Notes from the Electronic Cottage 7/03/08

Producer/Host: Jim Campbell

Well, the Australians seem to have decided that a national ID card isn’t for them.   In the U.S., not only are we moving toward a de facto national ID card, we’re also spending a billion dollars of taxpayer money so the FBI can amass the largest biometric database in the world on U.S. Citizens – not just convicted felons or other criminals but hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of regular folks who need to apply for a job, whose parents think it’s a swell idea to register their fingerprints or iris scans when they are children, or people who are arrested by federal authorities – even park rangers – even if they are never even charged with a crime. Feel safer? Feel like you live in the land of the free?

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Talk of the Towns 6/26/08

Producer/Host: Ron Beard, University of Maine Cooperative Extension

Topic: Looking back, looking ahead:  Maine Towns and the Legislature

We live in towns and cities; we also live in the state of Maine.  Each jurisdiction creates policies that, depending on your point of view, help us or hinder us as we make our homes, our livings, and our lives.   In this program, we ask state legislators to comment on the 2008 session and policies that have clear connection to municipal government, to help us understand the sometimes fuzzy boundary between your town and your state.

Guests: Representative Chris Rector, Thomaston, Senator Christine Savage, Union, Representative Ted Koffman, Bar Harbor

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