Peter Steele, LePage’s communication director, tells the Sun Journal that there’s no plan for the governor to submit such a bill. Macdonald is a local official.

The deadline to submit bill titles for the second legislative session, which begins in January, is 4 p.m. on Friday.

“The days of being quiet are gone”, Robert Macdonald writes in a column in the Twin City Times.

The controversial mayor wrote on Thursday that he plans to create a “asking that a Web site be created containing the names, addresses, length of time on assistance and the benefits being collected by every individual on the dole”. MacDonald, according to The Washington Post, wants a website built that will publish the names and addressed of welfare recipients because he believes the citizens of Maine have a right to know how their tax money is being spent.

MacDonald was undeterred. “I think it will discourage a lot of people from committing fraud”, he said.

Opponents said it’s a form of public shaming, but MacDonald doesn’t see it that way.

He said a better way to improve the system is to focus efforts on getting people back to work. “It makes me angry”, said Nora Burpee of Lewiston. “Some people are going to get harmed but if it’s for the good of everybody, that’s the way it is”.

There is a negative stigma associated with financial hardship, receiving welfare and government assistance that is not the same for those receiving pensions. “It’s none of your business how much of your money they get and spend”. Who are you to question it?

A former police officer, Macdonald had no political experience when he won the mayor’s seat in 2011. “Instead, he likes to scapegoat and publicly embarrass people”.

“I’m not sure that it would stand up”, he said. Calls for his resignation erupted in 2012 after he said in a documentary that immigrants should embrace American culture and that, when they come here, they need to “leave your culture at the door”. Jalbert and others in the city’s downtown said they’re not on board.

Macdonald ended his weekly column by promising to “talk about our progressive liberal friends’ war on the elderly” in next week’s edition. The couple founded the paper in 1999.