“Look, a bad guy is a bad guy, I don’t care what color it is”, he said on August 26, during a press conference about suspected racial profiling by police. But I think some of the recent stuff has thrown even LePage’s strongest supporters’ confidence in him into question. “What I’m going to do right now is I’m taking one step at a time”.
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“If you’re in a room with Paul LePage, he’s a charming, charismatic person – I don’t have any personal animus towards him”, she says.
The Rachel Maddow Show filed a Freedom of Information Act request, asking the governor’s office just how many other letters LePage may have received from Mainers who asked him to quit.
During a town hall meeting last week, LePage was asked about his previous racist comments. And when it comes to meth labs, they’re essentially all ME white people. Some are calling for his resignation. Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics said that success, coupled with Trump’s rise, could have emboldened LePage to double down on attack politics. “They’re Hispanic and they’re black and they’re from Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts, Waterbury, Connecticut, the Bronx, and Brooklyn”. He also said that month that his state is too easy on drug dealers, and should “bring the guillotine back” and have “public executions.” While LePage has not backed down from that assertion, he did on Tuesday apologize to Rep. In January, LePage caused a similar controversy – and generated national headlines – when he said men with names such as “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” bring heroin into ME and “half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave”. When a reporter relayed Gattine’s comments to LePage, inaccurately saying that Gattine had called the governor a racist, a freaky series of events unfolded.
He also met on Monday night with Maine Republicans to discuss the situation and said that they were “looking at options”.
On Saturday I wrote a letter to the governor.
In order to impeach the governor and remove him from office, the ME state House needs only a simple majority. “It’s one thing to have one part behind [you], it’s another thing not to have any party behind you”.
The voicemail at the center of the controversy contained profanity and threats of violence, and prompted quick condemnation.
In a recording of the message obtained by the Press Herald, the governor identified himself and went on to curse out Gattine. “You don’t hear us bemoaning the flood of guns bought in ME with its weak gun laws”. I want to talk to you. I didn’t know Drew Gattine from a hole in the wall until yesterday.
He also said he’s been keeping a three-ring binder of arrested drug dealers in ME and claimed 90 percent of them are black or Hispanic, according to the Press Herald. “We have to move Maine forward, whether it’s me or somebody else”.
“I believe that, for me, what this is about is stopping the categorizing of people, the negativity towards entire groups of people, the suggestions of violence, it’s not a way to carry on the business of the state or the business of society”, Cynthia Phinney said.
Though LePage, a Republican, has been elected twice, the state of ME has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992.
As the Press Herald report added, LePage insisted, “Every drug arrest, we get the story and the people, and when it comes to meth labs it’s all white people from Maine”.
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LePage previously said he will not resign. “I apologize for that to the people of Maine, but I make no apology for trying to end the drug epidemic that is ravaging our state”.
