CHEAP SHOTS – Board of Ed Bozos, New Hideout for Deputies Skeered of Criminals, and Buying a Resume for a Judge

CHEAP SHOTS

Political gossip is just that—gossip. I once stopped to get gas at the old Tippett’s Texaco in Hollywood, and the mechanic stopped me in the office, which doubled as an old-fashioned country store, serving old coffee and some not-so-fresh snacks and chips.  The grease-covered mechanic had just come in from the service bays when he spotted me and wanted to know why there wasn’t a Cheap Shots in the newest weekly edition of ST. MARY’S TODAY. I told him I was surprised he would be interested in a political gossip column that was packed near the end of the dozens of pages of crime and mayhem. I’ll never forget his answer when he said, “That’s the only way we can find out what’s going on.”  After that, if I didn’t have time to write the weekly CHEAP SHOTS, I would simply pull out an old one and run with it. That day taught me not to anticipate why a reader wanted anything based on their job or profession but to just dig out what’s going on in the world and go with it. It’s up to the reader to assign the importance of the information and the job of the newspaper editor to shove it in the paper.

Understanding the motivations of politicians and elected officials is not an exact science. Take St. Mary’s County, for instance, where a set of commissioners are preparing to raise taxes despite the all-Republican Board of Commissioners running on the platform of not raising taxes in 2022. It’s a head-scratcher, especially when you consider that Randy Guy has been championing the need to hold the line on taxes since 2010 when he was on the Town Hall Alliance slate of commissioner candidates aligned with St. Mary’s Commissioner Larry Jarboe.

The St. Mary’s County Commissioners approved a new Sheriff’s Palace in the capital budget a few years ago and have been laying out the process of design and planning, plopping out a million here and a million there for the original projected cost of $25 million. The building is a place for deputies who are afraid of criminals having a place to hide out. They even plan for a series of concrete pillars to be in front of the building so criminals who have motorized tanks and Humvees cannot storm Fort Cameron at fifty miles an hour.  Why do the deputies need a larger and more expensive building to hide from criminals when we all thought it was the job of deputies to get out in their fleet of patrol cars, dozens of which are parked around the county office complex in a series of parking lots, and find the criminals, lock them up and take them to the big, big county jail.

Isn’t the existing Sheriff’s Headquarters/Hideout big enough? The new $6 million Sheriff Lexington Park Station is very impressive. It has huge windows that never seem to be broken out by the marauding gangs of criminals shooting and stealing around Sin City.  If they are running out of hiding places in Leonardtown for the skeered deputies, why can’t some of them be sent to Lexington Park and hide in that building? There is plenty of room. 

Most days, the place is as cold as a morgue and as lonely as a straight teacher at Chopticon High School.  

The real, actual, eventual cost of the new SHERIFF HIDEOUT AND PALACE in Leonardtown will soar to over $50 million due to the Biden-Inflation and COVID-19 pandemic. The commissioners could easily cancel this building and shift funds to pay for teacher salaries instead of raising taxes. Paying teachers to start at $60,000 isn’t that big a deal when the county pays some deputies up to $180,000 a year including overtime. The Good Old Boys Sheriff’s Department is exactly that: a collection of Good Old Boys in a private club, that is publicly funded. Shifting to a professional county police department means that a bunch of clowns like we have now as county commissioners would hire the police chief, and then what would we have accomplished?

There is a Board of Education election in St. Mary’s County this year, and the primary just ended with contestants in three seats of the five-member board. Dorothy Andrews and Karin Bailey do not come up for election until 2026.

Mary Washington, not really related to George, at least not real direct, was first elected in 1996 and she has hornswoggled lots of voters in St. Mary’s County into thinking she does anything. If she did everything right, dotted her eyes, and crossed her tees, she would still have to go, as nobody in a policy-making job needs to hang around for three decades. When Bill Clinton was still slubbing Monica in the Oval Office, it was 1996, and the affair was in high gear and still a secret. Mary took office in December of that year. Clinton had just won reelection, and the first flip phone came on the market.  ET was the top-ranked movie at the Box Office.  Mary, bless her soul, is a nice lady and says she enjoys going to various schools and reading to students, going to games and meetings.  

Cathy Allen is also a sincere and enthusiastic booster of education, and like Mary, she is stale and needs to find a hobby as she was elected TWENTY-FOUR YEARS ago.  She has served longer than another candidate has been alive.  School board members don’t get paid a lot, and the law is structured to guide them into following what the education bureaucrats tell them to do.

During the time that these two officials have been on the St. Mary’s Board of Education, a student entered Great Mills High School and murdered his ex-girlfriend before killing himself as a school resource officer approached him.

This school board responded by spending over eleven million dollars on paving sports fields with astroturf instead of installing metal detectors at the front doors of the high schools. In January 2024, a security video system installed inside Great Mills High School detected a gun held by persons inside the school during school hours, and deputies later found and arrested the person after identifying him.

In an interview, Allen was asked why metal detectors weren’t installed at Great Mills High School. She answered that the school security chief and the superintendent visited a high school in the District of Columbia that has such protection, and it took a long time for students to gain access. The Banana Republic of The District of Columbia really isn’t too good at doing a blasted thing except soak up tax dollars and ring up murder rates.  Allen said she wouldn’t want to expose students to someone with a gun outside who could mow down a bunch of kids. The moronic answer shows not only Allen’s lack of understanding but how convoluted that logic is in that any outside gathering of students, such as at sports games, would pose the same risk. The answer also revealed that possibly Allen just blurted out a dumb answer as she hadn’t anticipated the question, and the school board really spends a lot of time listening to mundane and cheery presentations at the meetings.  It’s too bad that Superintendent Smith and his security chief didn’t take a trip to BWI or National Airport, where thousands of people go through metal detectors hourly without long backups – on most days.

Mary Washington and Cathy Allen need to be replaced.

JUDGE ELECTION

The conflagration of burning piles of money poured into the coffers of Amy Lorenzini to hang on to the Judgeship she was appointed to be Governor Larry Hogan should be embarrassing to those who believe that we have an impartial and fair system of justice. We don’t; it is a system of the fat cats, by the fat cats, and for the fat cats. Those who pony up for Judge Amy will be remembered as their litigation comes before the court for the winkin’, blinkin’, and nodding in coming years.

Kudos to Senator Jack Bailey for standing up to Hogan on this judgeship and supporting the best candidate, Sue Ann Armitage, and to Delegate Todd Morgan.  A slew of former elected officials also endorsed Armitage, but their necks aren’t on the line, so they can pat themselves on the back.

You can be happy that you don’t have to pay for this commentary and that you instead invested in Judge Amy’s campaign. You did a good job of keeping her. 

One of the neatest things about this election is how a candidate like Judge Amy, we can all stay on a first-name basis with her now after so many written invitations to do so spread in roadside ditches and street corners as if she is an ambulance-chasing attorney, is all about promotion.

Judge Amy showed us that she and just about anyone can create a wonderful resume by getting a dozen friends to nominate her at THE DAILY RECORD to be honored for being a Top Woman of 2024, or MOST INFLUENTIAL MARYLANDER, or SUPER LAWYER, or just about anything, complete with an awards dinner, glossy photos of family and self on a stage, wall wraps for attorney’s waiting rooms. 

Who Knew? 

A candidate can go to THE DAILY RECORD, like Judge Amy did last year, and get nominated by her political consultant’s ten best friends to be the MOST DISTINGUISHED judge no one ever heard of, and of course, WIN. And then THE DAILY RECORD will slime out press releases with full-color photos of the self-nominated, arranged winner on the stage as if she had just breezed past Justice Amy Coney Barrett to be the most famous judge of all time south of Hughesville.  To sum it up, Annapolis Lobbyist G.S. Proctor and a bunch of Prince Frederick lawyers organized socialist Democrats and country club Republicans and, using tons of direct mail and telemarketing text calls spun out a lawyer who purchased her own awards following a fake career as a prosecutor when she was in reality only processing deadbeat dads’ papers for Social Services.

Did you get a Keep Judge Amy coffee mug? No? You must not have bought one when you had a chance. How about a refrigerator magnet with her name and photo?

The scum buckets at THE DAILY RECORD are running a scam for lawyers, and the lawyers all pay for play. How about THE DAILY RECORD, get a big dose of DEI, and let drug dealers apply for TOP FENTANYL PRODUCER OF 2024 IN BALTIMORE AWARD?

Now we learn that five big Baltimore law firms are being hired to go for payoffs for the wrecked Key Bridge.  Can’t wait to find out how Gov. Wes Moore and Mayor Brandon are going to enrich themselves from all the mayhem of the Key Bridge reconstruction and cleanup.  People gotta pay to get contracts. That is the Culture of Corruption in Maryland, and that’s the way it’s always been.