Maine

Two Landmarks Reached By American Politicians! Mayor Richard M. Daley and Senator Barbara Mikulski!

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As the year 2010 nears an end, two landmarks have been reached by political officeholders.

Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago has just passed the longevity in office of his father, Richard J. Daley, who served as Mayor from 1955-1976. Son Daley will be in office a few more months until his successor, likely Rahm Emanuel, former Congressman and Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama, wins the election in February to succeed the retiring younger Daley.

Also, Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski is surpassing the record for longevity in office of the longest serving woman Senator, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who served 24 years in the upper body from 1948-1972, and since Mikulski has just been re-elected to a fifth six year term, she will be adding to the record daily.

Congratulations are in order for Mayor Daley and Senator Mikulski, both of whom have had a major impact on their city and the Senate, respectively!

Profile In Courage Needed By Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Richard Lugar, And Lindsey Graham Against Tea Party Movement Threat To Honored Traditions Of GOP!

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In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy began his anti Communist rampage, promoting fear and hysteria in millions of Americans; destroying the reputation of many public figures in government, media, Hollywood, and the professoriate; and silencing most members of the Senate who feared to speak up against him and his witch hunt! 🙁

But early on, a courageous woman Republican senator, Margaret Chase Smith, spoke up against McCarthy when no one else was willing to do so!

Smith was the first long serving woman in the US Senate, ultimately serving four terms from 1949-1973 for the state of Maine! She was truly a “profile in courage”, the title of a Pulitzer Prize winning book by Senator John F. Kennedy a few years later, although Kennedy was unwilling to speak out against McCarthy, particularly because his own father was supporting and financing the Wisconsin Senator!

The kind of courage Smith displayed, showing she had principles and was willing to risk her career to speak out against McCarthy’s tirades, needs desperately now to be copied by several Republican Senators, who are decent, mainstream Republicans, and who in their heart and mind, cannot be imagined to be supportive of the Tea Party Movement trying to usurp power and take over the Republican Party! 🙁

I am referring to Maine Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, and South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Graham has, actually, been courageous to express doubts and criticism about the Tea Party Movement, but the others have remained silent. It could be because Snowe and Lugar face reelection contests in 2012, while Collins and Graham face it in 2014.

Graham has set the standard and needs to convince Collins, Snowe and Lugar to condemn what is going on, even if the result is a challenge to their seats when reelection time comes!

Sixty years later, we need some reputable GOP Senators to uphold the honored tradition of the party at a time when the party is in deep trouble and about to commit potential suicide!

The Rapid Marginalization Of The Republican Party: Maine As An Example

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The Republican Party was born in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery, and for many party founders, opposition to slavery itself.

The Republican Party became the majority party of the nation within a few short years; won the Civil War under President Abraham Lincoln; promoted racial equality during the Reconstruction period; endorsed the development of industrial capitalism; gave us Theodore Roosevelt and the growth of the progressive movement; advocated bipartisan foreign policy during the beginning of the Cold War under President Truman; gave the country the moderate, internationalist views of Dwight D. Eisenhower; and continued to have a moderate wing, even in the times when conservatism under Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan won control of the party.

The Republican party also, sadly, pursued policies that helped to cause the Great Depression of 1929; promoted fear and hysteria during the the Age of McCarthyism in the late 1940s and early 1950s; and advocated policies that led to economic excesses under Ronald Reagan, and economic and foreign policy tragedies under George W. Bush; and allowed itself to be hijacked by the religious Right in the last generation!

Now, in the past few years, at an accelerated rate, the Republican party has become more extreme and marginalized with the growth in power and influence, not just of the religious Right, but also the radio talk show and Fox News Channel crackpots who spew forth wild rhetoric which incites and fuels extremist movements, such as the Tea Party activists that are promoting conspiratorial views about liberals, progressives, and the Obama Presidency!

Witness not only the fact that a very conservative but respectable US Senator Robert Bennett is repudiated in the Utah state convention proceedings last week, not able to make it on the ballot for Republican voters to decide in a primary!

Witness not only the crazy rantings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other right wing talk show hosts who promote the most extreme depictions of our President, and advocate ideas the most incendiary ever enunciated on the airwaves, enough to incite fear, hysteria and panic among people suffering from GOP policies that led to the Great Recession we are still trying to recover from!

But Maine, a state that has long had the image of being a moderate, reasonable state politically, last weekend had a state Republican convention, and came out of it sounding as if insanity had taken over! What happened at this convention?

The convention called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve; declared global warming a myth; called for sealing the border with Canada; denounced the idea of a one world government; stated that health care is not a right; called for the elimination of the Department of Education; advocated the arrest, detention and deportation of anyone here illegally immediately; and sounded as if the Maine Republican party had been taken over by the Tea Party Movement and Ron Paul!

As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post stated: “The Maine Republicans a week ago rejected a platform proclaiming that ‘we believe that the proper role of government is to help provide for those who cannot help themselves’, that ‘we believe in ensuring that our children have access to the best educational opportunities’, and that ‘every person’s dignity, freedom, liberty, ability and responsibility must be honored.'”

Milbank states that the Republican Party is becoming unglued, and showing signs of cracking up, and that if this is what is happening in Maine and Utah, as well as in Arizona and elsewhere, that May 8, 2010 will be seen by historians as the beginning of the disintegration of a party once great and magnificent in many ways! 🙁 The problem is that there were clear signs of this before last week, but Maine being part of it is indeed shocking! 🙁

This should be an alarm bell ringing in the night, as Thomas Jefferson said at the time of the debate about slavery, which led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which, ironically, helped to create Maine as a “free” state in the debate over slavery expansion!

This extremist, right wing activity is a threat to freedom itself, and to every decent American who believes that this country is a land of opportunity and humanity! 🙁

The Two Maine Senators: Again Open To Bipartisanship

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Again, the two women Republican Senators from Maine–Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins–seem to be on the way to bipartisan support of the health care bill, as they were of the economic stimulus bill last winter.

Snowe voted for the Baucus Senate Finance Committee bill, and Collins now hints she may also be willing to support the bill on the Senate floor.

The problem for both is their unwillingness to support a public option as costing too much and adding to the debt, so if the House bill or the Senate Health Committee (Tom Harkin of Iowa) wins out over the Baucus bill, they may yet vote no, but even the possibility of support is appealing to the Obama Administration.

Some observers also think that George Voinovich of Ohio, another moderate and getting ready to retire from the Senate in 2010, might be a possible vote for a health care overhaul.

At the same time, there is no hint that even one GOP congressman will vote for it when the House gets to the final roll call.

The growing impact of Maine and its independent streak politically, as evidenced through its two GOP senators and otherwise, may yet be the story of the year, depending on events yet to be foretold.