Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine shelled out nearly $382,000 opposing Portland’s nonbinding referendum last Tuesday on single-payer health care, more than 20 times what proponents spent – and still lost. In the post-election mop-up, Anthem offered this assessment: They actually won because they didn’t lose by all that much; all that money, derived from fast-rising premiums, was well-spent because premiums just might possibly rise under a single-payer system; and, anyway, Portland’s awfully liberal. Hope your policy covers acute politococcal spinitus.

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Maine, which usually touts itself as a hotbed of democratic participation, did not exactly distinguish itself on Election Day with a dreary voter turnout of less than 25 percent. A ray of hope comes from the town of Winslow, where the election of a school board member ended in a 15-way tie. OK, so no one stepped forward to be an official ballot candidate for the position, but, local officials note with pride, all 15 write-in ballots were filled out correctly and not one was for Mickey Mouse. Hey, it’s a start.

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We were going to let this slide, but after a couple of recent trips to the state’s southern border, we must speak out. The new slogan on welcoming signs, “Worth a Visit, Worth a Lifetime,” must go. Isn’t “Worth a Visit” awfully redundant for people already visiting? Doesn’t “Worth a Lifetime” come across as rather threatening, more like a sentence than an invitation? We’re thinking of something along the lines of the way of life in Maine being a good way for life to be, but admit is needs some honing.

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Everybody’s talking about John and Phyllis Cacoulidis, the wealthy New York couple who bought Hope Island in the town of Cumberland as their exclusive getaway and who now want to secede from the town because they don’t get much in the way of municipal services for the taxes they pay. The prevailing opinion seems to be that the Cacoulidises should have thought of that before they bought an island, but we think secession is a splendid idea. Followed by submergence.

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Certain Northeastern members of Congress received unwanted attention recently from a loose-lipped staffer who, according to Roll Call, has written a Vanity Fair article about the congressmen partying and singing just two days after the Sept. 11 attack. One of the congressmen notes that, in fact, they were having a regularly scheduled dinner and the song they were singing was “God Bless America.” Rep. John Baldacci was among those named but the craziest observation the article could make about him was that he sat quietly at the table and talked to someone about a medical-school application. Rep. Baldacci referred to the story as “a gossip column with no gossip,” but that seems to overstate it.