Al Diamon, a Maine columnist who has had his weekly column “Politics & Other Mistakes” published in numerous news outlets for the past 25 years, such as the Daily Bulldog and the Portland Phoenix, has written a column calling for the resignation of Maine’s House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross.
The July 14 column, “Politics & Other Mistakes: Not suitable for work,” responds to an opinion piece written by former Portland Mayor Ethan Strimling for the Maine Beacon, entitled “In praise of Speaker Talbot Ross.”
Diamon tears into Strimling over his adulation for the House Speaker:
If Maine had a monument like Mt. Rushmore, former Portland mayor Ethan Strimling would be clinging to the side of whatever unfortunate peak had been sentenced to suffer that fate carving a likeness of Democratic Speaker of the House Rachel Talbot Ross into the rock.
According to Diamon, while Democrats in the Legislature scored major victories this session, such as paid family and medical leave and narrowly passing Gov. Janet Mills’ late term abortion bill, Talbot Ross’ “role in much of that process can be charitably described as marginal.”
He describes how Talbot Ross was “clogging up the legislative pipeline,” and “engaging in ill-considered attacks” on her fellow Democrat Gov. Mills — such as her opposition to the governor’s supplemental budget bill due to Mills vetoing the tribal sovereignty bill LD 2004, which had no effect on the budgetary process.
“The lesson most of the state’s politicians took away from this odd confrontation was that Talbot Ross was little more than a cardboard cutout of a speaker who could safely be ignored,” Diamon wrote.
What should not be ignored in Diamon’s view, however, is Talbot Ross’ call to “storm the Capitol” at a Juneteenth event in Portland.
“We should all storm the institution, out of anger that this is the attitude that they’ve taken about our history,” Talbot Ross said at the event, due to her anger over what she saw as a failure by Maine’s Department of Education to integrate African American history into the classroom.
“We should be storming the Capitol. Really, I’m serious,” she said.
Diamon notes that “if it wasn’t for the conservative Maine Wire, this Trumpian outburst would have gone all but unnoticed.”
“Most of the mainstream media failed to report on Talbot Ross’s bombast, with the exception of Spectrum News, which buried it deep in its story, and the Bangor Daily News, which waited several days to cover the diatribe and only after a conservative columnist pointed out the BDN’s failure,” Diamon wrote.
The Portland Press Herald has still not covered the House Speaker’s Juneteenth remarks.
Mary-Erin Casale, a Talbot Ross spokesperson, said in a statement that the House Speaker “genuinely regrets her choice in language,” and that it was “never her intent to encourage anyone to repeat the events that occurred on the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
“Her advocacy on this issue stems directly from her lived experience and her fight to create equity in the story we tell of our nation’s history to our students,” Casale said.
For Diamon, this statement “falls well short of apologizing.”
“Rather than being immortalized on a Maine mini-Rushmore, Talbot Ross should resign,” Diamon wrote.
Watch — Maine’s House Speaker Calls For storming the Capitol:
All five black people in Maine storming the Capitol. What a sight.
RTR “dedicated her career to public service and social justice” according to her bio. In other words, she’s a hard-core Leftists who has never had a real job. The question that needs to be asked is this: Is she in her position as Speaker of the House because of merit or is she a box checker being a woman of color? If you search for a list of the numerous bills she has sponsored or co-sponsored, you’ll easily find the answer.
USGrant:, apparently you haven’t looked around recently; might be a tad more than five and they’re demanding all sorts of things to which they claim they are entitled. RTR might be better placed in an animated pictorial setting (e.g. “Looney Tunes”) than as Speaker of that once venerable institution, the House of Representatives. Good Gawd, are we circling the drain waiting for someone to flush?
She attended Wesleyan University…affirmative action beneficiary or did she get in on her own scholarly merit? Either way, she clearly embraced the progressive, social justice mantra. If a white person made the same statement she did, you can bet the farm all the mainstream media would have made that front page news for days. Many thanks to the Maine Wire for keeping it honest and real.
All overt Marxists should be removed from office immediately. We need to publicly shame these people and those who enable them. Wake up your neighbors and show them the similarities in history, we are seeing the rise of communism in our country and this is how it always starts.
I’ll say it again. It’s not the Massachusetts people moving here that are ruining Maine, it’s your democrat next door neighbor that you need to worry about!