Who are the champion enablers to Maine left-wing politicians? And why are they never in the news?

Among the enabling elite is S. Donald Sussman, the New York hedge fund mogul who, along with his partners and associates, funneled a reported $100,000 into U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree's successful campaign for Congress.

Sussman, who is often said be romantically linked to Pingree, operates out of New York City and the Virgin islands. He gives liberally to leftwing political causes and along with George Soros and other far-left billionaires, provided thousands of dollars to the shadowy ACORN organization. He also donated $10,000 to Al Franken, which may tell you something.

Sussman is at home in China where he is a founder and director of New China Capital Management, an investment fund based in Beijing. He has also founded and bankrolled an antiquities center in the Chinese capital. But he is perhaps just as much at home in Portland where he owns a modest hideaway on Munjoy Hill.

It would seem that such a large (and interesting) donor to a Maine member of Congress might attract some attention from the Maine media. But it's a good bet that few of Pingree's constituents know any more than his name, if that.

So why is that the case?

Most local journalists appear uninterested looking into the financial and social connections between Rep. Pingree and her leading donor. Only Chris Busby who edits the Bollard, an alternative paper in Portland, has done any in-depth reporting on Sussman and his connection to Pingree.

Busby's entertaining story about chasing Pingree and Sussman home one rainy night can be found HERE.

Another major political patron who dishes big bucks to lefty politicians across the country lives right here in Maine. William Rice, who lists his home town as Ellsworth and describes himself as a "self employed investor," has contributed more than $60,000 over the past couple of years to left-leaning hopefuls.

Rice gave almost $7,000 to Al Franken and a whopping $16,000 to John Edwards, two of the most sleazy Democrats, thus establishing his questionable bona fides as a judge of character.

Despite such major handouts to ultra-lib Dems across the country, Rice didn't neglect Maine. He donated $4,600 to Tom Allen, even more cash to the state Democratic Committee and smaller amounts to state legislative candidates who had demonstrated promising left-wing tendencies. But who, except his beneficiaries, has ever heard of him?

One of the reasons that people like this can operate more or less under the radar in Maine is the lack of astute political reporting. The kind of reporting that is insightful, knowledgeable, interesting and fair.
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Well before the turn of the century, papers in Portland, Lewiston and Bangor all had writers who were thoroughly at home in the State House. These journalists had informants in every nook and cranny of the Capitol who were more than willing to slip them information that could lead to a good news story. Or, at the least, provide them with the kind of intriguing political tidbits that could spice up the weekly political columns most of them wrote..

If such savvy reporters, or anybody remotely like them, were around today, wealthy political operatives like Sussman or Rice could not be able to hand out their largesse from the shadows.

A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, and Afghanistan was a nice place to take your kids, we would have known we were being lied to. We recognized that the problems Barack Obama inherited wouldn’t go away overnight.

During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn’t be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires, and would not be an easy venture for us.

So starts a letter that appeared on Jan. 21 on the editorial page of the Bangor Daily News. It was a well-written defense of President Obama and signed by an Ellie Light of Bangor. It attracted almost 100 comments from BDN readers.

There was a major problem, however. Similar letters signed by Ellie Light appeared in many newspapers across the country. In every case the writer listed a hometown located in the paper's circulation area.

Somehow this came to the attention of Sabrina Eaton, a political reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who used Google and Nexus to track down the Ellie Light letters, many of which went to big metro dailies -- and even to The Politico, perhaps the most prestigious political website on the internet.

Apparently it was never questioned. Which should raise concern about how well newspapers monitor readers' letters. If Ellie Light is an example, the oversight process is not good. And that is disturbing indeed because it could indicate how easy papers could become victims of letter-to-the-editor scams. Especially, a cynic might argue, when editors agree with the letter's viewpoint.

Nobody at the BDN or anywhere else, for that matter, questioned it. At least not to the extent that Ms. Eaton did.
She found Ellie Light. The strange story is HERE.

MaineToday Media, the publisher of the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, has issued a heartless (and awkwardly-worded) defense of its firing of veteran employee Larry Grard,

Talk about overkill. MTM's reaction to criticism is about as bizarre as the capital punishment it inflicted on Mr. Grard for a transgression that was relatively minor considering his record of 18 years of faithful service to the newspaper.

Mr. Grard is a Catholic who takes his religion seriously and was repelled by the accusation that he is a hater. He shouldn't have reacted in the way he did, but the compulsion to do so was at least understandable.

The newspaper's subsequent action, though, borders on the grotesque. Not only did it fire Mr. Grard without due process but it dismissed his wife, a part-time contributor to the paper, as well, leaving the Grards with a daughter in college and no income.

Merry Christmas!

Shades of Van Jones and Acorn. After a week of silence, the Portland Press Herald finally acknowledged that "Climategate" is a newsworthy issue. It's almost as though some ideologue on the news desk assumed that if the paper did not run the story it would go away.

But, as with Jones and Acorn, the story didn't disappear. It grew more legs. Stacks of revealing emails provided growing evidence of a conspiracy among leaders of the climate change community to cook the books.

The growing scandal engulfed the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, which has been in the forefront among climate change alarmists. The director of the unit, Prof. Phil Jones, was forced to step down.

The situation evoked a firestorm in the volatile British press, and in the U.S. it was reported all last week by Fox News, talk radio and and internet bloggers. But for days the saga of the incriminating emails went virtually unreported in the American mainstream media, including those in Maine. Not until Friday, for example, did the Portland Press Herald run its first story on the scandal.

Then, as if to show disdain for such a non-politically-correct view, the paper buried the story under a typically sycophantic piece seemingly designed to appease enviromentalists. A conspiracy? Unlikely.

Not a lot of deep thinking goes into the design of inside pages on small newspapers, so placement of stories depends on copy editors who too often allow their own political views to shape their work. Sadly, it happens all the time when more responsible editors nod off on the job.

The paper's best look into the scandal came on the same day's op-ed page. M.D. Harmon is the bete noir of the liberal community, and his Climategate column did not generate cheers from them.

For many Press Herald readers, last Friday's stories and Harmon's column constituted the first they had read about the bizarre machinations among leaders of the global warming establishment.

Perhaps some readers will choose not to believe a scandal exists, but shouldn't they at least be told of the controversy? It seems incredible that after its embarrassing failure to report in a timely manner on the Van Jones and Acorn stories that the paper would repeat its mistakes.

But it did.