Gov. Paul LePage doesn’t like the media much.

There is no hospital in my mother’s home town. There’s not a gas station, a bank, a restaurant, a hardware store or dime store, either.

When a friend posted on Facebook that he was having trouble with “floaters” (those pesky spots that appear in some people’s line of vision) one respondent quipped that they both apparently had reached the age where “it’s always something.”

It has become politically convenient to call for cuts to federal agency budgets and steep reductions in the numbers of federal employees.

Public libraries face deep cuts in budget, staff and hours of operation as states and municipalities struggle with the fiscal consequences of a recession that is reluctant to loosen its grip. We conducted federally funded national surveys of public-library use between 2004 and 2008, which we updated in 2010, to establish the consequences of recessions.

Conventional wisdom holds that the congressional super-committee established by the debt-ceiling deal to propose further deficit reduction will go nowhere.