Burning money

Just before deadline, Richard Davies, an aide to Governor John Baldacci, called to say, “The governor would like to move to a system where we have volume buying for LIHEAP customers around the state,” but “it appeared the furthest we can push” the housing agency board “at the moment” is to accept the pilot project.

Ironically, most of the board members are Baldacci appointees — including McCormick. So how come the governor can’t move the board more to this line of thinking?

“Once they become members of the board, we trust them to exercise their best judgment,” Davies says. “We don’t bully them around to get them to do what we want them to do.”

•   SUSPECT SPEAKS; VICTIM’S FAMILY BEGINS $1-MILLION-PLUS LAWSUIT  |  November 04, 2009
  The widow of Sheldon Weinstein, the Maine State Prison inmate who died in April several days after allegedly being beaten by inmates, has taken the first step toward filing a wrongful-death lawsuit against prison guards, Department of Corrections “policy-making personnel,” and prison medical-care providers.
•   LIMITING SUPERMAX SOLITARY  |  October 08, 2009
  Representative James Schatz, a Blue Hill Democrat, has proposed legislation to tightly limit when prisoners can be kept in the solitary confinement of the 100-man Supermax unit of the Maine State Prison in Warren.
•   LESS THAN EQUAL  |  October 02, 2009
  This story has a bias. It’s in favor of human rights for all people.
•   DANGEROUS SLURS  |  October 01, 2009
  A heavily tattooed, self-described Satanist serving a life sentence for savagely murdering two people in Augusta in 1998 — his 16-year-old stepdaughter and his 87-year-old former landlady — inmate John L’Heureux, 39, is probably not the man Maine’s gay-rights groups would choose to represent their cause in the state prison, if they were inclined to choose anyone there.
•   PRISON ‘TROUBLEMAKER’ CONFRONTS RACISM, MEDICAL ABUSE  |  September 09, 2009
  Vacillating between grit and despair — between aggressive lawsuits and suicide attempts — Deane Brown, the prisoner who in 2005 blew the whistle on the torture of mentally ill inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement “Supermax” unit, is struggling against prison conditions in Maryland, where he was exiled by the Baldacci administration.