A Little Comment(ary)...

So much for a leisurely boat ride
By BILL NEMITZ
Portland Press Herald

This is just great. My small Cape Dory sailboat, having emerged from its winter tomb, sits on its trailer in my driveway, silently begging for me to launch her in Casco Bay.

Closing my eyes, I see warm August afternoons, gentle breezes, soothing ocean swells and terrorists?

The bad guys were officially inserted into my summer daydream Monday by none other than Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Speaking in Washington, D.C., to the National Marine Manufacturing Association, Chertoff announced that the federal government is recruiting the nation's 80 million recreational boaters to help hold the waterfront line in the war on terror.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it: Keep our eyes peeled for anything "suspicious." And if we see it, call it in pronto.

"It's nothing more than if you have a cell phone or a VHF radio that you call the Coast Guard station and say, 'I don't know if this means anything or not, but this guy's acting funny,' said Maj. John Fetterman, deputy chief of the Maine Marine Patrol. "They're not suggesting that you confront anyone."

Acting funny, of course, can mean a lot of things. The Coast Guard's up-and-running America Waterways Watch program cites several scenarios of "suspicious activity" -- out-of-place characters with video cameras and notebooks riding in aimless circles around bridges, power plants, oil tankers, that sort of thing.

I'm happy to say I've seen none of that to date -- maybe because I'm too busy dodging all those beer-bellied boozers "acting funny" in their overpowered, gas-guzzling cigarette boats.

All of which makes one wonder what exactly it is that Secretary Chertoff seeks to accomplish here.

A good part of what he asks us to do is basic common sense (a foreign concept to many in the Bush administration). What boater these days, if he sees three guys in a skiff taping a bundle of something to the supports beneath the Casco Bay Bridge, isn't going to get on his cell phone and dial 911?

But speaking to the boating manufacturers this week, Chertoff went beyond a call for boaters to sharpen their sense of the obvious. In one part of his speech, he called for more investment and research into small-boat "identification systems" such as transponders or GPS devices attached to our vessels so the feds can, ahem, keep track of what's going on out there.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=184673&ac=PHnws

Winds of change in Buxton?
By BILL NEMITZ
Portland Press Herald

BUXTON — His business card says "solid waste manager," but Greg Heffernan is also this town's resident dreamer.

His dreams come tinted in green: He looks at the growing municipal complex off Portland Road and envisions solar panels pumping out renewable heat and energy. And right next to his cavernous transfer station, which handled 1,193 tons of recycled materials last year alone, Heffernan sees a windmill.

"It wouldn't have to be a big one," he said Thursday morning as the recyclers, bless them, came and went. "We'd get some power from it, but mostly I'd be looking at it as educational."

So why not build it? Because in these parts Heffernan is having a hard time getting the powers that be just to talk about wind power, let alone embrace it. "Anything new in a town this size -- any town this size -- is met with a lot of resistance," Heffernan said tactfully.

Take what happened earlier this year, for example. While briefing the town's five selectmen on what he'd like to see included in Buxton's annual what's-on-your-mind survey of its 8,400 citizens (of which I am one), Heffernan tried -- and failed -- to insert a question about a town windmill.

He knew it was a lost cause when one selectman referred to it as "all that hippie crap."

But a lot has happened since everyone was cranky and neck deep in snow: Fuel and food prices set new records almost daily. A national energy policy (or the glaring lack thereof) is front and center in the 2008 presidential race. And heck, there's a new municipal windmill up and spinning just down the road in Saco.

Heffernan, who has degrees in both business and environmental science, figures a demonstration windmill will cost about $20,000 installed. While it won't power, say, the transfer station's heavy-duty compactor, he said, it will produce enough electricity to pay for itself in 10 years.

Just as importantly, Heffernan added, it will show local folks that "it is possible to do this."

As he spoke, two women pulled up to the entrance booth with an assortment of trash and recyclables. Heffernan, seizing the day, asked how they'd feel about a windmill right over there across the parking lot.

"I have no problem with windmills," one woman replied. "That would be a good cause."

As the car pulled away, Heffernan said, "I'm getting that reaction from everybody!"

Then a real breakthrough occurred. Two selectmen, Daniel Collomy and Robert Libby, happened by within a few minutes of each other and naturally wondered what all the interviewing was about.

"A windmill," came the reply. "How do you guys feel about a town windmill?"

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=184986&ac=PHnws

Happy stories would just ring false
By J.P. DEVINE
Freelance Writer Morning Sentinel

Once upon a time in America -- when the world was young, the air was clean, the moon was blue, and kids drank water straight from the hose on hot summer days -- we were really something.

OK, maybe it was all a dream our grandparents told us. We all remember the stories, the tales, the fables. There were stories, back then, of a "made in America" America, when it was always summer, where boys home from France sat in their khaki suits at player pianos in the parlor and tinkled out "Moonlight On The Wabash," and when girls only had one beau and probably married him.

Maybe it was just a movie I saw once.

So there I was, standing in the shower in a Boston hotel with shampoo water running down my face, and I looked up and saw a symbol of a country changed and a world gone mad: There were no shower rings on the curtain. There was a tiny sign sewed to the inside that read "Shower Ring-Free Curtain." Yeah, like "sugar free" or "fat free." Only this has bitter consequences.

So I went down to the bar before dinner and had my maximum allowance of three glasses of fine merlot and sat staring into space. No curtain rings.

Into the second glass of fine merlot, I began to imagine this Midwestern landscape, a small town on a picturesque river with trees full of cicadas and bushes full of crickets. Maybe this was once a town that prided itself on making the finest wooden shower rings in America, and then even when things went bad, turned to plastic rings. But still, they made them and we all used them.

Maybe they even exported them, and some poor German or Italian person had to spend 30 minutes, as I have, trying to link them into those small holes and cursed this small town in America for making them.

Maybe you had a relative or knew someone in the army, back then, who came from a town like that and bragged about how they were famous for making shower rings. I'll bet they had annual "Shower Ring Days," when all the guys from the factory would bring their families to picnics with barbecues, ring-tossing games and even "Miss Shower Ring" competitions. Some lucky girl, way back then, might have started her career as "Miss Shower Ring" and worked it into a brief career in Hollywood before coming back home brokenhearted and marrying the owner, the "Shower Ring King," of this town. What's wrong with that?

Some stories do have happy endings, but this one doesn't.

This is the story of an America that was once full of little towns like this, towns that were famous for making Popsicle sticks or toothpicks, hairbrushes and quality shirts, the kind you saw on movie stars sitting on bar stools with other movie stars.

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/5027723.html

Fryeburg firing 'legally defensible,' but it still stinks
By BILL NEMITZ
Portland Press Herald

It's one of those letters that says very little -- and at the same time says a lot.

"On behalf of the board let us state again our hopes for your successful treatment and our best wishes for your full recovery," wrote David Knapp, chairman of the Fryeburg Board of Selectmen, to Town Manager Phil Covelli last month.

Covelli, 51, has Stage 3 lung cancer. And he'd have appreciated Knapp's good wishes much more if not for something else he learned from the April 7 letter.

Effective later this month, Covelli is out of a job.

"This really threw me for a loop," Covelli said last week, his voice still raspy from a recent radiation treatment. "I just find the whole thing incredible."

Fryeburg hired Covelli, a career public servant, almost four years ago to be its first-ever town manager. And daily headaches of running a municipality aside, he enjoyed his work.

But then he got sick. So sick that by Jan. 15, he went on disability (which he paid for) and began a battery of chemotherapy and radiation therapies to stop the cancer that had already spread from his lungs to some nearby lymph nodes.

Covelli's contract with the town contained a clause stating that if he was incapacitated for three months, the selectmen "may" terminate his contract by giving him six months of severance pay and benefits (including health insurance).

The three-month trigger occurred on April 15. As it approached, Covelli told the selectmen through his attorney that he'd settle for three months in view of the fact that his contract was due to expire on May 12. He also offered to stick around part-time to help break in his replacement "if that's the way they wanted to go."

The only response was Knapp's April 7 letter.

"We appreciate your offer to withdraw early from your contract," the chairman wrote. However, the board "will not extend compensation beyond your contract period."

Knapp continued, "the board will not seek a new contract with you and we wish to extend the thanks of our citizens for your service to Fryeburg as her first town manager."

Knapp did not return several messages seeking comment. But Ed Wilkey, another selectman, said the decision to cut Covelli loose had nothing to do with his illness but was rather a "personnel issue" that could not be discussed publicly.

"If he wants to play the victim, I guess he'll just have to play that out," Wilkey said.

Covelli, who never received a single evaluation from the selectmen, said he knows of no performance issues that might have cost him his job.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=185321&ac=PHnws

Maybe Michael Heath should spend time with a civil rights team
By JUSTIN ELLIS
Portland Press Herald

Here's the thing about bullies: They don't always use their fists to hurt people.

Some don't even need to shake you down for your lunch money.

Oh, and there are plenty of them beyond the school yard.

"One reason bullies may (harass) people is because they are angry or facing the same thing at home and want to take it out on someone smaller than them," said Calvin Carr, 13.

Carr is a member of the civil rights team at Memorial Middle School in South Portland, which is one of more than 200 teams in schools around the state that work to confront intolerance and teach students about the Maine Human Rights Act.

Last month, the Christian Civic League of Maine began promoting another referendum to overturn the state's human rights laws.

But somehow, in the civic league's recurring battle over who has the right to marry whom, and whether that preference will cost them their job, it's also taken aim at the civil rights teams.

Michael Heath, the league's executive director, says the teams are nothing more than a front, a way of brainwashing kids into accepting homosexuality as normal.

"One idea, just by the nature of the project, is that all sexuality is good sexuality as long as it's consensual," Heath said in an April 10 story in the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram.

He's right about one thing: The teams are all about teaching acceptance and understanding – of everyone.

Maybe, just maybe, Heath could benefit from spending a little time with a team.

For kids such as Carr and other members of the team, speaking up is the easy thing to do. "The hard part is talking with people who don't see (what they're doing) as wrong," Carr said.

Max Knutsen, 13, said one of the biggest problems they face is the language people use, intentionally or unintentionally. It's when words like "gay" or "Jew" are used as slurs, he said.

The teams and their advisers are established through the Attorney General's Office but are independent of the state. Each team determines what problems it is going to address in school and the best way of doing that.

At Deering High School in Portland, the civil rights team recently held a day of workshops for students to talk about the language used in school and the effect it has on their peers.

Team members were optimistic about the results of their efforts, but they knew they did not reach everyone.

A.J. Chimsky-Lustig, a student and team member who had experienced harassment himself, said it wasn't long after the workshops were over before he started hearing the same things – slurs, teasing and threats.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=185642&ac=PHnws

J.P. DEVINE: Wanted: Lessons in being redneck
By J.P. DEVINE
Freelance Writer Morning Sentinel

Wanted: One White Working Class Rural American male to give a White Urban Semi-Working Class Male survival lessons. Experience required. Will pay in acting lessons and successful sartorial tips.

What I need, first, is someone to teach me how to shoot a gun, or at least how to hold the thing properly so I don't blow my foot off. I need this ASAP. Not too big a gun, not one of those big things Bob DeNiro and Christopher Walken used in "The Deer Hunter."

I don't want to kill and mount anything, I just want to look good before the election. I carried a gun while in the service, and it looked really cool, but they took it away from me when I forgot where I put it one morning.

They then sent me to school to learn to type. Imagine my embarrassment. In those days, only girls went to typing class. You can see I have a lot of ground to reclaim if I'm going to be part of the WWCRAM group.

I also need someone to teach me to bowl and spit. I did some bowling once. I think I did better than Obama but I'm not sure. Let me get this straight. Stop me If I'm wrong. There are two ... no ... three holes in a ball? You use three fingers? OK. I'm cool with that.

As to the spitting thing, I just want to look as cool as Manny Ramirez. Nobody spits a cool as that Red Sox star.

Now, as to the drinking thing, and I'm putting this out there so my fellow elitists can get their acts together and join me in this socio-political transformation. If I can get enough of us together, we can form an elitist bowling, spitting and drinking team. Stop it. Badminton and croquet are not WWCRAM sports. You want to stay in that stereotyped sissy box forever? We're losing this election in the WWCRAM areas, and we need to come back strong in November.

What I'm trying to do here, of course, is dispel this right-wing notion that all left-wing liberals are effete and "elitists."

OK, I do tend to be a bit effete, I'm told I get that from my mother who was a terrific dresser. My father wore a uniform all of his life. I tried that for four years, and it didn't work out the way I hoped. Did you know that there is no pocket in a Class A Air Force uniform for a silk pocket hankie? And what's worse is that the shoes are all black. Khaki and black? Where did these guys go to school? Don't they read GQ?

Yes, there are good, patriotic American males, simple hard-working folks who don't ordinarily wear silk pocket hankies or cashmere scarves, who don't drive hybrids or drink imported Italian water.

I think they're called "survivalists."

I know they're afraid of Obama because he always wears a suit and tie. Rural working-class guys almost never wear a suit and tie except to attend the funerals or weddings of other white rural working-class guys. I speak from experience. Except for my father, all of my five brothers were white working-class guys who served their country in World War II. They smoked, drank, cussed and knew how to spit.

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/5042059.html

Time is now for Maine to maximize its superior 'quality of place'
By RICHARD BARRINGER and CATHERINE REILLY
Portland Press Herald

In late 2006, the Brookings Institution reported that after painful industrial restructuring and amid surprising negativism, Maine is poised for a new era of prosperity "if it takes bold action and focuses its limited resources on a few critical investments." Brookings recommended a threefold strategy of investing in product and service innovation, streamlining government at all levels, and revitalizing our towns and cities while maintaining our rural landscapes.

In the last regard, Brookings found that "accessible wild places and tranquil country farms, human-scaled Main Streets and working waterfronts: these are what differentiate Maine from other places and in many respects drive its economy. ... And so Maine should protect these assets and invest in them as sources of economic advantage."

Now, the Governor's Council on Maine's Quality of Place has issued its final report, calling for "a new and needed Quality of Place Investment Strategy for Maine." Here's why.

QUALITY OF PLACE MATTERS

We are no longer a place set largely apart from the forces shaping the national and global economies. Maine today is engaged in a world-wide competition for people -- people to create and sustain prosperity in the 21st century. The council has found that Maine's chief economic asset in this competition is our quality of place.

In the modern economy, prosperity comes from the ideas, talents, and energy of people. Today, skilled workers, entrepreneurs, tourists, and retirees do not have to come to Maine, they may go anywhere. Where they choose to work, visit, and live depends on their personal preferences and the appeal of their destination. Maine's advantage in this global competition for people is our quality of place.

A HOMELY EXAMPLE

To understand what this means, think of your home in Maine. You may like your home because it's in a historic neighborhood near cultural amenities, or because it's in a quaint town surrounded by open space and recreational opportunities. You may like your home because you enjoy farming or gardening, because you love being by the coast or near a lake, or because you are inspired by your scenic views or your relationships with community members.

Our homes in Maine represent many values to us, just as do our historic downtowns and Maine landscapes of all kinds. But at times in our lives, a home's primary value becomes its economic one: We want to move and need to sell. How do we market our home? We fix it up, paint it up, polish it up, to show it in its best light. We attract prospective buyers by touting our home's architecture; its neighborhood or town location; its access to cultural, recreational, or community amenities; its views of sunsets, mountains, or open fields. We need to distinguish our home as of better quality than others we're competing with for a sale.

That's what we need to do for Maine's future prosperity. We must attract new "buyers" --visitors, retirees, businesses, and skilled workers -- to Maine. Our distinctive, competitive advantage in a world that has become one giant economic neighborhood is Maine's spectacular, place-based, natural and built assets.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=186708&ac=Insight


File photo

Welcome home from Iraq – now hit the campaign trail
By BILL NEMITZ
Portland Press Herald

Like most spouses of military personnel returning from Iraq, Ruth Summers met her husband, Charlie, with a huge hug Saturday evening at the Portland International Jetport.

Then she handed him his schedule.

"I'm not kidding -- she really did," Summers said over coffee Thursday morning while a smiling Ruth nodded in agreement.

Over there, he was Lt. Cmdr. Summers, a Navy public affairs officer with the U.S. Embassy who spent much of his time traveling the country with provincial reconstruction teams.

Here, he's Candidate Summers, one of two Republicans vying to be on the ballot in Maine's 1st Congressional District in November.

His opponent, Dean Scontras of Eliot, has been all over the district for months, telling people why he should be their next congressman. Summers, who since leaving in July has relied on his wife to make his pitch for him, now has just less than a month to play catch-up.

Meaning this is anything but your typical homecoming.

Federal law prevented Summers from campaigning while on active duty. But it didn't keep him from "logging onto pressherald.com every day" to see who was doing what.

Even when all he could do was watch and listen?

"Yup," Summers replied.

Didn't that drive him crazy?

"Yup."

It could have been worse. He thought when he left that he'd be in Iraq for a year, but the early arrival of his replacement and the ongoing drawdown of U.S. forces combined to put him on a plane home before, rather than after, the June 10 primary.

His return comes none too soon. Already he's attended three candidate forums, taped a TV ad that will probably debut next week and hit the phones to add to a campaign fund he now estimates at $100,000.

(Contacted Thursday, a gracious Scontras said he's relieved Summers that is home safely, adding that Ruth did a "fantastic" job filling in for her husband on the campaign trail.)

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=188024&ac=PHnws

Not too far from that madding crowd
By J.P. DEVINE
Freelance Writer Morning Sentinel

When Daniel Boone could see his neighbors' fire smoke, he moved. Daniel hated neighbors. I think most Mainers have a lot of Danny Boone in their genes. It's not that they dislike their neighbors, they just don't seem to like living so close to them.

Up here on the frozen lip of America, central Maine residents, like others who live in rural states, seem to have fallen in love with long distance. No 27-floor towering kennels for them. And as their incomes rise, they move farther and farther from the center of town.

My friend Tommy who grew up here in the relative urbanity of Waterville, bought a house far out on the edge, and then when, maybe, he saw his neighbor's smoke, bought another even farther from the madding crowd. I haven't seen Tommy lately. Maybe he's in Alaska.

This seems to be endemic in the younger and Boomer Mainers. My friend Cheryl, who grooms my dog, Jack, lives on a bucolic country road surrounded by rolling fields of grass, horses and cows. This city boy drives the lane there with mouth agape. Horses and cows? Only minutes from the sweaty teeming excess of Wal-Mart and tech-age smell of Starbucks?

Can Snow White be far?

Cheryl not only lives far from the rest of us, but her house, like most around her, is set so far back from the road you need a GPS to find it. Helloooooo, Daniel. Can you smell me?

I'm sorry, but I also don't want to live cheek by jowl with my neighbors in those tiny kennels. Neither do I long to chew a blade of straw and stroll among the horse flies.

Yes. I'm phobic. I have long been diagnosed as an urban obsessive compulsive. I see poison ivy and dengue fever everywhere. As a pilgrim here in the wild. I keep up my tetanus shots.

Where Cheryl and her brethren see tranquility and peace, I see ticks waiting to bite me. I eschew horse flies, chiggers, rabid skunks and opossums.

I know Lyme disease and avian flu are very likely nesting in those bird droppings that smear my Prius.

Waterville and the teeming boulevards of Augusta are rural enough for me, thank you very much.

http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/5070935.html

King's wind-farm idea: It's time to start hopping
By BILL NEMITZ
Portland Press Herald

How does it feel to be a frog?

Not just any frog. We're talking about the frog in a pot of water who doesn't notice the temperature slowly but inexorably rising until suddenly the water starts to boil and ...

"We're dead," said former Gov. Angus King.

King floated his metaphor before the University of Southern Maine's monthly Corporate Partners breakfast last week. His warning: We Mainers adjust at our own peril to the steady upward creep in fossil fuel prices.

"This is a looming, impending, rolling catastrophe," King told the packed room at USM. "We're in the cross hairs of a disaster."

It was the former governor's second public pitch in as many months for what many might still call a radical idea: a 5,000- megawatt wind farm sucking up the ocean winds 25 miles out in the Gulf of Maine.

King focused not only on why such a massive endeavor makes sense, but also why paying the ever-increasing cost for oil and gas to heat our homes and power our cars doesn't.

Noting that forecasts of crude oil prices are consistently falling short of reality, King foresees an energy crisis so severe that within the next dozen years (or less), "Maine essentially will become uninhabitable."

Think he's kidding?

Picture paying $2,000 to fill your home heating oil tank. Or $200 to fill up your car. At $300 per barrel for crude -- "a reasonable expectation by knowledgeable people studying the oil market," King claims -- those nightmares could come true.

The wind proposal -- 1,000 five-megawatt windmills on floating platforms, not visible from the coast, covering a mere 1 percent of the Gulf of Maine -- has far to go before the juice starts flowing.

Two existing technologies -- on-land wind power and floating platforms now used (ironically) to drill for oil -- must be married to handle the extremes of winter in the gulf.

At the same time, Maine (and the rest of the country, for that matter) must replace its oil furnaces and gas-guzzling autos with electric-powered heat pumps and plug-in cars.

"In other words, no more oil," King said. "No more oil."

Sounds crazy? No crazier than what we do now, King said:

"If I came to you today and said I want to develop an energy source for Maine that will require thousands of trucks, highways bridges, storage and, by the way, this stuff is flammable and pollutes the ground if it gets out, you'd say, 'Oh, wow. Are you crazy? That's the last thing we need.' Well, that's the system we've got."

Juxtapose that with the world-class breeze blanketing the Gulf of Maine -- King calls it "the Saudi Arabia of wind" -- and an overhaul of how we produce and consume energy doesn't seem quite so far out there.

King said it's too soon to tell how the $15 billion-to-$20 billion project ("Six weeks in Iraq," he noted) might take shape. He said it might be modeled after the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produces 33,000 megawatts of clean hydropower and over the past half-century has melted into the national landscape.

http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/story.php?id=188322&ac=PHnws