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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pogeu Mahone who wrote (124995)	11/2/2010 11:54:53 AM
From: longnshort	4 Recommendations Respond to of 132070

Bangor police officer denied right to vote after refusing to surrender weapon 10/31/10 01:53 pm Updated: 11/1/10 04:56 pm By Eric Russell BDN Staff Update: The election warden who turned the officer away has been dismissed, and the Bangor police chief has stated at a press conference that officers are not required to surrender their weapon at the polls. BANGOR, Maine — In the 18 years that he has been a police officer in Bangor, James Dearing couldn’t think of a single time when someone has asked him to turn over his firearm. Until last Friday. Dearing, who was patrolling his assigned beat near the Bangor Civic Center, decided to stop in and cast an early vote. He walked into the polling place in full uniform and stood in a short line with other voters. One of the election officials told Dearing he couldn’t bring his gun inside. The officer said he thought it was a joke. Election warden Wayne Mallar then approached Dearing and reiterated the request: Turn over your weapon to another officer or we can’t let you vote. Dearing refused. “I would never relinquish my weapon,” the officer said later. Today's poll Should citizens be allowed to vote while armed? Yes No View results Mallar stood his ground. The officer said he left the civic center Friday feeling embarrassed and insulted. Dearing posted details of the incident on his Facebook page late Friday and immediately began receiving strong responses. “One fellow officer, who is stationed in Iraq, said ‘What am I over here fighting for?’” Dearing said. The incident bothered the officer enough to draft a letter to Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, which the officer also provided to the Bangor Daily News. In it, Dearing writes that Mallar claimed he would be violating state law by allowing the officer to vote with his weapon holstered. “Mallar claims that this was a state of Maine law, however, I cannot find such a prohibition listed in Title 21-A,” Dearing’s letter read. “Furthermore, many members of the police department and I have been casting ballots at the polls for many years in full uniform and have never been required to remove our firearms.” Reached by phone on Sunday, Dunlap said he had not yet seen Dearing’s letter but said there is no state law that says officers are prohibited from carrying firearms anywhere. The secretary of state could not remember a similar complaint in recent years. “Most of the complaints we get are from people concerned about candidates stationed outside the polls and over-aggressive petitioners,” Dunlap said. Mallar said Sunday that he couldn’t comment on what happened other than to say, as warden, he is in charge of a polling place and has the right to make determinations about safety. Dearing flipped the safety question around. “What if someone else had come in with a gun concealed? Then I wouldn’t have my gun to protect people and do my job,” he said. The officer said he doesn’t want Mallar fired. Dearing just wants the warden to admit he made a mistake. And he wants to cast his vote. bangordailynews.com

To: Pogeu Mahone who wrote (124995)	11/2/2010 12:36:42 PM
From: longnshort	3 Recommendations Respond to of 132070

Md. State Workers Remove GOP Posters Monday, 01 Nov 2010 01:20 PM By: Ken Timmerman Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley ordered state highway workers to remove political campaign signs for Republican candidates during the weekend, according to GOP candidates and homeowners. The leader of the state with the slogan of "Seize the Day Off" apparently told state employees to work on their days off, at overtime rates, according to candidates and residents along major thoroughfares in the Democratic stronghold of Montgomery County, in the Washington suburbs. Those residents told Newsmax they were surprised on Saturday when highway workers removed signs from their front yards and tossed them into a state dump truck. “This is an absolute outrage,” said Rob Vricella, a Republican candidate for county council who confronted the workers. “I jumped up into the truck and retrieved my own signs and saw a pile of what looked like all Republican signs.” When Vricella challenged the workers, they identified themselves as state employees who were getting overtime to remove the signs on the Democratic governor’s orders, he said. Perhaps not coincidentally in this state regarded as one of the bluest of the blue, O’Malley is running for re-election against former Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich (right), whom O’Malley ousted in 2006 after Ehrlich had served just one term. A few minutes after Vricella encountered the state workers, the truck stopped in front of Charles Pelham’s house in Bethesda. His wife was working in the yard when the state workers removed Republican campaign signs from their property, despite her protests, Pelham said. The workers told her the same story: They were acting on the Democratic governor’s orders and receiving overtime for working on Saturday and Sunday. Candidates regularly put up signs on the medians of main roads, even though state law forbids the practice and holds offending candidates responsible for their removal. Candidates who don’t remove their signs after Election Day can be fined, although that has happened rarely, if ever. But the state has no authority to remove signs from private property. Removal of private property without the owner’s request is theft. “Normally, we never see state workers on these roads,” Vricella said. “The county plows the road in winter, and fills potholes. It suggests to me that the Democrats are running scared and will do everything they can to stifle us and keep us from getting our message out.” Maryland is among the bluest of the blue states, with registered Democrats outnumbering Republicans by 2-to-1. It has only one Republican member of Congress, among eight. Both of the state’s U.S. senators are Democrats, as is a majority of the state Legislature. President Obama won the state in 2008 with 61.9 percent of the vote. But independents account for roughly 30 percent of registered voters, and they have voted for Republicans as recently as 2002, when Ehrlich was elected governor, beating unpopular Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Democrats clearly are worried about losing ground in Maryland. The Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee pumped an additional $348,000 into the contentious 1st Congressional District race last week, bringing the total they have invested in this race to $1.5 million. Democrats hope the cash will help beat back a challenge to freshman Rep. Frank Kratovil from popular Republican state Sen. Andy Harris in a rematch of the 2008 face-off that Kratovil won by fewer than 3,000 votes. Republicans have poured in almost as much cash, making the race one of the five most expensive in the nation. The latest Washington Post polls have O’Malley sailing to re-election with a double-digit margin. But sources inside the Ehrlich campaign say their internal polling shows the Republican challenger just three points behind, making the race a statistical dead heat. O’Malley campaign spokesman Mark Giangreco denied any gubernatorial involvement in removing the political signs. “These desperate and completely baseless charges are what we'd expect from Bob Ehrlich's floundering campaign on the eve of the election,” he told Newsmax in an e-mail. Montgomery County GOP Chairman Mark Uncapher countered that the order to remove such signs can come only from O’Malley. During the past two decades, Maryland has become “an incubator for the far left,” says Republican state Delegate Ron George. George is locked in a tough re-election battle with Judd Legum, a 31-year-old lawyer and former opposition researcher for Hillary Clinton. The Clinton camp has hosted several fundraisers for Legum, with help from former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, whose Center for American Progress gets money from George Soros. Another target of the sign snatchers was Republican state Senate candidate Kurt Osuch, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer who now is a business consultant. Osuch is running against incumbent Richard Madaleno, who tried to pass legislation this year that would compel the governor to bring home Maryland National Guard troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also campaigned hard to legalize gay marriage.