Jim Fossel’s column on July 10 exhibits a tendency by reporters and other Mainers to treat Paul LePage as if he is normal, as if this is a straight-up race with Mills over taxes.

Now that we have a normal governor, who is trying to restore the state that LePage deliberately wrecked, it’s important to remember some details: LePage denied health care to 70,000 Mainers after 60 percent voted to expand Medicaid; he thinks people should fend for themselves, though the state paid for his fat surgery; he dismantled 27 public health coalitions; he sent children deeper into poverty; more than 12,000 calls to Maine’s child abuse hotline went unanswered in one year; the physical abuse of children increased 52 percent between 2008 and 2016; under LePage, the state government failed to investigate the deaths of 133 people with intellectual disabilities; he sat on federal opioid funds because he didn’t think drug users were worth saving; and, doing what he wanted with federal money, he cost the state millions.

As Maine columnist Edgar Allen Beem was quoted in The Nation: “He grew up abused by his father, and he abuses everybody.”

Donna Halvorsen
South Portland

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