ELECTION 2022 – LEFTISTS HOODWINKING THE ELECTION FORUMS

One Candidate Debate Sponsor Has Sneaky Past; Another Preaches Critical Race Theory while A Third Has Complete Disdain for the Redneck Rubes in Southern Maryland and Advocates Reeducation on How to Choose Media Outlets

BY KEN ROSSIGNOL

THE CHESAPEAKE TODAY

In order to conduct a fair election forum for candidates, the sponsors of the forum should be non-partisan. The forum planned for St. Mary’s County has three leftist groups sponsoring the event, all with strong ties to progressive-socialist issues, and no group from the Republican Party or a non-partisan organization. The chief sponsor, the League of Woman Voters, has a history of conducting tainted events with ethically challenged moderators.

In the St. Mary’s County Commissioners election in the 1986 Democratic Primary, educator George Sullivan filed for the seat representing the north end of St. Mary’s County, the Seventh, Fourth, and Fifth Election Districts. 

Eddie Bailey was appointed to fill the remainder of the term following the death of Commissioner Dick Arnold. The League of Women Voters sponsored a candidates’ forum at the Leonardtown Middle School on September 3, 1986, to assist voters in deciding between the two candidates in this race and hear from candidates in other St. Mary’s County races.

The process of conducting the debate consisted of a moderator soliciting questions from the audience. Questions from the audience were pre-planned and planted among the audience, geared to attack Eddie Bailey and support Sullivan.

Many of the planted questions geared to make Bailey look silly came from the Potomac River Association members.

In the Democratic Primary held on September 9, 1986, Bailey beat Sullivan by 373 votes, won the General Election over Republican Carolyn Billups, and won the post again in 1990. Thought to be unbeatable in 1994, Bailey lost to Republican Larry Jarboe, ending his career as a commissioner and allowing him to be a full-time restauranteur.

The Potomac River Association was an activist environmental group that led the battle to fight the Steuart Oil Company from operating a refinery in 1974. The PRA rallied the county’s citizens to the polls in a special referendum held in July of 1974 due to a bill passed by Senator Paul J. Bailey. Sen. Bailey brought legions of watermen and environmentalists to Annapolis to testify in favor of his bill to provide for the referendum, which was signed into law by Governor Marvin Mandel.

Steuart Oil’s representative walked into the county engineer’s office in 1973 at lunchtime and applied for and received a permit to build an oil refinery.

Steuart built the oil storage tank farm at Piney Point, which still operates in 2022 and receives petroleum products via tankers and exports them via barges, tanker trucks, and two pipelines, including jet fuel that leads to Andrews Air Force Base and oil to power plants at Chalk Point and Newburg.

The action of Steuart in obtaining a building permit for an oil refinery stunned many in the county. In his last year in office of the four terms he served in the Maryland State Senate, Senator Bailey put in his Refinery Referendum Bill to allow the voters to ban up to 1400 petrochemical industries from operating in St. Mary’s County. A heated debate ensued with environmentalists led by Jack Witten of the Citizens Coalition Against the Refinery, David Sayre and Tucker Brown of the St. Mary’s Watermen’s Association, and others, with the Chamber of Commerce and business owners in favor.

Senator Bailey was joined by Sayre, who later became a county commissioner, Dick Arnold, Circuit Court Judge Philip H. Dorsey, Board of Education member and commissioner candidate Larry Millison, and others who traveled the county to fight the refinery. They traveled to churches, civic and fraternal groups, and social halls to inform voters about a refinery’s danger to the air and water.

Steuart Oil did the same, erecting a large tent at their property in Piney Point and hosting catered receptions aimed at gaining support from small businesses and professionals. Steuart Oil hired a political consultant who convinced the company to design and produce a comic book as appropriate campaign material for the electorate. That decision blew up in the company’s face when Leonard Steuart explained that the average voter in St. Mary’s was best reached in that method.

THE PAPERBOY WINS; THE SAWMILL OPERATOR BEATS THE UNBEATABLE BAILEY

Joining Jarboe in the contest for St. Mary’s Commissioner in 1994 was Chris Brugman, a Washington Post distributor and weekly columnist for ST. MARY’S TODAY. Jarboe, the owner of a sawmill, and Brugman both wrote columns focusing on general themes, government, the environment, and outdoor life. 

Both Jarboe and Brugman won the Republican primary and faced Democrats in the General Election. Larry Jarboe was the leader of citizens who successfully fought the placement of a stump dump for municipal waste in fragile land near the Patuxent River by a relative of Steny Hoyer and John K. Parlett.

Jarboe took on incumbent Eddie Bailey, while Brugman’s opponent was Joe Anderson, a former Vista volunteer and teacher’s aide in Lexington Park that moved up in local affairs enough to be appointed to the Planning Commission. Anderson moved to Chestnut Ridge to be in the Hollywood Leonardtown commissioner district. He held a$100 a plate breakfast fundraiser attended by developers that he cultivated as a planning commissioner.

In examining the candidates’ campaign finance reports, I noticed a fee of $100 paid by the Anderson campaign treasurer Mike Whitson to Dick Myers.

Myers was the debate moderator for the League of Women Voters. Therefore, I called Whitson to verify that he paid Myers with campaign funds for Joe Anderson, and he admitted that he did, and the record filed with the State of Maryland was correct. Myers was working for me covering general news at ST. MARY’S TODAY, and also at the now-defunct Channel 10 cable television in Leonardtown.

I asked Dick why he would accept a fee in advance of a campaign debate that he was moderating between two opposing candidates. Myers said he was paid the fee for his time examining Brugman’s past columns so he could ask good questions. Myers asserted that accepting payment from one of the candidates did not affect his impartiality. Others may and did disagree. Brugman was furious to have his words taken out of context in various columns by the moderator and accused Myers of being “paid off” by the liberal Democrat Anderson.

Babs and Little Lulu at Sadie Hawkins Dance. 2002

The same election year saw a contest between Democrat Mary Ann Chasen and Republican Frances Eagan for County Commissioner. A member of the Democratic Central Committee, Betty Kostenko, moderated a debate between Eagan and Chasen without disclosing that she had donated to the campaign for Chasen.

The-losing-ticket-of-Democrats-for-St.-Marys-Commissioner-in-1994.

In 2018, the election forum held at the Lexington Park Library was again operated in a corrupt way that failed to provide voters with a clear opportunity to hear from candidates about their views and stands on issues that affect the post they seek in the election.

In the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s race, the supporters of Tim Cameron salted the audience with gotcha questions for Thomas Phelan. In contrast, questions that could have been asked of Tim Cameron about his handling of failing to hold deputies accountable for major failure to adhere to department policies and or criminal conduct were never asked. Cameron always hid behind the Law Enforcement Officers Bill of Rights and “personnel issues” as reasons to avoid accountability for him and dismissed officers.

In the 2022 election, candidate face-offs are set for the Primary Election. This series of events is sponsored by the very liberal and progressive St. Mary’s College group dubbed the Center for The Study of Democracy, the NAACP, and the League of Women Voters.

LEFTIST BUREAUCRATS AND EDUCRATS AT ST. MARY’S CITY SAY DO IT THEIR WAY OR THE HIGHWAY; IT WILL SAVE SO. MD. FROM BEING IGNORANT REDNECKS

The Center for the Study of Democracy lays out its mission on its section of the publicly funded website of St. Mary’s College of Maryland. The mission statement makes it clear that the two publicly funded institutions, St. Mary’s College and Historic St. Mary’s City Commission, seek to educate persons in Southern Maryland on how to obtain their news, ignore social media, certain cable news channels, and other organizations that wish to influence elections. The mission statement from the group includes the popular progressive-socialist Biden Administration term “misinformation” in an Orwellian piece of propaganda prose, reprinted unedited as follows:

“Our goal is to empower the community with the skills to critically evaluate and analyze information and participate as responsible citizens. The spread of misinformation and disinformation has proliferated in recent years, facilitated by the rise of unregulated social media as a source of news, the expansion of targeted cable news channels and the efforts of individuals who seek to take advantage of this fragmented media ecosystem to increase their personal power and/or profit. The result has been the loss of acceptance of shared facts and the growth of a national climate of dissonance and distrust in institutions, elected officials, and science. If not addressed, this trajectory could become a threat to the fundamentals of our democracy. Our objective is to engage and educate the southern Maryland community on the important relationship between the media and American democracy and to empower this community with the skills to critically evaluate, analyze, and contribute to media landscapes in our society. In response to this issue, we propose a framework that features speakers, workshops, film screenings and discussion groups designed to equip participants with the skills needed to navigate the diverse media landscape and take part in our democracy as responsible and engaged citizens.”

Remember, the above statement does not come from the American Communist Party or the Democratic National Committee website but from a publicly funded educational institution operated by folks who don’t like how people in Southern Maryland think, get their news, or vote.

Yes, you rubes who live in Leonardtown, Bushwood, LaPlata, Lexington Park, Huntingtown, Owings, Brandywine, Waldorf, Mechanicsville, Ridge, and all across Southern Maryland, these intelligentsias from St. Mary’s City are out to make you wise. Isn’t it wonderful? They will teach you how to read the news media they approve of and want to regulate social media so you won’t become the pawns and useful idiots of people just like themselves except with different viewpoints.

ST. MARY’S IS NOT SYSTEMICALLY RACIST

The NAACP is dominated by so many leftist and neo-Marxists that want Critical Race Theory and “equity” to be the guide to providing education to St. Mary’s County. In the past two years, combined with the pandemic, the public schools have seen a drop in enrollment of over 800 students as families move children to homeschool and private schools. The local NAACP is run by racists that are so open about their brand of racism that the contrast to the legitimate leaders of the Civil Rights movement would be shocked to listen to them bray on at recent public meetings in St. Mary’s County.

When giving statements to the St. Mary’s Board of Commissioners on redistricting, NAACP representatives stated that St. Mary’s County is systemically racist.

The ignorance displayed by those speakers glossed over the real history of St. Mary’s that the late Commissioner John Lancaster, a black Democrat, was elected county-wide in 1986 and 1990 by an electorate that was more than eighty percent white.

 Joe Lee Somerville beat white opponents in the 1978 primary and general elections to become Maryland’s first elected black sheriff.  

Retired principal Elfreda Mathis and her sister Janice Walthour continue to berate St. Mary’s County and simply can’t accept that voters just didn’t want to elect Mathis to anything. Changing the way commissioner districts are formatted won’t increase her likeability. No candidate has a right to win an election due to their race or “equity.”

Mary Washington was first elected to the St. Mary’s School Board in 1996, and perhaps the attack dogs of the NAACP didn’t notice that Mary was a black lady. Her failure to win a commissioner race is due to voters being able to discern she won’t be responsible with tax dollars.

The president of the NAACP recently quit his post and filed as a Republican for office as county commissioner. B. J. Hall cited the inability of the organization to focus on local issues and instead worried about national issues. Hall said that the people in DC are not worried about St. Mary’s, yet the local group’s dominant attention was not on local government.

Why do the Republicans put up with all the chicanery and manipulation on the part of the liberals, leftists, and loons? The leadership of the Republican party should demand to participate in the debate process, the creation of rules for fairness, and find unbiased moderators.

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