage is following the script from Tea Party Central. It is written, it is being implemented, and no public opposition will influence the plan. I come from New Jersey, where toxic wastes have forced the closing of beaches, turned rivers orange, saturated aquifers, and since the 1980s have been left to the state DEP to solve – at horrendous taxpayer expense. Today, New Jersey’s principal toxic waste sits in the governor’s office: Chris Christie, maybe not a “model for the nation” as the Tea Party claims, but a model for Paul LePage.

Of course, the Tea Party-GOP wants to eradicate all public ownership for transfer to profiteers. Of course, it wants to subjugate workers to lower wages, remove their health care, nullify the rights to organize and petition, and purge their retirement funds. Of course, the Cantor-Ryan Tea-Party deficit plan targets all money spent on people. Of course, the FOX News demagogues blame the poor, the disabled and the elderly for the trillions that went to speculators, Wall Street derivative schemes, hedge funds, bond vigilantes and to wars. And of course, the Democrats and President Obama rubber-stamp all of it.

“As goes Maine, so goes the nation” is a myth today, for it is the other way around. If you want to know where Paul LePage will take Maine, just follow New Jersey.

Michael T. Bucci
Damariscotta