Category Archives: Politics

How we pieced together a lobbying puzzle

Maine’s working to update how it presents campaign finance and lobbying reports, an acknowledgment that moving government transparency online is a long and ongoing process. I took a closer look at ways of presenting that information in a story today, finding a different perspective on the lawmaking process in 2015. It’s an important part. The disclosed amount paid to communicate […]

More money meant more winning in Portland races

Portland’s mayor-elect and committees winning local referendum questions far out-raised the campaigns they trounced. Now, that’s quite cynical (I’ll explain), but vote totals from last night give us the denominator for the fun equation: $$$ / vote. The graph (comparing spending with vote totals from Tuesday night) says it better than I can: Now, there are a few caveats, particularly with the […]

Is your Facebook feed nothing but politics? In Maine, probably

It’s one thing to get bombarded by political advertisements like never before, but political chatter in Maine’s making things personal, at least for Facebook users. Facebook provided The Washington Post’s Darla Cameron with data showing nearly one in five Facebook users in Maine have either posted about the elections or liked a candidates’ page from July 10 to Oct. 19. That’s the most […]

Auburn’s Jim Wellehan, owner of Lamey-Wellehan, featured in Obama’s video campaign to raise the minimum wage

Auburn shoe store owner Jim Wellehan may be retiring and selling his company to its employees this year, but he’s not stepping down from the spotlight. Wellehan, the second generation of family leadership for the business founded in 1914, got recent social media mentions from President Barack Obama for his participation in a video campaign about raising the federal minimum wage. […]

Maine absent in ‘business climate’ survey that issued it an ‘F’ in 2013, but how much do we care?

Maine was absent this year from a state-by-state ranking of “business friendliness” to small businesses after dropping its 2012 “D” grade to a seemingly unfair “F” in 2013 (Last year, Maine scored well in categories that authors of the annual Thumbtack.com and Kauffman Foundation survey said matter most for small business owners. It was the only state to get an overall score of F in […]

Everybody has something to say about offshore wind development

The National Wildlife Federation has updated a 2010 assessment of offshore wind development along the East Coast in a report that calls for states bordering the Atlantic Ocean to set ambitious offshore wind power goals, invest in research and establish a competitive market for that power. Before I run through all the details, let me try and […]

Not so fast: Recession complicates effort to measure Maine and nation’s economic recovery

The pace of Maine’s economic recovery heard an encouraging word this week from Binyamin Appelbaum, of The New York Times, but his look at the nation’s job recovery comes against a backdrop of debate among economists about the standards by which post-recession progress should be measured. It also comes against the backdrop of election season, which has political campaigns curating their […]