by Jim Scarantino | Nov 3, 2020 | General
Election fraud in Philadelphia could determine who is the next President. That’s what we’re hearing from analysts war gaming the Electoral College and concluding that the White House could go to the person who wins the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes. Donald Trump won that state by less than 45,000 votes in 2016, and current polls show the race again being very tight.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ordered extraordinary measures that may favor Joe Biden if the Pennsylvania Democrat Party engages in election fraud, of which it has a very long history. They have prohibited election judges from comparing signatures on absentee ballots with the signatures on voter registration cards. They are requiring that absentee ballots received three days after election day be counted, even without proof they were mailed.
The Trump campaign has raised fears that the election could be stolen in Philadelphia. We saw in Obama’s first election Republican poll watchers being thrown out of polling places that reported hardly any Republican votes, despite contrary voter registration numbers in those precincts. Poll watchers are again being thrown out of polling places in Philly and being prevented from standing close enough to the counting tables to see what is going on.
These events are transpiring far from Port Townsend, but they may have an historic impact on us and our nation. So I thought I would share a memory of election day in the City of Brotherly Love.
Tommy Foglietta
I worked there as an Assistant District Attorney after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In 1980 I volunteered for the campaign of Tom Foglietta, who was running for South Philly’s Congressional seat. These are the neighborhoods of Sylvester Stallone’s morning runs in the Rocky films. It was then very much controlled by they Mafia and a powerful Democrat machine. It once elected a dead man on orders from Democrat bosses.
The Italian Mob has lost some of its grip on South Philly as demographics have changed, but it is still in the hands of the Democrat machine.
Michael “Ozzie” Myers
Foglietta’s race was seen as historic. His family had been Republican for generations. He was clean as a whistle. To have any chance of winning he ran as an independent. He was challenging Michael “Ozzie” Myers, the incumbent and the machine’s handpicked man who had been convicted in the Abscam bribery and racketeering sting. Myers was captured on undercover tapes accepting a $50,000 bribe and saying, “Money talks and bullshit walks.”
He was still on the ballot, though he had been kicked out of the U.S. House of Representatives in October while charges were pending. He was eventually convicted. Congressman Myers was a real sweet guy: he had also beaten up a security guard and cashier earlier that year.
I was part of Foglietta’s election integrity team on election day. We got word our poll watchers had been kicked out of a polling station near the water front. I took a bus there in my 3-piece suit with proof of my authorization to enter and observe. I was blocked at the door by some no-neck guys. I made a fuss and told them I would not leave. In a few minutes about six black cars rolled up and out piled Jimmy Tayoun, a big time South Philly restauranteur and bar owner friendly with the Mafia. Tayoun later went to prison for racketeering.
Jimmy Tayoun
With him was Fat Matt Cianciulli and a bunch of other big Italian guys in track suits. Fat Matt had been a Democrat State Representative who had recently done federal time for voter fraud. He was enormous and it took only one hand for him to push me against a wall.
Fat Matt Cianciulli
Tayoun pressed his face close to mine and gave me one minute before they came after me. So in my Brooks Brother suit I ran as fast as I could towards South Street. A single black car tailed me for a while. Foglietta was crushed in that precinct, but went on to serve in Congress. I got bloody blisters from running in stiff wingtip shoes.
Forty years later it looks like this is still going on. Let’s hope that voter fraud in Philadelphia does not lead to very serious problems for our entire nation. We don’t want these people having any kind of power over us.
by Jim Scarantino | Nov 2, 2020 | General, Politics
2020 saw young conservatives emerging as activists in Jefferson County. They had not previously been involved in politics of any kind. They are fearless, motivated and already making a mark on their community. They have deep roots here, all of them having grown up in Jefferson County. These are people to watch.
The year started with Josh Peacock being pulled over by police in Port Townsend. Two 911 calls had come in of a young man flying a big Trump flag off the bed of his pickup. In defiance of the sometimes oppressive political local monoculture, Peacock had established a routine of driving a circuit around Uptown and Downtown with a flag pole on the back of his truck. On one of these days, a police cruiser followed him and its lights came on. The officer told him about the 911 calls. He had been watching Peacock but couldn’t see him doing anything wrong. He apologized, wished him a good day and complimented Peacock on his good driving skills.
Word of what happened to Peacock sparked other public displays of support for President Trump during the following year. Those 911 calls backfired.
Peacock and his friends later marched in the January Women’s March–or Womxn’s March, whatever it is. They brought up the rear flying Trump banners and a huge American flag. For blocks they shouted, “Four more years!” to the consternation of people in odd pink hats who looked back over their shoulders at the boisterous crew at their heels.
Peacock has participated in protests and rallies in Portland and Seattle in support of President Trump and law enforcement. He participated in the peaceful march of thousands of Proud Boys across a bridge and into downtown Portland. He works in security professionally and has provided his services to protect others against the violence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
Danielle Rain’s business was declared “non-essential” by Governor Inslee, though it was absolutely essential to her family’s survival and well-being. She was instrumental in launching the Reopen Washington State Facebook group. That resource has connected those forced out of work by the Governor’s “guidance,” business owners ordered to shut down and bleed red ink, local officials seeing their communities ravaged not by a virus but by the Governor’s actions and medical patients denied critical care because the Governor had inserted himself into the doctor-patient relationship. It has served as an organizing tool for rallies across the state. That group now has over 50,000 members.
Rain and other young women organized the first Reopen Jefferson County rally on May 19, 2020. I wrote about that event in “Fear and Loathing in Port Townsend.”
Rebekah White jumped into the County Commission District 1 race against incumbent Kate Dean just weeks before election day. She’s not kidding herself about her chances. She stepped up to make a statement, gain experience and build towards another run for office in the future. She says she had to do something after watching Dean ally herself with Black Lives Matter and push a “systemic racism” declaration through the Board of Health while for four years Dean has done nothing about the county’s suicide, drug addiction, joblessness and affordable housing crises. Dean was instrumental in preventing Sheriff’s deputies from receiving small gift bags for law enforcement appreciation day. White had raised the funds for those tokens of recognition and assembled dozens of the bags. Before a similar complaint made it to the Port Townsend Police, White rushed to the Port Townsend police department and left bags for every officer in the reception area. She is resourceful in that kind of creative, fun, tenacious way, like posing for a campaign shoot in front of Dean’s failed Cherry Street Project. One of her major goals is to get more young people involved in local politics. White is a pediatric medical assistant. Her campaign Facebook page is here at this link.
Leanne Dotson is a powerful woman in many ways. She teaches weight training for women and can dead lift more than most men. She comes from a law enforcement family. Her father was Sheriff and her husband is a deputy. She had seriously considered pursuing a career in law enforcement, but opted against it so that both parents of her children would not be putting their lives at risk every day they stepped out the door.
Watching the political attacks on law enforcement spreading to Jefferson County, in particular the calls to disarm police and leave them defenseless, drove her to say, “Enough!” With other law enforcement wives, Dotson organized several pro-law enforcement demonstrations around the county, culminating in the massive August 30 Back the Blue motorcade. That event drew over 400 vehicles that formed a six-mile line of cars, trucks and motorcycles stretching from H.J. Carroll Park in Chimacum to downtown Port Townsend. Her confident and calm leadership and her wide network of contacts in the community made that such an impactful and successful event. Dotson works as a courtroom administrator and continues to steer her piece of the pro-law enforcement movement in Jefferson County.
If Jefferson County has more Culp for Governor signs per capita than any other county the credit goes to Robyn Middleton. Middleton is the Jefferson County coordinator/field manager for Loren Culp. She has never participated before in any political campaign, let alone been in charge of one. Her efforts have spilled over into neighboring counties. She produced the 1,300 person rally for Culp in Port Angeles in September.
She seems to know or know about everyone in Jefferson County. She is a fighter. She has hunted down sign thieves and relentlessly replaces destroyed Culp signs, working day and night with her husband and the crew of volunteers she has built. She also cares for a seriously ailing father, driving him to medical appointments and taking him hunting. She never says much about her own battle. While working overtime for Culp and her family, Middleton is living on 2/3 of a kidney and waiting for a transplant. How she finds the strength and energy to keep going astounds all around her.
Aside from the stunning proliferation of Culp signs, Middleton has engaged hundreds of people who, like her, have never “been political” about anything. They are the working poor and the old rural families forgotten and ignored by Port Townsend’s political elites. That is the mark of a real leader and an effective activist.
He is only starting out, just getting on his feet in the position, but honorable mention goes to Aronn Wilke, the head of the brand new Jefferson County Young Republicans. You read that correctly: young Republicans. Imagine that.
However this election turns out, it is encouraging to see a desperately needed diversity of voices speaking up and being heard in Jefferson County. Keep your eye on these people in 2021 and beyond.
by Jim Scarantino | Oct 29, 2020 | General
It looks like a scene from Seattle. A transient/homeless village of at least 35 tents, RVs and vehicles has taken over the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.
“I’ve been here 12 years,” says Terry Berge, the Fairgrounds campground host. “I’ve never had a a year like this. It has been tough. Frustrating. Seventy percent of these people have mental health problems. Police are out here at least twice a week. Five times last week. Last night three officers were here until midnight.”
Those officers were dealing with a woman who had taken over the bathroom and refused to leave during a mental health episode.
What about drug use? Was he seeing it? “Constantly,” Berge says. “Three times the police had to use Naloxone” on people who had overdosed on heroin.
Was he seeing stolen property being brought to the camp? “Yes. There is an awful lot of stuff piling up here. We’ve had 50 to 100 bikes. There’s one in the dumpster now.”
When I visited the Fairgrounds this summer, tents were lined up against the fence by the apartments. Neighbors had been complaining about loud music, fighting, shouting at all hours, and open drug use. (“Lines Form in Battle for Fairgrounds’ Future“)
“We had complaints about buckets,” Berge said. “The smell and seeing it being done.” He was talking about people using buckets as toilets, defecating in the open. “We took four or five buckets from one tent. Neighbors could smell it.”
Only five paying visitors were staying overnight at the campground this day. “They feel like they are being taken advantage of,” Berge said. “One of the saddest things is the people who would come back here every year. They said this was a gem. They’d come from California and other places. Now they pull in and turn around, or stay only one night.”
The transient/homeless campers are not paying anything, not for the use of their spaces, for water, the bathrooms or trash removal. The dumpsters were completely full. So people would not use buckets, at its own expense the Fairgrounds brought in a portable toilet and pays for servicing.
“I found it smeared with feces,” Berge said. On this day it smelled pretty bad, even from a distance.
A homeless camper’s RV caught fire. The owner was told not to come back. The Fairgrounds had to spend $6,000 to clear away the wreck. That person has returned and cannot be evicted because of the Governor’s order prohibiting evictions during his declared pandemic emergency.
“The people that were paying at the beginning,” Berge said, “stopped when the Governor’s order came down.”
As I discovered this summer, quite a few of the transient/homeless campers have incomes, from Social Security, even retirement. But because of the Governor’s order, they have collectively decided not to pay anything.
In a little while heavy rains will come and the Fairgrounds will turn into a muddy mess. In anticipation, Berge is taping off large areas of the field to prevent vehicles from driving through what will become bogs. Living conditions are going to rapidly deteriorate for those in tents.
Berge looks weary of it all. Instead of being a campground host, he has become the community’s front line representative in dealing with a large, troubled, lawless homeless population. “There’s new people here all the time,” he says.
The pay box for the Fairgrounds has been robbed. He has to negotiate with factions of the homeless who are hostile towards each other. He has to do his best to keep the place from getting worse. He has seen not one elected city official and no County Commissioner since Greg Brotherton came out several months ago. The encampment is receiving no social services, though a Dove House employee does come by occasionally to talk to some of the residents.
County Commissioners have been getting public comments and many letters from neighbors reporting crimes, people passed out on their lawns, vandalism and discarded syringes. They have also been told of drug dealing going on in the camp.
Berge pointed to the empty, overgrown pastures and corrals. “We can’t have horses here,” he said. “It wouldn’t be safe for them.”
There is another homeless site in the trees behind these trailers.
Driving away, I felt sorry for Terry Berge. He did not sign on for this. And he’s getting no help except when the situation becomes so bad police must be called.
by Jim Scarantino | Oct 27, 2020 | Politics
The Board of Health needs to look in the mirror.
They have declared “systemic racism” a public health emergency. Do they realize that they are that system?
The Board of Health is a composite of Port Townsend’s political and economic elite. Only one of of its members does not have a city mailing address. They represent what passes for our local ruling class.
If there is “systemic racism” they are to blame. They run the show. They make the laws and regulations. They have set the narrative and governed the society they now condemn as sick.
In their resolution, passed October 15, 2020, with only one dissenting vote and a minor edit, they commit themselves to healing themselves. The resolution is really all about them, anyway. It is their ritual self debasement. Maybe they need redemption. Maybe they just want to show how virtuous they can be in a Mandala Center for Change acting-out-sort-of-way. Over a year ago they had suggested putting the whole Board of Health through one of Racism Central’s cultish indoctrination workshops. The Mandala Center is where you go in Port Townsend to become a racist, or hone your pre-existing racism, and emerge with a complicating symptom of tedious self-righteousness. I hope to be writing more about that down the line.
The Board members commit to ongoing work around race and equity such as participating in racial equity training, engaging and being responsive to communities and residents impacted by racism as partners in identifying and implementing solutions, establishing an agreed upon understanding of racial equity principles to work towards antiracist policies and practices and to serve as ambassadors of racial equity work, seeking diversity in board membership, the need to include voices of people of color when addressing issues of racism, and to hold one another accountable to addressing implicit biases of all kinds.
That’s from the Board of Health’s systemic racism declaration. The treatment will require more than a few weeks at a re-education camp. Of course, taxpayers will be paying for their therapy sessions while the Board of Health continues to ignore Jefferson County’s real health crises: joblessness, poverty, addiction, depression, despair and suicide.
The Board of Health already has before it a simple first step towards correcting its racist ways. But they won’t take it.
They endorsed Black Genocide and chose to honor an organization created to control, reduce and eventually exterminate Black Americans.
I wrote in June about their decision to celebrate a full century of Planned Parenthood’s work, including its racist and eugenicist origins. (“Black Lives Don’t Matter: Systemic Racism in the Jefferson County Public Health Department“) For most of its history Planned Parenthood was led by Margaret Sanger, whom everyone who is not lying to themselves knows was an avowed racist. Heck, she was a popular speaker at gatherings of the Ku Klux Klan. She wrote openly of how Black people were at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. She is still the organization’s spiritual and intellectual inspiration. Their highest award is today named after the woman who warned White women that Black men could not help but be rapists because it was in their primitive nature.
Our racist Board of Health members effectively held up her work and writings and said, “Right on! You go, girl!”
Does this make them racist? Yup. We don’t want to toss that word around as recklessly as CNN does. But seriously, nobody made them celebrate Sanger’s work. They chose to bake the cake for her ugly baby’s 100th birthday.
More and more Black Americans are condemning Planned Parenthood and Sanger’s deplorable beliefs. I wrote about that in the article linked in the preceding paragraph. Since then, new, louder and more prominent Black voices have spoken against the implementation of Sanger’s planned Black Genocide through her institutional offspring. The latest voice joining that chorus is Kanye West who spoke on a podcast to Josh Rogan’s almost 20 million followers. “We’re in a genocide,” West declared as he called out Planned Parenthood’s program to kill Black babies.
“Let me talk about Planned Parenthood. There’s the last figure I saw is there were 210,000 deaths that’s due to COVID in America. And everywhere you go, you see someone with a mask on … With abortion culture, there are 1,000 Black children aborted a day,” he said. “So, more Black children have died in the past, since February, than people have died of COVID, and everyone wears a mask,” he continued. “So, it’s a matter of where are we turning a blind eye to?”
Dear Board of Health, remember, ALL Black lives matter. Your silence is violence.
Of course, the Board of Health may not be hearing Kanye West or other Black voices saying that abortion is killing them at numbers greater than those killed in the North American slave trade. Why? Because, to quote Joe Biden, “they ain’t Black.”
If you want to see real racism, look at how White liberals react to Black conservatives. They ignore them. Or they ridicule and attack them to deter others from jumping off the intellectual plantation.
That’s what you will hear from Black conservatives who have been on the receiving end of White liberal racism. Larry Elder’s, “Uncle Tom” documentary tells their story. It is eye opening for it shows (1) the rich intellectual, philosophical and political diversity of Black America that is ignored by establishment media; (2) the brilliance, eloquence and determination of conservative Black Americans; and (3) the sordid truth that liberal America is in fact the source of any systemic racism that exists in this nation. The photo at the top shows Elder with some of the scholars and activists featured in his film. These are your therapists, dear Board of Health.
“I will not pretend to be a victim in this country,” says Candace Owens in the film. “I know that makes many people on the Left uncomfortable.”
We hear that getting uncomfortable is the first step for Whites to shake off their White supremacy. Hey, Board of Health, this may be something you really need to hear. If you have the courage to listen.
“At their core, the White liberal is the ultimate narcissist,” says Owens. “It’s the people who adopt animals for the purpose of saying, ‘I adopted an animal.’ Like, to them we are these pathetic, cute little playthings that they can then take to their friends and say, ‘Look at this person that I helped.'”
Uncomfortable yet? Here’s more self-awareness therapy for the Board of Health:
It is the Democrat Party, the party of every member of the Board of Health, that spread slavery across the country and provoked a bloody Civil War to preserve it. Like they chose to embrace Sanger, they have chosen to give their loyalty to this party. The party of the Board of the Health lynched Blacks, burned their homes and blocked them from participating in American democracy and prosperity for over a hundred years after Appomattox. The Board of Health belongs to the party of the Klan and Jim Crow. Democrats are responsible for the 1994 federal crime bill authored by Joe Biden, a friend to segregationists throughout his Senate career. This legislation, passed by a Democrat Congress and signed by a Democrat President sent a generation of Black Americans to prison when White Americans committing equivalent crimes got probation as punishment. The Board of Health is of the party that creates and maintains urban plantations of despair wherever it has monopoly power over city politics.
The Board of Health says it wants to change the way it thinks about Black Americans and racism. They don’t need a reeducation camp. They can all watch Elder’s “Uncle Tom” and take their first step on the path to healing what’s wrong with them.
And they can revoke their celebration and endorsement of the racist legacy of Planned Parenthood. Easy peazy, if the will is there.
Cheaper than a brainwashing session at the Mandala Center ($150 for an online workshop), Elder’s excellent, critically-acclaimed documentary is available on DVD for only $17. I am ordering a copy for the Board of Health. They can pass it around and begin to purge themselves of the systemic racism they believe they have helped graft onto this county of wonderful, kind, people. I really hope the Board of Health members will watch Elder’s video. It would be racist not to.
Lesson 1. Here is an out take from the film that convicts White liberals for what they are doing to Black Americans. “I can change a bigot faster than I can change a patronizing liberal,” says Robert L. Woodson at the beginning and its gets more and more uncomfortable for White liberals from there. But that’s good, right? https://youtu.be/YvIVSe8VH0w
by Jim Scarantino | Oct 23, 2020 | General
Who is this sign thief? She was photographed just after she stole a Trump sign. The location was Irondale Road at the bottom of a driveway, close to where 7th Street turns off. The sign had been standing along the road near the bottom of a drive for a single wide that is not currently occupied.
Port Townsend Free Press will pay $100 for information leading to her citation for the criminal offense of damaging/stealing political signs.
[Update: the thief has been apprehended and cited for eight incidents of stealing campaign signs. Good work, deputies. The woman who contacted the Sheriff’s Office has not claimed the reward. This thief wasn’t too smart. Not only did she pose for these photos, she recorded herself in the act and posted a TikTok video of her crimes.]
