Free Republic

Democrats question how 21 more votes from Long Island, all for the Republican, turned up in the very close District 25 recount. Maine Democratic Party is calling for investigation into ballot count discrepancies on Long Island The party’s claim involves 21 ballots from the island town that appeared on Nov. 18, when the Secretary of State’s Office conducted recount in the race between Republican Cathy Manchester of Gray and Democrat Cathy Breen of Falmouth. The ballots were not tabulated by Long Island officials on election night Nov. 4, and all 21 of them were cast for Manchester, according to written...

Gov. Paul LePage’s administration is facing a potential loss of federal funding to administer its food stamp program over concerns about state’s decision to put photos on cards used to access the benefits. Federal officials said in a letter to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday that recipients are being given information that makes it seem like they’re required to have their photos placed electronic benefit transfer cards, even though the program is voluntary. The Republican governor’s administration must make it clear to recipients that their decision to not have their photo placed on the card...

A Maine logger helped save an infant from drowning when he crawled into a car that was upside-down in water and used a knife to cut the straps off her car seat and pull her out, police said. The baby wasn't breathing and another bystander performed CPR, reviving the girl, police said. Leo Moody, 44, of Kingman, was driving home from work Monday when he saw a flipped SUV in a culvert in Kossuth Township, about 175 miles northeast of Portland. Moody said he called 911 and rushed to the vehicle. Moody said one of the SUV's passengers told him...

They are going there to get subsidized Section 8 housing vouchers to take to another state. Refugee resettlement is a euphemism for importing whole Muslim communities, importing jihad. I have long documented the targeting of gateway cities (smaller cities) overwhelmed with Muslim refugee immigration from countries like Somalia — cities like Emporia, Kansas, Nashville, Greeley and Fort Morgan, Colorado, Lewiston, Maine et al. The over-saturation and drain on city resources has driven these immigrants northward to settle in Wyoming, according to these reports. Organizations like Lutheran Family Services profit enormously from the Federal government handling these refugees. The sharia compliant...

PORTLAND Maine (Reuters) - Maine's largest city has begun clamping down on spending as newly re-elected Republican Governor Paul LePage makes good on a campaign promise to cut funding to cities and towns that give aid to undocumented immigrants. In an internal memo released on Wednesday, Portland city officials said they had frozen hiring and cut travel and overtime spending after their requests for reimbursement from the state for assistance provided to families with children in emergencies had gone unanswered since July. The budget shortfall could grow to as much as $3 million this year, city officials said, a hefty...

Via Newsbusters, after yesterday’s unpleasantness and the Halbig “speak-o” fiasco of a few months ago, I see Democrats (plus independents in name only like King) have finally reached the “Jon who?” stage of their Gruber problem. This is the game we’re playing now, eh? KILMEADE: They just lied about a health plan to the American people, called the stupidity of the American voter and bragged about the lack of transparency. KING: This is one guy. I don’t know who this guy was. All I know is that it’s important for people to have health insurance. And if you guys are...

Healthcare, Fiscal, and Tax 10/22/2014 Jeanne Shaheen's Dishonest Claim That Obamacare Doesn't Cut Medicare Avik Roy In last night’s U.S. Senate debate in New Hampshire between incumbent Jeanne Shaheen (D.) and challenger Scott Brown (R.), Shaheen uttered a flat-out, bald-faced lie: that Obamacare doesn’t cut Medicare spending to pay for its expansion of coverage to the uninsured. It’s a talking point that a number of Democratic Senate candidates—and their enablers in the lefty blogosphere—have been clinging to. And it’s embarrassingly dishonest. “I want to go back to Scott Brown’s suggestion that we’ve taken three-quarters of a trillion dollars out of...

Federal regulators slapped a six-month ban on most cod fishing off New England this week and are threatening to cut next year’s catch by up to 75 percent, in a move some say will destroy the livelihoods of fishermen across the region. ... NOAA announced several measures, including the ban which expands no-fishing zones, on Monday. But fishermen whose livelihoods rely on catching cod, as well as the coastal communities that depend on money coming in from that industry, worry the new regulations will devastate them.

Post maine thoughts here

Maine Governor Paul LePage called Howie to celebrate his re-election to the corner office and what was in store for Maine.

Initiative 594 just passed in Washington State, bringing on residents mandatory gun background checks and making it a felony to privately purchase or even hand a gun to a friend without government permission. A story in the Seattle Times the morning after the mid-term elections, revealed the true motives of the I-594 campaign and its proponents. It didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop and the rest of their anti-rights agenda to be exposed. Other states they’re now targeting with initiatives include Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Maine. Our rights are and always have been their real target, not...

For years now, whenever someone would draw up a list of the most vulnerable incumbent governors in the country, Maine’s Paul LePage would be right near the top. Pugnacious, hot-headed, and occasionally vulgar, LePage was consistently underwater with his approval ratings, especially after he would make national headlines for telling the state chapter of the NAACP to kiss his butt or television viewers everywhere that a Democratic state senator always wanted to “give it to the people without Vaseline.” (SNIP) In the end, over 8 percent of voters cast ballots for Cutler, sealing Michaud’s fate. But a third-party spoiler only...

At a press conference held at his home in Brunswick, Maine, independent Senator Angus King announced that he plans to continue caucusing with the Democrats, after months of speculation that he might switch allegiances if the GOP took control of the Senate.

Angus King is holding a press conference. Apparently, officially it's merely to "discuss" what party he will caucus with; I don't know if National Review's Sahil Kapur is being presumptuous, but he tweeted that King will caucus with the Republican Party. King has been a lockstep liberal, but switching party may move him slightly to the right (as it did Colorado party-switcher Ben Nighthorse Campbell). More importantly, it would seem unlikely that he could politically switch back to the Democrats if the Republicans outnumbered them 50-49 after the 2016 elections. So this would give the Republicans a boost in holding...

Maine Republican Governor Paul LePage has won re-election, CBS projected on Tuesday, retaining his seat in a three-way race against six-term Democratic U.S. Representative Michael Michaud and independent Eliot Cutler. LePage, 66, a former millworker, is an outspoken Tea Party-backed conservative who was considered one of the most vulnerable governors....

Kaci Hickox didn't go to the polls. She instead opted to vote via absentee ballot on Monday, her lawyer told ABC News. Hickox's boyfriend, Ted Wilbur, told ABC News today, "We voted yesterday in absentia, and you can guess who we voted for. We encourage all the good people of Maine to join us in returning decency to Blaine house." Blaine House is where the Maine governor, now Paul LePage, has traditionally resided for nearly 100 years. The incumbent Republican who's in a competitive race for re-election had tried to force Hickox to take a blood test. LePage has polled...

Kaci Hickox, the nurse who was quarantined despite testing negative for the Ebola virus after returning home from Sierra Leone, said this morning on Meet the Press that she will stay away from public places in her Maine town, and apologized to residents for the media firestorm that has erupted. Upon landing in Newark, New Jersey, she was forced into quarantine under the new regulations put into place by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and has since defied those orders and returned to her hometown of Fort Kent, Maine. Even though a judge ruled that Maine Gov. Paul LePage can...

Nay-sayers are all too quick to decry scientific findings if they don’t agree with their own cracked views.Kaci Hickox embodies all the American values conservatives say they admire. She’s tough – you don’t volunteer to leave New England to stem the spread of Ebola in Sierra Leone unless you have courage. She’s a rugged individualist, filled with the pioneering spirit, who makes her own way, without waiting for the say-so of “big government”. No tax-dollar funded politician or bureaucrat is going to lock her up in the land of the free. She knows, as every doctor knows, that Ebola is...

There is no “stigma,” and comparisons to criminal imprisonment are absurd. The first responsibility of the president of the United States is national security. In the absence of presidential leadership as Ebola makes inroads in our country, state officials such as New Jersey governor Chris Christie have stepped into the security breach, taking commonsense steps to protect their citizens from the deadly virus. One of those measures is to quarantine those who have been exposed to Ebola, including health-care professionals who have risked their own lives to fight the disease. As a public-health precaution, it is entirely reasonable for states...

Maine Could Elect The Country's First Gay Governor – But LGBT Activists Are Split Democrat Mike Michaud is in a neck-and-neck race with incumbent Paul LePage but he persistently voted against gay rights legislation before coming out Jon Swaine 1 November 2014 The man who may soon be the first openly gay person elected as a governor in the US sat silently in Maine’s house of representatives as an older colleague embarked on a homophobic tirade against the anti-discrimination proposal that they were considering. “I don’t see them as gay because they never smile, they have got that withdrawn look,”...