After the clearly unfit-for-office Maine Gov. Paul LePage claimed last month that "90-plus percent" of his state's arrested drug dealers "are black and Hispanic," Maine news outlets have been very eager to see what LePage had claimed was the evidence for his supposition: A three-ringed binder of arrest records that LePage said he collected to document those drug arrests. Personally. As in, the sitting governor of the state spent his time collecting photographs of everyone arrested for drug dealing in the state of Maine so that he could document whether they were white or not-white, because that is totally something a sitting governor would do, in Maine.
That binder has now been released under the state's open records law. It does not show what Gov. LePage claimed it showed.
At first glance, the photos do not support LePage’s assertion that 90 percent of more of Maine’s accused heroin dealers are black and Hispanic, as more than half the photos in the binder appear to be of white people.
LePage now says he meant blah blah gobble blah, and no doubt there's still a lot of detail to work out because perhaps Gov. LePage is just a more acute observer of race than anyone else in the state and/or is applying a variation of the "one drop" rule to mark pretty much anyone in his state who's ever been caught with drugs to be a sekrit minority if you go back far enough. It's hard to say. It doesn't matter, because Paul LePage is clearly and has clearly been unfit for office for a damn long time now, and the Maine legislature is so cowardly and dysfunctional itself that it can't be bothered to do anything about it.
[W]hile LePage and his staff have repeatedly been asked why the race of a drug dealer matters, they have not answered that question, nor have they explained whether LePage was using the binder to inform his public policy decisions.
As far as we know, in fact, Paul LePage has vowed that he would no longer be speaking to his state's press at all, because they hurt his fee-fees, so we'll have to get the answers to those specific questions from a gubernatorial Ouija board.