The gubernatorial election is approaching in Maine, and to everyone’s surprise, former Governor Paul LePage is running again.
LePage was an enthusiastic member of the Tea Party. He called himself “Trump before Trump.” He insulted immigrants, gays, anyone other that straight white people. He took his cues on education from Jeb Bush.
He was a xenophobic disaster. Keep your eye on Maine.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We now have ranked-choice voting, so it’s less likely that a third-party candidate will swing the election in Lepage’s direction.
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Sadly, yes.
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I think Janet Mills is doing a good job as governor and she has tried to work with both sides – but she does have a low approval rating. I never thought the country would elect Donald Trump – so having Paul LePage back in office wouldn’t surprise me.
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Could he be re-elected? Most definitely. He has the nerve center of influence with its strength due to decades of investment in a sophisticated suite of tools including data, media and messaging behind him, He’s anti abortion and proud of his conservative religion.
Wikipedia describes his personal life.
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The old adage…you reap as you sow.
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This from the moron governor in 1-28-2016, via huffingtonpost: Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) wants state residents to start shooting drug dealers on sight in order to help alleviate Maine’s heroin crisis.
“Everybody in Maine, we have constitutional carry,” LePage said Wednesday.
“Load up and get rid of the drug dealers.”
Since October, Maine has allowed legal firearm owners to carry concealed handguns without a permit.
LePage frequently talks about the state’s heroin epidemic, often focusing on penalties for drug traffickers. On Tuesday, he said he wants drug dealers to face the death penalty, even suggesting that they be subjected to the guillotine. End quote
Good grief, this jerk should not be in charge of a hot dog stand let alone the state of Maine.
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Donald Trump wasn’t elected US President, way back in 2016. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the popular vote (direct vote in some countries?).
Donald Trump was selected by the Electoral College (who normally would have gone with the popular vote). We elected mostly unknown Electoral College people to pick Hillary.
My question:
Who are these Electoral College people that selected Donald Trump and why aren’t they investigated?
🤔😐
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The number of electors a state has is the number of Senators, which is two for every state, plus the number of Representatives, which is based on population as determined by the most recent Census. So, this means a vote in a small state counts more than does one in a large state. So, as FairVote puts it:
For instance, each individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each individual vote in Texas. This is because Wyoming has three (3) electoral votes for a population of 532,668 citizens (as of 2008 Census Bureau estimates) and Texas has thirty-two (32) electoral votes for a population of almost 25 million. By dividing the population by electoral votes, we can see that Wyoming has one “elector” for every 177,556 people and Texas has one “elector” for about every 715,499. The difference between these two states of 537,943 is the largest in the Electoral College.
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Thank you Bob. 🙂
I’m seeking the names of those electors. 🤔
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So, a vote in a small (by population) red state like Wyoming or Montana means more than in a big (by population) blue state like California or New York. That’s how a candidate can win the popular vote and lose the election. And it’s perfectly legal. It’s stupid and undemocratic, but it’s perfectly legal.
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“each individual vote in Wyoming counts nearly four times as much in the Electoral College as each individual vote in Texas. ”
Six of one and an eighth dozen of the other.
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The other issue with the Electoral College is that in some states, electors are not bound to vote as did the population of the state. The rules there vary A LOT.
The treasonous criminal Donald J. Trump tried to get the votes of the actual electors in several states thrown out and the votes of a set of “alternative electors” chosen by Trumpanzees counted instead, and more than 120 Senators and Congresspeople were ready to go along with that. That’s how much they care about democracy. Traitors, all of them.
But will anything ever be done about this and the other attempts to interfere with and overthrow our 2020 election?
Don’t hold your breath.
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The other big issue, Eddie, is that the rules in most states say that party of the winner of the popular vote gets all the electors of the state, which means that a person can pick up a lot of electors in a big state that he or she won by a small majority, thus effectively disenfranchising those who did not vote for him or her.
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The Electors, Eddie, are chosen by rules that vary from state to state, but most commonly in a state party convention or by state party committees.
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Eddie,
Trump lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020.
The electoral college gives disproportionate power to states that have small population.
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The founding fathers were wise to come up with the electoral college…remember, these are the United STATES, and states’ rights and their individual identities used to be, and in many ways still are, a really big deal. Just ask Ron DeSantis.
Without the electoral college, candidates for President would ignore huge swathes of our nation, and spend all of their time campaigning and fundraising in the NYC metro area, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, LA, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Miami. This country is not just about the big urban areas…the voices of ranchers, farmers, and working class people in “flyover country” are equally important.
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I saw an antique map of the American West the other day that displayed the Dakota country as one territory. As we all should know, the Dakota was divided into two states to provide disproportional representation to rural constituencies.
Recommendation to DC statehood advocates: if Reps want to keep I at 50 states,tie it ro legislation that consolidates N and S Dakota into one state
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The last Democratic Gov. in S.D. was in 1979. The last Dem. Gov. in N.D. was in 1992.
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I remember being amazed that Ronald Reagan, whom I identified with extreme conservatism due to his behavior during the free speech movement at Berkeley, was elected President.
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Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969. In the novel, he wanted to show that Billy Pilgrim’s wife was a totally crazy, right-wing extremist, so he put a Ronald Reagan for President bumper sticker on her car. Everyone got the joke. Reagan was governor of California. He proposed cutting down the redwoods and selling the lumber to get rid of California’s deficit. He claimed that air pollution was caused by trees. He had been one of the Joe McCarthy Communist witch hunters when he was president of the Screen Actors Guild. When he first was running for president, he was giving speeches about how Social Security was a Communist plot (until his handlers put him on a script for all his appearances). So, yeah, it was totally crazy when this guy became president. And then when Bush, Jr., did, whose qualifications for the job were what, exactly? That he had had Daddy pull strings to get him out of the draft and then went AWOL from the limited service he actually did do? That he had run a series of businesses into bankruptcy? That he had spent his life drinking and doing cocaine until Laura told him that if he didn’t sober up, she would leave him? That he then became a fundamentalist Christian kook? So, even worse.
And then, when I thought we had scraped the bottom, Trump.
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This is so true.
It is crazy that the Democrats have run so many perfectly fine candidates — sometimes boring, certainly flawed, but overall perfectly fine — who end up being totally trashed by the press and the public (including by Dems) while the Republicans run candidates who should be absolutely unacceptable, but just keep getting normalized, with the criticism they get arguably not nearly as harsh as what the Dems get.
Because the Democrats’ are constantly characterized as untrustworthy and immoral, while the untrustworthy and immoral Republicans are characterized as amusing and strong-minded even in critical articles. “You know where they stand” say Republicans about their candidate. “You don’t know where they stand” say Democrats about their candidate. And everything else is just noise.
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Well said, NYC PSP!
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My response, Roy, is in moderation. I guess is immoderate.
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cx: I guess I was being immoderate again. LOL.
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The restrictive radical, Reagan, now is revered for what he said and ignored for what he did. He screamed about the deficit, but was too smart or well-advised to actually offer a balanced budget. He railed at communists, but dealt (apparently against the advice of some of his experts) with Gorbachev.
Modern conservatism is based on what Reagan said. So when Trump was elected, I expected him to behave rationally to some extent. Soon he was behaving madly.
How far we have gone.
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He screamed about the deficit, but was too smart or well-advised”
One thing is absolutely certain: we can rule out the first possibility.
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It would be so much easier if the Trumpanzees lived in one area of the country.
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They could put up a wall between themselves and the blue states and elect orangutans to office and carry their ARs and AKs to church services.
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They could call it Ivankalandia!
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A goodly (Godly?) number of them already do live in one area — or two: Texanistan and DeSantistan.
I bet the Mexicans are actually glad they put up the wall in the former case.
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Keeps out the Texiban.
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Trump loves this country almost as much as he loves himself.
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The only God Trump worships is Mammon, and the only person he cares about at all is himself. He was for decades a money launderer for Russian mobsters, and he was throughout his presidency, Putin’s dog. And then he treasonously attempted to overthrow an election, mounting several parallel attempts to subvert democracy. He’s a traitor and a fool and a mobster. And an imbecile. And breathtakingly ignorant. This is the guy who thought that steal airplanes were actually invisible, that the Continental Army captured British airports, that Alabama was on the east coast, that Frederick Douglass was doing a great job, that Denmark would want to sell Greenland to us, that doctors should try treating Covid by injecting people with disinfectants, that there was a book of the Bible called Two Corinthians, that a dementia test was an IQ test, and on and on. An utter moron who leveraged more than half a billion dollars in money he got from Daddy to make a name for himself, went bankrupt building casinos, turned to Russian money to bail himself out of that, and started sham charities and universities. A crook and a moron and an imbecile. The only American president who, when he addressed the UN, actually had the delegates laugh at him. An utter fool.
He doesn’t love this country. He loves Trump. Period. And he is continuing the grift, fleecing the suckers by pretending to be the rightful president in exile.
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cx: stealth airplanes
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The Idiot, Don the Con, is STILL telling people at his rallies that he put tariffs on Chinese goods and so made them pay us billions. A complete moron. Utterly ignorant. No clue that tariffs are paid by the importer.
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He’s still telling people at his rallies that people are flooding through our borders, creating crime waves and taking their jobs. Again, no clue. He doesn’t know that undocumented immigrants have the lowest crime rates of any segment of our population. He doesn’t know that like all people, they buy gasoline and shirts and groceries and so increase demand, which increases the number of jobs. No familiarity at all with the tons of serious research by economists showing that the net effect of undocumented immigration is about a 1 percent INCREASE in jobs for US citizens. If he could read, he could learn all about that by looking at summaries of the reports on that on the Brookings Institute website. A racist, sexist, homophobic idiot who inherited a lot of money from Daddy, blew it because he’s a terrible businessman, and then turned to a string of cons. Don the Con.
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Putin loves Ukraine almost as much as he loves himself. That’s why he is destroying Ukraine, pulverizing it’s cities, towns, villages. Deadly love.
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“Trump loves this country almost as much as he loves himself.”
“From Russia, with 💕”
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I despise Trump and voted for Hillary but you need to do some reading on how the Electoral College works.
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Was that meant for me, Mr. Gerhardt. I was trying to give the short and simple version and didn’t get into stuff like party block voting, rules governing faithless electors, etc.
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No, that was for Eddie. He clearly doesn’t understand how it works. Just like I don’t fully understand how to reply to comments here.
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For the first couple levels of comments, Mr. Gerhardt, simply go to the comment that you want to respond to and click the Reply button under that comment. But this disappears two levels down. No reply button. So, that introduces some confusion.
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But you probably knew that and were just being funny, in which case, my apologies!
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Thanks again Bob. 🙂
I went by my CPS education. I admit I’m wrong. Thank you too, Robert. I await your EC explanation. 🙂
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I think Maine and New Hampshire must be the result of continental drift because the inhabitants clearly have more in common with those of Texas and Florida than they do with the rest of New England.
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And the fossils in Maine government (both state and National) are also much more like those in Texas and Florida.
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For example, Susan Collins has a great deal in common with the Texlobites and Florlobites (no backbone, among other things)
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“And all the lousy little poets comin round…
…tryin to sound like Charlie Manson” — from the song The Future, by Leonard Cohen
New Hampshire’s state motto is “Live Free or Die”. Maine’s is “I Lead.”
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