After promising to seek Clean Election funds, and then failing to collect enough initial contributions to have a shot at qualifying, Green party gubernatorial candidate Lynne Williams has now announced that she "will not use taxpayer funds" for her campaign. Cloaked in objections to the recent changes to the campaign, the message sounds like just about any other politician facing troubles and refusing to admit them honestly.

Ben Chipman, a Green party member on Portland's Charter Commission, reports that the commission has preliminarily moved toward recommending instant-runoff voting as the method for selecting the city's mayor.

While there are legitimate concerns about IRV (as Al Diamon notes - though he misses another major criticism, which is the lack of proportional representation achieved through IRV), it does have the advantage of allowing people to vote for third-party candidates who may well lose, without feeling like they've wasted their vote when it could also have supported a like-minded major-party candidate.

According to a report by Avery Yale Kamila earlier today, Portland's indoor winter farmers market will open one week later than expected -- but it will open! Various permitting and licensing snafus are to blame for the hold-up, which has some observers in a tizzy. When it opens on February 20 at 85 Free Street (across from the Civic Center), the market will operate through April, offering winter vegetables, meat, cheese, bread, and fish.

Senator Olympia Snowe has said the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited corporate spending on elections is "regrettable" and "disappointing."

What remains to be seen is whether she will back the Fair Elections Now Act, which would provide public funding for federal elections (similar to the Clean Election system in Maine), some other attempt to solve the problem of corporate personhood, or take no legislative position at all.

Portland has had a car-sharing program for approximately one year. While experts are still analyzing the numbers and what they mean for U-Car Share in Maine, here's some raw data, brought to you courtesy of Excel spreadsheets (I remember how to find averages! thanks college!) and transportation advocate/city councilor Kevin Donoghue:

An unfolding national mystery/hoax struck Maine earlier this month, when a woman named Ellie Light wrote letters that were published in three newspapers in Maine and seacoast New Hampshire, claiming to be from towns in each of the papers' coverage areas.

As the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been reporting now for a few days, Ellie Light isn't from anywhere near here (and a person purporting to be her e-mailed me today saying she lives in southern California).

Portland Phoenix contributing writer Lance Tapley has a freelance piece in The Crime Report (yes, it went up a month ago, but the holidays had us frazzled and we're just now recovering) exploring the connection (or lack thereof) between casinos and crime. A timely read, given Maine's never-ending series of casino proposals.

We got a press release today from the Maine Civil Liberties Union, whose Alysia Melnick testified in Augusta today in support of LD 1658, a bill that would create study groups to analyze Maine's high-school graduation rates. The bill was proposed by Portland state senator Justin Alfond. Melnick, who serves as the MCLU's public policy counsel, expressed specific concerns about schools' "zero-tolerance policies," which may push students -- particularly minority students -- off the mainstream education path and into the juvenile justice system.