Maine: America

This May Day hundreds of Mainers will visit Senators Snowe and Collins' offices in Biddeford, Portland, Auburn, Lewiston, Augusta, Bangor, and Presque Isle to highlight the urgent need for federal reform that creates access to quality, affordable health care for all. A "Health Care Caravan" of twenty-five activists will travel to each office, meeting up with many more local residents in each city. At each office, community members will present the Senators with a lighthouse, share a personal story related to the health care crisis, and request that the Senator be a "guiding light" out of the health care crisis by supporting a public health insurance plan at the national level for everyone in America.

Rep. Chellie Pingree will be laying out her priorities regarding the administration's budget for FY2010 today at a hearing before the House Committee on the Budget. Below the fold find her prepared testimony.

I want to thank Rep. Pingree for promoting two ideas that I consider paramount to Maine's and our nation's future - providing access to basic, affordable health care to every American, and developing alternative energy generation to fossil fuels.

Testimony of Congresswoman Chellie Pingree

Committee on the Budget
U.S. House of Representatives

March 18, 2009
As prepared for delivery

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Budget Committee, thank you very much for having me here today.

Printed with permission by Joe Steinberger, founder of WRFR-FM and The Free Press. This first appeared in their 4 March issue - my thanks to them.

On 24 February 2009, Rep. Michale Doyle (PA-14) introduced the Local Community Radio Act of 2009 (H.R. 1147) that would make it easier for residents of small communities to start there own low=power FM stations. -- GW

Rockland's local radio station, WRFR-LP at 93.3 FM, is seven years old this month. The LP stands for low power. WRFR broadcasts at just 100 watts, compared to the 10,000 watts and more that high-power stations radiate.

The idea to allow low-power stations like WRFR to exist was conceived by the Federal Communications Commission as a small antidote to the growing concentration of radio station ownership in the hands of a few large corporations.

h/t Harry Shearer

Via the Independent the lede says it all:

Less than a month after signing an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, President Barack Obama has quietly agreed to keep denying the right to trial to hundreds more terror suspects held at a makeshift camp in Afghanistan that human rights lawyers have dubbed "Obama's Guantanamo".

In a single-sentence answer filed with a Washington court, the administration dashed hopes that it would immediately rip up Bush-era policies that have kept more than 600 prisoners in legal limbo and in rudimentary conditions at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul.

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Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.