LePage in rage

Talking Points Memo -  Maine Gov. Paul LePage, left a bizarre and threatening voicemail for a Democratic state lawmaker he thought called him racist:

“Mr. Gattine, this is Gov. Paul Richard LePage,” a recording of the message begins. “I would like to talk to you about your comments about my being a racist, you cocksucker.”

“I want to talk to you. I want you to prove that I’m a racist. I’ve spent my life helping black people and you little son-of-a-bitch, socialist cocksucker,” the governor continued. “You … I need you to, just friggin. I want you to record this and make it public because I am after you. Thank you.”

The governor later called [a] news crew to his home to continuing slamming Gattine as “a snot-nosed little guy” that he would love to challenge to an old-fashioned duel.

“I’d like him to come up here because, tell you right now, I wish it were 1825,” he reportedly said. “We would have a duel, that’s how angry I am, and I would not put my gun in the air, I guarantee you, I would not be Hamilton. I would point it right between his eyes, because he is a snot-nosed little runt and he has not done a damn thing since he’s been in this Legislature to help move the state forward.” 

Huffington Post -    LePage was widely criticized earlier this year for claiming men with names like “Smoothie, D-Money and Shifty” were coming into his state to deal drugs. Earlier this week, he said he keeps a binder with mugshots of all the drug dealers arrested in Maine, and he claimed that 90 percent of the people in that binder were black or Hispanic.

Note that 95 percent of Maine residents are white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

LePage first denied that Maine police officers were racially profiling people - an obvious concern if they really are arresting almost exclusively people of color for drug crimes.

Then the governor suggested that people of color in Maine were “the enemy.”

“Look, a bad guy is a bad guy, I don’t care what color it is. When you go to war, if you know the enemy, the enemy dresses in red and you dress in blue, you shoot at red, don’t you?” he said. “You shoot at the enemy. You try to identify the enemy. And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority right now coming in are people of color or people of Hispanic origin. I can’t help that. I just can’t help it. Those are the facts.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine had pointed out Thursday that research shows blacks and whites deal drugs at similar rates.

“According to the governor, Maine police are nine times more likely to arrest people of color for selling drugs than white people, even though we know white people are just as likely to commit drug offenses,” Alison Beyea, executive director of the ACLU of Maine, said in a statement. “This alarming disparity in arrests raises significant concerns that Maine law enforcement is participating in unconstitutional racial profiling.”