Author: Jonathan Reisman

“An Act to Define and Assess Equity” would require Maine state agencies, public K-12 schools, and the University of Maine System to define and assess “equity” if they are promoting it in any policy area. It turns out that there is no definition of equity despite widespread equity advocacy. The hearings should be quite the show. Across the nation, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) divas are polishing up their resumes. The FBI has ditched DEI and a lot of corporate America is having second thoughts. Here in blue/purple Maine, the action will move to Augusta, courtesy of House Minority Leader…

The upcoming November referenda authorizing $13.5 billion in borrowing charged to the electricity consumer’s credit card and cosigned by Maine taxpayers to convert Central Maine Power and Versant into a government-owned electric grid controlled by the climate Stasi looks to be an epic spending and ideological battle with existential stakes for freedom and prosperity. The climate alarmists have played this beautifully and they have a real chance to destroy what is left of Maine’s economic freedom and future prospects. For more than 30 years, the climate cultists, allied with the Democratic Party, the environmental left, the legacy media and academia,…

For more than 30 years, Americans have been propagandized with a climate alarmist apocalyptic message: global warming (now climate change) is an existential threat to the planet caused by humans (specifically by capitalism, greed and fossil fuels) and we must stop using fossil fuels to save the planet. The propagandists include the left, the Democratic Party, academia and most of the grant-driven science community. They have now been joined by the Sunrise County Economic Council, which was originally a center-right non-profit established to promote economic development in Washington County, but has now morphed into a full service leftist grant whore…

With Indigenous Peoples Day replacing Columbus Day, Goodbye, Columbus seemed a natural, but I realized that most folks under 50 would not get the reference. Goodbye, Columbus is a 1959 novella by Phillip Roth that was made into a 1969 movie starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw. It was Macgraw’s debut just before Love Story in 1970 rocketed her to fame. Goodbye Columbus is also the desired woke outcome of Indigenous Peoples Day. The novella and movie are about two twenty-something American Jews who begin an affair and deal with their class differences, assimilation, and the sexual revolution. Benjamin plays…

Maine lobster was recently placed on the unsustainable “red list” by the environmental group Seafood Watch, a non-profit associated with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Gov. Janet Mills, Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King, and Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden all came out in defense of the Maine lobster industry, defending its sustainability bona fides. It was a nice photo op, but the truth is King, Collins, and Pingree had plenty of warnings that the environmental left was using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to damage Maine’s economy and sovereignty. They chose to do nothing. Maine’s lobster community has been…

Over the last year, frequent communications from University of Maine System leaders Chancellor Malloy and UM/UMM President Ferrini-Mundy endorsed “equity” and “social justice” without ever actually defining those terms. Since the vast majority of the academic community is left of center and those who are not are well advised to keep their mouths shut, it is unlikely that the President and Chancellor heard any dissenting or differing (as in diverse) points of view. President Ferrini-Mundy proudly noted that a Black Lives Matter flag had been flown over the Orono campus, apparently either unconcerned or in agreement with BLM about riots,…

Note: I am teaching Environmental Policy this fall, for perhaps the last time. I first taught it more than 30 years ago. The spotted owl endangered species listing and Maine’s efforts to comply with the Clean Air Act Amendments were important parts of my early studies. I advised gubernatorial candidate Angus King to oppose car testing and worked in Augusta to get rid of it. Upon returning to UMM, I found the theoretical elements of the endangered species act I had studied from afar were alarmingly real and personal with the Atlantic salmon, and I led the ultimately unsuccessful effort…

Last week’s economic reports revealed that President Biden has apparently found a DeLorean time machine, equipped with a Chinese-made flux capacitor, and returned America to the 1970s. The recent near-doubling of gas prices was the first clue, but an inflation rate of 5.7%, double the average of the last 40 years, confirmed it. I expect that the president will assign Vice President Kamala Harris to combatting inflation, and she can recycle Gerry Ford’s “WIN–Whip Inflation Now” campaign to add to her portfolio of Kabuki policies that do nothing to solve whatever problem she is assigned to manage, but do provide…

The legislature’s Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry (ACF) Committee recently held a public hearing on LD 324, “An Act to Limit Public Land Ownership in Maine.” I testified that the vast majority of public land acquisitions over the last 20 years were in the Second Congressional District (specifically Piscataquis, Washington, Hancock, Penobscot, Somerset, Oxford, Franklin and Aroostook counties, where the need was lowest), while the southern Maine counties of York, Cumberland, Lincoln, Kennebec, Androscoggin and Waldo were below the state median in public ownership and had the greatest need of land conservation. I reminded the committee that Maine set a 10%…

Last week I poked the green hornets’ nest by testifying in support of LD 324, “An Act to Limit Public Land Ownership in Maine.” The environmental left was outraged that any such sentiment would even be considered, and suggested that the legislation was unneeded, counterproductive, overly broad, a burden on democracy, local governance and efforts to confront the climate apocalypse. One advantage of the pandemic is that testifying no longer requires six hours of round- trip driving to Augusta, and dress standards on zoom are somewhat lower than the capitol. Still, I had to sit for nearly four hours on…

In a shameless act of cultural appropriation, this week’s column title takes the Black Lives Matter / Antifa / “mostly peaceful protesters” mantra of “No Justice, No Peace” and applies it to the current contretemps roiling the nation, the likely replacement of the notorious Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG) with the notoriously “dogmatic” (at least according to California Sen. Diane Feinstein) Catholic mother of seven, Amy Coney Barrett (ACB). According to the left, if Judge Barrett (or any Trump nominee) is confirmed and seated, there will be no justice and no peace because the Supreme Court will be indelibly stained…

The systemic racism industry has had its sweet multimillion consulting racket exposed and trumped. The President used his “pen and phone” to order the critical race theory hustle out of the federal bureaucracy. The shrieks and howls from the incredibly undiverse set of pricey diversity consultants kicked off the taxpayers’ dime can be heard in human resources departments and liberal convents across the country. The picture below, captioned “critical race theory in one image” went viral and possibly triggered the president’s action, which was long overdue. It should have happened after the Smithsonian Institution critical race theory propaganda was revealed…

“If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.”- Moshe Dayan “You can only end a negotiation for peace if you begin it”- Benjamin Netanyahu “It’s a distraction”- Speaker Nancy Pelosi President Trump signed the Abraham Accords on Sept. 15, a peace agreement between Israel and two Sunni Arab Gulf States, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Similar agreements were last brokered by President Clinton (Jordan, 1994) and President Carter (Egypt, 1979). A number of other Muslim and Arab nations, including Oman, Morocco, Chad and perhaps even Saudi Arabia, seem poised to join the…

Last week marked the beginning of my 37th year at the University of Maine Machias and my 47th consecutive September on a New England college campus. The times, they are a changing. American higher education is on the cusp of a financial, cultural and political reckoning that will leave it smaller, poorer, less popular, less powerful and decidedly diminished. Those changes, as deserved as they may well be, will probably not be accompanied by any recognizable change in attitude, humility, leftist indoctrination practices or self-regard and esteem. The Chinese Communist Party’s pandemic is certainly the immediate precursor of the coming…

August rolled in and although the garden looks good, I cannot say the same for Maine, the Republic or freedom. Thanks to drought defying irrigation, a cornucopia of lettuce, kale, cukes, zucchini and green beans has poured forth. A wall of pumpkins is climbing the fence, joined by butternut squash. A fall harvest of leeks and carrots looks promising, and second plantings of snap peas and green beans should grace October. Deer tracks surround the garden fence, and the squash and beans that escape through the fence pay “deerly” for it. My wife’s retirement has led to a beautifully coiffed…

As a long-time supporter of the First Amendment and the value of free and open inquiry, leftist cancel culture efforts to silence, de-platform, censor and otherwise stifle speakers and viewpoints they disagree with has angered and repelled me. As a young professor, I naively believed the academy shared those sentiments, but I have been disabused of that notion over the last 20 years. First, when the leading feminist on campus suggested that I would (mis)use the First Amendment to “harm diversity”––in other words, that conservative free speech was racist, sexist and homophobic––and a majority of the faculty agreed with her.…

Opening schools this fall should not be a partisan issue, but it is and will be. The physical and mental welfare of our children and the well-being and fitness of our economy and communities should be the decisive factors, but will not be. Education policy is and will be most strongly influenced by the overwhelmingly left of center National Education Association (NEA) and associated teacher unions. The NEA is arguably the strongest and most influential interest group on the left (with apologies to Planned Parenthood, AARP, Trial Lawyers, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan).   A number…

In mid-May, I spent almost 15 hours over two days in a Zoom training/symposium on the learning management system that the University of Maine System has purchased (your tax and tuition dollars at work). John Baker, the CEO of D2L (Desire2Learn), the Canadian-based company that won the platform contract (called Brightspace), opened the conference with a keynote address to almost a thousand University of Maine System (UMS) faculty, staff and administrators. The title of his talk was “When Learning Saved the World: How Life after the COVID-19 Pandemic will be Different.” Mr. Baker started by telling the captive UMS audience…

Senator Rebecca Millett, the chair of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee, has introduced LD 898, “An Act to Provide for a Professional Wage and Support for New Educators”. The bill was most likely written by the Maine Education Association, and would more honestly be titled “An Act to Sustain and Succor the MEA”. LD 898 is a Trojan horse posing as an effort to improve teacher quality, while containing provisions likely to assure that only “woke” students committed to social justice will be certified to teach in Maine (and join the MEA). LD 898 is one of several bills…

This piece was first published in the Portland Press Herald. I am an associate professor at the University of Maine at Machias, where I have taught for 34 years. Until recently, I very proudly served as grievance officer for the Machias chapter of my union: the Associated Faculties of the Universities of Maine. I enjoyed serving AFUM and colleagues in that capacity. However, I have since opted out of membership in my union because I could not get out of being associated with its state and national affiliates. I have ultimately had to make the difficult decision to sue for the right…

This article was originally published in the Portland Press Herald The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech is under attack in Maine. The attackers include Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, the editorial page editors of Maine’s largest daily newspapers, the Maine chapters of the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union, and Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and Rep. Chellie Pingree. Mills is a serial abuser of the First Amendment. In 2015 she chose to prosecute pro-life protesters outside Planned Parenthood in Portland for allegedly speaking too loudly. Despite being clearly told by a Barack…

The United States needs a climate change policy grounded in and consistent with the Constitution. We don’t have one. The incoherence and ineffectiveness of our current climate policies are a consequence of the unconstitutional, extraconstitutional and swamp-weasel approaches practiced by previous presidential administrations. Clinton refused to take Kyoto to the Senate for ratification; Bush refused to “unsign it” or to take it the Senate, and Obama and John Kerry negotiated the Paris “agreement” as a “voluntary” international agreement not requiring Senate approval. Trump withdrew the US from Paris, but making the Senate vote on it would have been the best…

The National Monument Tango and the Presidential Primaries have combined to create a surreal mix of reality show, drama and fantasy.  It’s a depressing but addictive political and cultural opioid. North Woods Law It is a foregone conclusion that President Obama will designate the Quimby holdings as a national monument sometime after the November election. President Obama has frequently demonstrated his willingness to use- and push- executive power. There is ample precedent for such environmental policy- the Atlantic salmon endangered species listing was announced by the Clinton administration in exactly that manner after Bush-Gore in 2000. House of Cards Our…

The Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) provides some of the best and sometimes only coverage of statewide policy issues.  That coverage often sets the agenda and shapes public opinion. Like Fox News, MSNBC  and Maine’s newspapers, MPBN has biases which effects it’s news judgement, influencing what issues it covers or ignores and how. The First Amendment protects the media from government meddling, but competition and credibility concerns have led most media outlets towards more transparency regarding their ideological bents and potential conflicts of interest. MPBN, as a pseudo “public” entity providing a public good while receiving a taxpayer subsidy has…

The Precautionary Principle has been used by progressive environmental  and public health advocates to justify climate change, energy, food  and chemicals policies that damage economic freedom and prosperity while imposing extreme risk aversion and technophobia. It was something of a guilty pleasure watching the progressives squeal for freedom as Governor LePage applies that same precautionary principle to Ebola and public safety. One version of the Precautionary Principle appeared in the 1992 Rio Declaration on the Environment, “When there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost effective…

A powerful coalition of environmentalists and crony capitalists have engaged the American people in a confidence game called Climate Change. The coalition is an example of what economist Bruce Yandle termed “Bootleggers and Baptists”- disparate interests who network and unite to get the government to impose a regulatory regime which benefits both. The Baptists are the true believers, fighting for truth, environmental justice and the planet. The Bootleggers are the business, academic and related special interests seeking profits,, grants and advantages over competitors. The first card played in the climate policy con game is apocalypse/guilt. It confidently  declares that  Global…