I was sent this link and asked to comment on it.
Maine, my home state, the state I've lived in my entire life, excluding a couple of school years during my college years, is not the liberal state a lot of people imagined it to be. We have had some very good liberal politicians over the year, Chellie Pingree is great, as was Tom Andrews during his brief career, only wish he'd managed to hold the seat but for every one of them there are at least five of the like of Dave Emery and Jim Longley jr. We've elected some pretty awful senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Angus King ain't exactly wonderful either. And have had a long, long run of mediocre and awful governors, including Jim Jongley's father, Jim Sr. and Olympia Snowe's husband and former awful Congressman, Jock McKernan. But none of them are as cruelly evil and just hateful as Paul LePage, the incumbant governor of Maine, the beneficiary of our ridiculous elections laws that have made it easy for spoilers to put in office terrible people. He won, twice, through a combination of a millionaire egotist spoiler and less than stellar campaigns by otherwise good Democrats. The loss of Mike Michaud after the loss of Libby Mitchell proves that our election system is seriously broken and will need to be fixed if such disasters as Paul LePage are to be prevented. At the very least, no one should ever be able to become governor without getting more than 50% of the votes in an election, a run-off being automatic of no candidate gets an outright majority of the votes. I would, as well, tighten up ballot requirements to prevent ego driven millionaires and those financed by millionaires in and out of state from being listed. The idiotic ease with which candidates and ballot measures can be gotten on Maine ballots is one of the worst ideas of brainless "reform". That it hasn't worked to get us better government proves it was a stupid idea all along.
Paul LePage is an example of a major party, the Republicans, putting all of the haters together and gaming the system to put truly evil people in office. That many Republicans in the legislature and the state Senate, even some of those on the Supreme Court of Maine know that he is a stupid, mean spirited, hateful person who is driven by a desire to hurt people, especially poor people, and corrupt didn't keep them from retaining him as a candidate or supporting the one opponent in the last election who could have won against him. It hasn't led to them - or democrats, for that matter - changing our election laws to prevent a repeat of this happening the next time a millionaire vanity candidate knowingly acts as a spoiler to put someone like LePage in office. He has certainly not been over exposed by the Maine media, especially not the TV and radio stations, especially not MPBN, the allegedly public, actually corporate, TV and radio alternative. I don't even turn it on anymore. Maine could be a test tube for what happens when media doesn't inform The People and, as a result, The People get lousy government.
Democracy rots from the head down, the head being what has to know the truth for democracy to be possible. The absurd libertarianism that has replaced responsible liberalism is where it all started to go wrong, those pseudo-liberals freed corporate media to lie us into oligarchy, here and everywhere. Nothing will change until we keep the media from lying us into oppression and, yes, you need regulation of broadcast and cable media to make them tell the truth. You win with an effective margin of people, LePage won with an effective margin of ignorant, hateful people, people who brainlessly voted for him, they are the ones who govern us, not the majority who voted against him, twice.
No comments:
Post a Comment