Jan 08 2016

Maine’s Full Racist Governor

Update 1630 1/8/16 These are the drug dealers LePage was referring.

Which one is D-Money?

Maine’s very bigoted Tea Party Governor Paul LePage went all out racist at a town hall meeting on the heroine epidemic in that state.

It came when LePage launched into comments on drug addiction, using a line that has become something of a stump speech on the topic, riffing on the street names of alleged drug dealers arrested in Maine.

He said “guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” come to Maine to sell heroin and “they go back home.” But after that, he diverted from his normal speech.

“Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue we’ve got to deal with down the road,” said LePage.

While the Gov. LePage backs his fellow GOP governor and presidential candidate Chris Christie of New Jersey on a softer approach to the war on drugs, his actions don’t back that approach. On Tuesday, the Maine legislature took up debate on a bill to address the states a drug problem that LePage has threatened to veto with an unfounded accusation that the bill’s sponsors “put the names of the companies that will get the money” in the text of the bill calling them corrupt. Some of the house Republicans aligned with the governor have questioned the bill’s funding mechanism.

(The) specifics on how to fund it weren’t made public until text of the bill was posted online by Tuesday. It calls for moving $2.5 million in settlement money to the state’s General Fund to pay part of the bill. The rest will be funded by the Legislature’s surplus, according to spokespeople for Eves and Alfond.

Maine won $21.5 million as part of a settlement with Standard & Poor’s announced by Mills’ office in February. The federal government and 19 states, including Maine, accused the agency of defrauding investors in the run-up to the most recent recession.

In February, Mills said her office would control the money, which would be spent on consumer protection. But later that month, LePage challenged her authority over the money, calling it “repugnant” under the Maine Constitution.

On Wednesday, Tim Feeley, a spokesman for Mills, said she was consulted about the bill and “feels this is an appropriate use for the settlement funds.”

As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out in the opening of her show last night, New England politics can be very bizarre.

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